Interesting article that could help many of you run your business better. I know it’s a constant area that can always use improvement for me. Why aren’t you delegating?

Great article on how gratitude can help make you more successful and reduce your stress levels! http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/gratitude-true-secret-to-success.html

At approximately 6pm on Friday June 29, 2012 a very large storm front crossed almost all of Ohio. Several of us were still at the office working late when the storm hit. Power was knocked out in our city and across the state. Estimates of 633,000 people were affected. Their estimate is 5-7 days for power to be restored! Reports are the winds from this storm were in the 80-85 MPH range and worse than hurricane Ike in 2008. There are some large trees completely uprooted and blown down by the storm!

Staff remained at the office to ensure servers stayed up during the storm outage. At one point in time we had 6 staff members and 10 family members here! Myself and one of our friends left to go to Krogers, which was still open due to them having a generator, and got enough food to cook from our gas stove at home and brought dinner to the office. We feasted on Brats and home made spaghetti! Brandon remained all night to monitor the servers and power while the rest of us went home.

Today, Saturday, thankfully power is being restored already to our city and, as of this time, most of the power is up, including at our office. We want to thank the hard workers at AEP for restoring power to most of our city well before the time estimate. We are now hoping it stays up and other affected areas come up quickly as well!

Thanks to the generosity of our staff and our customers, we were able to donate $75.50 in cash plus several jars of PB & J to the local Children’s Services to support families in the area needing extra support while school was out. We are very proud of all of you!

We recently received a letter from our local Athens County Children Services Board. They are conducting a Peanut Butter and Jelly food drive again this summer. Athens County Ohio is one of the poorest counties in the state and many children depend on the meals that they receive at school to provide their nutritional needs. The Athens County Children Services Board has been distributing PB&J since 2009 to families in need during the summer to make providing food for their families easier during this season.

Each summer they have served hundreds of children each week with this food drive. They are partnering with Community Food Initiatives and Friends and Neighbors Community Food Center to supplement the peanut butter and jelly with fresh produce as well.

We, at BCS Engineering, have decided to do a local collection in our office of either Peanut Butter & Jelly Jars or monetary donations to the drive. We felt it important to also extend this opportunity across the world to you, our clients and friends.

How can you help?
We’ve created a special product that allows you to donate $5 or more towards this program. All proceeds will go directly to the PB & J Project minus credit card fees. If you would like your entire donation to go to the project, simply use Check/Money order as your payment option and mail your donation to:

BCS Engineering
ATTN: PB&J Project
25 Grosvenor St.
Athens, OH 45701

You may also give directly to them by contacting them on their website: http://www.athenschildrenservices.com/pages/peanut-butter-and-jelly-project

Our belief has always been to help those that are less fortunate than ourselves in any way that we can and we appreciate your consideration in helping with this worthwhile project! As always, feel free to contact us if you have any questions. We will be accepting donations through Friday, June 22nd.

Wow, what a crazy storm for a Monday afternoon…guess that’s what happens when you have 80 degree temps in mid-March! Yep, that’s hail in the picture…

The town of Athens is just a bit fired up over the OU Bobcat Basketball Team’s trip to the Sweet Sixteen and we’ve had our fair share of partying over the weekend it seems…So much so that we had to call and report a city parking meter resting along side our building this morning. You know you are in a college town when you call to report it and the person on the other end of the phone is not surprised at all! Who knows what we may find if the team moves on to the Elite Eight! GO BOBCATS!!!

I recently read an article that suggested an interesting way to thank our customers for their business and thought you might benefit from it as well. If you are an ecommerce business and ship goods to a customer, how about including a personalized thank you on company letterhead within the shipment itself? Tap into the resources you have on hand to personalize the letter and add the shipment date. Encourage the customer to contact you with any feedback they may have and use an actual signature from a staff member. Customer service goes a long way and this is just one example of how you can differentiate yourself from the competitor. The complete article can be viewed here

Nothing spices up a rainy Monday morning like a major power outage, but our backup power sources held us until the generator kicked in. The power is back on now and thanks to our foresight in preparing for just such an emergency, we hardly missed a beat! Nice to see all of our prep and research in disaster recovery and business continuance pays off if it is ever needed. It’s important to plan ahead for the unexpected so a small blip on the radar doesn’t turn into a very very bad day! Strong storms predicted for much of today, be safe wherever it is you may be roaming…

The vision statement has been stuck in Carrie’s head for over 9 years. We finally have documented it officially.

“Providing customers with the proper resources to help their business succeed.”

Ever since 2002, when Brandon and Carrie came up with the idea of a shared company, their goal was to help others. With this vision in mind, they found that Carrie’s natural ability to program on the web was a perfect fit to helping small local businesses get their web presence online using a shopping cart called X-cart. Ever since then, BCSE has worked to help any an all customers, no matter what their size be successful via their pre-built modules, custom services and hosting.