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Grow your business through employee training, improving company communication and morale and inspect what you expect through mystery shopping reviews.

How Does Shopper Recruitment Work?

One of the questions that sometimes comes up with our new clients is how we at The Brandt Group find mystery shoppers to perform all our audits. Is mystery shopping a vocation? Do mystery shoppers attend classes, receive special training, and earn certifications? What does it even take to become…
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Beyond Compensation and Benefits

The specter of the Great Resignation continues to haunt most companies around the country, as droves and droves of employees are resigning to pursue other opportunities. With the workforce in so much flux, many businesses—especially small proprietorships—are rightly concerned about losing their best employees and having to deal with a…
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How to Manage Your Boss

Managing your own boss sounds oxymoronic, at first. We often think about management as being a downstream action, with someone above managing you, and you managing those further down the chain. As it turns out, the most effective leaders do both: they take the responsibility of making sure tasks get…
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How to Challenge Authority Respectfully

Unless you’re the business owner, president, or chief executive of your company, you always have someone higher up to answer to. After all, employees by definition are employed by someone else. And regardless of the kind of job you’re working, you’ve almost certainly experienced moments when you’ve disagreed with managerial…
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Employee Fulfillment

In last week’s blog, we discussed the rising tide of employee turnover straining an already delicate economy. One key Gallup quote that should haunt all of us is, “Fifty-two percent of voluntarily exiting employees said their manager or organization could have done something to prevent them from leaving their job.”…
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The Tide of Employee Turnover

While The Great Resignation has thrust the problem of employee-turnover into the spotlight recently, it turns out that it’s not actually a new challenge. It’s been a long, long time since the norm was individuals working the breadth of their careers for one company and retiring with a pension. In…
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Strategies for Staying Open

As if the labor shortage weren’t already aggravated by the so-called Great Resignation and the droves of baby-boomers retiring, you can add a giant spike of employees calling out sick recently. Fueled by the Omicron surge and likely combined with other seasonal maladies, many businesses are struggling to field enough…
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Great Service, No Excuses

The pandemic has either created or magnified a myriad of problems for manufacturers, distributors, and businesses all across the world. Supply is constrained and delayed, and costs have risen dramatically. Add to this the labor shortage, and businesses are left scrambling to find a way to tread water, let alone…
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‘Tis the Season for Appreciation

Though it’s been another difficult year, businesses everywhere should take the time to look back with appreciation for all that they’ve been able to accomplish in 2021—despite the challenges arrayed against us all. The biggest reason for this success is, without a doubt, the loyalty of customers and employees alike.…
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Cutting Costs

One of the great challenges many small businesses are facing right now is figuring out how to survive amid economic inflation, supply chain disruptions, and the labor shortage. Belts are getting tight, and it’s getting much harder to find a way to keep the doors open. One such consequence of…
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The Choice Short-Staffing Forces

An ongoing challenge that businesses across the country are facing is short-staffing. At the start of the pandemic, many employees were furloughed or lost their jobs altogether, sending millions to unemployment. As our country has opened back up again, many of these workers have not returned to work en masse,…
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Understanding the Supply Chain Woes

The last couple of years have either created or magnified many of the economic challenges we all face today, not the least of which is the critical problem with supply chains. As Peter S. Goodman, writing for The New York Times explains, “The pandemic has disrupted nearly every aspect of…
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