Category Archives: small business

Just another Friday at ABG

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It looks like everyone made it through another week! To celebrate that accomplishment, let’s chat a little about what’s been going on at ABG Capital.

We first want to announce that we’re still looking to fill a few positions within ABG Capital and our Portfolio Companies. I mentioned these open positions last week, but we’ve listed them here again for you. If you think you might be a good fit for any of these positions, please email your resume to our HR Manager, Sharon Kolesar, at sharonk@abgcapital.com. She’ll be able to get you more information.

  • Technical Services Representative – VoIP Innovations
  • Customer Service Representatives – InspiraFS
  • Website Designer (with a concentration in website coding) – ABG Capital
  • Java Developer – ABG Capital

Now let’s see what’s been going on with the ABG Capital blog since we had two great articles posted this week. The first explored how Big Data can improve the customer experience. Whether you’re searching for something in Google or buying something from Amazon, you’re contributing to Big Data. When business owners and marketers explore Big Data they can find valuable information that helps them get to know their customers and cater to their needs. If you visit the article, you’ll find out more information on Big Data and your customers.

The second article that we posted this week was to help business owners find the perfect health plan for their employees. Having a great health plan, not only makes your current employees happy, but it’s something that potential employees are also looking at. The article is full of tips and useful information that can help any business owner narrow down a health plan that fits their business and best serves their employees.

Next week on the ABG Capital blog, we have a post on improving employee skills through MOOC’s. MOOC’s, or massive open online courses, have become extremely popular in the last few years. Hundreds of universities now offer thousands of courses to millions of participants worldwide ranging from business development to jazz appreciation.

Since it’s the end of May (can you believe how fast it’s gone??), we have some announcements to make from our company-wide Month End Meeting that was held today.

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  • May Honorable Mentions: Shannon Hogan and Chris Wallet (Inspira Customer Service Reps)
  • May Spotlight: Rhonda Taylor-Boles (Inspira Customer Service Rep)

 

On top of those awesome achievements, we’d also like to announce a promotion!

Trichelle Barish, a former Porting Representative at VoIP Innovations has only been here for a few months, but she has been standing out from the crowd. Her new position will be the Porting Coordinator and according to Barry Yancosek, the Provisioning Manager, she will be his “right-hand man”. She will continue to keep up with her porting responsibilities, but she will also start to train new employees, delegate workloads, interact with customers and vendors and help to maintain the overall department standards.

Congratulations to Trichelle for her amazing accomplishments in such a short amount of time! Keep up the great work and we know you’ll succeed at ABG Capital.

The last announcement that we have to make is that we are starting another office-wide Biggest Losers Competition! It will kick off on Monday, June, 2 and it will last for 8 weeks. The winner will receive a Grand Prize for losing the largest percentage of body weight and there will also be smaller prizes given out for weekly challenges along the way. We want to create a healthy office and this is one step closer to achieving that! Make sure you leave some supportive words in the comments section below!

Thanks for stopping by for another weekly edition of Just another Friday at ABG Capital. Have a great weekend!

Just another Friday at ABG

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Hey everyone! We hope you’ve been having a great week. In today’s Just another Friday at ABG Capital, we’d like to spend some time with a few of our most recent hires. We asked them a few questions just so we had the chance to check in with them since they’ve been here a few months now. Justin Sparks and Rhonda Taylor-Boles were kind enough to take few minutes out of their busy days to answer these questions. Here’s what they had to say:

Justin - ABG Capital

Justin Sparks – GlobalPOPs Technical Services Representative

Q. What has been your favorite thing about working at ABG?
A. Before working for this company, I have had very few former coworkers I would have spent my free time with. However, the people here are more than coworkers, they are friends.

Q. What has been your favorite thing about your position at ABG?
A. Solving complex problems. I am challenged each day when I come in, and it keeps things from getting stale.

Q. What has been your proudest moment?
A. When I started, I was originally hired for EUS. After only 4 days, I was moved to Global Pops.

Q. What has surprised you the most about working at ABG?
A. Three words: Scotch Cart Friday.

 

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Rhonda - ABG Capital

Rhonda Taylor-Boles – Inspira Customer Service Representative

Q. What has been your favorite thing about working at ABG?
A. I think my favorite thing about working for ABG is being able to form ideas, solve problems, and the complete openness and honesty of not only Inspira, but the whole company.

Q. What has been your favorite thing about your position at ABG?
A. Getting to speak my favorite language every day, and being able to be my whacky self with no judgment.

Q. What has been your proudest moment?
A. Every day I get something accomplished is a proud moment. I think translating the forms that go out to people every day and having a banker tell me that they were well done and informative. That was a proud moment for me. Translating into another language is tricky and time-consuming. Hearing that someone who was not familiar with Inspira, or me take notice of the work I did was a proud moment.        

Q. What has surprised you the most about working at ABG?
A. Well, I think that everyone here is on the same page to make the company a better, and thrive more every day. You don’t see that much anymore. Everyone has the same goal.

Thanks for stopping by for another rendition of Just another Friday at ABG Capital!

We Launched The New ABG Capital Website!

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Our Marketing Communications team has been working on creating a new ABG Capital website for weeks and it has finally been launched for the public to view. Keeping a fresh looking website is important to us and we have put a large amount of time and effort into the new site.

New ABG Capital Header

The overall look and feel to the website took the most time because we wanted something that was welcoming and professional at the same time. We also wanted to incorporate a borderless look so the site feels much more open. We wanted visitors to look at the new ABG Capital site and not feel like they were visiting some faceless organization.

“Our website is an extension of our people and our culture and it should be representative of that,” said Jeff Tapolci, CEO of ABG Capital. “We have such a unique atmosphere at ABG Capital and we want people to feel as welcomed while they cruise our website as they do when they walk through our office.”

We are a very family oriented organization here at ABG Capital and we really wanted that to show through with our new website design. As you can tell from looking at the new site, the tone of the content and the images take on the same feel as our culture. Part of the design plan was to reduce the amount of content on the site so that the remaining content would contain the most meaningful information. We wanted to focus more on images than text because after all, a picture is worth a thousand words!

The most successful part of our new ABG Capital website is the inclusion of all of our employee pictures. We highlighted all ABG Capital employees as well as all employees working for our four portfolio companies.

The People of ABG Capital

Please take a few minutes to explore the new site and let us know what you think by leaving us a comment in the comment section below!

Just another Friday at ABG

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Welcome back to your weekly Just another Friday at ABG Capital blog post! The biggest news that we have to share with you today is that a few members of our executive team will be out of the office all next week at the Fortune Leadership Summit in Orlando, Florida. There are two Gazelles Summits a year, one featuring individual growth and the other featuring company growth. During this Summit, they’ll hear from speakers like Verne Harnish, Pat Williams and Bill Treasurer. We’re sure they’ll come back to the office with all kinds of great information that will help ABG Capital grow even more as a company.

At the end of May we’ll be going to the National Cemetery of the Alleghenies to help them get ready for their Memorial Day ceremonies by cleaning headstones. We’ve been volunteering here for a few years now and it’s always such a rewarding experience. Below is a picture from when we went last year.

ABG Capital Volunteers

We shared this very interesting article on our social media sites this week called, This Company’s Secret Hiring Weapon? Ping Pong. Since we just got a ping pong table a few weeks ago, this article really resonated with us. The theory behind using ping pong as a hiring tool is that you can use it to gauge whether or not the candidate is the right fit for your company. They could have been the most impressive person you interviewed, but how do you act when they lose a game? How do they act when they win? Is this really the person you want your team working everyday? The way a person acts during a game of ping pong (or any other game for that matter) is a great tool for seeing how they’ll behave in the workplace. Check out the article and let us know what you think about this by leaving us a message in the comment section below.

We’re glad you had the chance to stop by and read our Just another Friday at ABG Capital blog post. We hope you all have a fantastic weekend!

Just another Friday at ABG Capital

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It’s finally May and that means summer is right around the corner! In celebration of starting a new month, we’d like to mention the ABG Capital Birthdays and Anniversaries for May:

  • Birthdays
    • Sally Stewart May 11th
    • Sara Warhold May 12th
  • Anniversaries
    • Jason Tapolci May 26th 16 years

As you know, we’ve been doing some massive art projects throughout the office. Well, this week we made another huge addition to the ABG Capital Office. That addition was a giant collage that includes everyone in the office. This was one project that we’ve been most excited about and we’re thrilled that it came out as perfect and we hoped. Check out the time-lapse video below to see it being installed.

While we were celebrating the new collage, we had a visit from our property managers who haven’t seen the office since we started the build out a year ago. We have made some pretty drastic changes since then and they loved everything that we’ve done. They even brought a great bottle of Scotch as a gift (which we opened for an impromptu Scotch Friday). We’re very proud of the office we have now and we’re glad they love it as much as we do.

ABG Capital Celebrates with Scotch

Shannon Hogan, the newest addition to the Inspira Call Center, got to celebrate making it to her 30 day mark by going to the Rivers Club for lunch. Jeff and Jason Tapolci make it a point to take new employees out to lunch and get to know them. See how great they looked in the picture below!

Shannon has her ABG Capital Lunch with Leadership

Thanks for checking in with ABG Capital this week! We hope everyone has a great weekend. 🙂

Just another Friday at ABG

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Happy Friday everyone! How has April been treating you? It’s been great so far for everyone here at ABG Capital. We want to start off by giving you a little recap of the blog posts we’ve featured this week. They both revolve around customers and offer great tips on what you can do at your organization to be more successful.

The first post we had was called, Does Your Business Need a VP of Customer Success? Your customers should be your primary focus. If you don’t have someone to manage that, then it might be something you want to look into! Did you realize that having a VP of Customer Success could help direct your team to a more customer centric focus? Did you know that a VP of Customer Success could also help boost sales? Well, both of those are true and there are even more benefits outlined in the post.

The second post that we had to share on the ABG Capital blog this week was, Enhancing Customer Experience Using Big Data. If you’ve never heard of big data before, just know that it is defined as data that is too large and complicated for traditional tools to capture, store and analyze. The article explains that utilizing this data can give you a better understanding of your customers, which makes your job as a business owner much easier. More importantly, it makes your customers happy and that’s ultimately what every business strives to accomplish.

Just to make a quick announcement, we are currently recruiting for the positions listed below. Our HR Manager, Sharon Kolesar, recently attended a job fair at CCAC and while, she met some great candidates, we are still searching for new employees.

  • Technical Service Representatives 
  • Customer Service Representatives
  • Web Developers (please know that we’re looking for experienced candidates for this position)

If you are interested in any of these positions, please send your resume and cover letter to sharonk@abgcapital.com.

While we’re looking for new people to add to our team, we can’t forget for recognize some of our current employees! Let’s share some of the birthdays and anniversaries that we have coming up in April:

  • Birthdays
    • Rhonda Taylor-Boles – April 9th
    • Dustin Campbell – April 10th
    • Dan Ravenstahl – April 18th
    • Kimmie Rivetti – April 28th
  • Anniversaries
    • Jerry Eddy – 6 years on April 3rd
    • Mark Fleckenstein – 4 years on April 16th
    • Jennifer Williams – 1 year on April 16th
    • Nate Rupp – 6 years on April 25th

While we’re talking about celebrations, we have to announce something on behalf of one of our portfolio companies, VoIP Innovations. Today they are taking the afternoon off (their support staff will still be working) to celebrate hitting a fantastic revenue goal that has been escaping them for years. A giant ABG Capital congratulations goes out to everyone who is part of the VoIP Innovations team. You are all A players and we couldn’t be more proud to have you as part of our amazing organization. Keep up the great work!

 

This week we also had Brad Withers join us for the second year in a row to do a workshop with our managers. This year he focused on team building strategies and our managers had a VERY interesting day because he came ready to do all kinds of activities. Any speaker can come in and read a manual to your for 8 hours, but Brad explained the value in teaching the concepts behind the content. Our mangers built index card towers, spaghetti and marshmallow skyscrapers and they even played a little catch with noisy stuffed animals. It wasn’t the activities themselves that taught them about team building; it was the debriefing once the activities were over. There was a great deal of valuable information talked about during this workshop and we can’t wait to see how these mangers put their newly learned skills into action! Here a few pictures from the workshop.

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Before we close out this week’s Just another Friday at ABG Capital, we wanted to let you know that next week we’ll have our annual kickball game. This is the second sporting event of the year and we can’t wait! Below are a few pictures from last year’s game.

ABG Capital Kickball Game 1

ABG Capital Kickball Game 2

ABG Capital Kickball Game 3

 

Just another Friday at ABG

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Happy Friday everyone. 🙂 How was your week? Ours was great! Let’s get into this week’s Just another Friday at ABG Capital blog post! On the blog, we featured a great article that talked about employees and retirement plans. Do you use your company’s retirement plan as an incentive for prospective hires? This article is advising that you do. More and more people are looking for jobs that offer the kind of “exit strategy” they desire. Having a well-defined retirement plan makes your employees want to stay loyal to your company and it also brings a sense of ease knowing that there is a plan for their future. Check out this article and make sure you’re doing everything you can to offer the best retirement plan in the industry!

Next week on the blog, we’ll have an article that talks about how instituting good employee wellness programs can really be beneficial for your business as a whole. This is one thing that we value very much at ABG Capital and starting last year we decided to have Tend to You Breaks at 10 and 2. These breaks are designed to make everyone get up from their desk twice a day and go outside for a walk or toss the football around. It’s great for increasing productivity and boosting employee morale. It also helps with those employees who can’t wait for our quarterly sporting events!

In the office this week, we had a Lunch & Learn that was presented by our Office Administrator, Sara Warhold. Sara attended a workshop on Managing Multiple Projects and Tasks a few weeks ago and she shared some of the great tips with our staff. One of the tips she brought back with her was to “eat the frog”. Now before you go jumping to conclusions, let me explain this a little further. “Eating the frog” simply means doing the task that you’re dreading the most. It’s best to do this first thing in the morning so you get it out of the way. This method will give you a great sense of self-fulfillment and it will ultimately reduce your stress level. Next time you’re asked to do that awful project, just remember one thing: EAT THAT FROG FOR BREAKFAST!

Thanks for reading this Just another Friday at ABG Capital and have a great weekend!

Just Another Friday at ABG

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Happy Valentine’s Day! Did you make any special plans for that special someone in your life? Here at ABG Capital we’ve been selling roses and carnations to raise money for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Along with the pre-ordered flowers we’ve been selling for the past few weeks, we’ll be doing a cash-and-carry sale with extra flowers we ordered. This is great for those who may have forgotten to pick up flowers for their sweetie.

Just Another Friday at ABG Capital

In other news this week, we posted two great articles on our blog: Helping Your Employees Get Their Degree and Changing Your Business to Better Serve Your Customers. Employees who get their degree become an overall better employee and ultimately drive up your revenue. Take a look at the post for more great reasons why helping and supporting your employees to get their degrees is a good idea.

The second post we had this week was on what your business can do to better serve your customers. The post covers some very well-known businesses who knew it was time for a change. Two of these companies are Samsung and Taco Bell!

Next week we have a blog post titled, Why All Employees Need to Sell. Whether you know it or not, every employee represents your company. Making sure they know how to represent you to your customers on the finer points of your organization is instrumental in continuing to run a successful company.

Last night Jeff Tapolci, Ron Eggert, Lowell Smith, and Natalie DeCario attended the annual KFMR e2e event. This event was created so that shareholders, staff, and friends of KFMR could get together and enjoy cocktails and conversation. It was a great night and it was nice to see old friends and colleagues. Thanks for putting on another great event KFMR!

The last announcement that we have to mention is that we’re going bowling next Friday. This will be the first employee sporting event of 2014 and if it’s anything like last year, it’ll be a blast. Stay tuned for pictures!

 

Just another Friday at ABG Capital

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We’re so happy you could join us for our Just another Friday at ABG Capital blog post! We’ve made a great deal of improvements since our last post and we’re excited to share them with you.

Two weeks ago we introduced you to Yvonne Iwanejko who is our newest Porting Rep at VoIP Innovations. Since then we’ve welcomed three more employees to the ABG Capital team. Continue reading for a picture and a brief bio of these fantastic new employees.

Rhonda | Just another Friday at ABG CapitalRhonda is the newest Customer Service Rep at Inspira. She comes to us from Gillece where she handled Inside Sales and Customer Service as a Benefits Manager. She recently got married in May and lives with her husband Brandon in Spring Garden. Together they have five dogs (Zeus, Zena, Shiloh, Nikita and Delilah) and two cats (Leo and Isabella). She is a fan of many sports and enjoys skiing at Seven Springs.

Justin SparksJustin will be working in the Call Center as a Technical Support Representative for End User Services. Justin comes to us from Verizon Wireless where he worked in Customer Service and Tech Support. He was recently married in June and lives in Butler with his wife Christina. He has a Pitbull named Gemma and a cat named Heisenberg. Justin also enjoys geocaching and camping.

Coming up at the end of February we’ll be continuing the fun tradition of our annual Staff Bowling Event! Here are a few pictures from last year:

ABG Capital Bowling

Sally and Bruce!

ABG Capital Bowling

We have one last announcement to make before we let you in on some great posts we have coming up next week. Great Place to Work is holding a video contest called We <3 our Workplace and we’re planning to win! We’ve already formed a committee and we’ll hold our first meeting next week. The grand prize for this contest is $5,000 to a charity of your choice. As most of you know, the Make-A-Wish Foundation is the organization that we have the most dedication and passion for. We have been “Wish Granters”, raising at least $3,500 every year since 2008 but last year we were able to grant wishes for two local children! Winning the $5,000 will put us in the running to grant 3 wishes for some amazing kids this year. When the video is complete, we’ll be counting on all of you to vote for us and spread the word to your friends and family. We’ll provide more information as we get closer to the completion of our video.

Next week we have these awesome blog posts to share with you:

  • Helping Your Employees Get Their Degree – Better-educated employees improve the well-being of your business. This article looks at some of the issues involved in helping your employees get ahead in their field.
  • Changing Your Business to Better Serve Your Customers – Sometimes the best way to help your customers is to radically change the way you do business. Take for example WePay, who over the past year has moved from a “group payments” company to a payment company for platform businesses. They felt it was the best way to empower their existing clients.

Thanks for checking out this week’s Just another Friday at ABG Capital blog post. Enjoy your weekend!

 

Just another Friday at ABG

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Here we are again wrapping up yet another great week at ABG Capital. We have some great news to share so let’s not waste any more time and get right into it!

Post by ABG Capital.

 

Our newest employee, Kimmie Rivetti, had her lunch with leadership this week! This is a great thing that we do so the new employees get to spend some quality time with Jeff and Jason Tapolci. It’s important to them they that the get to know their employees on a more personal level. Check out the amount of support their picture got when we posted it on our Facebook Page!

Yvonne Iwanejko

Yvonne Iwanejko, our newest employee!

While we were celebrating with one employee for making it to her one month mark, we were also welcoming another new employee into the VoIP Innovations Porting Department. Her name is Yvonne Iwanejko and we’re excited to have her with us! In the next few weeks we will be introducing to you to even more new people who are joining our team. 2014 is going to be a year of major growth for ABG Capital and its portfolio companies and it’s going to be exciting!

This week we also posted a great article on how to develop a great corporate culture. At ABG Capital, we take our culture very seriously. I’m not saying that we have a serious culture; I’m saying that the founders of this company have put a great deal of dedication and passion into developing a unique culture. What is your company doing to provide a positive culture for its’ employees? Share it with us in the comment section below!

Next week you can expect to see another great post that talks about the Return on Investment (ROI) that you can expect to see with professional development. Anyone can have fun at work, but are they having fun in a way that enhances their skills and ultimately can increase the profits for your company? This article will give you more insight on how exactly to achieve the most ROI.

We have one last announcement before you head out today. VoIP Innovations, a wholesale VoIP service provider, will be traveling to Miami next week to attend the Internet Telephony Conference and Expo (ITEXPO). We’ve been hearing about what they have up their sleeve for this and it seems like they’re going to WOW the crowd! If you have plans to attend the show, make sure you stop by Booth 606 and ask about their Industry leading BackOffice platform, Titanium III. You can’t miss them; they’ll be the guys in the orange ties!

That’s all that we have for you today! Bundle up and enjoy your weekend. 🙂