Just another Friday at ABG

Posted on May 30, 2014 by Natalie DeCario

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

Posted on May 23, 2014 by Natalie DeCario

It’s Friday and you know what that means… Your weekly ABG Capital recap! This week we have a good bit of things to share with you. Let us first give you an update on a few of our portfolio companies:

VoIP Innovations:

Last week while members of our Executive Team were in Orlando for the Gazelles Fortune Leadership Summit, we had two VoIP Innovations employees, Tim Linn and Joe Aponick, attend an invitation only training session with Sansay. They got to spend time with the Sansay Engineers and other engineers like themselves, from all over the country. We’re proud to say that both Tim and Joe are now Sansay Certified Technicians.

InspiraFS:

As you know, we have recently launched a brand new ABG Capital website. That’s not the only website that has seen a facelift! Inspira has been growing very quickly over the past few months and it was time for their websites to reflect that growth. So far, we’ve updated Total IRA and Pinnacle IRA. We’re planning to release a new Payday IRA website in about two weeks and their Twitter account is already up and running! You might want to take a second to go and follow them. 🙂 The main Inspira site is the next one in line to be updated and we’ll be posting more details and a completion date soon. In the meantime, you can visit them on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and now Google+.

We’d like to mention a few more company announcements before we let you go for the weekend. We’re HIRING! ABG Capital, along with all of our portfolio companies are experiencing extremely rapid growth and we need more “A Players” to add to our team. Below is a list of the positions we are looking for. If you think you might be a fit, please email your resume to our HR Manager, Sharon Kolesar, at sharonk@abgcapital.com. She’ll be able to get you more information on these positions.

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

Giving back to our community is something that we value very much here at ABG Capital. We’re always doing something that can benefit the organizations we support. The biggest giving back initiative that we focus on each is granting wishes for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Last year we were able to grant two wishes and this year we’re shooting for three! The current fundraising effort we have going on is selling raffle tickets for a basket full of Martini related items. Unfortunately we can’t sell tickets for this basket to everyone in the world, but if you’re interested in supporting this fantastic organization on your own, visit the Make-A-Wish website and make a donation!

Speaking of our giving back initiatives, today is the day that we’ll be heading to the National Cemetery of the Alleghenies to volunteer. We went last year and it was such a great experience. We’ll be cleaning headstones and helping to construct the Avenue of Flags in preparation for their Memorial Day services. Stay tuned for pictures of the day. We’ll be posting them on our Facebook page later today.

Next week, you can expect to see some great blog posts showing up on the ABG Capital blog. The first will be on how Big Data can help to improve the customer experience and the second will be on choosing the best health plan for your employees. If you don’t want to miss these great posts, then simply enter your email in the subscribe box and you’ll get them delivered right to your inbox!

That’s all we have for you this week, we hope everyone has a great Memorial Day weekend!

Just another Friday at ABG

Posted on April 4, 2014 by Natalie DeCario

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.

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.

Just another Friday at ABG

Posted on March 28, 2014 by Natalie DeCario

Welcome back to a new Just another Friday at ABG Capital blog post! Today we want to recap the events from this week, go over some things you can expect to see next week and then we’ll fill you in on some company updates from our Month End Meeting.

Let’s start with the blog post we featured this week that concentrated on employee health and wellness. Did you know that active, healthier employees make more productive employees? Well, it’s true! Some employees get so caught up in staring at their computer screen for 8 hours a day that it causes them to be unhappy and it ultimately drags down morale. One way to bring those employees back to life is to institute some health and wellness initiatives. Without them, your business might begin to suffer. Check out the article because it talks about some of the major implications associated with unhealthy employees.

While we do not have a formal health and wellness program in place here at ABG Capital, we have instituted “Tend to you at 10 and 2” breaks. These breaks encourage our employees to get up from their desks twice a day and go outside to walk around, play catch, roller skate; whatever they like as long as it’s some kind of physical activity to get the blood moving!. We also recently set up a basketball hoop that employees are free to use at any time. Our company Portal is also stocked with plenty of handy health and wellness information that is always available to our employees.

Here are two great posts that we have coming up next week on the ABG Capital blog:

Does Your Business Need A VP Of Customer Success? – Self-centered organizations often define jobs by their internal function, but cutting-edge companies are taking their viewpoint to heart by creating roles that are truly customer-centered.
Enhancing Customer Experience Using Big Data – Large amounts of data generated through client interaction allow businesses of all size to gain a better understanding of their customers. Amazon’s “suggestions” are just one example of how well this can work.

Now for some important ABG Capital updates! This week was the official start day of a new Customer Service Representative for Inspira and her name is Shannon Hogan. Welcome to the team, Shannon!

While we’re on the topic of new employees, Justin Sparks celebrated his 30 day milestone and had his Lunch with Leadership with Jeff and Jason Tapolci at the Rivers Club!

Here are a few announcements from our Month End Meeting:

February Employee of the Month – Collin Ballantine
February Honorable Mention – The Inspira Call Center
March Spotlight of the Month – Tyler Weimerskirch
Events coming up:
- Our Annual Kickball Game will be held on April 11th
- Our Annual Volunteering event at the National Cemetery of the Alleghenies will be held on May 23rd.

We also want to mention that we had a great time with the students from the Entrepreneurship Program at Canon Mac High School today. They visited our office last year and we’re so happy they returned again this year! Here are a few pictures from their visit:

We even brought out the Cruisin’ Cooler for them!

Thanks for stopping by for another great Just another Friday at ABG Capital blog post. We hope to have you back again next week!

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Enabling our companies to focus on growth by providing value through culture, expertise and resources.

Tag Archives: Big Data

Just another Friday at ABG

Just another Friday at ABG

Just another Friday at ABG

Just another Friday at ABG