Author: Pamela Swift

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Uncategorized

3 Tips to Set Up Your New Business for Long-Term Success

Article Contributed by Noah Y. Rue

It’s no secret that starting a new business is stressful. There’s a lot to plan for, a lot to pay for, and an endless stream of potentially unforeseen circumstances.

It’s also easier than ever to start a small business, and that means more people are doing it. Not without cause, either! 91 percent of startup founders surveyed by First Round Capital agree that now is a great time to start a small business.

More people starting businesses equals more competition among entrepreneurs. The pressure is on to create a profitable business that will outlast the others in the market. In the frenzy of getting your doors open, it can be easy to get caught up in the immediacy of it all and forget to forecast for the future.

If you just focus on the present, though, and don’t have a plan for scaling your business up as you grow, you may make it past opening day and then have no direction. While you’re dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on your business plan, keep a few things in mind to set you up for success down the road.

Plan for Efficiency

Nothing will curtail your business like spending time and energy when you don’t have to. It may seem simple (and cost effective) to just do everything yourself, but it can lead to major pitfalls down the road.

As a business owner, it will behoove you to automate whatever processes you can afford to, though don’t assume this means you can ignore them. You’ll still need to keep an eye on the processes to make sure everything’s running smoothly. However, with the magic of computerized payroll systems, predetermined monthly supply shipments, and scheduled email blasts, you’ll be able to concentrate on growing the bulk of your business.

While your business is small, take the time to standardize as much as possible. Any intake papers, forms, quotes, etc., should look the same. Having uniform templates will ensure that all the necessary information is gathered for a given task. You’ll minimize the likelihood of something getting overlooked or of key details being missed out on.

Have one of your first employees write everything down. And I do mean everything. As business processes get refined and put into regular practice, document what the steps are and keep an up-to-date version of office processes available. This will help with future training materials as your business grows, cutting down on the time needed to go back and create these documents retroactively.

Cultivate Company Culture

As soon as your company grows, you’ll have to hire. It’s a mixed blessing for new companies — on one hand, you’re growing. On the other hand … who likes sorting through resumes?

Employees are the lifeblood of a company, and the type of people you hire now will have a massive impact on the type of company you become.

Millennials are redefining the workplace, and one of their massive sticking points is culture. The way a job feels and the prevailing attitude of management is a determinant in whether or not they’ll stick with a company. In order to recruit the top talent, you’ll need to create a desirable company culture.

While it may seem daunting, the task of cultivating culture may be easier than you think.

Primarily, hire wisely. This goes back to employees being your company’s lifeblood — hire the type of people you want your company built on. Be picky; don’t feel like you have to settle just because you’re a new business. You may not be able to hire the top in the industry, but look for passionate, dedicated, curious people who align with your company’s goals. And remember, when your company is small, every new hire has an impact — personalities are important.

Second, once you’ve hired people, treat them well. Millennials are looking for management that is transparent, honest, and available. Be available to your employees when they have questions, be transparent about the business and their progress as employees, and generally just treat your employees like people. Never underestimate the power of a thank you.

Finally, make work fun. This doesn’t mean everything has to be a game or that productivity has to suffer. Provide incentives like a monthly learning lunch, company snacks, or seasonal events for employees to enjoy, and don’t make them dependent on merit or competition. Creating events where employees can bond and form friendships will go a long way towards solidifying your company’s culture.

Check Your Legality

No one wants to think about legal trouble — that’s only for shady businesses, right?

Unfortunately, no. An uncomfortably large percentage of new businesses will end up with legal trouble at some point in their tenure, and no amount of company culture can wish that away if it comes for you.

A good place to start is to look up other businesses within your niche and see what they’ve had trouble with. Learn from other people’s’ mistakes (or unfortunate circumstances) so that you can cover your bases and make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to you. Additionally, ask other business owners what kind of insurance they have and what they’d recommend — you may be surprised at what business insurance can cover.

Make sure all of your company practices and documents are up to snuff. This includes hiring practices, employee agreements, workplace conduct, and other regulations. It may be worth consulting a lawyer to make sure you’re covered in the event of a suit.

Finally, when dealing with clients, create airtight invoices and contracts — no company wants to end up in small claims court for balances that a client refuses to pay. It takes time and resources away from other business functions and defers getting paid for longer than some new businesses can handle.

Go Forth and Conquer!

Starting a business is a big endeavor, and it can be hard to see more than a few weeks ahead. Don’t let the pressure overwhelm your judgement. If you plan for your future now, you’ll be leagues ahead of your competitors once you’re more established. Following the tips in this article will makes sure that you’re not playing catch up a year from now.

Categories
Operations

3 Easy Tips to Improve Your Startup’s Work Organization

Article Contributed by Dan Razak

Although getting a high-end equipment and hiring the right people helps make your business more productive, there is much more to it than these two aspects alone. The key to the success of your business lies in your startup’s work organization, which is not a small matter. In order to be able to unleash its full potential, your business needs to run like a well-oiled machine but to achieve this, every single cog needs to be in its place. With this in mind, here are three simple tips that can help improve your startup’s work organization significantly.

1.      Encourage employee autonomy

The first thing you need to realize if you want to expand your business is the fact that you won’t be able to micro-manage everything forever. Even with an assistant, you can’t be everywhere at the same time, which means that you should start trusting your employees. In the very first sentence of this article, we’ve mentioned the importance of hiring the right people for the job. Well, if you handpick and train your employees the right way, all that is left for you is to trust them.

They are more than capable handling tasks they are appointed with, which is why you need to encourage employee autonomy whenever you can. Of course, when it comes to major managerial issues, you still need to be the one calling all the shots.

2.      Outsource non-vital tasks

The next thing you should be focusing on is improving the productivity of your team in its core tasks. Here, we are usually talking about your production or sales team. At the end of the day, the aspect of your business that interests your clients the most is how good your product/service is. Because of this, you need to focus on it as much as possible and make it your priority.

Unfortunately, new entrepreneurs usually get exhausted by issues they are not as skilled in, such as IT, HR and customer support that they get barely any time or energy left for these core-departments. In order to remedy this situation, you might want to consider outsourcing. Moreover, you might even want to consider offshoring in order to get the highest quality of service at the most competitive prices. While India is one of the greatest outsourcing hubs in the world, outsourcing Jordan companies are currently on a steep rise, as well.

3.      Improve your communication channels

Finally, in order to make your business run as smoothly as possible, you need to work hard on improving your communication channels. This goes two ways. First, your management needs to become much more honest towards the staff and let them know exactly what is going on. Regardless of what some may believe, even people at entry-level jobs can benefit from seeing the bigger picture. Furthermore, you need to create an atmosphere in which people won’t be afraid to speak their minds. Sure, it may not be the best idea to fraternize with your employees but they shouldn’t be afraid of you either. This kind of situation can backfire in more than a few ways.

Conclusion

By working on these three issues alone, you stand to make your business much more automated. What a lot of people aren’t aware of is the fact that one of the most common reasons SMBs fail is the fact that the entrepreneur that started it simply burned out. Running a one-man show may currently seem as your only option but keep in mind that this usually isn’t a healthy business practice. By hiring others to relieve you of at least some of your duties, you will be able to allocate your talents, time and resources where they can be useful the most.

Author Bio

Dan Radak is a marketing professional with eleven years of experience. He is a coauthor on several websites and regular contributor to BizzMark Blog. Currently, he is working with a number of companies in the field of digital marketing, closely collaborating with a couple of e-commerce companies.

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Online Business

How to Take Your Small Business Online

If you’ve got a small business that’s been doing well, but you’ve been struggling to grow it into something bigger, it might be time to take things online. By turning your small brick-and-mortar boutique into an online business, you can reach a much larger audience. If you’re selling small goods, then you should be able to ship anywhere in the nation, or even globally depending on the sort of goods you’re selling. Meanwhile, if you’re offering a service, taking your business online can help to spread the word about your business and bring in new clients.

When potential customers are looking for a product or service, 81 percent of shoppers will research it online first. Creating a strong online presence can help to guide that search and lead those potential customers to your business. So what does taking your business online entail? Here are a few steps to follow that can get you started.

Start small.

While moving your business online is a big step, that doesn’t mean you should get overly ambitious straight out of the gate. Don’t expect to be the next Amazon before you’ve even started. Decide on a few products to sell online at the start just to test the waters. If you’re selling handmade crafts, you might even consider opening up a small shop on Etsy.com. If you’re ready to aim a little higher, though, you’ll want to build a solid website.

Reserve your domain name.

One of the first steps in making a website is registering a domain name. A domain name is important, because it creates a sort of identity that customers can associate with your business. Without a domain name, following the format www.[yourdomainname].com, your company’s web address would be an unintelligible series of numbers.

To reserve a domain name, find a domain name registrar online, such as GoDaddy or Dotster. On the registrar’s site, you can search to see if the domain name you want is available or if it’s already been taken. If it’s available, you’ll be able to pay to register it for your website. Once you’ve built your website, you can associate it with your domain so that customers will be able to find you easily. Make sure to pick something easy to remember and easy to communicate. If it’s difficult to spell, that means it will be difficult for your customers to find you. Keep it short, and keep it simple.

Build a quality website.

Remember, your website is the online equivalent of your business’s storefront. You want it to look professional and appealing. Make sure that it’s easy to navigate so customers can easily find their way from the homepage to any product descriptions or other pages they might be looking for. Make sure to optimize it for keywords that people will be searching for that apply to your business. Keep the website up to date, and post relevant content on a regular basis. Make sure that all information about your business is current as well, including business hours, phone numbers, email addresses, and address of your physical location.

Also, when you are first designing your website, keep growth in mind. Your business may be small now, but if you’re successful, it won’t always be. Make sure to build a framework that can handle bigger customer loads later on so that you won’t need to do a complete revamp of the system if business explodes.

Claim and update online profiles.

Make sure to claim all online profiles that point back to your business, both on review sites like Yelp and in business directories such as Google My Business. Make sure that all of those profiles have accurate, up-to-date information about your business. In order to improve local SEO, you’ll want to claim a physical location on Google My Business. Often, your local search results will improve based on the user’s proximity to that location, and it will give Google Maps something to work with. It’s particularly useful if you provide a service within a local radius, such as pool builders in Henderson, Nevada or lawn care in Jacksonville, Florida. For the people who are within a certain range of your headquarters, you will get prime placement in their local search results.

Encourage customers to leave positive reviews online.

Another way to boost your online search results is to consistently receive positive reviews from your customers on sites like Yelp and Google. If a customer seems particularly pleased with your product or service, don’t hesitate to ask them to go online and give you a 5-star review. It will improve your search rankings and direct more traffic to your site.

Make sure to monitor these sites and address each review as it comes in. If you get a positive review, be sure to thank them and let them know you appreciate their business. If the review is negative, attempt to address the problems they bring up. Make a point of avoiding any confrontation online, and if a customer does have a problem with your business, invite them to take the discussion offline to preserve their privacy and allow you to come to a solution together.

The internet is one of the most powerful tools small business owners have in their arsenal, so don’t delay in building your online presence. In the end, it will improve your relationships with your customers, as well as bring in new business.

Categories
Human Resource

5 Tips for Entrepreneurs to Increase Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is a hot button topic for many companies and entrepreneurs across the globe. In fact, employee engagement has risen in the ranks as a strategic focus in the minds of high-level leadership.

Employee engagement has a huge impact on the overall health of a business, especially of small businesses and newer start ups. A recent poll of over 1.4 million employees found that the top 25% most engaged teams experienced lower turnover, lower absenteeism, higher productivity and higher profitability. Here are a few low cost ways to take on the employee engagement challenge and give your employees what they need and crave:

Offer Frequent & Individual Feedback

Feedback is important to all employees and it should come more often than during the performance review process. A recent poll found that 65 percent of employees would like to receive more feedback. Modern talent development research suggests that employees prefer frequent and informal feedback with their managers rather than the more stuffy formal review process.

Employees are more receptive to both positive and negative feedback when it happens in real time as they can connect more closely with the comments. This strategy also ensures you correct issues in a timely manner and provides encouragement when needed creating a more personal connection between the organisation and each employee.

Promote Learning & Development

Learning and professional development are important components of a healthy organization. Many employees are motivated by the opportunity to learn new ways of doing business and taking on new responsibilities. Many organizations will offer tuition reimbursement and the opportunity for GRE tutoring. Other companies will focus on internal workshops and certifications. Either way, an organization focused on employee engagement should invest time and dollars into the training of the staff. This ensures your team is continually learning and equipped with the tools and knowledge to take your organization to the next level.

Incorporate Community Service

Community service initiatives are a great way to boost employee morale. Workplace volunteerism provides team building in a natural way and can create a deeper connection to the workplace. Employees overall want to feel empowered and appreciated and volunteerism gives them this sense of value.

In addition, employees who are offered the chance to volunteer through work are much more likely to share it with others. This paints your organization in a positive light and can have a huge impact on your reputation.

Invest in the Right Tools

In today’s fast-paced business environment, employees are under immense pressure and stress to complete a lot of work with limited time and resources. As an employer committed to employee engagement, you want to provide your employees with the tools and infrastructure that will allow them to complete their work in the most efficient way possible. This step alone will dramatically improve the employee’s perception of the company and will maximize the effectiveness of the organization.

Communicate Laterally

Many organizational leaders make the mistake of limiting their communication with the lower levels of the organization. Unfortunately, many organizations are structured hierarchically which stifles communication flow. Important messages get lost in this communication pathway and employees on the lower end of the totem poll aren’t updated on the progress or challenges of the company. If you want engagement at all levels of the organization, your leaders need to be visible and available to all employees. This creates a sense of connection and teamwork that can’t be beat!

These are just a few of the many strategies you can implement when focusing on employee engagement. There is no doubt, employee engagement is crucial to the overall health of the organization. It may take a little time and research, but the results are well worth the investment.

Categories
Starting Up

How to Start a Business the Right Way

Taking the leap towards entrepreneurship can be rewarding and it brings a great sense of freedom. The idea of being your own boss is thrilling because there is joy in being in charge of your schedules and finances. However, you can’t just wake up one day and start a business if you intend to achieve lasting success.

The truth is that building a business takes a lot of time and patience since you have to come up with solid plans and strategies that will guide your business to success.

After you’ve laid all the necessary plans, it’s time for implementation and laying a strong foundation for the business. In this article, you’ll learn about the necessary steps you should take to build a successful business.

Identify a need in the market

When starting a business, you can draw upon your past experience or a solid research to identify a gap in the market. However, it’s important to go past superficial findings if you want to establish a profitable business. If you have a brilliant idea without an ideal market, it may take a lot of time before making profits from that business.

Before starting a business, try to see if there are businesses similar to your idea and then think about the target group that is likely to visit your business premises. The good thing is that there are several government sources that can offer useful information and statistics on trends and emerging markets.

Generally, it’s important to look at expanding markets and trends, but you should be careful when you are dealing with products and services that exhibit rapid changes. In addition, you should be careful when engaging in businesses that are likely to be over flooded within a short time.

As a rule of thumb, you should start a business in an area that you know well but if you don’t know, it’s in your best interest to do a pilot test and determine viability. An idea may seem to be very attractive to you but it has no real value in the market.

Instead of wasting several years trying to build a business that is destined for failure, it’s better to spend a few months testing the idea in the market. Once you’ve determined the viability, it’s upon you to ensure you become better than your competition.

Combine the right motivation with adequate funding

If you are going to achieve any meaningful success, you have to be working towards something that you are truly passionate about. If you are starting a business because you want to run away from your job or because you are jobless, things might be tricky for you. Statistics show that most people who start a business as an alternative plan are more likely to give up in the early stages.

Although some businesses are conceived as a result of acute financial desperation, it’s definitely not a good starting point. Generally, you shouldn’t jump into a business without thoughtful consideration of the effect it will have on your personal finances.

Before you start, figure out how much you can comfortably lose and how long your finances will take you if you don’t make any profits. Because startups are likely to be locked out by most traditional lenders, it’s important to consider your credit profile since you might need to take a loan for your business.

Although you can have a hard time getting funds from traditional lenders, it doesn’t mean you are doomed. Today, there are many non-conventional lenders that are friendly to startups and they understand the challenges of a new business. With them, you can get a just right loans product that is tailored to suit your financial situation. However, it’s common to come across many business owners taking a line of credit since it enables them to borrow at any time of need.

Plan for success

Take your time to create a comprehensive business plan and commit to reviewing it on a regular basis. Although not all parts of a business plan are comfortable to handle, you should do your best to come up with an actionable plan. In the process, you’ll learn invaluable lessons and discover some useful information about your business.

In the business planning process, make sure you’ve figured out all the financial facts and don’t base your conclusions on assumptions. You need to clearly come up with a realistic financial plan that encompasses projected income, costs, and growth. In addition, try to figure out how long it will take before you’ve made some profits so that you can plan adequately.

Conclusion

Starting a business comes with significant benefits and it is a dream for many people. Despite the fact that it may seem hard at first, you can conquer all hardships if you start on the right footing. Finances are the major cause of most business failures but you can easily access some funding from unconventional lenders. Most importantly, ensure that your business idea is viable and focused on the right market.