Author: Ethan Theo

Abe WalkingBear Sanchez is an International Speaker / Trainer / Consultant on the subject of cash flow / sales enhancement and business knowledge organization and use. Founder and President of www.armg-usa.com, WalkingBear has authored hundreds of business articles, has worked with numerous companies in a wide range of industries since 1982 and has spoken at many venues including the Shakespeare Globe Theater in London.

Categories
Work Life

Is Your Business Ruining Your Relationship With Your Spouse?

There is nothing more satisfying and rewarding as running your own business, especially one which is successful and thriving.

While your partner was initially supportive and as excited as you were about the promise of financial freedom and building an empire, things are gradually starting to decline. As the majority of your thoughts (at the office or in a social setting) are focused on the business, your relationship with your spouse appears to be suffering as a result. It may not be obvious to you why there is a growing distance between you both, and the lack of quality time together can, unfortunately, leave little chance to figure that out.

While your credit score range is very good, your relationship is on a downward trajectory. So what can you do to ensure that your personal relationships can also prosper alongside with your business?

Designate time for your spouse and family

Most working professionals will tell you that quality time is getting harder and harder to come by. This is tenfold for many self-employed entrepreneurs or those tasked with pushing a start-up business. Aside from day to day necessities at the office, the work is usually taken home. Throw in meetings with creditors, networking, and functions, and it can feel like a very lonely time for your partner.

By assigning times such as date nights or family activities, you can follow a schedule and ensure that your loved ones get to see you and spend time with you. Being flexible is important to those around you, and can go a long way towards a happier life. You want the support of your partner and loved ones, so try to make them feel as important as possible, as sometimes a busy work life can feel threatening to those that don’t understand how things work.

Communicate with your partner

Communication is the fulcrum of any successful relationship, and is crucial to any supportive partnership. Without communicating with your significant other, the information which can explain why you are stressed, overworked or simply disappointed is not available to back up what they simply see as a bad mood or lack of interest.

Encourage your partner to speak to you, voice their concerns and work together to promote a sense of trust and understanding. By opening up about any problems you have with work, this will also give your partner a sense of involvement and make them feel as though their opinion counts. By asking how their day went, you are also providing your partner with the opportunity to tell you how they are feeling and how their career or own business endeavour is running.

Business and family can work together

While it may sometimes feel that you are married to your business and your wife or husband, it is not necessary to put your affairs ahead of those you love in order to succeed. With the support of your loved ones, your business can thrive as a result. Just as a happy bus driver makes a long ride seem easier, a happy businessman will approach any tasks with a good sense of optimism.

Categories
Operations

Marketing & Accounting: Two Tasks Entrepreneurs Should Outsource and Why

When you become an entrepreneur you often gravitate towards the DIY lifestyle. Often the result of limited finances, you decide to wear all the hats until your operation starts producing profits. Though this can work in some cases with some responsibilities, there are certain areas of business that unless you’re already skilled in, should be outsourced to a professional. Taking on too much, particularly in areas like marketing and accounting, could end up costing you more than you bargained for.

Why You Need to Consult Experts

Though it can seem cost-effective to keep doing these major tasks on your own, you’ll soon learn that it’s not. Because both of these areas of business are complex and ever-changing, the ability to learn every trend, rule, or regulation to remain in compliance and in the competitive market can prove difficult for the average business owner. Eventually, time is wasted, errors occur, money goes down the drain and your startup remains to stagnate. Consulting the experts on an as needed or ongoing basis makes a world of difference.

Compliance

Here’s one factor that should be a top priority for all entrepreneurs – compliance. In order to maintain a successful business, you must remain in compliance with rules and regulations. This is especially true in matters of accounting. When company funds are not properly recorded and reported each year (sometimes sooner depending on profits), your business could face tax penalties and fines. You want to consult a financial professional near you as they’d be most familiar with laws in your state. If you were working from Missouri, for example, you’d want to find a Quickbooks accounting CPA St Louis community business leaders have vetted and deemed trustworthy. A good CPA will help you get set up and ensure you remain out of trouble with the government.

Experience and Education

Unless you’ve gone to school and received adequate education and training in the fields of marketing and accounting, to complete these jobs on your own only hurts your business. Both fields require a great deal of education and experience to master as the process of accounting and trends in marketing are constantly changing. When you lack the necessary education or experience, you stand to make mistakes as well as miss out on opportunities to advance your business forward.

Time

What many entrepreneurs don’t know is that both marketing and accounting are ongoing responsibilities. You can’t create an Excel spreadsheet or set up a free QuickBooks account and never enter information into the system or not work from a budget and expect your company to do well. Just like you can’t build a website and never make updates or create content without using SEO techniques and expect it to go viral. You’ll have to dedicate time and energy to these things daily and this ultimately takes time away from other areas of your business that you could have been dealing with (in which you are trained and educated to do so).

Growth

There are very few successful brands that got to where they are today without the help of some other business professional or service provider. From making effective purchase decisions based on financial forecasts and planning for expansions to increasing online presence and attracting your target audience to increase sales potential, ensuring a business can grow successfully requires skill and experience beyond your own understanding. Accountants ensure that you are properly managing the funds to get you to your goals faster while marketers help to build your brand and get you in front of as many prospective customers as possible to boost your business. Which essentially makes them crucial keys in reaching new levels of success.

There are a lot of reasons that entrepreneurs shy away from consulting the likes of accountants and marketers for their small businesses. From not having enough money to believing they can tackle the job themselves, these reasons end up leaving them in a lot of financial trouble and ions behind the competition. Service providers like CPAs and marketers have the education and experience to save your business time and money while helping to build a solid brand.

Categories
Operations

The Digital Revolution is Pushing Globalization but There are a Few Hurdles to be Crossed

Globalization tends to attract negative emotions especially from people who have a tendency to promote conspiracy theories. The mere mention of globalization evokes images of an evil corporation making inroads into an emerging economy to kill off the local businesses in order to gain a control of their market. Many people believe that globalization is a tool used by the world’s rich to perpetrate the cycle of income inequality.

However, when examined in an objective context, globalization could be a positive force. And globalization when merged with entrepreneurship could birth innovations for a more inclusive economic growth. Entrepreneurs are now starting to think globally in order to improve the odds of surviving locally.

Entrepreneurs have to source raw materials, services, and skills from other countries in order to get the best value for money. Some other entrepreneurs also find ways to sell their products and services to other countries where they could getter better prices because of the dynamics of demand and supply. The interconnectedness of today’s business in turn triggers a domino effect of wealth creation across national borders.

However, a number of hurdles must be crossed for globalization to reach its true potential as a powerful tool for wealth creation in the hands of entrepreneurs.

Some countries/companies are yet to embrace digital communications

Entrepreneurs in some countries have to contend with the fact that globalization is moving at snail speed because digital communications is yet to take a firm root in some places. Some companies still have corporate cultures built around paper communications with postal mails. Trying to build a business relationship with such companies could be somewhat stressful because postal mail between countries could take months to arrive. In some places, faxing documents is still in vogue and entrepreneurs in the west might have to relearn how fax works in order to send and receive documents.

Foreign exchange management is still somewhat expensive

If you are trying to do business with any form of international exposure, you’ll need to find a way to get your money in/out of your home/destination country. Many entrepreneurs doing business internationally still have to live with the exploitative fees that some traditional financial institutions charge to send or receive money from foreign countries. In fact, you can expect to pay between 10% to 20% in fees when sending or receiving money from some countries.

Apart from the exorbitant costs of foreign exchange transactions, some forex transactions often take a number of days to process; thereby adding to the opportunity cost of having cash at hand. Thankfully, services such as moneytransfercomparison.com can provide you with valuable information for choosing reliable international money transfer companies. In addition, entrepreneurs with foreign exposure can find ways to handle forex headwinds by employing best practices in foreign exchange management.

Shipping across international borders is still problematic

Entrepreneurs who are involved in the production/sales of physical goods might find it somewhat cumbersome to do business internationally because the shipping business is simply complicated. The cost of shipping goods to the some countries especially in parts of Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa is simply expensive. The worst part is that you can’t always pass on the shipping costs to the buyer because you’ll end up losing your competitive advantage on the price point.

 

Categories
Finance & Capital

2 Practical Ways for a New Business to Manage Financial Problems

Business is not for the timid, but for the brave and resourceful. Courage is necessary because it’s difficult for you to anticipate all possible contingencies. It’s almost impossible to prepare ahead of time on what you need to know to make the best decisions when a peril or opportunity opens up. Similarly, resourcefulness is necessary to make ends meet when you are starting a business. It isn’t uncommon for entrepreneurs to go without a paycheck for a length of time while the business gets off the ground and to have to work side jobs to keep the business afloat.

Here are two ways of coping with a financial crisis early in your business: one, for working with a problem with a recognizable cause; the other, for working on a problem whose cause eludes you:

How to Deal with a Known Cause

If you know the cause of the problem because it’s obvious, you need to evaluate the scope of the financial problem so that you can arrive at the best solution.

The financial constraints you’re facing may not be as bad as you imagine. An unexpected spike in your overhead might be compensated for by an increase in sales revenue. Perhaps, too, it’s a minor issue that can be resolved by using a payday loan alternative to get your business back on track. For instance, you might feel inclined to panic if your single business vehicle, a delivery van, has broken down — but with a few hundred dollars worth of repairs, you’ll be back to serving your customers.

Conversely, the problem may appear minor, tempting you to ignore it, but it will get worse if you do nothing about it. For instance, it’s easy to overlook a slump in sales volume for a particular quarter, but this might be the symptoms of a deeper malaise, a shift in the market or a problem with the way your sales team is closing sales.

Either way, whether it looks bad but can be easily remedied or it looks mild but can get worse, assessing the scope of the problem will give you a realistic picture so that you can then find the best solution.

How to Deal with an Unknown Cause

Financial problems are not random events, but symptoms of an underlying cause, a business process that is malfunctioning. If the reason for the problem is obvious, you can move toward a solution, but if you don’t know the actual reason why your business is losing money, then you obviously can’t even begin to think about possible solutions.

Naturally, if you know the cause of the problem, you can work towards a solution. If the salaries you’re offering candidates are below market value, then you can raise them. If there are certain company policies that people consider unfair, you can revise them. However, what do you do if you don’t know the cause? In cases when you don’t know why a problem exists, it’s necessary to resort to applying some problem-solving methodologies or hiring outside experts to help you with the detective work necessary for identifying the unknown cause.

As an example, let’s suppose your HR department has begun to notice that your business has a high staff turnover. Since you spend so much money training new staff, watching them quit soon after working for your company is a cause for financial concern.

Here are 4 steps you can take:

  • First, define the problem, getting clear on why a certain situation is problematic.
  • Second, get some metrics on what has happened and forecast what will happen if the problem continues.
  • Third, research all possible causes until you find the root cause that is responsible for the diverse problems your business is experiencing. A single issue may be manifesting in different ways.
  • Fourth, implement a solution and be sure to test it for awhile to see if it works well enough to put the problem behind you.

Problems and Processes

What known and unknown business problems have in common is that they both cause financial distress because they arise from a broken business process. Through patient inquiry and methodically trying out the best solutions that occur to you, they can be resolved. If it’s a discrepancy in cash flow, you can raise the money to resume business operations, or if it’s a problem within the company, then you can use problem-solving methods to identify the hidden cause and set things right again.

Categories
Operations

4 Reasons Why Employees Fear, Loathe and Dread Some Point-of-Sale (POS) Systems

Ah yes: your point-of-sale (POS) system. That piece of advanced technology that you spent a significant amount of money on, so that you could boost customer experience and increase sales. What’s not to love?

Well, unless you’ve checked to make sure (actually, double-check), then there’s a chance that your employees aren’t in love with your POS. In fact, they might fear, loathe and dread it. Here are the four reasons why:

  1. It’s s-l-o-w.

A slow POS system turns what should be a rapid touch point into a tedious, awkward and frustrating process for customers; one that that makes employees — and the businesses and brands they represent — look bad, and stuck in the last century. Yes, retro is in, but old school is out. Slow POS systems are the latter. Heck, you might as well be using Internet Explorer (sorry, I’ll take that back — there’s no need to hit below the belt).

  1. It’s unreliable.

Few things — actually, make that almost nothing — embarrasses customers more than having their transaction declined. But you know what? Nothing irritates or even infuriates them more than learning that this rejection was because a POS system didn’t want to work and play well with their perfectly valid payment card. Sadly, employees are on the front lines of this unhappiness, and make very easy targets.

  1. It’s needlessly complex.

Customers shouldn’t feel as though they need to watch a how-to video in order to figure out which button is for checking and which is for savings, or how to leave a tip (presuming that they don’t talk themselves out of leaving one after such an uphill climb). Again, employees are on the front lines here, and even if they politely and professionally guide customers on what buttons to press, it’s not a pleasant experience — and hardly fits into the “omnichannel, seamless, gap-free end-to-end buying experience” that retailers promise, and that customers expect.

  1. It’s not mobile.

Handing customers a POS system attached to a coiled wire is about as high-tech and impressive as going to the gas station, and getting a key with a hub cap attached (so that you can’t steal it — the key that is, not the hub cap). It’s easy to understand why employees and customers dislike twisting and turning to accommodate wires. It’s harder to understand why businesses use a wired POS system in the first place! Companies like Retail Management Solutions offer a secure, wireless solution that enables employees to turn any area into a payment hub — even outside at the curb (which is ideal for retailers like pharmacies).

The Bottom Line

Your POS system needs to be an ally in the fight for customer loyalty and increased sales — not an enemy. Don’t get misled by marketing hype or vendor promises. Speak with your employees to see if the “S” in POS experience doesn’t really stand for “sale”, but for another 4-letter s-word (yeah, that one). If so, then you know that upgrading to something better is a top priority.