Category: How-To Guides

Cash flow management is an ongoing challenge for many entrepreneurs and business owners. It is crucial to keep a close eye on accounts payable and accounts receivable to ensure there are no financial gaps in receiving payments and using those incoming funds to pay important expenses.

Below is an infographic from Citizens Bank that outlines what to pay special attention to when analyzing accounts payable and receivable. You can even use specific accounting software to help track payment dates and financial projections. Then, you can truly understand if you’ll need additional funds to assist you with your business goals, whether it’s a small business loan or line of credit to help with equipment or everyday needs. Is there a strategy that works well for you? Let us know in the comments.

Consider small business loans from Citizens Bank.

Starting a business in rental property can be challenging and unpredictable but like most important ventures in life, it requires careful planning to pull off. The property market is a highly competitive industry so patience, organisation and professional advice in the right places is required for the best chance of success. Here are a few tips for making your mark in the rental property business.

Write up a Business plan

To ensure every score and detail is accounted for, you must formulate a thorough business plan for your new rental property business. Once you have decided upon your chosen areas and demographic, conduct some market research about the needs of potential tenants. Other considerations should include market examinations, finance management and all legal aspects of rental property, taking into account possible property disputes and legal fees etc. The more detailed and well-considered your business plan, the easier it will be to operate. Consult some tips on how to write a successful business plan if you are unsure and consult professionals for further advice.

Consider property areas

Choosing where you will place your rental property(s) is perhaps the most important decision to make when entering the rental property business as this is central to most other decisions such as design, facilities and other specific considerations.

Added to this, you must also consider your demographics of potential tenants. Will you be open to families as well as students or will you concern yourself with a particular type of tenant based on the location i.e. student campus or elderly retirement communities? The more you question and research your chosen area, the more flexible your business approach.

Compare tradesmen

The team of builders and contractors you hire to prepare your chosen properties for rent are likely to be the same team you will require for home repairs and services further down the line so it is vitally important to compare builders and price quotes at the earliest opportunity. When interviewing potential tradesmen, be thorough when checking their references and past experience to ensure they are right for your requirements.

Once you have the basics of property startup covered, the next step is to consider the appearance of each rental space. As Landlord and overall owner, it’s important for the sake of tenants and future business that you keep decor consistent throughout each property. Whether you accommodate students or professional couples, furniture experts such as David Phillips specialise in a range of landlord furniture packages that can help you achieve seamless style and quality from one home to the next.

Working as a freelancer offers a number of benefits including the freedom to decide your own schedule. Flexible working hours may seem like a dream come true if you are used to working from nine to five but keeping productivity levels high can be a challenge. With this in mind, here are four tips that will help to ensure your freelance business is a success.

Create an Efficient Working Environment

Productivity is the key to creating a successful freelance business and if you want to be productive, separating your home and work life can help. If you have a spare room, turn it into an office and create a comfortable place to work that is free from distractions. If you aren’t comfortable, your mind will be on other things so make sure you invest in a high quality office chair. Sitting at an office chair for hours on end can cause a few aches and pains but this article will help you to set up an office space that promotes good posture.

Set Up a Website

Becoming a successful freelancer very much depends on word of mouth recommendations. However, if you are just starting out, you can do with all of the exposure that you can get. Having your own website is the perfect way to promote your services and show potential clients what you offer. You can use this platform to showcase your freelance portfolio and use it to secure new clients.

Get Social

Having a website is the first step to creating a successful freelance business but if no one knows it exists, interest will be limited. Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are the perfect platforms to drive traffic to your website. Promote your services via social channels and increase awareness without paying as penny.

Invest in Professional Correspondence

As a freelancer, you may not be in a client facing role but this does not mean that you shouldn’t conduct your business in a professional manner. In order to make a living from freelancing you have to present a professional image to your clients if you want them to use your services on a regular basis. Stationary printing services can help you to maintain a professional image with unique invoices, envelopes, letterheads and more. Rockhill First Class Envelopes have a great selection of quality envelopes that are guaranteed to make a great impression.

So, there you have it, four tips to help you build a successful freelance business in 2014.

Whenever people refer to the Great Recession, the topic of accidental entrepreneurship is almost always brought up. This is because the worst financial crisis in years had a huge impact on the job market, and forced thousands of unemployed individuals to go it alone in the quest for security and independence.

Now that the economy is improving, however, those without the drive or instinct to remain as entrepreneurs are looking to sell their ventures for a healthy profit. This is far easier said than done, however, as anyone with first-hand experience will testify that selling a commercial business is a process fraught with hidden dangers and potential pitfalls.

Top Tips for Effectively Selling your Business

With this in mind, what practical steps can you take to effectively market and sell your independent business? Consider the following: –

Set a Fair and Reasonable Valuation

Whether you are looking to sell your entire business or simply a predetermined equity share, it is crucial that you apply a reasonable valuation which offers some incentive to potential buyers. While there are multiple ways that you can appraise your commercial assets and arrive at a valuation, this means little unless you are able to apply common sense and establish a price that has merit in the existing market. So be considered in your approach, and remember that compromise may be necessary if you are to achieve your long-term financial goals.

Target the Right Market for your Business

While there are a number of potential deal-makers who may offer to help sell your business, not all of these are as reputable as they seem. With this in mind, it is imperative that you are patient in your approach and strive to identify the right market for your business. In effect, this will put you in touch with reliable individuals who have the willingness and capacity to buy, which in turn will optimise your chances of executing a quick and efficient sale. This may prove crucial, especially if your business belongs a niche market that is prone to instability.

Seek Out Professional Assistance

Regardless of the price that you set for your business, you will need to work extremely hard to maximise the value within the firm. This may require professional assistance, as market leading firms such as the Axis Partnership bring a wealth of experience and professional negotiation skills to the table. This is key, as potential buyers will always strive to lower the cost and achieve a bargain regardless of the nature of your business and its overall appeal. By partnering with an experienced firm, you can achieve the best possible financial results for your business.

There is more to launching a product or program to your community simply than sending out an email and hoping people will buy!  It’s about creating a whole product/program launch system so that you can get maximum sales for your brand-new offering.  Every business owner is excited to launch a new product or program and dreams of seeing “sold out” on their website.

But very often they don’t have a launch strategy in place, and so miss many of those vital pre-launch steps that would result in those “sold out” sales.

Before I figured out the very specific system needed for a successful launch campaign, I too experienced those “launch flops”:

• Spending months putting a program together and not having a single sale when it launched!
• Tried again a few months later with a new program, and had two sales!
• Then, finally, creating a program launch system that created “sold out” signs going up on my website!

With the technology that’s available to business owners, and the world-wide reach of the Internet, you’d think it would be easy to create a product or program, launch it, and make sales!  Not so.  It’s all down to your program launch system, and taking very specific, step-by-step actions to ensure you have all the steps covered.

Here are my top five steps to ensure a successful product launch:

Step 1: Give yourself enough time to plan and implement your launch. So often business owners don’t allow enough time to put in place all the key steps needed to ensure a successful launch campaign.  There are so many moving pieces in a launch cycle that if at any point in the process a step gets missed, it could spell disaster for your launch and means it might not to be as successful as you hoped it would be.

Step 2: Set realistic sales goals.  For this you need to understand the metrics of your business.  If your goal is to have 100 members in your new membership program, but your list size won’t support that goal, then you’re going to end up being very disappointed. In my experience, business owners set unrealistic expectations of what they want simply because they don’t understand their business. So take a look at your business, and determine what realistic goals are for your product/program sales.

Step 3: Set up the necessary back-office systems.  This means having your Infusionsoft or 1ShoppingCart account properly set up to handle the automated sales and delivery process.  If you don’t understand how this technology works, and you don’t have someone on your team who can do this for you, then taking orders is going to become an issue for you at launch time.

Step 4: Determine which promotional strategies you’re going to use. This ties into Step 1 above as there are many different promotional strategies you could implement, with some taking more time than others. For example, will you be hosting a preview call? A series of preview calls? A video series? Will you be bringing on board affiliates and joint venture partners? Knowing at the outset which promotional strategies to use will determine the timeline for your launch campaign.

Step 5:  Decide on your launch window.  After launching your product, how long will you make it available for? When will you close the cart? What will you do during this timeframe to encourage more sales?  All of these are key factors that you have to build in to your launch campaign at the outset. And, depending on what you decide to do, you’ll need to allow the time and resources to implement these.

As you can see, there are LOTS of things you need to take into account.  And this is why it’s so important that you create a system for your product launch campaign, so that enough time is allowed and important steps don’t get missed.

Once your launch is over, if you planned it all out from the beginning and created a system for it, you should be congratulating yourself on reaching your sales goals.   And next time, guess what … you have the system in place.  You simply rinse and repeat for future launch campaigns.