Category: How-To Guides

We all want our startup operations to run as smoothly as possible. Hiccups and lags cost time and money, two things no small business can spare. Efficiency is the holy grail for entrepreneurs in an increasingly internet-driven economy – and can appear about as elusive too. However, there are an array of ways in which shorter delays, faster responses, and all around more bang for the buck can be achieved.

Optimize ergonomics

Workers perform better when they are reasonably comfortable. It’s a pretty straightforward, common sense observation, but too often gets put on the back burner during the launch of a startup. The easy to find discount desks, chairs, keyboards, and so forth are rarely optimized for human comfort. Instead, do your research to compile a list of work space necessary products with a reputation for ergonomic design. Narrow down options at or near your price range, then proceed with deal hunting to make a final choice. Your staff will thank you, and you’ll thank yourself when productivity exceeds expectations.

Streamline communications and data entry

There is nothing worse for employees than being bombarded by work-related communications from all sides. When workers are expected to reply to texts, emails, calls, and so forth from a variety of sources, they tend to drag their feet. The same goes for entering in numbers, documenting expenses, and all the other work needed to keep track of the actual work. The simple solution is opting for a service like Kore, which integrates intelligent bots with its enterprise messaging solution. This allows for more efficient and productive communication and workflows.

Track employee productivity

Entrepreneurs are often the managers of a startup, at least at the beginning. The importance of monitoring employee progress is frequently undervalued, as entrepreneurs are focused on building connections rather than incubating productivity improvements. Again, the solution may be opting for software. Such services watch over the staff for you. This way, when an entrepreneur wishes to try out techniques for keeping employees productive, there is a measured way of determining whether it is working or not.

Set weekly goals

Goals are good, but difficult to assemble accurately. We tend to aspire to accomplish too much or too later. Minimize the pressure placed on a specific series of work goals by sticking to a weekly breakdown. Attack these objectives as chunks on a five days at a time basis, with an overall strategy in mind. This outlined plan must be as flexible as it is motivating, so center goals on general growth and success rather than specific deals and sales points.

Forget about the trouble customers and/or clients

The following is taboo among most entrepreneurial circles, but it doesn’t mean it’s not true: prickly, seemingly never satisfied clients and customers are not worth the trouble they cause. What constitutes as trouble depends on the breakdown of cost/benefit. Audit the transactions and plug in the overhead to decide whether the work required to keep someone coming back is worth the revenue. More times than not the answer is no.

All entrepreneurs desire efficiency. Achieving optimal productivity and performance is not easy to do – or so it seems. In truth, the methods for making a small startup launch more efficiently and therefore more effectively are relatively easy to incorporate into your business plan. Go for it, and watch as things begin to run more smoothly than ever before.

It’s all in the planning

Don’t waste time with needless worry when you know that you have to write an essay but take the necessary steps to prepare yourself mentally and simply believe that this is something which you are well able to do if you put your mind to it. The first steps will always be to read carefully through all of the instructions or questions and it may help to underline some keywords which seems to strike a chord in you. Also identify those words within the instructions that seem to be placing some kind of limitation or restriction on the discussion with in that essay and this may be especially those areas which deals with a specific time period. Look at exactly what it says in the instructions such as what is the keywords, is it compare, discuss or explain because this will give you an excellent indication of where you should be heading. No one has all knowledge and therefore if you find words which you do not know then make use of a dictionary also pay close attention to words which may have reference to a particular subject with in that essay. In order to learn how I write my essays from scratch readers should pay special attention to the following paragraphs.

Approach carefully

Before you actually start pouring words on paper sufficient consideration should be given to the relevant ideas, you know like brainstorming and as things come to mindwrite those ideas down because they may just be an excellent starting point to your narrative. Absolutely any additional information which is relevant to those ideas which you have already discovered or anything at all which could substantiate those ideas should also be written down in your preparation notes. Look at the available information from all possible angles and just let your mind go in order to see if there is any other realistic connections between the available portions of information available to you. Most topics will require a substantial amount of research in order to ensure that the essay either has sufficient background information to actually be able to write a compelling essay. Not all sources which could be found on the Internet or in the library will necessarily be useful for your purposes and therefore choose carefully. It is important to make notes of all resources which is used so that they can be included in either the bibliography or in the footnotes of your essay.

Plan your essay carefully

Put all the information which you have accumulated in a logical sequence and it’s important to ensure that every snippet of information which has been gathered during your research process is really relevant to the instructions and the questions which has been included into that project by the teacher. Once this process has been completed and everything has been written down in a logical sequence the student or essay writer should know exactly where they are going with the rest of the content. This whole process will require intensive consideration because it is important to provide a response that will be in keeping with the mood of the entire project and it also serves no purpose to provide content which is too simplistic and which does not address the issues properly. You need to carefully plan the entire style of the essay and you need to clearly indicate your intentions right from the opening paragraph. You need to frequently refer to that strategy or most important thoughts and once again when it comes to the conclusion of that essay the final proof as to the validity of that strategy have to be proven in a convincing fashion.

The importance of the introduction

It is vitally important to provide content that will be able to engage the reader and that will keep them interested. Therefore during the actual introduction it is important to put your case on the table and open it up for discussion. It will now be necessary to proceed to present your centralthoughts or also known as the thesis. Although you still have a long way to go in actually writing that essay the introduction should provide at least some indication of how the questions which are relevant to that essay is going to be answered. Once that has been done the essay writer should not proceed to the main body of the essay. When reading expert essays it will quickly be seen that the preferred practice will be to address each point in a completely new paragraph. It will be important to ensure that there is an intelligent link between separate paragraphs and it should be clear to the reader how those paragraphs relate to each other. It is not merely sufficient to provide information but the essay writer should be able to support every point which is made with sufficient evidence. Some important points will have to be repeated two or more times in order to emphasize their importance and also their relevance to the main topic.

Trading can be a very lucrative decision if you are in there for the long haul. But the question that most beginners face is how to get started in trading. Here is a detailed guide on how to start with trading, steps you need to take and points to remember:

Stock Broker Account

The first thing you need to do is to open a stock broker account. There are plenty of stock brokers and investment companies who provide online avenues and mobile app services and charge reasonable fees. Make sure that you go through their terms and conditions and understand their fee structure.

Find a Mentor

This is true for every business or investment line and trading is no different. If you are a beginner in trading, you need to find a mentor or someone who can guide you through the market and make trading simpler. You may want to consider a company like Simpler Trading, who has a team of experts to help clients achieve success.

There are different types of trading options like:

~  Call option – Call options are like legal contracts that provide their owners the legal right to purchase the underlying asset at a pre-agreed price in the future. You will most likely buy a call option when you are positive that the value of the asset in question is going to rise in the future.

~  Put option – Put options, on the other hand, is the exact opposite of call option. Under this option, you are given the right to sell an asset in the future at a pre-agreed price. So theoretically, you would buy a put option when you are positive that the value of the given asset is going to fall in the future. Under both call and put option, there is an expiry date on the contract. So you cannot wait forever.

~  American style options – American style options does not mean that you have to buy them at a specific location, but it means that the terms of the contract will be dictated by that place. Call and Put options as discussed come with an expiry date and when the date comes, you can either buy or sell the given asset respectively. But if it is an American style option, then you have an additional benefit, the right to exercise any time before the expiry of the contract.

~  European style options – European style options differ from their American counter slightly in a way that you do not have the third option. This means you can buy and sell only at the time when your contract expires and not before that.

The point here is that if you are a beginner, then you need to hire the services of an expert, who know what they are doing. It is their job to make sure that your investments remain safe and give you suitable returns.

What sets these experts and their membership apart is that when you join them, you also get to benefit from a strong community of investors who are already profiting from their expertise and knowledge. This strong investment minded community of traders share a combined knowledge of over 200 years.

Tax

Whenever you buy shares, you have to pay taxes. Not only this, when you make a profit on your shares, even then you have to pay taxes. You may or may not like it but it is there and for everybody.

Before you start investing, make sure to understand the tax structure, percentage applied and general rules and regulations. There is some tax exemptions available based on how long you decide to hold your stocks and how much profit you are booking. This will help you stay ahead of the game. Understanding the tax structure will also help you save your hard earned dollars. Any time you can save money during a recession that never ends and in a high tax environment is a wonderful thing.

Books and Investors

Apart from getting help from an expert and learning your way around the tax structure, it is also recommended that you buy and read some books on the topic. Follow salient and fantastic investor minds of our time like Warren Buffet, Franklin Templeton, Benjamin Graham, Peter Lynch, and Paul Tudor James. This will help in building the groundwork, like a foundation on which your future will be built.

News

Every morning follow the news on Yahoo Finance or Google Finance. This will give you an overview of what to expect from the day and the top stories of the day. In case you are looking for in depth coverage of the stock market, then you can also start following Wall Street Journal. Technology has made it easier to do this all on your smartphone.

All the knowledge in the world cannot help you if you fail to take a decision and act on it. Wayne Gretzky once said “you miss every shot you never take” and this correlates here since if you do not make decisions based on this information you will not benefit like you could.

It is paramount that whatever you have read and understood here, you begin to practice it as soon as possible. Hire the services of an investment pro, choose paid subscriptions to improve your knowledge and education, and start implementing what you have learned.

Article Contributed by Cynthia Chen of Xperii and Brown University

In our last lessons, we’ve talked about the right reasons to start a new venture, and how innovation is extraordinarily valuable, but ultimately, the value of an idea is lost if no one takes the actions to implement them. In these lessons we’ll discuss how to actually get started with that implementation, and keep making progress every day.

Lesson VII – Start with those you know.

    In developing a new venture, there is a need to seek feedback in order to asses market reception and tailor your offerings accordingly..To obtain this guidance, many aspiring entrepreneurs aim to connect with key industry leaders in venture funding and well-known groups. These individuals and firms, however, often do not have much of an interest in early stage startups and ideas, and may even remember an unwanted email if it didn’t come with a recommendation from one of their trusted connections. So, who should entrepreneurs whose startups are still in early stages go to when seeking advice?

    Considering the unlikelihood of obtaining such valuable guidance from top-name VC firms and industry leaders without connections already in place, it is often best to reach out to your personal repository of contacts. Before one can even contemplate securing serious money—that is, sizeable seed rounds or beyond—having as much feedback and thoughts as possible about your idea is invaluable.

    Not all advice needs to come from domain experts – there is something very valuable to be gained by learning how to present your startup to generalists. More often than not, friendly connections are willing to provide feedback—be it via an email conversation, or over the phone. While investors are the deciders of funding down the road, the general opinions of friends and family can be very helpful in formulating how you convey your company and ideas as clearly as possible. Seek comments on your pitch deck, ask what needs clarification in general, and assess overall reactions from those familiar with startups, and those who are not.

    Startups require a broad range of expertise, from operations, to sales, to marketing, to finances, to manufacturing —chances are, there are people you are overlooking who can assist in providing help in many of these functional areas. Along the way, you may even be introduced to others who can assist. Meeting with as many contacts and mentors as possible can serve as a tool to help advance your idea further along its journey. And who knows? Sometimes the people you have forgotten about in the back of your mind can become key in later business development and partnerships.

Lesson VIII– Don’t take it personally.

Clearly, it is inappropriate to Google “VCs near me” and cold-call them. While you should generally have an introduction to VC firms or important contacts, there will be times when you need to take a leap of faith reaching out to an important contact with whom you have met only briefly or in passing. Oftentimes, these follow-up re-introductions will garner no reply, but they are well worth your effort. A single success can help shape real progress for your company.

Because e-mails tend to stack up quickly, many simply fall victim to being overlooked and forgotten, especially in today’s digital environment. I am sure many of us have wondered after sending an email with no response back: “Will I ever receive a reply?” Repeatedly facing this situation can make reaching out to contacts a more daunting task than it should, and an entrepreneur should not take this nonresponse personally. Remember is that you are among dozens of others who face the same situation.

While you will encounter this routine scenario over and over as you continue to develop your idea and reach out to more and more contacts and mentors alike, it is important to not to take it personally and let the lack of response to emails be a deterrent from reaching out to potential advisors. This scenario will likely play out many times before it pays off, but it’s worth it to not get discouraged – doing so could force you to miss out on your most valuable contacts.

Lesson IX– Make it personal.

    Given the rapid speed startups operate at, quick responses to your outgoing emails can make a big difference. While you can ensure the speed with which you reply to incoming mail is same-day or same-hour, the delayed replies to outgoing mail can be problematic. Having faced this particular fact (e-mails going unnoticed or ignored), there are other alternatives to raise the chances of obtaining the desired feedback or reply e-mail when reaching out to follow up with a contact.

    Today is digital. But this doesn’t mean there cannot be a personal component as well. If you connected well, picking up a phone and verbally following up is just one of these “personal” methods. Arranging for a face-to-face meeting is another. Stacks of unread e-mails get lost in the clutter; giving a reason to make the follow-up more personal often leads to better success. Engagement is a rarity among electronic messages.

    Personalized communication provides an opportunity to develop a relationship more substantial than words on a screen. Adding this personal component can provide a greater weight not only during the initial meeting or contact, but also in subsequent follow-up meetings. If the matter at hand is important enough to you (and your startup), picking up the phone and scheduling a phone meeting, or in-person one, will often produce better outcomes. Take this a step further and take them out for coffee or lunch so that they aren’t forced to burn work-time to speak with you: you’re likely to find yourself with more time face-to-face with those who can impact your startup the most.

About the Authors

Cynthia S. Chen is a junior at Brown University studying applied mathematics, computer science, and economics. She has conducted research at Boston College, MIT, and The University of Michigan in many areas including mathematical knot theory, cognitive science, computer vision, and bioinformatics. Cynthia founded Xperii, a software as a service company serving researchers who work with human subjects, and currently serves as its Chief Technology Officer.

Daniel S. Williams is a graduating Advanced-Standing Senior at Boston College in the Carroll School of Management majoring in Management, with a concentration in Finance. Daniel has previously worked at several firms and startups fostering client-interactions, handling taxes, banking and filing systems, as well as marketing initiatives. He has been a part of Xperii since its inception and has served advisory roles with other ventures.

 

Security should be a primary concern for any business owner. Not only do you need to safeguard your most valuable assets, but employee productivity can also suffer if staff feel they aren’t adequately protected. If you’re tasked with managing the security of your business, here are the three main areas that you should concentrate on.

Security Fencing

The first thing you should do is create a physical boundary between your business and the outside world. Not only does this provide protection, but its presence also acts as a deterrent. As well as protecting your business against trespassers, though, security fencing can also provide an invaluable service to the community. Factories, warehouses, or anywhere that operates heavy machinery are dangerous work environments that no members of the public should be able to easy walk into. For maximum protection, consider installing automatic steel gates. These can be fitted on sloping or uneven roads and are designed to withstand even the harshest environments.

Video Surveillance

In the event that you aren’t able to restrict a trespasser from entering your property, you’ll want to have video surveillance in place so that you can assist the authorities in tracking the individual. Don’t worry about the prospect that the image quality will be substandard. CCTV cameras have improved dramatically over the years so you can expect a clear, high-definition video feed rather than the grainy black and white images of yesteryear. This will also help you to identify the weaknesses in your security system and improve on them for the future. Similarly, like physical barriers, their visible presence can also act as a deterrent to potential thieves.

Employee Training

Finally, employee training programs are among your most powerful tools. Not only should you ensure that your security team is trained to its full potential, but you should also consider how you can educate your other employees on the proper protocol on behaving in an extreme scenario. According to a report by The British Retail Consortium in 2013, around 28,700 members of staff claimed to have suffered from physical attacks, threats, or verbal abuse while on the job. While your main focus should be restricting the chance of these scenarios happening, you also need to factor in the rare case that these events do occur.

Of course in the modern era there are now new threats that no physical boundaries can stop. Cloud computing is becoming an everyday part of people’s working lives, but that doesn’t mean it’s secure. If your business carries sensitive data, you should be putting just as much resources, if not more, into improving your methods here as you are in the rest of your business.