Category: Business/Entrepreneurship

3 Tips on How to Represent Your Business Well

Two of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. A major component of building your business/enterprise is personal appearance. This encompasses both physical appearance, demeanour and actual preparedness. The following contributed post is thus entitled, 3 Tips on How to Represent Your Business Well.

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If you’re a small business owner at a trade event, or if you’re a member of a much larger organisation and have been tasked with representing the organisation in some official and formal context, it’s essential that you know how to conduct yourself in a manner which presents your business in the best possible light.

Of course, there’s a lot that goes into a professional presentation, and there are many aims that you will likely be trying to accomplish.

It will, for example, be important for you to present your business as a serious, professional, and diligent force to any competitors in the field. It will also be necessary for you to reassure your clients, or would-be clients, of your organisation’s strong ethical standards that sit above reproach.

Here are a few tips on how, specifically, you can conduct yourself to represent your business well.

Be sharp in your presentation — both your personal presentation and the presentation of your branding and marketing materials

If you’re in the position of representing your business in an official capacity, then it’s important for you to treat your own personal presentation as an extension of the kind of image you want to convey for the company at large.

This means tailoring your outfit for the day according to the image the company would most like to convey. Should you wear a suit or a pair of well-fitted jeans and a black T-Shirt? Of course, your personal grooming and hygiene should be impeccable in any case.

The next step is to carefully select the branding and marketing materials that you plan to use to represent the company more specifically. Will pull up banner displays help to make a strong impression, and highlight some of the company’s key benefits and USPs?

It’s worth spending a good amount of time considering these questions.

Be the person who accepts responsibility — let the buck stop with you

It’s all but impossible to respect people who don’t accept responsibility and accountability — certainly for issues which are essentially their own innate responsibility anyway, but even for things that aren’t necessarily their responsibility in the conventional sense.

If your company has been embroiled in recent controversies, and you’re going to be representing your company in public, expect people to raise those topics, and have answers prepared. Answers which position you as someone who is accepting responsibility on behalf of the company.

If someone raises a point of company controversy, and you shrug and say “don’t ask me, nothing to do with me, I just work here”, the impression made is not likely to be stellar.

Play it straight and stick with the truth, don’t get caught up in spin

Obviously, you’ll want to present your company or personal business in the best possible light. But you should nonetheless do so in a way that is rooted in the truth, and that doesn’t involve deceit or mischaracterization of the facts.

If you get caught up in spin, you undermine your own position, put people off you on an instinctual level, and also are liable to get caught up in your own tangled web of confusing half-truths.

Speak positively of the company, but only to the extent that your words are true. If you can’t find anything to say about the company which is both positive and true, you’re likely working for the wrong company.

Getting Your First Small Business UP and Running

Two of the key focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. They say that the majority of business fail with the first couple of years, but even to give your idea a chance to succeed you have to start it. There are some key considerations to getting it up and moving. The following contributed post is thus entitled, Getting Your First Small Business UP and Running.

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Nowadays, increasing numbers of people are opting to set up their own small business in an attempt to escape the rat race and work towards building their own dreams rather than making someone else’s dreams a reality. But setting up a business can actually prove to be a relatively complex process. So, it’s a good idea to familiarise yourself with the start up process before throwing yourself in the deep end! Here are just a few areas you should focus on to get the ball rolling in the right direction.

Company Formation

One of the first steps that you need to take when it comes to setting up your company is to engage with company formation. If you are unfamiliar with the process of starting a company www.yourcompanyformations.co.uk will be able to help you out. This process will essentially establish your business as a distinct legal entity, making everything official!

Product and Service Development

Now that the ball is rolling, it’s time to start seriously considering what kind of products or services you are intending to provide the consumer market with. If you already have an idea, that’s great. But if you’re feeling lost and are unsure what area you’d like to specialise in, choose something that you are genuinely interested in and try to identify a gap in the market within this field. The marketplace is already a very saturated place, so it could prove extremely difficult to offer a product or service that already exists – someone else will have already established their company as a leading brand or force and chances are that they have more money to play with when it comes to advertising and securing brand loyalty. Identifying a gap means you have a good opportunity to dominate an area of the marketplace for yourself.

Conduct Market Research

No matter how good you might think your idea is and how much encouragement you might have from friends and family members, it’s absolutely essential that you conduct market research. Market research is essentially a process where you pitch your products to your target demographic and see what they think of them. You can gain a whole lot of information, including:

● Whether your product concept appeals to people.

● What they feel could be improved about your product.

● Whether they already source a similar product from someone else and who these alternative products are being provided by.

Engaging with this process will give you unbiased information and advice from the exact people you are targeting. These are the people that your company relies on for sales and profit, so who could possibly be better to ask? At the end of the day, no matter how much time, effort, and money you pump into your business, everything will be wasted if people don’t want to buy what you have to offer them. Once you’ve got the go ahead with your product concept, you can also use market research to determine whether your products will be financially viable and potentially profitable. You can ask target consumers questions about:

● Their income (this will help you to figure out an average so you know how much the average consumer you are targeting earns and has disposable).

● How much they would be willing to pay for the product that you are offering.

This will help you to come up with realistic price points and you can then work out profit margins. If there’s a large margin, it could be worth going ahead. If you’d be making a minimal amount of profit after forking out for manufacturing, packaging, shipping, and other factors, you might want to give creating this product a miss. As you can see, conducting market research before going any further ahead will help you to only make wise investments and only move forward with bringing concepts to life that will actually sell. If you are unfamiliar with conducting market research yourself, not to worry. There are plenty of different tutorials out there that can help you find participants and ask the right questions. However, generally speaking, it’s best to outsource this service. This ensure your market research is conducted with as little bias as possible (as it will be carried out by a third party) and you can better spend your time focusing on other areas of your business’ progression while market research is being carried out.

These, of course, are just the starting blocks of starting your own successful business. But everyone has to start somewhere and focusing on these areas should get things off to a good start!

7 Words You Need To Understand Before Starting Up In Agriculture

Three of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money, Business/Entrepreneurship, and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). Agriculture is a fascinating sector in that it merges business with the plant sciences, Botany and Ecology. In order do business in Agriculture, there are key terms that you need to understand. The following contributed post is thus entitled, 7 Words You Need To Understand Before Starting Up In Agriculture.

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Agriculture is a thriving sector of the economy and currently going through enormous change. That means that there are big opportunities available to people who can see them.

But part of understanding any industry is knowing some of the jargon that people in that industry use to communicate with each other. Jargon isn’t pointless, as many people contend: it’s just a way of expressing shorthand with other people with a high level of knowledge of a particular subject. So what words should you know if you’re planning on setting up in the ag business? Let’s take a look.

Yield

If you grow your own crops, you need to understand the concept of yield. Yield, put simply, is the weight of crop produced, divided by the area required to produce it. Modern farmers will usually speak of “tons per hectare”, but old-fashioned metrics might include “bushels per acre” where a bushel is an imperial measure for a quantity of a crop. Visit this website to find out more.

Bushel

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Speaking of bushels, what exactly are they? Bushels are just a unit of measurement for a crop, Traditionally, a bushel was 8 gallons of grain, but the weight of a bushel varies with the type of plant. Eight gallons of oats, for instance, weighs about half as much as the same volume of wheat.

Polyculture

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Take a look at most modern farms, and what do you notice? The same crop is grown in all directions, mile after mile. But is this the best way to grow? Polyculture refers to the process of growing complementary crops next to each other, boosting the yield of both.

Seed Drill

Seed drills are pretty self-explanatory. Before mechanisation, farmers used to drill seeds into the ground mechanically using horse or cattle-driven ploughs. Today tractors pull seed drills along fields, allowing farmers to plant seeds at set depths and intervals.

Permaculture

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Permaculture refers to a process of designing human communities so that food production and waste are closely linked. The idea is to recycle all of the raw ingredients of farming to create something sustainable.

Dry Farming

With freshwater supplies under threat worldwide, there’s a growing need for dry farming: or the practice of relying on rainfall and soil moisture alone, rather than irrigation. Traditionally, farmers relied on building channels that would transport water to their crops to keep soil moisture levels high. But dry farming is a far riskier process because farmers essentially don’t have any control over when it rains. Dry farmers tend to rely on hardy crops that can withstand water and nutrient depletion.

Herbicide-Tolerant

Weeds can reduce yields by outcompeting crops for resources: soil nutrients, water and sunlight. Farmers need to get rid of weeds, but that can be difficult. Killing weeds with herbicide is all well and good, so long as the herbicide doesn’t kill the crops at the same time.

Herbicide-tolerant crops are those which can survive treatment with herbicide. The weeds die, but the crops don’t – exactly what you want as a farmer.

So, are you ready to start up in agriculture?

3 Ways to Kick Off Your Healthcare Business

Two of the key focuses are my blog are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. The healthcare industry is constantly evolving and will most likely not go anywhere. Thus those who choose to get involved with this industry stand to make a lot of money. The following contributed post is thus entitled, 3 Ways to Kick Off Your Healthcare Business.

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No matter how much experience you have in the field of healthcare, all new business owners need a bit of help along the way. There is more to a healthcare business than providing healthcare, after all, and without some proper business sense, you won’t really get too far – and you certainly won’t survive for those all-important first five years.

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If you have just embarked on the journey as an entrepreneur, you’ve definitely come to the right place. Here is a handful of tips in terms of kicking off your healthcare business so that you can watch it prosper a bit faster and make sure that you’re able to provide the best kind of care for your clients. It’s what it’s all about, after all.

#1 Pinpoint the challenges

First of all, you know very well that the healthcare sector is full of small and big challenges. While you might be able to overcome some of them, there isn’t much you can do about the problems surrounding funding and finding enough time for each client – but you can certainly try to make it a bit better for your business.

What most clients look for in a healthcare business is a flexible and convenient place they can go to with their health problems. This means that, while other healthcare businesses in your area may struggle to find the time to fit every client and make it convenient for them, you can try to make use of technology to make it a bit easier.

Start by researching the market, from a business-point-of-view, before you attempt to solve these issues within your own healthcare business.

#2 Provide time and convenience

Provide time and convenienceLet’s start with the challenge we mentioned above first. Make sure that your business, first of all, has a system that allows you to get a bit more time with each client. This might mean that you invest in the kind of technology that allows for video consultations, for example, so that you can still meet with the clients who are not able to travel.

Your calendar system will also need to be up to date, though, to ensure that you have a perfect overview of every consultation in the future. That way, you won’t overbook yourself – and you can give your clients a bit more of your time during each session.

#3 Invest in your suppliers

You’re going to depend on your suppliers of medical tools and gadgets quite a lot, by the way, and cultivating a good relationship with these is the key to keeping your business up to date on all of the new advances. Start by having a look at this reservoir 12, for example, and consider each supplier individually before you start to make any deals.

When you start to pinpoint the specific issues with each supplier in relation to your business needs, you will naturally gravitate towards suppliers that spark a good working relationship. But this can mean if your business expands, you may work with additional suppliers. If you need to branch out into radiofrequency oriented practices, which require tools like radiofrequency ablation needles, the eye must always be towards the future and making sure that each supplier can serve your needs. But this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep up your end of the bargain; working with your suppliers is all about a two-way relationship where you can both help each other.

When your relationships with these suppliers are great, you’ll also be able to enjoy excellent service in the future – and won’t have to worry about any missing deliveries.

It’s the kind of stuff that makes it a bit easier to start your very first healthcare business and make sure that it kicks off right from the start.

Business Ideas For Those Who Enjoy The Outdoors

Two of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. Outdoors-type businesses can be very lucrative depending on the location and what the location is. If your interested in such a venture, the following contributed post is entitled, Business Ideas For Those Who Enjoy The Outdoors.

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Picture by David Bartus

Being outdoors has many benefits for one’s wellbeing. You get a healthy dose of Vitamin D, it helps you restore focus and gain perspective. Plus according to psychologists, it can also give you the strength to shrug off social pressures and place more importance on valuable aspects of your life such as family, sharing and community, essentially making you a better well-rounded person. When the thought of being confined indoors working fills you with stress, there are alternative ideas for you to develop your own business and spend all the time in the world outdoors so that you can feel energized and motivated to take on the day.

Starting a business that’s in keeping with your personality and values is imperative to ensure you are pursuing a life that makes you happy and that your business doesn’t sacrifice your health and wellbeing causing you unnecessary stress. For those who thrive on being outdoors, that’s exactly where you should be, take a look at the opportunities below.

Gardener / Landscaper And Urban Planner

If amongst being outdoors, being meticulous about design and aesthetics of the outdoors sounds of interest to you, starting a business as a gardener or a landscaper may be your calling. With no particular education and experience required to be a gardener, you may wish to practice on your own and your families gardens before providing your services to customers. The extent of gardening activities you offer is entirely up to you, whether mowing lawns, pruning bushes or selecting and planting perennials, you decide the breadth of your role. The most important part being, you get to be in your favorite place, outdoors.

Farm Business

Without the world’s farmers, where would we be? Becoming a farmer is another option for those who adore the outdoors, however gaining education and experience is recommended as farming is no easy task. You may wish to enroll in a course for agriculture and shadow a reputable professional farmer to better understand what it takes to become a successful ethical farmer. Working alongside a farmer you can establish what you would like to farm, what equipment you need such as tractors and fertilizers from https://www.fertilizerdealer.com/ and how to generally and own and run your own business. Although you have the luxury of mostly being outdoors, this work is physically demanding and requires a genuine and passion in growing crops and/or feeding and nurturing animals to carry you through the challenges you will face as a farmer.

Outdoor Activity Club

If you’re friendly, energetic and like instructing, guiding and encouraging others, you may want to consider opening a business for an outdoor activity club. The activities you provide can range from anything such as river rafting, water zorbing, paintballing, cycling or offering general sports such as soccer. You may wish to play on your strengths and choose to become a qualified instructor in the activities you feel most confident, or challenge yourself and seek a certificate for a new activity. This job caters to your need to be outdoors and if you’re particularly adventurous and sporty may appeal to other parts of your nature too.

You are not limited to the above positions for being outdoors because when you run your own business, you can work where you want to in reason. Even if this means working online but sitting outdoors with your laptop (weather permitting) there are ways to adjust your startup business to also prioritize the needs of your health, wellbeing, and happiness.

What Do You Need For A Successful Startup?

Two of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. All businesses initially go through the ‘startup’ phase. If you have the training and experience, the steps to this are obvious. If it’s your first time, you may need some guidance. The following contributed post is thus entitled, What Do You Need For A Successful Startup.

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Starting a business requires you to have certain things in place to give yourself the best chance at success. Without these things, you could be in the 97% of startups that fail every year. We know that you don’t want that, so you are going to have to ensure that you have got everything on the list we are about to give you to avoid this from happening. You might think that you already have everything you need, and if that’s true then great, you’re good to go. But, we suggest that you read this article first, and make sure that you have thought of everything that we have.

An Awesome Website

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The first thing that you are going to need is an awesome website. If you don’t have one of these, you are going to have a high bounce rate meaning that people are going to click onto your website, and then click straight back off. You need to have content that grabs peoples attention, you need to have images and videos to engage with them, and perhaps most importantly you need to have a great web design. You can hire a professional to take care of this for you, and we would highly recommend that you do as they know what clients are looking for.

By doing this, you are giving your business the best possible chance of success by ensuring that you have a website that is easy to use. Your clients aren’t going to spend more than two minutes trying to figure out how to work your site, so you need to ensure that they can do this in one.

Money, Money, Money

People say that you can start a company with next to no money, and while this is true, it is only going to make your challenge all the more difficult. You may also have heard those same people say you need to spend money to make money, and this is also true. It is possible to do it both ways, but one gives you a better chance. Yout business is going to have an easier time if you have the money to invest in it. You need resources, employees, and so on which don’t grow on trees.

If you are struggling to find the money yourself, you could always take your business idea to a tradeshow. Here you will find investors and other companies like yours who are looking for something new to try out. So, if you can get the attention of an investor, or a bigger company here, they may be able to help you fund your startup.

A USP

USP stands for unique selling point. While you might think that you are offering your customers something they need, other companies on the market are going to be offering the same thing. What you need to do is find something that you can offer that nobody else can. It doesn’t matter what it is as long as it is going to appeal to your customer base. People like to go to a business that knows who they are, and what they can do for their clients. By establishing a USP for your business, you are doing just that. Ensure that you market this effectively to get the best results when you enter the market.

Marketing Strategy

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The final thing that you are going to need is a marketing strategy. Without one of these, your business is doomed to fail before you have even started. If you don’t know anything about marketing, then you are going to need to hire a team to take care of this for you. It might be a little pricey for you in the beginning, but if you have no prior knowledge of how to market effectively, you are going to have to take this chance and run with it.

You should make sure that your company is going to be utilizing all of the main marketing strategies both online and offline. Getting your content to be a little different from the current trend in your industry is more likely to make you stand out to prospective clients. The marketing is all about targeting your customer, and telling them why they need you, so keep this in mind when you are strategizing.

We hope that you have found this article helpful, and now know some of the things that you are going to need for a successful startup. Following this advice will help you to hit the ground running as soon as your business is ready to launch, good luck!

Keep Your Business From Ongoing Disruption

Two of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. When you’re running a business of any kind, it’s important to understand how to prevent disruptions and also how to get your operations back up and running once there has been a disruption. The following contributed post is entitled, Keep Your Business From Ongoing Disruption.

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To keep a business moving at the right pace and in the right way takes a lot of effort in different areas. One of the bigger concern you are likely to have here is that you will probably need to try and find a way to ensure that your business is not being disrupted along the way. That can be hard to do, but as long as you know where to look and what kind of steps you need to take, you should find that it is also a lot easier than you might have thought. In this post, we are going to take a look at some of the ways in which you can hope to keep your business from any ongoing disruption, by paying attention in particular to a few key areas and how they are functioning on a daily basis.

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Outsourced Partners

One thing you will need to pay particular attention to is the activity and behaviour of any outsource teams you might have on board in your business. Because of the nature of outsourcing, you never quite know whether or not they are going to help or hinder you, and in many cases even if they are helping you on the whole, they can still be causing disruption and distractions at the same time too. It is therefore wise to make sure that you keep an eye on what they are doing, but what does this mean practically? It might be that you want to utilise something like the servicenow vendor risk management to ensure that you are not having to take on any unacceptable losses or risk from outsource IT firms, or it could be a simple case of making sure that you thoroughly vet any outsource firms before agreeing to contract them with work.

Rogue Employees

Although it is not quite as common, it is still always a possibility too for certain people in your own employment to make things difficult for the business. This is the kind of situation that you will generally want to do away with as soon as possible, but as long as you are keeping a close eye on those who work for you, you should be able to spot such individuals pretty swiftly anyway. If you do get a feeling that there are some individuals not really pulling their weight and causing a nuisance, then you should make sure to follow it up with a particular disciplinary routine, which you should already have set out as much as possible.

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Marketplace Variations

Clearly, this is an area in which you have much less control than the above two example, but it is still something you will want to look out for. You will at least then be able to know why your business is experiencing disruption, and that will mean that you can hone in and ensure that your business gets back on track as soon as possible, despite what might be happening in the marketplace outside it.

11 Ways To Make Money Outside Of Your 9-5

The first principle of my blog is Creating Ecosystems of Success, and two key focuses are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. There’s an argument out there that the smartest way to live is to have multiple sources of income. As such, many individuals have given a lot of thought to how they can create second- or third-income streams outside of their 9-5 jobs. The following contributed post discusses how to create multiple income streams and is entitled, 11 Ways To Make Money Outside Of Your 9-5.

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Making money by going to your 9-5 job every week is certainly an honorable way to earn money. However, more and more people are beginning to realize that if they want to lead truly comfortable lifestyles and build wealth, they are going to need more than one source of income to do it. In fact, the most wealthy people in the world often have 6 or 7 different sources of income. The less you have to rely on one source of income, the better!

Below, we’ll go into 11 ways you can make money outside of your 9-5 so you can begin working on bringing in cash from various sources:

1. Rent Out A Part Of Your Property
If you have a property and you don’t use all of it all the time, you could consider renting out a part of it. Even renting out your driveway could help you to bring some extra cash in from time to time! If you have a spare bedroom you could rent that out, provided you don’t mind sharing your home with somebody else. Alternatively, you could look into a site like Airbnb to rent out your entire home when you’re going to be away yourself. You could make money while you’re off on your own vacation!

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2. Sell Things You No Longer Use
Go through each room in your home and collect things that you haven’t used for 6 months or more. Usually, if you haven’t used something in 6 months you can pretty much guarantee you won’t use it again (unless it’s some special item that you only really need for emergencies, that is). You can use sites like eBay to sell these items and make some extra cash. If you’d rather cut out the middleman costs, selling on Facebook or even hosting a garage sale can be just as effective.

3. Offer Your Services As An Online Freelancer
If you have a little spare time, you could always offer your services as a freelancer using sites like Upwork and People Per Hour. You could proofread, write content, design logos, or do anything else that you think you’re good at! It can take a little time to get work when you’re just starting out, but it can be a nice way to make a decent side income in your own time.

4. Start Blogging/Vlogging
Blogging and vlogging should be done first and foremost because you are passionate about what you want to share. If you’re doing it purely for the cash, you’ll probably get fed up and end up giving up after a short time! You should create quality, consistent content because you have a message you want to share and you enjoy it. Enjoyment will keep you going when your subscribers aren’t growing and you’ve made a miniscule amount of money in months. Consistency is key if you want this to be a way for you to make money!

5. Turn Your Passion Into A Side Hustle
If you have something you’re truly passionate about, it could be possible to turn it into a side hustle. Maybe you like making jewelry or reupholstering furniture; if you’re serious, you could spend your spare time building up this business. Eventually, you may be able to leave your 9-5 job and work for yourself. However, you’ll want to make sure you’re aware of the reasons most new businesses fail. It won’t be easy, and you’ll still need to work hard in the beginning. You really have to love it and you really have to want it!

6. Investing
Investing can sound like a scary word, especially to beginners who have only ever put their spare cash into savings accounts. However, it’s essential if you want to ensure your financial health for the future and give yourself a chance at being truly wealthy! There’s a plethora of information out there that can help you to get started, and you only need to start small. You can even find apps like Moneybox to help you get started. The important thing is getting started and committing a portion of your earnings to investing regularly – then you’ll build up momentum and be able to learn as you go along. You’ll be glad you started now. The earlier you start, the more you can take advantage of compounding!

7. Smart Spending
Smart spending can sometimes be all it takes to help you make money outside of your 9-5. There are numerous ways you can do this. For example, by making sure you buy items that will enable you to make more money in the long run, like Disney DVDs that become more valuable once they are taken off the shelves (rather than items that lose value, like brand new cars). You can also spend smartly by using cashback sites when you buy, and you should be able to get a portion of what you spend back each time. Then you can try smart spending alongside the NFL betting guide or make a sports bet with any online site that gives you the opportunity to bet on real or imaginary games. Be warned about betting, however. Using this method comes with an element of risk that you should keep in mind, and you should be wary of if you have a gambling problem. However, if you are able to monitor your spending, you could win big if you bet wisely.

8. Create Online Courses
If you have a lot of knowledge and/or passion on a certain subject, how about creating online courses to help others learn? You can create courses about just about anything these days, and the great thing is, you only have to do the work once. The courses can sell again and again and you will continue to make money!

9. Write Ebooks
Ebooks can help you to make cash if you do some keyword research and figure out what people want to know about. Both fiction and non-fiction are an option, although you may need to write lots of ebooks to make a decent sum of money.

10. Start Your Own Ecommerce Business
Ecommerce businesses are extremely popular, and for good reason. Pretty much anybody can set one up using sites like Shopify, selling items that they feel passionate about.

11. Advertise On Your Car
There are companies that will pay you to have an advertisement for their business on your car. All you have to do is fill out a form stating where you drive and how much you drive, and any suitable offers will then be sent to you. The company will remove the ad when the campaign is complete and you will get paid. Easy!

Help Yourself To Help Recruit The Best Talent To Your Team

Two of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. One of the most powerful things you can do for your operations is to hire the right talent to work for you. Identifying the right talent isn’t easy and separates the successful from the unsuccessful business. The following contributed post is thus entitled, Help Yourself To Help Recruit The Best Talent To Your Team.

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Hiring the right people for your business, and then holding onto the right talent has not been tougher than it is now. With an aging population, in the coming years there aren’t going to be enough younger people (nine percent down), coming into the workforce to replace those retiring. So if someone did leave your business, it could be hard to replace them. Plus, when you recruit the right people, it really is what makes your business. They are the ones that are out there each day working to make the business a profitable one. So for many reasons, getting the right talent for your business and then doing enough to hold onto them is exactly what you want.

So with all of that in mind, here are some tips to help you to create a great workplace culture that will attract people to your role, as well as how to keep them wanting to work for you.

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• Put Employees First

There has been plenty of research that has shown that if you want to recruit and keep the right people for the job, then you need to create a culture within your business that makes people want to work there. This doesn’t always have to mean things like the Google offices or give them slides instead of stairs. But your employees need to feel respected and valued at all times. Show this through how you conduct yourself, but also how you are interacting with others.

• Provide Training

If you are interviewing people, then being able to demonstrate what they can look forward to, and the different ways in which they can work their way up in the business. Talking about the training that you can offer is a good way to recruit the right people and those looking for longevity in their career within your business. But apart from that, there are so many other reasons why providing training is really important for your team. Take the threat of social engineering to businesses, for example. There are many threats online to businesses, and you are likely to have some aspects of your business online. But the human aspect of hacking is where businesses can fail. Social engineering, or things like phishing, is where problems could occur. So training your team for things like this can help the business to keep thriving, and in turn, help their career to carry on.

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• Use Emotional Intelligence

One of the worst things that a small business can do when it comes to recruiting is disengaging with the hiring process. You can see why it isn’t going to be a good thing for your business, as when it is your business, why wouldn’t you want to be involved with the recruiting and let someone else do the recruiting for you?

Part of the process of recruiting should look at the employee’s emotional intelligence as well their skills, experience, and their intellectual capability. Studies have shown that IQ alone isn’t enough to show how well someone is going to do in a job. You need to look at their emotional intelligence as well and how they react in certain social situations. So as part of the recruitment process, don’t use qualifications alone. You could look to add in an emotional intelligence evaluation so that you can see how well they are going to fit into your business. The better they fit in, the more they are going to enjoy coming to work, and hopefully, the more they are going to want to stay working with you.

Being able to be flexible in the recruitment process is really important too. If you hire someone and it is working out well and they are fitting in well, but could be better suited to a different department, then move them around to other roles. Then they can experience more and it is likely to lead to longevity with your business if they can experience a variety of different things. This is because if you find someone that fits well with your company, you will want to find the right role for them that is going to help them to stick with you.

Communication is really key and it can make the difference, so make sure you are talking to your employees about what they want to be doing and where they see themselves in the years to come. There are no guarantees in life and business, of course, but putting in the effort with employees can really help.

What Could You Outsource In Your Business?

Two of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. Depending upon the time of business you’re running and its stage of development, outsourcing parts of its operations may be the way to grow to take it to the next level. The following contributed post is therefore entitled, What Could You Outsource In Your Business?

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If you’re a business owner, you will be familiar with the idea of outsourcing. Whilst some people aren’t too fond of the idea, as it can take away some of your control as a boss, there are many benefits of outsourcing, and it can save you a lot of time and money. When it comes to handing over some of your work to those outside the office, there are many different services out there, and outsourcing is an ever-evolving market. If you’re interested in the services that could help you and your business, read on, as we have brought together some of the best examples here.

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Your website creation

Coding and updating your own website can be a difficult task for any business, especially if you don’t have the skills and experience to do these things yourself. Whilst you may think that going DIY is a good way for you to save a bit of money, your website is where all of your clients will go for information about your business, and if it isn’t up to scratch, they may question your professionalism and ability to do the job right. You only have one shot to make a good impression on people who are thinking of using your services, so ensure that it is perfect and outsource it to people who know all there is to know about website creation and coding, and you’ll be glad that you did.

Your IT services

When you think about how much time your employees spend on their computers, you’ll realise how catastrophic it could be if any problems occur with your IT. If your IT usually runs smoothly, and as such, you don’t need to employ somebody full-time to stay on top of it, you could benefit financially by outsourcing these services. Most IT companies will offer 24 hour support, so if any problems arise, they can be rectified straight away. They will also know about all of the latest software, and will usually implement these without even having to pay a visit to your office. If you want your company computers to run smoothly with little stress and low costs, look into these options.

Your phone calls

As a business owner, you’ll know how many phone calls you can receive each day, and it can be difficult to stay on top of all the other tasks that you have to do whilst constantly being interrupted by calls from clients. Of course, it is fundamental that you stay on top of these things, but you could benefit from outsourcing them to a different company. There are many virtual headquarters out there who can take your calls for you, answer them with the responses that you have provided, and forward the important messages directly on to you. This can save you a lot of money, as you won’t have to hire someone on a full-time basis to answer all of your calls.

Your payroll

Paying your employees, particularly if you have a large team, can take up a lot of your time, especially if you pay them weekly. Sitting there and going through all of the hours that people have worked can take up a lot of hours that you simply don’t have to give, so outsourcing may be a better alternative to keeping your payroll in-house. You also have to try and navigate the world of taxes and the regulations that come with paying your employees, which can be another stress that you really don’t need as a business owner. As with the other forms of outsourcing, this will help you to save the cash by avoiding the need to have a team member dealing with these issues.

So…

If you’re interested in the world of outsourcing, some of these services could help you to spend less as a business, and will save you and your employees a lot of time. You can stick to focusing on the things that really matter, and leave these difficult tasks to the professionals, so that you can get on with the more important duties that you have. From outsourcing your website creation to getting somebody else to answer your phone calls, there are plenty of services out there if you’re interested in saying goodbye to the mundane, and hello to business success with the help of some other companies. You’ll be glad that you did when you see the savings that you have as a result!

Try these different ways of outsourcing, and see how they could help you to achieve the business you’ve always dreamed of!