Category: Business/Entrepreneurship

Protecting Your Employees

The first principle of my blog is Create Ecosystems of Success, and two of its key focuses are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. When running any organization or business, it’s critical to protect your employees. Doing so will not only help assure their loyalty, but it will also help improve their productivity. The following contributed post is thus entitled, Protecting Your Employees.

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As an employer, whether of one person or a thousand, you have responsibilities. You are responsible for creating safe and trustworthy products. For taking care of your customers and providing a service. You’re often responsible for dealing with complaints, for coming up with new ideas and motivating your staff, on top of your everyday jobs and tasks. One of your key responsibilities is to your team. Looking after them, keeping them safe, ensuring that they are happy at work, and fairly treated.

Many employers neglect this particular responsibility. They are too worried about the growth of their company. They invest time in products and services and assume that their team will look after themselves, especially if there aren’t many of them. This is a mistake. Protecting your staff and looking after their interests isn’t just good for them; it can also help to boost your business. Well cared for staff are often loyal. They are hard working and creative. If you give your team your time, they’ll be more likely to go the extra mile and give their all. It can be great for business while reducing turnover and cutting recruitment and training costs.

How you protect your staff will, of course, depend on the nature of your business and their specific roles and needs. But, here are some more general tips to help you.

Take Care of Your Equipment

If your business is office based and doesn’t use any special equipment for machinery, this isn’t something that you need to worry about. But, if it does, these items can cause injury or even illness. The risks are increased if the equipment is damaged, dirty or otherwise unable to work at its best. Take the time to have any equipment or machinery regularly serviced and get any issues dealt with as quickly as possible. If you use hot ovens or kilns in your business, invest in a high temperature camera so that you can complete safety checks yourself. Sometimes this can mean not using something until it’s fixed, but it’s worth it if everyone is safe.

Risk Assessments

Image Source – https://pixabay.com/photos/posted-warning-wet-floor-caution-652115/

Even if you are office based, risk assessments are an essential part of keeping everyone safe and protected. Even an office with a few chairs, computers and shelves has risks. You just need to find them. Print off some risk assessment sheets and walk around your workplace, as well as any secondary work sites or vehicles, and identify risks. Even smaller ones like heavy lifting, trips and slips and reaching high shelves. Assess the risk and think of ways to minimise it. For smaller risks, it might merely be a case of using wet floor signs when cleaning and teaching team members how to lift correctly. Make sure you complete separate assessments for pregnant or injured employees who might face greater risks or need changes to their job.

Train Them

Staff training is the best way to keep your team safe. They should be thoroughly trained to do their jobs well, with detailed instruction on anything that could cause them harm. Many businesses make the mistake of training staff once and then leaving it. Offer regular refresher training, and extra team sessions when something changes.

How To Make Your Online Store a Success

Three of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money, Business/Entrepreneurship and Technology. Setting up an online store is much different than setting up a traditional bricks and mortar store. For an online store, you must become savvy in terms of technology in addition to marketing. The following contributed post is thus entitled, How To Make Your Online Store a Success.

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If you love retail and decided to create an online store instead of investing in a brick-and-mortar shop, you are up against a huge competition. It is important that you are able to make the most out of your reach, engagement, and productivity, and automate processes that would take you too long to complete. There are several things to pay attention to before you launch your store, such as market positioning, competition, and customer behavior. Find out more below.

Market Research

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It is important that you pay attention to your market research and get to know your target market. This doesn’t only apply to your potential clients, but also your competition. It is crucial that you find out about the best methods to penetrate the market and find the gap you can fill. Look for profitable underserved markets and position yourself in a smart way in the marketplace. There are so many free market research tools you can utilize, such as Google Surveys or downloadable industry reports.

Name

Your business name has to be memorable and catchy, also give out the right message about what you stand for. It might be a good idea to create a mission, vision, and values statement before you would create a logo and brand name, so you can fully align it with your target market’s. After you have created your market research file, you will be able to identify your ideal client, and choose your brand name based on their characteristics. Be careful when choosing a brand name, as it can lower the value of your brand.

Brand Image

Once you have your brand name, you can start working on your brand image, too. You should be consistent when it comes to your social media accounts, your logo, and your website, but most importantly – develop your unique brand voice. Listen to your audience and their feedback, find out what they are looking for when searching for similar products and how they choose who to buy from.

Website

Of course, if you want to launch an online store, you will need to pay attention to your web development and design. You have to make it user friendly and engaging. You need to communicate the benefits of your products, not only the features. This is where many startup online store owners make a mistake. You need to gain people’s trust as well before you can convince them to give your products a try.

Shopping Cart Software

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While the design and functionality of your website is important, you will need to ensure that your infrastructure is easy to use and tailored to your customers’ needs. If you don’t know where to start, you will need to talk to seo agencies that optimize Shopify stores so you can get enough traffic and conversion. You want your visitors to quickly find what they are looking for, add them to their basket, but you might even design a system that recommends similar or complementary products so you can maximize your sales opportunities.

Social Media

You might have already heard about Pinterest success for online stores, but you will have to make the most out of your social media reach and use different platforms. It might be challenging to keep on top of all your posts and monitor the performance of all your accounts, especially if you are busy running your own business. You might want to automate your social media so you can make the most out of your reach and get a snapshot of your statistics, to find out what type of content your audience engages with.

Review Sites

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If you want your website visitors to trust you, it is important that you get listed and featured in online directories and on review sites. People want to know that you are keeping your promises and they can get a good service. They are more likely to listen to other people’s recommendations and reviews than your own marketing messages, so it is crucial that you implement these features in your social media and your website, too. After all, your shop’s reputation is one of the most valuable assets in your business.

Starting an online store is hard work, and there is no guarantee of success. However, you can do your research and get to know the industry, your competition, and the available technology to scale up your operation and make continuous improvements that will improve your traffic, engagement, and sales conversions at the same time.

Productivity Fails That Are Eating Your Business’s Profits

Two of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. When you start a business, it’s important to manage productivity as best you can so you can maximize profits. In order to do so, it’s important to think about where your productivity can be diminished. The following contributed post is thus entitled, Productivity Fails That Are Eating Your Business’s Profits.

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In the business world, time is money, and that means if your business is not spending your time in the right way, it ultimately impacts your overheads and so your profits. To that end, it is absolutely crucial that you avoid as many productivity fails as you possibly can. A topic you can read more about on the post below.

Emails

Emails are an excellent form of communication, in some cases. One of these cases is not between the employees that work in the same office or building. In fact, emails after a lousy way for people like that to communicate because they often cause more confusion and take up additional time in clarification that walking three desks over and actually asking the person would.

To that end, be sure to implement a no or minimum internal emails policy in your business. You may just be pleasantly surprised at the positive impact this can have on productivity.

IT fails

Few successful businesses work without IT these days, and in most cases, digital tech is integrated into every stage of a company’s process. This is fantastic for the most part because it speeds things up, allows users access to more information, and automates tasks, so they don’t have to be done by humans. Something that can actually improve productivity because it frees up staff to focus on critical responsibilities.

However, it also means that your entire business is dependent on your IT network being up and running effectively. Something that means when it does go down you can expect massive problems with productivity company-wide.

Happily, there is a way that you can prevent this from even becoming an issue, and it’s by ensuring that you proactively monitor your network.

In fact, network monitoring can pick up any issues before they become major ones and slow down your employee’s work. Something that can save you from having to deal with countless hours of downtime and increase your business productivity, and so your profits no end.

Workaholic culture

Believe it or not, working too hard and encouraging your employees to do the same is incredibly bad for productivity. This is because humans are only capable of focusing on a certain task for a short amount of time, and if you regularly encourage people to go beyond this, they will work slower and less productively.

To that end, encouraging regular breaks not only throughout the day but with vacations days as well is absolutely necessary.

Poor training and onboarding

When people don’t feel secure in their roles, they are unlikely to work most productively. What that means is that skimping on staff training and onboarding programs may seem financially viable in the short term, but over time you could actually be hurting your business’s profits.

In fact, staff training in both hard and soft skills doesn’t just affect productivity, but also customer service too. Something that makes it an essential aspect of running a business to get right, if you want to turn a decent profit.

Cultivating A Profitable Farm In The Long-Term

Three of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money, Business/Entrepreneurship and STEM. The agricultural industry has been around for centuries, and there are many things you need to know to get into it and to be able to turn a profit. The following contributed post is entitled, Cultivating A Profitable Farm In The Long-Term.

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The agricultural industry is one of the oldest on the planet, so it’s no surprise that thousands of farming entrepreneurs try to find their spot in the marketplace. Of course, as stable as the industry is as a whole, individual businesses have to work hard to stand their ground in the long-term. As a farmer, you have to plan and carefully look after your land so that you have viable produce to sell to the market. It can be a difficult business model to figure out. What does it take to cultivate a profitable farm in the long-term? Let’s talk about that in this post.

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Always account for overhead costs.
If you want to create a profitable farm in the long-term then you need to think about the expenses of running your operations. Many part-time farmers who make money through a career or other business ventures don’t concern themselves too much with this aspect of operations. They might not see their labor as an expense, for example, because this is all a fun hobby to them. As a result, their business seems pretty profitable. But hobby farms aren’t always profitable enough to stand on their own two feet. If you want to create a farm that is sustainable in the long-term and profitable enough to provide for you and your family if you’re going full-time then you always need to account for overhead costs. Of course, the costliness of running a farm often incentivizes farmers to increase their prices. But as a small farm that’s trying to stand out in the industry and build a client base of local grocers or consumers, you might not want to increase your prices too much. You might want to reel in customers with fair and decent prices.

That’s why the goal is to focus on your overheads. How can you cut costs without cutting the quality of your products and services? This is the question that causes headaches for so many entrepreneurs in all manner of industries. The answer is to budget smartly and assess individual expenditures. For example, you could save money on the energy bill necessary for running your farmhouse (the base of operations) by getting solar panels. It’s an investment that’ll save you money in the long run because you won’t be relying on the grid. Sometimes, in order to reduce long-term costs, you have to make wise investments. People say you’ve got to spend money to make money, but the smartest piece of business advice to remember is that you’ve got to spend money to save money. For instance, you could buy in bulk from your supplier in order to save money; that’s why it’s important to form strong lasting relationships with local businesses and people in your community. We’ll talk more about that later. If you’re going to cultivate a profitable farm in the long-term then stay on top of your monthly budget, track your expenditures, and find ways to use your funds wisely so as to keep costs low but maintain quality control.

Do your consumer research.
If you want to cultivate a profitable farm in the long-term then you need to do your consumer research. Making money is all about giving the market what it needs. You can’t push products or services successfully if there’s no market for them. Run surveys or simply talk to people in your local area. Get an idea of what people want from farms such as yours or your farm specifically. This is how you get an advantage over the competition. You need to talk directly to existing and potential customers. In turn, you’ll be able to develop a business which stands out from the competition in the marketplace.

Your goal is to create a brand for your farm that resonates with people. You need to make a connection so that clients want to choose your business over the competition. You might be selling similar types of produce to your rivals, so how are you going to stand out? Perhaps you could run your business in an eco-friendly manner so as to prove to the market that you care about the planet and not simply making money. You might want to look into getting an ASC certification in sustainability if you farm salmon produce. That’s an example of taking a step towards creating a more ethical business that impresses consumers. Just make sure you do your research so that you can start to create a farm which your target audience wants to see.

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Build a local reputation.
If you want to cultivate a profitable farm in the long-term then you need a loyal client base. This is true of any company in any type of industry. But in the world of farming, it’s all about the local community. Unless you build an international farming empire, you’re probably not going to start connecting with corporations and consumers all over the world. That might be the dream for your business in the future, but you need to take things one step at a time. For starters, you need to build a local reputation. You need to target retailers and consumers in your area so as to build a name for yourself. Go to the local market and pitch your produce to sellers. Find your place in the local industry. Once you win over the hearts (or bellies, rather) of local businesses and people, you’ll start to build up a loyal following. That’s how you’ll get repeat sales and achieve stability through a regular client base. It’s also how your business will start to grow. Happy clients spread brand awareness through word of mouth. But your farm can’t expand until you start building a reputation in your local area. Start small.

Make money with your land in many ways.
You might want to focus on your particular niche in the agricultural marketplace, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore opportunities to utilize your land in other ways. If you want to cultivate a profitable farm in the long-term then you need to pursue every potential opportunity to monetize your land. You could offer riding lessons if you own horses, for example. You could even sell tickets to people who might want to look around your farm to admire the animals or simply learn how the entire process works. You own a business that’s fascinating to people in many ways, so make the most of that fact. Look for all potential sources of revenue so that you can make your farm as profitable as possible.

So many small farms fail before they even get started. It can take several years to start making a decent profit from the land, so it’s important to keep working at it. It’s a gradual process. You need to continuously grow your business, as entrepreneurs do in any industry. The key to cultivating a profitable farm in the long-term is to create a viable and sustainable business model. You need to learn to continuously budget, research, and develop your business so as to keep it relevant in an ever-changing and ever-competitive agricultural marketplace.

How a Poor Name Can Lower the Value of your Brand

Two of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. When starting a business, one of the most important components is building and maintaining your ‘brand’. A key component of your brand is your name. Choosing the right name can be the difference between life and death in the business context. The following guest post comes courtesy of Squadhelp.com and is entitled, How a Poor Name Can Lower the Value of your Brand.

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When you are brainstorming a name for your brand-new startup, you might notice that certain people you run into will tell you not to worry about the name you select for your business. They will say to you that a startup name lacks any tangible value because they believe that names are just frills. They will tell you it is not worth investing your time and resources into, but they would be wrong. In actuality, research shows that easy, memorable names outperform non-captivating and lackluster names on the stock market by 33% or more.

A Poor Name Won’t Set a Solid Brand Foundation

In today’s fast-paced market, first impressions matter more than ever before. Generally, your brand name will be the first thing that a possible client or customer will learn about your brand. You brand encompasses many aspects of your business including your logo, beliefs, values and name.

The name is basically the foundation and the identity of your new company. If the name is too weak, it will not be able to support the weight of your brand and will hold your business back from growth. You ideally want to choose a name that sets the stage for your success.

Fail to Capture Audiences

Your target audience is very likely overwhelmed by the vast number of options available in today’s modern market. It’s very likely that your business offers special services or products, but without a great name that captures the attention of your audience, you might lose customers. If your name does not get their attention right away, they will move on to the next business without checking out the options your startup offers.

A name should create a strong connection between your business and your target market. Ideally, it should give them something to hold on to and remember about your brand.

Drive Audiences Away

Although making your brand name attractive is very important, you need double check that it does not drive any potential customers or clients away. Difficult, boring, or offensive names risk alienating a large segment of your customer base. Make sure that you don’t select a company name that is cringey or awkward, as something like that will likely drive customers away and send people the wrong message.

A great example of this would be a salon with the name Curl Up & Dye. Although this name is clearly descriptive and witty, but it could accidentally send the wrong message to any potential customers about the quality of services that the salon offers. The name heavily relies on the audience’s sense of humor, but you risk losing potential clients that do not find the funny brand amusing.

Audience testing is a quick and simple way to make sure that your startup name will do well with your chosen target audience.

A Forgettable Name = A Forgettable Brand

Even if a customer really wants to remember your brand name, if it is boring or too perplexing to pronounce and spell, they will likely not remember it. When your target demographic cannot remember your name even when they want to, it is a bad sign for your business.

A memorable name will ensure that your brand is something that your customers will never forget. Double check that your brand name does not fall by the wayside by brainstorming a catchy, memorable name that will capture your target audience’s attention. Peruse some of these winning company name suggestions to give yourself a better idea of what type of names catch your attention the most.

Lose Referrals

In the end, your brand name needs to be appealing and memorable enough that it establishes your brand and sets you up for success in the future. If you cannot create a solid foundation for your company with a great name, you will not only lose out on any potential clients but also the potential referrals you would have gotten from those clients.

Conclusion

Each and every tiny aspect of your brand adds up in the end, and if your name can help you get some extra of press coverage or a couple more chains of referrals from customers, it makes all the difference. A brand name really has the power to impact your business success.

When you are coming up with a business name, make sure you remember that a brand name is way more than just a word. It establishes the foundation for your business, and it can be a very useful tool making your business successful.

Grant Polachek is the Director of Marketing at Inc 500 company Squadhelp.com, the worlds #1 naming platform, with nearly 20,000 customers from the smallest startups across the globe to the largest corporations including Nestle, Philips, Hilton, Pepsi, and AutoNation. Get inspired by exploring these creative business names.

The Power Of The Personal Touch

Two of my blog’s key focuses are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. Depending upon the type of business you’re running, a key to its success is its personal touch. The more customers connect with your business, the more they’ll support your operations and return. The following contributed post is therefore entitled, The Power Of The Personal Touch.

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It should come as no surprise that the personal touch matters in business. Providing a reliable point of contact for each customer can streamline the selling process. The employee in question can then get a feel for what your customers want, and sell as much as possible. On top of which, customers will come to feel at ease with that one person. As a result, they may trust your company more than they would otherwise. For proof of how important this personal aspect of business is, consider social media. Here, companies focus on building strong voices and personal connections for just this reason.

What you might not realize is that getting personal with products can also make a difference. In the same way, this personal touch can improve customer relations. Whether you make items to order or personalize as you go, it can also benefit your business in the following ways.

A chance to give customers what they want

Any company would like to cut customer complaints wherever possible. Disgruntled customers are never pleasant to deal with. Dissatisfaction can also stop people from coming back, and damage your reputation in the bigger picture. If you choose to make items to order, though, you could cut back on complaints in a significant way. That’s because each item will be tailor-made with a customer specifications in mind. That removes any real margin for error and makes sure customers can’t pin anything they aren’t 100% happy with on you. They told you what they wanted, after all. Before you know, operating in this order-by-order way can see satisfaction levels skyrocketing. Your reputation might just rise along with them. It may be more work on the outset, but you can bet it would be worth your while.

A way to add sentimental value

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Sentimental value is an invaluable product addition. In many ways, all business owners would love to achieve this with their ideas. The things already have enough sentimental value for you, after all. And, if you can accomplish the same for customers, they’re more liable to remember your company and tell others about it. So, how do you add sentimentality with products? Through things like engraving, of course. By investing in laser cutting equipment, you can include unforgettable personal messages. All you would need to do is read up on something like this boss laser cutter review to make sure you’re investing in machinery you can trust. Then, you could offer this service to anyone who comes through your doors, and enjoy the rewards.

An increased chance of loyalty

Any business owner knows that customer loyalty is one of the best ways to make money which keeps on coming. And, loyalty is exactly what you’ll get with personal products like these. At least, you will if you do things well. Before you know, meeting with every customer need can see people coming back to you time and again. And, when that happens, you can really start to consider your company a success.

Finding Your Team

Two of the key focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. One of the key aspects of building your business is building your team. You have to find the right people to put the team possible together. The following contributed post is thus entitled, Finding Your Team.

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Your business has become, let’s face, it something like your baby. You are extremely protective of its growth and well being and are determined to see it succeed. And it’s this protective attitude that makes it so hard for some entrepreneurs to let go and relinquish some control. This plays out, more often than not, when it comes to hiring extra members of your team particularly those first hires.

In this blog, we take look at how to go about hiring for the first time and why you should let go, just a little bit for even greater business success.

Plan For Success

Whether you manufacture physical goods such as safety railing systems or sell your creative skills and talents as a service, you will have planned for growth and been prepared to expand as your business goes from strength to strength. The hard part is admitting that you now need help but you know that if you want your business to carry on its present trajectory, you’re going to need to hire someone in.

The first thing you’re going to need to do is set aside some time to figure out exactly what role you’re going to want your new hire to play. Think as specific as possible. Avoid vague headings, such as ‘admin duties’ and instead pinpoint exactly what will be required. The more specific you are, the more likely you are to find someone with exactly the skills and experience you are looking for.

Alongside your job description, you’ll also need to create a person specification document. This moves away from just the role the person will take and centres more on the skills and personal qualities a candidate should bring. You’ll be focussing in on both their hard and soft skills.

The Interview

If you have limited experience in interviewing people, then this part of the process can be almost as daunting for you as it is for the interviewee. Stay calm, professional and friendly. You want to see that your candidate can perform well under the pressure of an interview but that doesn’t require a good cop/bad cop routine.

Keep an open mind, the role of an admin officer might be easily filled but when someone brings some soft skills outside the remit such as a proven record in negotiation techniques, you might want to use this to your business advantage further down the line. Candidates who perform well on paper may not do so in person and vice versa.

Image from Pexels

Trust Your Gut

If you interview someone who seems like the perfect person but you just don’t seem able to connect with them, that feeling is perfectly valid and should not be ignored. If your business is small and you’re going to be spending quite a lot of time together then finding a candidate you click with is vital for operational success.

The same can be said for a candidate who may have only ticked the basics when it came to the job description but shows a strong ability to adapt and learn and who you can see fitting into the ethos of your business.

Build In Some Wriggle Room

Whoever you hire you want to be sure that they are fully on board with your vision for the company and share your overall goals and short-term objectives to reach that end point. With that in mind, it’s perfectly valid to build in a six month, or less, probation period agreed to by both parties. At the end of this period, either party can step away from the role for whatever reason with no recriminations.

If that does happen, then taking some time to learn what went wrong and why is a crucial part of the learning process and will help you to avoid making the same mistakes again.

When you’ve made the right hire once, the subsequent times will become easier and easier as you figure out how to make the recruitment process work for you and become more discerning at narrowing down the right candidates.

The benefits of building a strong team are tangible. Having people on your side who share your determination and drive will give you a real boost in productivity and should help to take some of the load off of your own shoulders. Being the boss might not be natural at first but when you’re all pulling in the right direction, you’ll be glad you made the decision to let go a little of the responsibility and allowed others to help take the strain.

Building A Business? It’s All About Making Connections

The first principle of my blog is Creating Ecosystems of Success, and two key focuses are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. Some key aspects of building a business are: raising capital, marketing, and recruitment of talent. Another key piece is networking which will allow you find partners in addition to finding customers. The following contributed discusses the importance of building networks and the post is thus entitled, Building A Business? It’s All About Making Connections.

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Image via Unsplash

The more you look into it, the more it becomes apparent that everything we do in life is dependent on a community. Nowhere is that more true than when you’re trying to launch your own business. Be it academic networks or entrepreneurial ones, the connections we are able to make are a major factor in determining our success. We go through life forming new communities. We need to find others who connect with what we are writing or selling. People who will share what we have to say with their own networks via social media or word of mouth. Communities function through the building of relationships and the exchange of ideas, and if you’re trying to get a company off the ground, then having the opportunity and the ability to form those relationships is absolutely vital. Forming a quality connection is about finding the common ground, having a shared vision or set of ideas. Once you have this, you’ll have an audience of brand advocates that can support, challenge and improve what you do.

Developing An Audience-Centric Content Strategy

But how do you find this community and connect with them in the right way? You have to begin by putting yourself out there – taking a few risks, showing what you’re all about and laying out your stall – literally and metaphorically! Find your voice and see who responds to it. It all starts with creating some quality content introducing your brand and it’s products or services. Work with the best web developers or Video Production Companies to refine your messages and positioning and make content which truly reflects who you are and what you’re aiming to do. This is your chance to show the world what your intentions are, so make it the best you can.

Establish A Feedback Loop

Once you’re out there with some content, put in place mechanisms to ensure you’re getting an accurate picture of the reactions people have. Use an audience discovery tool such as Mention to set up alerts around phrases and keywords relevant to your business. Topics you care about will guide you to your audience. They can be geographically related, related to a particular industry or even just a be a quirky subject that you have a particular interest in. Monitoring these topics will allow you to discover potential community members and further expand your networks of people and relevant interests. You can also use social listening to understand what people are saying about your business, what they love that you do, where you could improve and even ideas for future development.

Join In The Discussion

Reaching out on topics of interest or customer support issues can quickly gain you a reputation and a following, but it does take a bit of work to get off the ground initially. The key is to have a great CRM system which allows you to manage all your data centrally and connect with other services such as social media scheduling software, customer support tickets and email. Use this source to gather a fuller picture of who you are talking to using a tool like Riffle and then make those valuable connections that can really take your business to the next level.

Hidden Costs For Small Business Owners and How To Avoid Them

Two of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. Small business owners must be aware of cash flow and hidden costs. Control of these two things are life and death for any business. The following contributed post is thus entitled, Hidden Costs For Small Business Owners and How To Avoid Them.

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When you start out with a plan to create and build your own business, you will get a business plan and a budget together. In fact, it is usually so precise and specific that you will have all of your costs mapped out for quite a while and know exactly what needs to be spent where, and what you need to be selling in order to cover any costs. But the reality is, when it actually comes to running your business, there are many hidden costs that arise that you can forget about.

Think about maintenance of equipment, replacing broken chairs in an office, or adding insurance; it all adds up, and may not be what you are initially thinking about when it comes to making your business plan. But if theses costs get out of control, then it can be damaging. So with that in mind, here are some of the things that you can be thinking about and doing, to make sure that you are able to reduce your ‘hidden’ costs and stick to the budget that you have planned.

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Rent Equipment

When you rent a home, you pay for the home and essentially cover the mortgage, but you are not responsible for any of the things that might stop working, like the washing machine or dishwasher, for example. The same goes for when you rent equipment. As long as you have not purposely damaged any items, any repairs that need to be done, tend to be covered by the person that you are renting off. Take rental boilers, for example, they can be pricey to buy and repair yourself. Which is why renting could be better, so that you don’t have the hidden cost of having to pay for it to be fixed, should your boiler break.

Strict Expense Policy

If you have employees that are going to need some expenses paid for business related work, such as travel and so on, make sure that you have a clear and strict expense policy when it comes to what you do or don’t allow. If you keep the policy quite general, then you could be paying for expenses that aren’t really a legitimate business expense. So that is certainly something to be thinking about, as it can add up, especially if you have employees expensing a lot of items.

Negotiate

There will be plenty of deals and contracts that you will have as a small business owner over time. But if you just take things at face value, and don’t look into the contracts or even try to negotiate things on your contract, then you can be missing out. You can reduce some of your necessary costs through negotiating; it is always worth a try to ask. Otherwise, these kinds of thing can quite quickly spiral out of control, especially when things auto-renew before you’ve had to chance to ask for money off because of repeat custom.

Your goal should be to swim and get this business going, not be drowning in hidden costs. So take control and you can have business success.

Why Organization Is Key To Make Success Of A Side Hustle

The first principle of my blog is Creating Ecosystems of Success, and two of its key focuses are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. While many people have nine to five jobs, having an income generating ‘side hustle’ can prove to be very lucrative and a wise investment of time and resources. A key to effectively having this type of side hustle is organization. Many people in fact have these side hustles. The following contributed post is thus entitled, Why Organization Is Key To Make Success Of A Side Hustle.

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It’s easier than ever to try your hand at something new in the twenty first century. Millennials are savvy human beings with a thirst for interconnectivity and innovation, which is why they are reluctant to simply let their nine to five income wallow in their bank accounts. To make your money work more aggressively, you need to seek out more creative opportunities. Playing to your strengths means focusing on what you love such as craft, wine, real estate or stocks and shares and turning your hands to these ventures as an amateur. While you might not become an investment banker, you can develop a portfolio to help you prepare for your retirement. Organization is key. Take a look at these side hustle investments that you might want to look into.

Real Estate

Property is as safe as houses (excuse the pun) when it comes to making money in the long term. If you are willing to utilize some of your hard earned cash to put down a deposit on a pad, like those listed with William Pitt, you could find yourself with an exceptional asset on your hands. You could look into long term, short term or holiday rentals depending on the property type, target market, and location that you are after. Beachside, country or idyllic locations tend to lend themselves for the more lucrative vacation rental. In the high season, you could be charging over ten times your mortgage repayment weekly to cover costs and top up your nest egg.

Long term rentals may be a safer bet if you are looking for maximum financial security. By handing over the responsibility for the rental to a property management company, you can watch the money come in while not having to worry about a leaking washing machine or a burst pipe. For the long term investor, property is hard to beat.

Wine

If you love partaking in a tipple or two of the finest vintage, you might already have a decent amount of knowledge regarding vintage years and vineyards. Put it to good use and invest in some historic wines that will only grow more scarce and increase in value. You have to think of investing in wine in the same way as you would art. It has to be sought after, rare and have the ability to increase in value. Store it in your own cellar or ask for a wine storage company to look after your magnum or two for a decade or more, and you could have made a tidy profit.

Forex

If you’ve always wondered what trading currencies was all about, why not have a go. You don’t have to be investing hundreds and thousands straight away. Head online and set up a dummy account, and have fun investigating the markets. You might find that you’re a dab hand at buying dollars against the yen, and pounds against the krona. Take your time and learn the ropes, watching some tutorials along the way. When you’re ready, have a go for real but only ever spend what you can afford to lose.

By mixing the low, medium and high risk investments, you’ll create a portfolio that will see your side hustling go from strength to strength.