There is always a chance that something will go horribly wrong for your business. All business owners have this at the back of their minds. You don’t have control over what happens in the wider economy or how sales trends develop. You do, however, have control over what your business does. And if you want to make sure that your business is going to be able to survive a downturn, you need to put it in a financially secure position as soon as possible.
Start Investing
First of all, you should start doing some investing. If your business owns properties and rents them out, you can make money. Or you could invest personally and put the returns into the business. There are plenty of ways in which your business can invest in order to improve its finances. You might want to go to companies like triple net if you need help with beginning an investment strategy that’s going to work and pay off for you and your business in the long-term. There is nothing wrong with getting help when you don’t really know what you’re doing.
Next, you should start to think about diversifying your business as best you can. This will make your business more financial stable because it will allow you to get to appeal to more customers and, hopefully, sell more products or services. It will also make your business better able to cope with a potential downturn in the future because your business will be more diverse. You won’t be reliant on selling just one type of product, and that can be a big deal when you want to get ahead and remain profitable.
Save Money Regularly
Simple saving some money can make a huge difference to the financial stability and security of your business if it’s something that you can manage to do regularly. You only have to put aside a small amount each month, and you will soon see that your business is ready to face any problems that might be heading its way. The money you save should be stashed away and only called upon when something goes wrong and your business is in urgent need of cash. It’s pointless saving money if you also keep spending it. Put rules in place for when that savings pot can and can’t be dipped into.
Many businesses are pretty careless with their spending plans. Is it really worth spending big money on an extravagant idea or statement? Sometimes, you need to look at the value that a particular project is going to return to your business before you push ahead. When you do that, you can be sure that you only spend money on things that are really worth it for your business from a financial point of view. So, if you have an extravagant spending plans currently in the pipeline, it might be a good idea to halt them until your business is more financially secure.
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To a lot of start-up owners, growth is a universally good thing. You’re a small business now, and you want all the financial stability and branding strength of a large one. Naturally, this means that once you stimulate enough growth, everything else will fall into place, right? Well, not quite. If your start-up has experienced a lot of rapid growth recently, you’ll know that it’s something of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you’ll have better profit margins and a stronger platform for making a name for yourself. On the other, you’ll have to take care of a lot of scaling, which will mean managerial and organizational changes. Regardless of what your period of growth has done to your business, you need to be able to sustain these challenges. Here’s a guide to managing a rapidly expanding business…
When you drew up your business plan, it’s pretty much a given that you set a range of short and long-term goals, but what about medium-term ones? When business owners totally overlook any medium-term milestones, it can cause all kinds of scaling problems which will come back to bite them in the future. Every good business plan should have a long-term vision and mission, which you’ll ultimately want your business to reach. You’ll need a wider range of medium-term objectives, which will support that end-goal vision, and are usually milestones set five to three years down the line. Then, there are short-term plateaus you should keep in mind – skills, accomplishments and experiences which you can achieve realistically in the next year. A lot of people at the heads of growing businesses become too wrapped up in the long-term, and change the direction of their venture far too frequently. Set yourself some medium-term goals, and stick to them!
Keep Your Customers Happy
You should be placing a strong emphasis on customer satisfaction no matter what stage your business is in, but it’s especially important to make sure you’re not getting distracted by scalability. Your customers are the people who will come up with the most relevant ideas, the most immediate feedback, and in today’s social media-oriented world, they’re increasingly happy to help. No matter how rapidly or drastically your business is changing, don’t sacrifice a formal process for constantly listening to customers, and acting on their input. Aside from holding an ear to the ground, you also need to make sure that you can keep a handle on delivery, back-end support systems, and order fulfillment in the midst of all this chaos. If your customers become dissatisfied with your performance, you’re going to have a very hard time retaining them, and continuing to grow at a healthy rate.
Think About Finances
As your business expands at a fast rate, there are a range of financial implications which all need to be taken into consideration. As your business becomes larger and larger, your cash flow is going to become strained before it gets any better, so it’s a good idea to look for ways to save as much as possible. Recover any outstanding debts promptly, decrease prices wherever it’s practical, consider refinancing and borrowing money, offer up some rewards for prompt or upfront payments, and eliminate as much unnecessary overhead as possible. You may also be able to draw some savings from incorporating your business or registering it as a certain type of company. This can be done through services like yourcompanyformations.co.uk – registered formation agent . As more and more factors are added to your cash flow, you need to make it a priority to understand and manage those factors, and eventually manage all your income and outgoings with a “big picture” mindset. Financial growing pains have ended countless promising businesses over the years – don’t let yours become one of them!
Find a Good Mentor
Finding a good mentor, with a wealth of experience as an entrepreneur or executive in your field, can take a huge amount of the weight off your shoulders. You’ll be able to reap the benefit of their years in the business, and the advice of someone who’s been in the same position as you in the past. When you imagine a great entrepreneur, you probably don’t see someone who’s constantly asking for advice. However, you shouldn’t let your pride get in the way of the potential success of your business! Some of the most successful businessmen in recent history have developed on the advice of a mentor. Bill Gates had Buffet, and Mark Zuckerberg had Steve Jobs. I don’t care how smart you are, or how disruptive your business idea is, find a mentor if it’s possible!
Continuing on this theme of not thinking of yourself as a one-man-band, surrounding yourself with team members who are significantly smarter than you is essential for anyone who’s at the head of a fast-growing company. No matter how good your product, service or strategy is, if you don’t have a good team behind you, the rapid growth of your business can quickly become overwhelming. If the departments at your company are growing faster than you can handle, then choose the best minds you have available and give them positions as the heads of their departments. By doing this, you’ll be able to free up your time and invest it in your overall strategy. As these people become more familiar with their departments and senior roles, you should keep them in the loop about more executive decisions. Make them a part of the hiring process, and anything else that could impact their role.
Take Away While You Add
A lot of business owners think that once their company grows enough, they’ll have a lot more freedom and flexibility. As a matter of fact, scaling can actually be very restrictive. There’ll be all kinds of things that used to work, but won’t anymore, meaning that you’ll have to rub these out of your usual strategy. It’s only when your operation gets a little larger, you’ll realize that there are a range of things that have always been slowing you down, without you realizing it. Whether you axe paperback to revive the company or do away with things like performance reviews altogether, you need to be aware that certain things will need to go, and holding onto them will only drag your company down. Getting rid of performance reviews, for example, will mean that you’ll free your employees from a lot of tedious work, and redirect those people-hours to more pressing issues. Don’t be afraid to make drastic changes when they’re a gamble, provided that you’re certain you can make them pay off. If your grocery is on the verge of bankruptcy, but hiring greeters will reduce theft and improve sales, then go ahead and do it. If team meetings are too long and ineffective, don’t be afraid of being seen as a horrible boss by banning the use of phones! Whatever’s on the horizon, you need to stop resisting change, and choose the sacrifices you’ll have to make very carefully.
Wrapping Up…
Rapid growth, if you know how to handle it, can promise all kinds of great things for your business. However, if you approach it in the wrong way, it could be the thing that brings your promising idea to ruin. Going from managing a bootstrapped, fledgling start-up to a feverishly expanding business will require a lot of changes in your tactics, but through applying the strategies above and learning as you go, you’ll be able to assure a bright, successful future for your company!
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Picture this scenario; you have an employee on their way to a business meeting in Dubai. He’s currently in the taxi on his way to the airport, but sadly his work phone is out of battery and you have no way to contact him about the cancelled deal. He boards the plane, heads off to Dubai, and it’s only once he lands that he gets your message about the deal being cancelled.
This example highlights just one of the many uses of an effective communications system. The ability to contact the people you need to in an urgent manner is incredibly important due to how time-consuming and money-wasting a delay in communications can be. Yet, unfortunately, there is only so much you can do with traditional systems such as emailing and messaging. If there are other business emergencies, such as a fire breaking out at the office or your business premises being burgled, then you need a quick and swift way to notify everyone within your company because every second counts.
Emergency Notifications System
Let’s pretend one of your employees has come into work early. He’s the first one at the office and he enters the premises to find that your entire office has been trashed, the computers have been stolen and the security system smashed into pieces. With no way to contact everyone in a short time span, the employee isn’t a hundred percent sure what he should do. This is just one of the many emergency notification use cases. Giving your employees the ability to make a company-wide emergency notification is a great way to alert all of the staff about a pressing issue that needs to be sorted out immediately. Instead of relying on a chain of command that they have to climb up for their message to reach someone, they can simply tell everyone in the business with a simple message.
If your team are able to easily contact each other with an effective communications system, then it helps to make the team more efficient. Whether there’s an important change that needs to be made or some hardware that broke which was critical to their project, everyone in the team needs to know so that they can adjust their working schedule to either fix the hardware, prepare a replacement or work around it. If your team is unable to communicate effectively, it will lead to delays, disputes and other problems that are going to slow down your business.
Employee Management
Managers are usually quite effective at communicating with their employees, but there are going to be times when having social skills isn’t enough and you need software or technology to improve the way a manager contacts an employee. For instance, if there’s an easy way for your senior members to keep a track of their team members and record their progress, then it makes your business more productive. By having your managers communicate effectively and inform staff of their daily tasks, goals and issues, it creates a workplace that runs smoothly.
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As we go forward, the world of marketing online is going to change again. Companies are not only going to want to get their ads in front of their customers, but they also want them to be more personalized.
Why?
Essentially, it’s because personal ads help to develop brand loyalty and make the customer feel like the company cares. Behind this new wave of customization is a whole raft of digital technologies that are allowing it to happen. But some customers aren’t too keen about the trends that are in the pipeline. This is why companies need to be especially careful when using personalized ads: the last thing they want is to look creepy as if they are stalking their customers online.
We all know how using customer information can sometimes backfire, so how should we go about making our ads more personal?
Collect Data
Tom Caulton, an expert in digital marketing, says that the first place companies need to look are their data. He says that it is important for businesses to create “buyer personas” or descriptions of certain demographics that are visiting their site. From here, he says, it’s possible to do things like create better content and make more targeted ads.
To find out more about your customers, sometimes you’ll have to ask questions. But spamming customers with 25 questions all in one go is an excellent way to make them groan and close the questionnaire. Caulton recommends, therefore, that businesses ask questions periodically, one at a time, and spread the work for their customers over a longer period of time.
Create An Amazing Interface
Of course, collecting data is nothing without the right interface to back it up. This is why so many companies are now using custom software development to build things like mobile and web apps. Rather than interfacing with customers through generic browsers, companies are seeing the benefits of using their own targeted apps which offer more functionality and help keep customers inside the barriers of their business. Apps allow businesses to offer customers personalized content, as well as personalized offers, based on their behavior and preferences.
Map Out Your Content
Funneling customers is an incredibly important concept in the world of marketing. The idea is to slowly draw them in through multiple stages and get them to convert. The top of the funnel is simply about getting people to your website. You do this by producing things like webinar, ebooks, and whitepapers. You also do it by using PPC and SEO. The next step is the middle of the funnel where you nurture your leads, providing them with tailored content and buying guides. The bottom of the funnel is the offer stage: you might get your customers to try out a demo or give them a free trial.
At each stage of the funnel, companies are personalizing the experience. They’re creating personas of their customers and then delivering the right content, marketing or special offers that those particular personas will find attractive. Caulton says that this will boost conversions significantly.
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Your business thrives on how effective its marketing strategy is. Marketing is a concept that can almost consume a business that hasn’t got its strategy in order. Most businesses place a vast proportion of their budget towards marketing and its various sub-categories. A lot of small businesses don’t have this luxury. So, if you are a small business, are there any tricks that the bigger companies use that can be implemented without having to squirrel away a third of the year’s budget?
With any advertising campaign, the talk is generally geared towards two things, the image and the brand. The image is what you are presenting to the world via signs, symbols, and text. The brand is, in essence, the personality. There is a very subtle difference in the two words, but important enough for you to need to differentiate. Communication is how you get your business identity and image out there, which is why you need to be aware of semiotics.
Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols. Imagery is the image: text, signs, and symbols. This also includes language, gestures, clothing, and the list goes on. In terms of your marketing approach, you need to take into account how you are communicating your business brand via your imagery. This is something where a lot of small businesses fall into murky waters because they either don’t invest the time or finances into their imagery. You can smell a primitive company from a mile off because their images are not mature and, more importantly, do not sync well into their business brand. The two sides to semiotics are the signifier, which is the material presenting the image: an object, words, a picture, etc. The other side is the signified, and this the meaning interpreted by the target, which is your consumer or recipient of the image/ad/billboard/communication. Going for the right message in your ad campaign will communicate your business brand as it was intended. Now, all this may sound complex, but every marketing campaign thrives on the undercurrent of semiotics, it just isn’t communicated in these terms.
The next approach to your marketing strategy is to work on the brand. The image is part of the brand, and the brand is part of the company. To work on what your company “is” you need to get to the crux of what your company stands for i.e. the ethos or mentality behind the brand. Much like the actor who needs to “get into character” to understand what the character wants, which drives the actions of the story; you need to understand your needs as a company. Ask yourself, why you are selling these products? What are these products communicating to people about your business? By aligning product with business image, this is how you start to get a clearer idea of your target market, which then links into your marketing plan. The image and the brand are two important facets of your marketing that you cannot afford to cut down on.
Understanding your identity is the first part of controlling the image you put out there. It’s the equivalent to the writer finding their voice. The creative similes are being used because it is the essence of being as creative as you possibly can that will get you ahead in the game. Controlling your image is something that you need to do. If you are a small business, taking the time to go over the image before you put it on your website, or place it on a billboard is not normally a luxury you can make time for. But it is integral to how you communicate yourself in the wider public sphere. You need to vet the image and understand it, using semiotics as a yardstick so you can make sure the image you need to communicate is the correct one, and is not open for misinterpretation.
There are ways to cultivate a holistic view of your business, and that is dependent on the products that you put out there. Not just the actual products you are peddling, but the supplementary products that every business uses now, which is done typically via the internet. These can include podcasts, smartphone apps, webisodes, YouTube clips, and promotional gifts, which is a cute little way to promote your company. The Dynamic Gift website home page has a range of promotional gifts and display items that can put your business logo on things like keyrings, marquees, and lanyards. These types of companies are especially useful in trade show environments when you need to stand out or give your company a bit more personality.
It is tempting to go for every avenue so you can hedge your bets, but it is the corporate equivalent of spreading yourself thin. Much like the ad campaigns where you are unsure of the target market to gear yourself towards, the key is to nominate two or three areas where you can maintain immense focus. By going for every area and giving 25% dedication to each one is obviously not as effective as giving 100% on two or three. Each advertising method has its own benefits. For example, a podcast is a format for slow burners and dedicated listeners, ideal for a business that has a very limited range of products. But it is a subtle game to play, and by controlling your image at every turn, not only is it more attainable by only doing it through a few channels, it makes your job as its leader much easier.
The brand, image, and method of communicating the business are all integral pieces to your marketing campaign. The moment you understand what your “voice” is as a business, the other aspects will start to fall into place, and the building blocks that you have been working towards as a small company will finally begin to materialize and make sense. This is a methodical and time-consuming process, but it is one that is completely essential to building up your customer base through marketing.
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