Storage Solutions: Getting A Warehouse For Your Business

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article | Storage Solutions: Getting A Warehouse For Your BusinessWhen you’re building your business upwards and outwards, you might consider outsourcing some key components so you can focus on the company from an internal perspective, but you also need to think about accommodating more obvious components on site, or just finding extra space so things can be physically stored. A warehouse is one of those things that can be an absolute lifesaver, but for those businesses that have started in modest surroundings, it can raise a few questions, such as if it is necessary right now, but also, what can you do to help your business? Either way, you’ll have to expand at some point, and looking at possible properties will help you decide whether you need it or not. If you know how to look, you can find an industrial warehouse space with a convenient location for your business at affordable rates

Is It Appropriate For Expansion?

Every business has their own reasons for expanding, and when you are looking to boost the brand value, or you want to get to a new market, or just offer a wider range of products, a warehouse can prove to be a very useful component. But with this, depending on what you need, it could throw up a multitude of options. It all depends on two things, what you want, and how much money you have in the bank. For those businesses that are small in stature, it’s far more cost effective to have the warehouse close in proximity. When you hire a warehouse that’s far away, it can be useful for storage, but that’s only if you are expansive in your operation.

Is It Practical?

It’s not just the location, or even the storage facility, but it’s about the manpower and the facilities on-site. Choosing the right components, whether it is pallet rack storage facilities, various forklifts or transportation vehicles, they all need to come from a place of practicality. Naturally, this goes hand in hand with the objectives and the budget. But if you are looking to establish a new base somewhere, the warehouse can be the first thing to set up, so if you get the staff on board, and get the ball rolling before you start trading in this new area, it can mean you hit the ground running. But also, depending on the labor skills in this new location, you may find you have to pay a bit more money to get the right people. Think about the practicalities.

What Are Your Warehouse Options?

It depends on your budget and your overall goals, but the options consist of three main ones. You can get a private warehouse, and this will be built for the storage of your products. The great thing about these warehouses is that they can be altered according to the products stored inside. For example, if you specialize in foods, this space can be accommodated to refrigerate these products.
A public warehouse is licensed by the state, and comes with a storage fee. Ultimately, for a fee, you have this storage space, but it’s dependent on the regulations of the state, but as a major positive they are set up by convenient transport routes, like railways and main roads.
A bonded warehouse is a more beneficial approach for those who import goods because only duty is required as far as payment is concerned.

A warehouse can be an excellent addition to an expanding business. But it’s all about picking the right components and making it work with your business.

Can Anyone Become Competent At Business With The Right Resources?

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |The Art of Business|Can Anyone Become Competent At Business With The Right Resources?We often think that running a business is something that must always be struggled for. We consider it to be a privilege, and something that can easily fail if the correct attention is not placed in the right areas. Of course, both points are true to an extent, but does that mean that only the most accomplished of people could ever hope of dipping their toes into the business pool? How does experience and education develop in the modern day? Is business still a hidden art that must be learned through great risk and peril, akin to a martial arts novice training on a mountain top, or can anyone learn essential business skills with the right access to resources?

We would like to think that providing the wisdom to succeed can help you not only enjoy your business life more, but give you more to think about and potentially avoid mistakes that others seem to walk in to. In other words, yes, we believe that with the right resources, most people can learn valuable business skills. After all, talent and privilege is different to skill and hard work.

Consider our advice below:

Business Blogs

Business blogs offer some of the best curated opinion-pieces, statistical analysis and news that you can find. Of course, perhaps there are some that are the most popular, such as the business journal of your most favorite news source, or something dedicated such as the Financial Times or Forbes. But if you only view these sources, you’re missing out on a lot of grass-roots understanding and inspiration, featured by people who have a true understanding of their industry and wish to express it. It’s true that business journalists often have a great understanding and research deeply into their output before publication, but would you rather only listen to journalists, or those who have current experience in the business landscape? The correct answer should be ‘a mix of both.’

Business blogs are essential to a digestible daily understanding of business. An understanding of an idea can be boiled down to its grassroots and most essential point, helping you learn the idea without having to defer them yourself from elongated business case studies. However, those are essential to consider too. You can be almost certain that there’s rarely anything new under the sun, and that if your business is in a unique-feeling position, there have often been at least hundreds of businesses that have found themselves in a similar one worth paying attention to.

Podcasts

Business podcasts are essential to listen to. Give a few of them a try! With topics as serious and interesting as these, it’s essential to find hosts that you could listen to for hours without a sense of exhaustion. Playing these during your commuting hours or downtime could help you continually learn when you’re otherwise mindlessly occupied. There are many excellent podcasts out there. Look through the iTunes store business or financial categories, or perhaps browse through Spotify to see what could be streamed. You might be surprised.

But of course, you needn’t only listen to business podcasts. There are many excellent audiobooks out there to help you gain the digest of a full book in your car, or when working out at the gym. These might include topics that aren’t directly business manuals, but still hold some water. For example, perhaps listening to the memoirs or autobiographies of a major business figurehead in retirement can help you gain some insight only gleaned from a lifetime of work and understanding. Perhaps listening to industry-led podcasts can help you gain a perspective on the industry. For example, if you’re joining a marketing team for a video-game developer, it might be worth listening to the IGN podcast, or the Giant Bombcast, both are regularly in the top 100 podcasts of any indexed listing.

There’s a wealth of audible information you can download for free, and it’s best not to take this for granted. You never know just what insights you might be given.

News Feeds

It’s essential to keep up to date. You might decide that a Twitter aggregate of accounts can be worthwhile to follow, but this just leads to an overtly busy timeline. Signing up to many RSS feeds from an RSS reader can help you assess when new articles go online, perhaps by certain writers from a publication that you enjoy, or perhaps when a new issue of your online newsstand is released. Many publications are offering digital conditions of their work, and this can also be worthwhile to read.

But these methods might be considered somewhat outdated. If you wish to get your internet marketing news in the most reliable manner, using resources such as the Amazon news services can bring. This can prevent you from having to collect everything yourself, because no matter how hard you try, you’ll never be able to truly collect all the worth around you and run a business at the same time, or fight to get your start. Sometimes help from the professionals can allow you to collate the most important news, and this can help you gain an advantage over those who do not use these services. Whatever you choose to do, it’s best to have it localized in one place, to prevent having to collect your information from way too many sources at one time. It can save you plenty of stress.

Consultants

Of course, despite our previous words, finding the right consultant can often help you avoid plenty of problems from the offset. They are perhaps the most valid and unique tool you can use to help you out of your personal situation, be that a PR nightmare you’re experiencing as a small firm or when struggling with how best to structure your departments. These fees are often higher than other solutions, but none are as customized, as dedicated to results, and as personally responsible as these. For that, they are worth their weight in gold, and that can be incredibly important to keep in mind. A little consultation goes a long way, it seems.

Past Employment & Operational Results

Sometimes, the best place to look for advice and future insight is to reflect on your past. Have you worked in industries before, at a senior level? Did you see many of the moves made by those who managed you? Did you have somewhat of a broad view of the various roles and how they functioned? While this might not give you a complete view, do not discard your experience in the past. It could potentially help you consider things you wish to emulate and discard in your effort to help yourself as an employee.

It might be reading your past business journals or project plans that help you see where mistakes were made, or where your successes lay. The more experience you gain, the further context you will be able to apply to that situation. Consider how you might have conducted the same events or tasks if you were given them to deal with now. It might be that the result could have looked much different. This will only work for some industries of course. But those it does work for will likely be incredibly supported by this view of the past. For example, events and people management, financial handling, marketing outreach and a range of other possibilities will likely be helped by this viewpoint, and that can be a truly powerful thing.

Attend Events

You would be surprised just how many business lectures, events, expos and other forms of attendable organized functions are either free or very cheap to enter. This way you can gain contact with the businesses operating today, or hear experts speak about their previous experience or current operational efforts in the industry. It’s not hard to see how this can give you a sense of participation, and potentially help you learn more than beforehand. With an online presence and the ability to network both digitally and in person, you might find yourself making friends with those who are having real effects on the industry, or at least becoming somewhat familiar with them.

Network, network, networking can often not only help you boost your presence, but learn from others. There’s something about the integrated social functions of the online space and reaching out at events that helps curate content and bring people together. Who knows? You might gain insight that you would struggle to find elsewhere through this effort alone, and that can be quite an important thing to celebrate. It only takes a moment to look for events that you could attend, also. A simple browse online should bring up many in your city this year, be that for disparate celebrations. The annual women in business conference might be held near you, or perhaps industry-specific offerings. They can all have a positive effect.

With these tips, you’re sure to find the right resources to help you gain and retain your business confidence.

Specialist Or Generalist: Pros & Cons

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StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Article |specialist or generalist|Specialist Or Generalist: Pros & ConsIf you run a service based business or are planning to set one up at some point, then one of the key things you’re going to need to ask yourself is whether or not you want to position yourself as a specialist or a generalist.

Whilst there’s certainly no right or wrong because every business is unique and has different goals, it’s one of those things you should try to establish right at the beginning because you’ll need to be able to know how to market yourself effectively and you can only do this once you know what your positioning will be.

The thing will the specialist versus generalist argument is that people really have strong opinions on each side and as well meaning as they may be when trying to advise you on which path to take, this can really lead to you making a decision that’s not quite right for you, so in this post we’re going to share with you some pros and cons for each option, so that you can make the best decision for you.

Specialist:

  • Less competition: One of the main reasons that people often give when deciding whether or not to specialize in a specific area is that they’re afraid of limiting themselves and think they’ll have less chances to find clients, but the opposite is actually true and when you specialize, then you narrow yourself down to clients who are looking for your specific skills and who will happily pay more for your experience.
  • More money: Specialists in general will always have more earning potential because of the time, money and energy they’ve invested into their professional development, so if you have bigger financial goals and want to earn what you feel you’re worth, then positioning yourself as a specialist instead of a generalist is definitely going to be more advantageous financially for you.
  • Better clients: When it comes to clients, whilst it’s certainly not the case that all of them who are looking for specialists will be paying well, and those looking for generalists don’t have as much of an interest in hiring people based on value versus price, this is unfortunately often the case. The good clients who know what your services are truly worth are typically looking for people who are highly specialized in a certain area – for example, if you focus on a specialized part of the medical industry or you’re a copywriter who knows all there is to know about an electroplater.

Generalist:

  • More variety: Of course, being a generalist certainly has its good points, namely that if you’re someone who gets bored easily by working on the same type of stuff day after day, then being a generalist could be the right choice for you because there’s so much variety in the types of things you’ll be working on. This can be especially true for those who are in creative fields such as writing or design.
  • Easier to niche down later: Sometimes picking a niche to specialize in doesn’t come naturally to everyone and it takes a bit of time to find your true passion and your zone of genius, so if you’re not quite sure yet then working as a generalist for a while could be a good strategy to help you get experience in different areas and find what you want to focus on eventually.

Using Video to Boost Online Sales

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Video Marketing|Using Video to Boost Online SalesVideo is becoming a much bigger part of the internet, with even the most casual of users viewing videos online. We watch video advertisements. We tune in to Vloggers on YouTube. You might use instant videos to communicate with your friends and followers on platforms like SnapChat. Social media platforms like Facebook and even Instagram are seeing much more extensive use of video, and it’s almost impossible to scroll down your feed without viewing an online video. We stream our favorite TV shows on mediums like Netflix and Amazon Prime. We even use catch up services online to watch our favorite terrestrial shows. More families than ever are reporting that they no longer subscribe to any traditional TV package, instead choosing to stream all of the TV and films that they watch at home. On top of that, there are more specialist video services like Twitch, which are growing in popularity all of the time.

Research from online marketing outlet Digital Sherpa shows that video increases audience understanding by 74% and around 30% of everyone’s online activity is spent watching videos. It’s easy to see why using video is important, but if you are a small business, without much experience of creating your own online videos, or using videos in your digital campaigns, it can be a little overwhelming. Fortunately, description services can take out some of the hard, and more tedious work, and help you to ensure that your videos can benefit everyone. But, you still need to get stuck in for yourself. Here are just a few of the ways that your business could use video to boost sales.

To Build Trust

Building trusting relationships with your customers is essential if you want your business to grow. Without loyal and trusting relationships, you are always spending time trying to find new customers. You won’t have repeat custom, you won’t have a fanbase that spread positive word of mouth, and you won’t have clients that trust you enough to try new things and support your business through the inevitable ups and downs.

But, building this trust isn’t just about offering excellent products and services (of course, you should be doing that too), you need to provide more. Video gives you a fantastic way to give your customers more, to engage with them, to let them in a little more, and to make them feel as though you have a personal connection. Video gives you a chance to be more than just a faceless, souls brand. It makes you real.

To Explain and Educate

A brief description alone side a photo of a product or title of a service isn’t always enough to really show what you are offering. Video lets you explain your products and services. It can be a great way to troubleshoot and to give your customers advice. Video is much easier to understand than text, and many people find it easier to learn this way.

To Have Fun

Video, and vanishing videos especially, give you a way to have some fun with your audience. We focus so much on trying to be professional and serious, but it’s important to remember that people connect with other people, and they like to see more than the professional facade. Film some behind the scenes footage and let people in.