Tips for Hiring an Architect to Design Your Business’s New Flagship Office

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Hiring an architect|Tips for Hiring an Architect to Design Your Business’s New Flagship OfficeIf you’re looking for tips on hiring an architect, then you’ve already made the decision to use an architect to help design your new office. Hiring a good architect will be one of the best decisions you can make. A professional and well-trained architect will anticipate your needs, find innovative solutions to problems, and have the knowledge and contacts to help you at every step of the process. They are the person that will have the biggest influence on how your project turns out.

Below, we’ve compiled some top tips to help you select the best architect for you. Whether you’re building a small office for a close-knit company, or you’re a large multi-national looking to build something innovative, these tips will help you make the right choice.

Performing Due Diligence when Hiring an Architect

When you’re deciding who to contact, a referral is always the preferred option. This means someone you know has already used their service and been satisfied with it. If you don’t know anyone who has used an architect, then ask builders you trust for referrals. Building contractors often work closely with architects and will probably have experience with several local ones. Their first-hand experience could provide invaluable insights. There can be some conflicting advice about the type of professional you should hire, which is covered more in this guide, but a good architect will be the best person to make this judgement.

Whether you contact an architect because of a referral from a colleague or you just pluck their name off the Association of Consulting Architects website, spending a little time looking at their portfolio and asking the right questions can provide you with invaluable insights into whether they’d be a good fit for you or your project.

Check out an Architect’s Past Projects

An architect’s portfolio can give you an insight into any style or solution they seem to favour. The more variety between the projects the better, as this means the architect is not only experienced, but is probably good at turning their client’s vision into reality. Ask questions about the projects you like and pay attention to how they respond. Are they proud to show you their work? Do they get passionate or excited about the project?

Ask the Architect the Right Questions

There are several things you can ask in order to start to build a rapport and see if they are a good fit for your project. It can feel a bit like an awkward job interview when asking probing or difficult questions, but you’re investing a considerable amount of time and money into this project, and an experienced architect will welcome the questions.

Potential questions could include any of the following. Approximately what timescales would you foresee for building work and planning permissions etc.? How would you approach this project? Do you see any potential obstacles or red flags with what I’m trying to create? How do you calculate and charge your fees?

Architects are professionals that have completed years of training and are usually passionate about their chosen profession. A good architect will welcome all the scrutiny and questions, as they’ll be proud to show off their work and provide answers.

Business Plan Development: Know your Finances

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Finances Article |Business Plan|Business Plan Development: Know your FinancesA great business plan is the foundation of every great business. It sets out what your new business will do, how you will overcome the challenges of starting up and, most important of all, how you will make money.

But your start-up business plan is all just wishful thinking until you start filling in the financial figures.

Your marketing plan and SWOT analysis are interesting – but they don’t mean a thing if you don’t have realistic figures on your bottom line. Your financial forecasts and statements make up the most essential section of your plan. You need it – not just to set the financial targets you will work to, and as a blueprint for running your business – but to secure funding from investors or lenders. They are going to want to see numbers that show your business has the ingredients to thrive and grow and that they can be repaid, with interest.

What should be in the financial section of your business plan?

Your financial projections need to include the key figures that business accounts will show. These are the profit and loss, balance sheet, and cash flow.

These will be similar to the detailed accounting statements your business will eventually generate – but with one important difference. You will need to make projections of the figures your business will achieve, rather than report on those you have.

This means that you have to take an educated guess about the future performance of your business. It may be easier to make your estimates if you have experience of running a similar business – and if you have, say so!

Keep it real

It may be tempting to be over-optimistic – but the more realistic your estimates are, the more professional you will look – and the better your chances of securing the funding you want.

Everyone wants to set up the next Google or Twitter, but not every business can enjoy exponential growth – and plans that suggest it will, can be a red flag for investors.

One way to ensure your figures are credible is to base them on an existing business that you know well, and to use the following structure:

Start with a sales forecast. Set up a spreadsheet projecting sales over the first three years. Set up different sections for different lines, with columns for every month for the first year (you might want to change to a quarterly basis for subsequent years).

Don’t just include units. Have columns for unit sales, unit costs, pricing, one that multiplies units times price to calculate sales, and one for sales costs. This allows you to demonstrate gross margin: sales revenue less sales costs. Plus it’s a useful number for comparing with different standard industry ratios.

Create an expenses budget. Differentiate between fixed costs, such as rent and payroll, and variable costs, such as advertising and delivery. Include contingencies and variations based on different sales figures.

You may have to estimate things like interest and taxes.

Develop a cash-flow statement. This shows the cash moving in and out of the business. It is important to remember when compiling your cash-flow projection to show how many of your invoices will be paid in cash, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days and so on. Some business planning software programs will help you make these projections.

Income projections. This is your profit and loss forecast for your business for the coming three years. Use the numbers that you put in the other sections. Remember:

Sales – cost of sales = gross margin

Gross margin – expenses, interest and taxes = net profit

Include assets and liabilities. Start with assets and estimate what you’ll have on hand, month by month for cash, money owed to you, inventory, and your substantial assets like land, buildings, and equipment.

Then work out your liabilities or debts – the bills for suppliers, finance and loan repayments.

The breakeven point. If your business is viable, at a certain point your revenue will exceed your costs. This is a key point for potential lenders, who want to know that they are lending to a viable enterprise.

Do you need help?

The financial section of your business plan is so important that it is worth getting help with. Your accountant may be able to provide some input, and, remember, that you may be able to find templates for businesses like yours online.

Some accounts software may have helpful modules – and some will have the ability to translate your figures into graphic form to create pie charts or bar graphs that you can use to highlight your financials, sales history, or projected income over three years. And don’t be afraid to include visuals in your business plans – they can make complicated data much easier to understand!

Positive Business Reputation: How Reputation Management Affects Business Development

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, Positive Business Reputation: How Reputation Management Affects Business Development

How important is the perception of your brand in the eyes of your current or potential customers? We believe it’s immense and can shape your entire business success.

The way customers see you and the emotions, associations, and facts they relate to you are what makes you stand out from your competition. Making sure you keep up a positive business reputation is, therefore, obligatory.
But, how can your business reputation affect your business development? There’s a direct connection between the two and we’re about to break it down. So, if you want to learn about the importance of your business reputation, just keep reading.

Here’s how it can determine the success of your business.

Customer Reviews & Sales

Your online reputation will massively depend on the online reviews you receive from your customers or people who’ve received your services or tried your products.

Consequentially, other potential customers will read the reviews and rely on them more than you expect.

  • According to a study, 86% of people will hesitate to buy from a business with negative online reviews.
  • 90% of customers read online reviews before visiting a business.

Therefore, customer reviews can actually affect your sales and profit.

To ensure you keep your reviews positive, make sure to address every positive and negative review and establish a steady communication with all your customers.

Don’t ignore a negative review or attack the person leaving it. Address the issue and try solving it.

Social Media Feedback

Social media has become one of the major platforms for local and global businesses to improve their brand awareness. In addition, businesses use social media to build a positive business reputation.

On social media, your customers are just a click away from sending you a message or leaving a comment on your post.

It’s your job to:

  • read as many messages and comments as possible
  • respond and follow up
  • keep engaging and show that you are listening (Forbes)
  • learn a lesson from honest comments and messages

It’s not enough that you just read a comment. You need to listen to your customers and respond accordingly.
If you make social media a one-direction platform, you’ll lose your followers and create a negative business reputation.

Organic Traffic

You may not be aware, but search engines love reviews.
The more reviews you have, the better your search engine ranking will be.

Therefore, your business reputation can help you:

  • increase organic traffic
  • beat your competition
  • enable more people finding you on Google

Therefore, you need sure your business is on local review sites such as:

Inspire your customers to leave feedback by simply asking them to. In addition, be transparent with all your reviews.

Employer Brand

Your positive business reputation shouldn’t be seen strictly from the perspective of a customer looking to try your services or buy your product.

It can also be seen from the perspective of a young, talented person, looking into becoming your employee.

Your employer brand is:

  • company’s reputation and popularity from a potential employer’s perspective and describes the values the company gives to its employees (TalentLyft)

This type of business reputation can affect your business development in terms of:

  • finding and hiring talented professionals
  • employee retention
  • employee recruitment

People will refuse to work for you if your employer branding is weak or negative. Retaining top talent might be impossible and you’ll end up with the employees no one else wanted to hire.

Pay attention to your employer brand and don’t let it influence your business development negatively.

Takeaway

Building a strong, positive business reputation should be one of your business’ top priorities. It can leave an impact on your customers, employees, social media followers, and people thinking about trying your business.

Hopefully, the advice above helped you learn about the importance of a positive review, listening to your social media followers, or responding to any type of feedback. Use that advice to build a strong, positive business reputation and use it to improve your business success.

About the Author

Angela Baker is a self-driven specialist who is currently working as a freelance writer at writing services Trust My Paper and Grab My Essay and is trying to improve herself and her blogging career. She is always seeking to discover new ways for personal and professional growth and is convinced that it’s always important to broaden horizons. That’s why Angela develops and improves her skills throughout the writing process to help to inspire people.

Developing A Better Standard Of Marketing

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Marketing|Developing A Better Standard Of MarketingDeveloping a better standard of anything is essential when improving your business. Just like a house, it can grow cobwebs, slowly experience a state of disrepair and generally fall to dust should you fail to maintain it. What might work this year might not work the next year. The team you might have now could be stifling your progress, and fresh faces with brand new ideas might be needed to inject life into the firm.

Marketing is perhaps one of the most important elements to update within your business strategy from year to year. Trends, expectations and the means in which customers interface with firms have changed since 2010, and it’s astonishing to realize that was almost ten years ago now.

But how can you develop a better standard of marketing? Doesn’t it take time to read your audience, put together a coherent package, and only then realize that the trend might have been missed? How can you continually stay up to date and elicit awe, not groans, from your audience?

We think the following efforts might help you:

Hire The Professionals

There’s no worth in simply trying to market your brand without knowing your target audience, how they respond to certain stimuli, what you have to say, your goal for the marketing campaign, or how to best reach all avenues of accessibility when exposing a message. It’s essential that you know how to do all this, and for small businesses, that’s a big ask. With services such as Your Marketing People, all of this work can be expertly crafted and specialized, keeping you in the loop at all times. If you manage that, then you can expect to overcome the issues that plague so many first-time business marketing themselves and instead step onto the scene with a cohesive and worthwhile stratagem.

Measure

It’s essential to measure your marketing via every metric through which that can be found. Consider your engagement rates, your sales, where those sales come from, how social media comments reply to your marketing, your YouTube ad dislikes to likes, or perhaps how many ‘follows’ you gain as a result. Without all this information you can repeatedly market to a brick wall even after ten years of business development.

Take A Risk

Every single world can be poured over, copywritten again, approved, discussed, rejected and then the most baseline phrasing chosen if you overanalyze everything. The essence of marketing is being seen, so don’t be afraid to make bold statements, to take a risk, to be bigger and better than the competition. Just imagine if you saw a fragrance advertisement that didn’t feature a half-naked male or female model dressed in silk, filmed in black and white. You’d likely look just because of the originality of the piece in question. Take this ethos and apply it elsewhere, and you might just be exponentially compounding the effect of your marketing prowess.

With this advice, developing a better standard of marketing will be a worthwhile aim.

The Four P’s – Finding A Web Designer

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Website Design|The Four P’s - Finding A Web DesignerAn effective and easy to use website is something which is of the utmost importance nowadays. After all, having a dominant online presence is vital when it comes to your business excelling. Behind every good website is a credible and high quality website design company that has designed and put together the site. If you can find good website designers then you can ensure that you will have an effective, innovative, eye-catching and easy to use website. The four ‘P’s you need to consider in order to ensure that this is the case are as follows; price, portfolio, practise and previous customers.

First and foremost, price is an important quality because you need to ensure that the service is something that your business can comfortably afford. It is advisable that you search around online and get several quotes. By doing this you can form a general idea on the average price of website design. You can then devise your budget. After all, there are lots of website designers available today and thus you are bound to find something which fits into your financial situation. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that going for the cheapest option is not recommended. After all, this could signal a lack of quality and you could end up with a website which is not competitive.

The second ‘P’ that you need to consider is the design company’s portfolio. Any good company should have a section on their website devoted to work that they have done before so you can make sure they use website design best practices. If a business does not have a portfolio available on their website then it is recommended that you consider somewhere else. After all, a portfolio will display the company’s capabilities and will provide you with a vision for the level of service which you can benefit from.

In addition to this, you should also consider practice – this is the level of experience the company boasts. The more experience the better; it is recommended that you do not opt for a design business which has less than five years in practice. After all, in general experience shows that the company has been successful in order to have survived in the industry for so long. Moreover, it indicates that they have the knowledge, the insight and the expertise to deal with any problem that comes their way. It also means that they are more likely to have dealt with your requirements many times before.

And finally, you should consider previous customer reviews. This is the best way to gain an honest insight into whether the business is credible and provides a high-quality service or not. Have a look on the website to see if you can find any testimonials from previous clients. If a business is happy with the feedback they have received then they are more than likely to display it on their website.

All in all, if you consider the four ‘P’s mentioned in this article then you will give yourself the best chance of finding the best website designers to cater to your online needs.