To Outsource IT Services or Not? 8 Reasons a Business Should Outsource IT

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |outsource IT|To Outsource IT Services or Not? 8 Reasons a Business Should Outsource ITOutsourcing has become a standard part of business today. If you’re looking for a function to start with, there’s no better option than IT. It’s the most commonly outsourced position in the business world.

Do you want to learn more about what benefits you will get when you outsource IT? Keep reading to learn eight reasons why working with a managed services provider is worth trying.

1. Save Money

It isn’t a cheap process to hire a new employee. You have the cost of sending out job postings and the cost of spending time in interviews. Even after all that work, there’s no guarantee that you find the right person for the job.

Then you have the cost of a salary. One employee is expensive enough. If you have a lot of IT needs, your entire IT budget can go up by a lot.

You can save a lot of money by working with a managed services provider. You only pay a retainer based on the needs of your business.

2. Focus on Your Core Business

Getting the things done that you’re good at is challenging enough at times. If you decide to manage an IT team yourself, you’re going to run the risk of spreading yourself too thin.

By working with a managed services provider for your IT needs, you can keep your focus on your core business. They will handle the planning and hiring for your company. The only thing you need to do is approve what they want to do.

3. Secure Your Business Online

If you haven’t been following the news, you probably aren’t aware of all the recent data breaches. Even large companies are getting compromised. Nobody is immune from cyberattacks.

You must protect your business from these types of attacks. The bare minimum isn’t going to cover you.
When you work with an IT provider that has a security expert, they can help you put an internet security system in place to protect your company network. It will watch your network at all times and block anything that shouldn’t be there.

4. Backup Your Data

You can’t afford to lose your data in the data-driven world we live in today. Your data is what allows you to make the most informed business decisions. Without it, you’re going to be going into things blind.

Unfortunately, you aren’t going to know ahead of time when an accident will happen. It’s vital to have a backup system in place for when this happens.

Your managed services provider will help put a backup system in place that will do backups regularly. If you do ever lose data, all you need to do is log into your backup system and restore your lost data.

5. Get Help With Compliance

You need to handle a lot of regulations and compliance issues in business today. Consumers won’t stand for companies taking shortcuts anymore. The problem is, it can be hard to keep up with everything you need to do.
Being compliant is even more critical when you deal with technology. You’ll need to invest a lot of resources for staying up to code. An IT company can help you do that.

If you work with a provider that is experienced in your industry, you can count on them to know all the regulations your business needs to follow. They will audit your business to make sure there are no problems that can get you in trouble. After they find the issues, they can start getting them fixed for you.

6. Find Vendor Support

You work with a lot of hardware and software companies to keep your business running smoothly. Things work well most of the time. However, you can run into problems if something you use breaks.

If you don’t have reliable IT support, you’re going to spend a lot of time digging through your contacts to figure out who you need to call. Once you find the right person, it’s a matter of finding the right questions to ask. If you don’t have a background in tech, this can be a complicated process.

Your managed services provider can handle this process for you. They already have relationships with all the prominent vendors in the tech industry. They’ll be able to track down someone to fix your problem and get things fixed before you know it.

7. Scale Your IT Team

It’s hard to grow a team when your business is unpredictable. Sure, hiring people will save you in the short-term, but then you have to find something for them to do when business calms down.

You’ll either need to create new positions for the people who don’t have things to do or start laying people off. Either way, it will create frustration for you and your team.

If you use a managed services provider, you can use them to supplement your team during busy times and not need to worry about what to do when work returns to normal.

8. Get Access to Experts

Technology is making its way to every part of business. The problem is, hiring the experts to help your business use this technology isn’t cheap.

If you use an IT provider, they can provide you the access to the experts you need. They have done the work of finding the top talent in the field. If you need help with something, all you need to do is reach out to your provider, and they will send the person you need over.

You’ll be able to work with people who know big data, A.I., and how to set up remote working capabilities.

Things Get Better When You Outsource IT

Don’t underestimate the benefits you’ll see when you outsource IT. Working with a professional IT business will help you get the infrastructure you need while being able to focus on your core business. Talk to someone today to figure out what they can do for your business.

If you’re looking for more tips that will help your company succeed, go back to our blog and read our latest posts. They will help you figure out ways to take your business to the next level.

Why Your Business Needs An Online Bank Account

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship ArticleOnline banking has become increasingly popular over the years with many people choosing to manage their finances online. This is because there are many benefits to online banking such as easy access to your finances, online transfers and much more. Surprisingly, many businesses still don’t use online banking, making their lives a lot harder. If you run a business but don’t yet have an online bank account, you should keep reading or go to this site to find out why you should make the change.

It Is Easier To Manage

When you run a business, you often have to take some time to look through your finances. When you have a lot of paper bank statements in front of you, cheques and all sorts of other materials, it is a lot easier for things to get lost. This is why you should think about opening a BB&T online bank account if you want to be able to manage your business finances a lot more easily. BB&T have a range of checking and saving accounts for businesses that come with a lot of account extras which you should take advantage of. These include online banking and customizable checks.

Faster Payment Of Bills

There’s nothing worse than paying a bill and finding out that the cheque never made it to the company in the post. This can often mean that late charges are added on and there are usually other consequences. If you want to be able to pay your bills in a faster and much more efficient way, you should think about opening up an online bank account for your business.

Save Time

How much time do you spend going to the bank each week or sending one of your staff members there? When you have an online bank account, you’ll rarely need to go to your local bank branch and so you’ll save yourself some more time. This will give you a lot more time to focus on the other important parts of your business and you won’t need to make sure that you get to the bank before it closes.

Get Paid Faster

As a business owner, you often need to make sure that all of your clients have paid you within the time frame needed to ensure that your business is profiting. If it takes a lot longer for your clients to pay you, you might find that this can have a negative impact on your figures. Make sure to get yourself an online bank account if you want your clients to be able to pay you a lot faster. You will love seeing the money enter your bank account almost immediately and you’ll be able to ensure that everything is paid on time.

Get Started Now

In this day and age, there really is no reason for you not to be using an online bank account for your business. There are so many advantages of doing this and if you are still visiting your bank branch a few times a week then you are wasting valuable business time. Think about finding the best online bank account for your business and you’ll love the perks.

How Much Should You Pay Your Staff?

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StrategyDriven Talent Management Article, How Much Should You Pay Your Staff?

If you’re a start-up business looking to hire employees, you’ll need to consider how much money is enough to keep your staff happy without your business suffering. To stop you skimping out or overspending, here are some ways to budget for your staff and ensure they get the most suitable rate.

Know how much you can spare

Consider how much you need to comfortably live on and if you will need to make any cuts. You will need to be making enough money from your clients to cover the cost of your staff’s wages, plus compulsory insurance schemes such as employer liability and vehicle insurance if they are planning to drive. You’ll also have to account for any training and any wastage that may occur as a result of that (if it’s a restaurant you may need to prepare practice dishes resulting in wasted food, if it’s a professional electrician business you may have to pay for health and safety courses).

If after all this you still can’t afford to pay your staff minimum wage, you should reassess your business plan before making the decision to hire employees. Taking on a financial advisor or accountant temporarily may be necessary in order to budget this.

Commission or salary?

Next you’ll have to decide what kind of contract to give your staff. For businesses in which payment is not always guaranteed from week to week, commission pay may be more appropriate. In some sales jobs this can be a great incentive to make those big sales. However many employees may be put off by the uncertainty of not always being paid. Salary-based pay works best when you have a regular enough income to always assure payment to your staff. Failing to be able to provide for your staff could get you into a lot of trouble, so make sure you have that regular income to fall back on.

Account for age and experience

For young employees, the minimum wage bracket varies. This ranges from £3.40 for apprentices to £7.20 for those 25 and older. For businesses wanting to take on staff cheaply, apprenticeships are popular choice. However, apprentices are limited to what work they can legally do, and may still have to do their apprenticeship alongside a college course, so don’t look at them as a full-time solution.

It’s important to also account for experience. If you’re hiring an assistant manager, they should be getting more than your average worker. When advertising for experienced workers, make sure you’re charging more than the starting rate to ensure they don’t choose another business over yours.

Compare other businesses

A great way to gage the going rate is to find out what other businesses are charging. Job sites are a good indicator of this, as you can see what other employers are charging. For an even better pointer, you may wish to pay for a salary benchmarking and comparison survey. This involves paying a professional to review similar businesses to your own and find out exactly what they are paying their staff. From here you can set your own rate and know that you aren’t being too tight-fisted or over generous.

Incentives and bonuses

On top of regular pay you may want to provide extra incentives to keep staff happy. The most popular form of incentive is to offer bonuses to staff that perform well. This could include setting a yearly target that the whole team must aspire to or individual targets. Of course, make sure that these targets are realistic so that staff want to achieve them and don’t alter the goalposts halfway through the year – find a target and stick with it to keep people motivated (keep it on a big board or continuously talk about it weekly meetings).

Another incentive is to offer your staff stakes in the company. John Lewis is the most famous company to have pulled this off, but you don’t have to be retail giant like them – small business can offer shares too.

You can also offer other incentives such as free dental care, childcare vouchers, a company car or free lunches. Christmas parties and social events can also be provided to improve morale. These are some of the best incentives as they don’t just offer workers money but offer experiences. Such benefits are often known as employment packages. It is important to realise that these are affected by tax and NIC implications (another thing you may want to ask a financial advisor or accountant about).

A Brief Guide To Kickstart Your SEO

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, A Brief Guide To Kickstart Your SEO

Regardless of the size of your organization, SEO can prove to be one of the most effective marketing tools in your arsenal. However, the lack of appropriate know-how and proper skills to proceed with your SEO can do more harm than good.

Here’s how you can kickstart your SEO campaign, with minimal efforts and gradually grow your business.

Step 1. Identify What You Wish To Achieve

Of course, you need a website before you begin with anything. But even before that, you need to identify what is it that you wish to achieve. Whether you are selling your products online, as an e-commerce retailer, or you are a SaaS enterprise, it is important to clearly demarcate your objectives. For example, Blogger outreach from Outreach Monks makes use of different strategies for e-commerce stores and SaaS enterprises. Since their products are different, their strategies also need to be different.

Step 2. Develop Key Performance Index

Once you’ve identified your target, it’s important that you decide how’d you be measuring the success of your campaign. In other words, you need to develop KPIs for your campaign. For example, the number of visitors your website receives is a critical measure for your website’s performance. You can target a specific number of visitors you wish to improve within a given time period. And in the end, you can measure how good have you been at achieving it. Similarly, you can create performance indexes keyword generation, sales, click-through rates, and so on.

Step 3. Aim At The Appropriate User Online

An important part of your SEO is keyword optimization. These are practically the terms that relate to your content and your business. In short, they help you rank better in search results. It is important to understand what terms your potential customers are using to search for you. For example, if yours is a shipment business, targeting terms that can relate to shipping and transportation can help your website improve in ranks. It is noteworthy that keywords are dynamic in nature. Meaning they keep on changing with trends, and you need to keep up with the trends. Look for the terms concerning your business that are searched by your audience in large volumes.

Step 4. Balance On-Site & Off-Site Efforts

Typically speaking, your SEO efforts should begin with optimizing your website first. You need to optimize technical as well as non-technical elements of your website including responsiveness, SSL security plugins, cookies, and your on-page content, along with internal link-building. At a later stage, you’ll need to step out of your website and execute your off-page SEO. For example, you can seek services like link building from outreach monks, which can help bring in referral traffic as well as improve your website’s authority online. This would eventually improve the relevance of your website with the keywords and help it rank better in search results. But, make sure that you maintain a careful balance between on-page and off-page SEO to drive effective results.

In the end, SEO is similar to traditional marketing in the sense that it also involves hit and trial practices. But still, SEO being a quantifiable practice can be a lot more cost-efficient as compared to other marketing strategies.

 

The Idea Is Not Enough

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StrategyDriven Innovation Article | The Idea Is Not EnoughWhen I talk to aspiring startuppers, I realize they have fallen a little for the myth of a winning idea. While it is true that there must be an idea at the base of the creation of a new company, it is also true that it is now almost impossible to invent something new. What makes the difference is putting the idea into practice.

I think this is a more current, less naïve and definitely more complex concept in the sense that an idea may be brilliant, but if it is the wrong time, placed in the wrong market, by the wrong team, it will not go anywhere. Just as there are less interesting ideas, but they are put into practice so well that they can achieve exceptional results. Rather than having the idea of the century, the real advantage is having the resilience to be able to put it into practice in the right way.

Thanks to the experiences I have had so far, I have realized that even potential investors see it that way and, rather than just evaluating the idea itself, they wonder if those in front of them are able to realize it. They generally do not care if it is a sensational novelty, or whether all the numbers add up, or if the business plan is perfect, because they invest in people. That is what happened to me, Stefano and Marco when we looked for investors for our new venture, Foorban – they wanted to meet all three of us to see if we were really the right team to turn that idea into a business.

When they asked me where we got our inspiration from for Foorban, a lunch delivery service, I always feel a bit like laughing because we copied the business model of a New York startup called Maple… which failed dramatically in just two years! Maple arose from an idea from restaurateur and entrepreneur David Chang and debuted in Manhattan in the summer of 2015, offering a high level of service with gourmet lunches cooked in a dedicated restaurant and delivered to the customer in a quarter of an hour. Maple was a huge success; they managed to make US $20 million sales in a year, but then they went bankrupt. The problem was that, in an attempt to win over the whole market, they had lowered the price of their dishes to US $9. Of course, it was an economically unsustainable decision. With a business like that, where the raw material costs more than that of competitors who offer a more standard product, and with the costs associated with delivery in an area like Manhattan, it was unthinkable to enter into a price struggle – they could not win. In fact, at the third round of financing, investors refused to continue to bankroll it.

Maple’s story contains various lessons, such as that you need to have the correct positioning and understand exactly who your target audience is. It is clear that such a high-end product should not be offered to the masses, but to those who are more sensitive to the quality and healthiness of the product and who are willing to spend a little more.

The most important lesson of all is this – an idea may be right, but afterwards you also have to do everything else right, because every stage of creating a new business has its own perils.

About the Author

This guest post is adapted from CREATE UNIQUENESS: How To Turn A Passion Into A Business by Riccardo Pozzoli. Pozzoli is a global entrepreneur; he has co-founded eight companies in the past ten years and is Creative Director for Condé Nast Italias Social Academy.

For more information please visit https://www.koganpage.com/product/create-uniqueness-9780749497385