Why Its Time To Turn Your Business Green

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Green Business|Why Its Time To Turn Your Business GreenIf you haven’t started to make “green” changes in your business yet, then it’s time to start now. When it comes to your business, it’s not just about contributing to the sustainability of the environment as there are many benefits to your business as well and many reasons to go green.

Contribute to the Sustainability of the Planet

Let’s start with the most compelling reason for making your business greener and the most obvious one. We all know that the planet is changing and that we need to do our bit. Going greener can benefit our health, it can help endangered species and provide a better future for the next generations. Most people know about this now, and companies are doing what they can. From Starbucks providing incentives to bring your own reusable coffee cups, to other companies working on ways to use recycled frack water or non-potable brine for fracking. No matter what business you work in, there is something you can do to help, so it’s time to work out what that is.

Save Money

One way that you can go green in your business is to minimise your power usage – and the good thing about this is that it will save you money too. It might seem like a cost at first to switch to energy-saving light bulbs and upgrade to other more energy-efficient equipment where but over time it will save you a lot of money. You could try converting a paperless office which will save you money on paper, printing supplies and filing cabinets too.

Tax Reductions

Green strategies often equal tax deductions. Renewable energy will mean savings not just for now, but for way ahead into the future, and the government wants to encourage and are providing incentives to do so.

Builds Your Reputation

Today consumers are pickier over who they choose to buy from and give their money to. This applies to millennials in particular, who would spend more on the same product if the company they are buying from is more ethical than another. Research shows people now want to do business with merchants, service providers and manufacturers that share their values. It would help if you shouted about the efforts you are making, whether it’s on social media, writing blog posts or advertising your efforts. Let people know so that they can make an informed choice on where and with whom they spend their money.

Helps to Attract Talent

Just as people are picky about who they spend their money with, they are also particular about who they work for. If you want to attract the best talent, then you need to become a leader in your industry and stand out from the crowd. Today, employees are more bothered about being environmentally responsible too, so they will want to work from somewhere that they align with in terms of what is important to them. Make sure your home page, About Us page and blog proudly show that you value sustainability, and any potential employees who share your values will definitely notice.

How to Streamline Your Business Communications

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StrategyDriven Business Communications Article |Business Communications|How to Streamline Your Business CommunicationsCommunication is one of the key tenets of any business. Without clear communication, things just don’t get done, and start to fall apart. Whether your business’s communication is good or bad though, there’s always room to streamline, and doing so can have huge benefits for your company.

There are many ways you can look to improve your communication, both internally and externally, and find the systems that are going to allow your business to offer a better service.

Here, we take a look at five ways in which you can streamline your business communications.

Clearly Define Roles

When you’re working on an important project, it’s important that everyone clearly understands their roles. If everyone’s roles aren’t clear, that’s when communication can break down, as nobody knows who they need to communicate with.

You may think you have defined someone’s role within the project, but it really needs to be made sure that they understand exactly what that role is and what they’re responsible for.

Have a Point Person

You need to have a person at the top who is in charge of the project. Otherwise, different pieces of information can get passed around certain pockets of the project without ever making it to the person who’s actually in charge.

Communication needs to flow through the point person, who decides what to do with the information and how to proceed. Otherwise, people begin to communicate as individuals rather than as a team.

Bring Your Communication Together in One Place

We have so many different ways of communicating these days, which in many ways is great, but it also brings its own problems. Every minute someone spends trying to remember if they received that important piece of information through email or an instant messenger is time wasted, and this time can really add up.

Bringing your different communication channels together through unified communications (UC) with a company like Code Software can help streamline your team’s communication, making it more efficient and effective.

Make Use of the Data

When you use a UC system, you have access to so much data that allows people to learn about the way they communicate and improve their performance.

When it comes to communication with the customer, there are so many variables that happen in every call, so it can be difficult to judge how you’re performing. It’s only when you have access to all the data that you can see which areas you can improve on.

Make Rules for Different Communication Channels

Another way to overcome the problem of having too many communication channels is by having different rules for each communication channel. For example, if you’re seeking someone’s opinion, it can be quite tricky to do it through written word because it’s hard to understand tone in writing.

So, you can make the rule that if you’re seeking an opinion it has to be through a voice call rather than instant message. There are many different rules you can put in place to suit your business needs and further improve upon communication.

Keeping Your Business Safe: A Guide

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |keep your business safe|Keeping Your Business Safe: A GuideThere are a number of online threats that you can experience while running your business, and while some can be minor, some can be so catastrophic that it results in business closure. Building up a solid business idea and turning it into a profit-turning organization takes hard work and dedication, and the idea that it can fail due to someone else’s actions is devastating. However, it is a very real situation many businesses find themselves in, and all because they didn’t take online security seriously.

Just because you are a small business, doesn’t mean that you aren’t a target for online hackers. Yes, hackers will target big businesses, but as you are less likely to have viable security solutions in place, this is exactly why people will also target small businesses such as yours too. Fortunately, some solutions can help keep your business safe from online threats, and we will explore them in more detail here.

Secure your network

Whether you use your computers every day or once in a while, you still need to ensure that your network is secure. Start by encrypting your wireless access points, as this is a great way for hackers to get into your system and steal sensitive data. Then set about changing the name of your wireless network to something that doesn’t announce to the world that it belongs to you. Instead, make sure to use something more inconspicuous that will make it harder for the hacker to find out your location or business name.

Make this a private network, and ensure like everything you change the password regularly.

Test your company’s defenses

It is one thing to secure your network, but in circumstances where you want to ensure safety to the finest degree, you need to test how good this defense actually is. By carrying out penetration testing, you can test your protection against a number of different threats that hackers will attempt in an effort to steal your data. It will highlight any vulnerabilities and weaknesses within the system and what needs to be done to rectify it.

Antivirus software

One of the best ways to ensure your business is safe is to install the right antivirus software on every single device that enters the company before it joins your network. If a device that an employee has bought into work doesn’t have the right security defenses in play, you are at risk of a data breach.

Train your staff

Many problems regarding company data are the result of uneducated staff. Companies that don’t train their staff are at more risk of experiencing breaches. Therefore, you should make it mandatory training every year for your staff to learn more about cybersecurity and what they can do to maintain the safety of your business.

Educate them on how to spot potential security issues, such as phishing emails, but also reinforce how serious it is to uphold. As cybercriminals improve their techniques and strategies, you need to also improve your training. This is why it is recommended to carry out the training regularly and keep it relevant to on-going security issues.

How to Grow Your Ecommerce Startup in Year One

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StrategyDriven Starting Your Business Article |Ecommerce startup|How to Grow Your Ecommerce Startup in Year OneAs many proud business owners can attest, the growth cycle for ecommerce businesses doesn’t necessarily adhere to older principles related to the growth of physical stores. Indeed, when you’re setting up online, you’re bypassing many of the difficult aspects to scaling that you’d have had to work through with brick-and-mortar stores.

In this article, you’ll learn about your priorities in year one in order to make a sustainable and profitable business that scales effectively into your second year of operations.

Marketing

To scale, you need more people to visit your website, and more people to make purchases to boost your ecommerce business’ profits. It’s really that simple. While there are some other underlying elements to scaling mentioned later in this article, you’re going to need to build out a marketing campaign as a priority in order to draw in traffic, clicks, shares and sales to your site.

You can do this in a number of different ways, depending on your budget and the personnel you have on-side. If you’re a small company, you may prefer to outsource marketing to an experienced digital marketing firm, which will help you build a long-term strategy to increase engagement. Otherwise, look online to uncover some of the fundamentals of digital marketing, enabling you to slowly bend your strategy to fit with the wants and needs of your audience and your target customer.

Operational Efficiency

Many ecommerce startups begin with manual processes, and slowly move into the automated software world as they scale. That’s exactly what you should be looking to do in your first year, so you spend less time managing orders, responding to emails, and doing all those little repetitive jobs that end up consuming most of your waking day.

As a starting point, you should automate orders on your website, and automate emails through to confirm orders, confirm subscriptions, and add individuals to mailing lists. Mailing lists are incredibly important for your data collection, and to offer deals and discounts seasonally, so they’re also best set up in your first year in business. Once you’ve taken a good look at your operations, and made as many of them automated as possible, you’ll be able to deal with scaling far easier.

Deliveries

The only physical part of your ecommerce business is delivering parcels to customers. You want this to be as effective and efficient as you can possibly make it. You’ll know only too well that one of the main market differentiators in the ecommerce world is customer service, and that’s primarily driven through cheap yet swift delivery services. You need to get your parcel to its destination within the shortest-possible timescale.

The problem with distribution is that you can ship your products easily to local distribution centers – but it’s the final mile that’s the kicker, adding costs to your overall logistics operation.

Indeed, last mile delivery costs are one of your greatest overheads, and something you’re going to want to keep low in order for you to succeed in your first year in ecommerce. Be careful when signing contracts that you’re getting what you want to get from your delivery deal, and that you can hold delivery companies responsible for late packages, too.

Funding and Cash Flow

Finally, you need to be cognizant of your funding situation, and how much cash you’ll have in the kitty to support a growing business, before you enact your scaling plan. If you’re unable to meet soaring costs related to providing more for your customers, you’ll miss out on delivery times, you’ll miss payments to clients and subsidiaries, and you’ll endanger the soul of your business just as it shows promising signs of sustained growth. You need capital – some saved for worst-case scenarios – before you scale.

This capital will help you bring in new personnel if you’re swamped with orders to process. It’ll enable you to buy in bulk, reducing your order costs in anticipation of larger order volumes and it’ll enable you to invest in made-to-scale, cloud-based software – the kind that’ll help you to build your audience through automation, and meet the extra demands placed upon the entirety of your operations. With financial security in place, you won’t need to worry about your labor and your investments going to waste as you’ll be prepared for your next great step into ecommerce profits for 2021.

These tips are all designed for ecommerce startups in their first year – those which are ambitious to scale, but a little concerned about how to achieve sustained and sustainable growth into 2021 and beyond.

4 Tips for Renovating a Commercial Property: Are You Ready to Upscale Your Business?

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Renovating a commercial property|4 Tips for Renovating a Commercial Property: Are You Ready to Upscale Your Business?As a business owner, you know that attracting customers has almost as much to do with how your business looks as to how your business is run. Consumers are bombarded every day with ads from competitors trying to draw them into their store and sometimes, success comes down to something as simple as the way your business looks.

Renovating a commercial property can be a huge endeavour, but upscaling your business’ appearance can also be the thing that takes your company to the next level. Here are our best tips for renovating a commercial property:

1. Create a budget and a schedule

Like any renovation project, a budget and a firm schedule are key to success. There is an incredible array of changes you can make to a commercial storefront and it can be hard to reign it in, but proper planning and budgeting before the project starts are key. In general, you should add about 10% to your final budget as a contingency, since you never know what contractors might find when they start work.

Also, when it comes to scheduling your build, you want to make sure you can give your customers a date that you will be open and not leave them waiting. Customers’ attention spans are quite short these days, so if you run late on opening, they may forget about you!

2. Keep it clean

Even though your property is undergoing a renovation, it’s important to still keep it tidy and secure. Not only is it unsightly if there is lots of construction debris left lying around it can also be hazardous for the people working there. If you’re still open for business while renovations are ongoing, you could set yourself up for an accident if a customer got hurt. To prevent this, look into skip hire costs so that you have someplace to put your debris while the renovation is underway to keep your space safe and so that your storefront looks like its being worked on, and not like it’s been ransacked and abandoned.

3. Be prepared for change

While it would be great if our visions for renovation could go off without a hitch, that’s rarely – if ever – the case. Unless you’re building new, you can’t be certain what you might find behind the walls when the demo starts. Shoddy electrical work or outdated plumbing could quickly eat up your budget while taking away from your final product. While it might be hard to consider, being ready to have to change your final decor ideas to accommodate unexpected changes will be what helps your renovation succeed in the end.

4. Know your customers

Understanding who your business caters to is one of the most vital things to consider when you start a renovation. No matter what type of commercial property you’re renovating, take your employees’ and customers’ opinions into account. Make the design engaging and attractive, while still being a practical space for the work you’ll be doing in there. The way you renovate an office versus how you renovate a storefront will be vastly different. Don’t get lost in the design and stop considering how space will function.