A Smarter Approach for Upgrading Your Business Technology

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Business Technology|A Smarter Approach for Upgrading Your Business TechnologyTechnology is incredibly important for all of our businesses. No matter what kind of company you run, there’s probably some kind of technology that helps you manage customers, advertise your products and shorten the amount of time you spend on administrative tasks. Sadly, technology can get extremely expensive over time. With many companies switching to a subscription-based business model, it can be difficult to keep track of all the costs of keeping your business up to date.

So here are a few tips to help you approach your technology upgrades with a smarter and more streamlined strategy.

Identify problems before you consider upgrading

First, make sure you identify problems in your workflow before you go spending your company’s money on solutions. It’s extremely important that you take a slow and steady approach when it comes to upgrading your company’s technology, especially if your workflow is already well-defined. Attempting to upgrade portions of your work processes can lead to disaster if you’re not planning it correctly.

While technology can help you innovate, it needs to address a problem or challenge that you’re facing. For example, if you find that your employees are spending too much time on a particular task, then you need to focus on ways to assist your employees to finish said tasks. If you don’t identify a problem before you invest in new technology (or worse, you actively create an issue in order to “buy” a solution for it) then you’re going to end up wasting money and time.

Identify the companies that can help you innovate

It’s a good idea to identify what companies you can work with to help you solve your business challenges. There are some companies that operate at the forefront of technological innovation, constantly producing new products, machines, and software that actively solves challenges that real businesses are facing.

A good example of this would be Blue Iron Foundations & Shoring, LLC. The Giken Silent Piler is their latest machine that enables piling to take place with drastically reduced vibrations and noise. This has allowed construction companies to operate very close to homes without disrupting the neighbourhood. This has helped construction companies garner positive feedback from local communities, and it’s solved a challenge that is currently plaguing many companies in the same industry.

Find consultants that you can trust

One of the issues with hiring a consultant is that they’re often given a bit too much trust. It’s very easy for a consultant to abuse their position by introducing a problem and also suggesting a solution. This is something that entrepreneurs tend to do by accident because they’re not presented with the data that shows a problem in the first place. Instead, they blindly trust their staff or a consultant because they have too much faith in them.

If you’re the one in charge of decision making in your business, then you need to look at the data that points to a problem in your business. From here, you can start making smarter decisions by actually calculating the return on your investment and if it can make your team more productive.

How To Dress For A Job Interview

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StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Article |Dress for a Job Interview|How To Dress For A Job InterviewNo matter whether you are a man or a woman, an entry level junior or a CEO, you need to dress well for work. Period. Although nowadays the rules on office attire are generally more relaxed than they used to be, these relaxed rules aren’t an invitation to slack off when it comes to your fashion choices!

When you are interviewing for a promotion in your current company, or for a new position elsewhere, your clothing is a super important aspect of how you come across. Like it or not, your aesthetic choices will be judged by the person interviewing you, even on a subconscious level.

Don’t be afraid to be bold!

Although you should be dressing in a professional way at your job interview, professional doesn’t equal boring. You shouldn’t be dressing in a classically professional way unless that is actually your taste. Instead, make sure you incorporate your individuality in with your professional attire, by wearing your favourite colours or statement jewellery, for example.

By dressing in a bold but elegant way, not only will you come across as more confident to your interviewer, but this will also make you more memorable. Wearing statement clothes that fit your personality and also adhere to the type of company you are interviewing with will make them remember you clearly!

Tidiness is more crucial than the actual clothes you wear

When it comes to presenting as the best version of yourself, tidiness and cleanliness should take priority. Even if you can’t afford to buy a whole new outfit for the interview, or you don’t own designer labels, none of this will matter if you present in an orderly, clean way.

This means making sure your clothes are free of stains, scuffs or loose threads; additionally, you should ensure your hair and makeup (if you wear makeup!) are neatly presented too. You don’t want to come across as messy or rushed, so make sure you prioritise looking neat and tidy when getting ready for a job interview.

Impress with accessories

When you are sitting in a job interview, you are across a desk (or nowadays, perhaps across a screen) from your interviewer. They will be able to see the details of the top half of your body, meaning that if you wear statement accessories or chic details, they will be able to see it!

What accessories should you wear to a job interview? Watches are a good place to start. The Audemars Royal Oak watch models on WatchBox are the perfect example of professional watches that will impress an interviewer who is sitting up close to you.

Similarly, if you want to be really impressive both professionally and aesthetically, carrying a high quality pen in your breast pocket makes you seem prepared and stylish simultaneously! A beautiful pen speaks volumes about your attention to detail and preparedness in case you need to make any notes during the interview.

Final Thoughts

If you are preparing for a job interview, use our advice to make sure you dress to impress on the day!

How to Stop Drowning in Data and Find Actionable Insights

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StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures Article |Actionable Insights|How to Stop Drowning in Data and Find Actionable InsightsWhen a small group of executives from mid-size companies got together to discuss data issues, the conversation quickly turned to what to do once you have too much data. The executives were drowning in numbers and wanted someone to toss them a life jacket.

These companies had already invested significant resources into their data infrastructure. They were tracking millions or billions of data points in real-time and with some of the best technologies. Their challenge was actually using the data to make better decisions. They had this high-speed, modern car that no one knew how to drive. Just like you might admire a nice car as you walk by it, they were admiring their data infrastructure. But cars are meant to be driven, not just admired.

Data overwhelm is rooted in psychology and isn’t always solved by technology. In fact, technology might make it worse by increasing the volume of data. You can’t drink from a fire hydrant, and that same idea applies to data.

Data overwhelm is the classic “walking down the cereal aisle” problem. Imagine going to the supermarket to buy a new cereal. You don’t know what you want and instead will decide once you get there. The only problem is that there are a hundred choices of cereal. They all look surprisingly similar, and they might even cost roughly the same. How do you make a choice when everything looks the same?

That’s the problem with data overwhelm. You’re confronted with so many data points that you’re not quite sure what’s important and what’s noise. You may have discovered that 40 percent of your customers went to law school but so what? Should you change your marketing campaigns to talk about the law, or should you ignore this insight?

Now multiply this by 10, 50 or 100 insights, and you start to see the difficulties. Who’s to say what’s important or who could make that determination?

The underlying principle is to reduce the overall volume. It’s not about designing a process that could accommodate the weighing of hundreds of variables. It’s about reducing the number of variables that you’re working with. You want ways to rapidly remove large swaths of unnecessary data so you can deal with the remaining few.

This concept usually gets push back. Executives expect some kind of magical formula that can be applied to all of their data and spit out the right answer. They basically want a magic eight ball that considers all variables and then tells them what to do.

Instead, it’s best to work with fewer inputs to produce more outputs, which are decisions in this case. Once they move in a specified direction, it’s much easier to redirect the momentum towards the correct destination.

To help tackle data overwhelm and start finding actionable insights within your data, use these four strategies:

1. Use gatekeepers

The first strategy to deal with overwhelm is to employ gatekeepers. Companies are trying as much as possible to reduce friction in accessing data, but you may want to add friction in some cases. Some companies make it too easy to create reports, and everyone is constantly building them without thinking through what they actually want.

If you’re interested in learning more about the location of your customers, what will do you with the information? If you don’t have a good answer, your fishing expedition might prove fruitless. If your team struggles to sort through all the noise, you need to become more deliberate in where and how you fish. Gatekeepers can ask a few questions to clarify the overall goal of creating a report.

You want your own devil’s advocate who is skeptical of data requests. The Catholic Church created this position to argue against any given individual’s canonization (sainthood). It would assign someone to literally “advocate for the devil.” The healthy skepticism ensured that facts were uncovered and observed.

2. Decide WDIM — or What Does It Mean?

The second strategy is to obsess over WDIM. Whenever you come across an insight, your team should debate what this insight means (WDIM).

If you can’t come up with good answers, you may be dealing with a vanity metric. Vanity metrics are interesting to look at but don’t actually mean much to your business. If a metric can go up or down without forcing a significant behavior shift within your company, then you can safely ignore it.

3. Choose 3 things

The third strategy is “3 Things,” and it’s the simplest to apply. If you can’t figure out how to prioritize your data, pick the three things that fit the best or seem the best to you. Then analyze these three insights further and take action on them or discard them.

Wrong choices are seldom fatal, but paralysis is. Moving forward can be beneficial because you can now gauge the impact of your decisions and adjust as needed.

4. Manage expectations

For some teams, having the pressure of delivering on a deadline is the thing that helps them break through overwhelm. They focus on prioritizing, making clear choices and finding the WDIM in their data.

Work with your teams to manage expectations around how data is used, and the different scenarios in which data is appropriate and where it can be safely ignored.

Data overwhelm doesn’t have to derail your data strategy, but you need to think about it differently. Focus on the people behind the data, and you’ll start to see solutions to this pesky problem.

About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor | Ruben Ugarte Ruben Ugarte is founder of Practico Analytics, providing expertise in data analytics. He has worked with companies on five continents and in all company stages, helping them to use data to make higher quality decisions, boost performance, increase profitability and make their teams world-class. He maintains a popular blog with more than 100,000 readers. His new book is The Data Mirage: Why Companies Fail to Actually Use Their Data (Business Expert Press, January 22, 2021. Learn more at rubenugarte.com.

6 Great Hobbies to Keep Your Stress Under Control

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StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Article |Keep your stress under control|6 Great Hobbies to Keep Your Stress Under ControlStress is an incredibly dangerous thing and if left uncontrolled it can cause absolute havoc on your mental and physical health. This means that any activity that you enjoy that helps you to mitigate and control your stress is a major boon to your health and wellbeing. To that end, this article aims to suggest a number of potential hobbies that could help you to control your stress and keep it at manageable levels.

1. Archery

One of the most relaxing and meditative sports out there, archery is all about careful control and accuracy, making it one of the best sports you could possibly engage with for stress relief. The enjoyment and engagement that you can get from taking your time, controlling your mind, and hitting your target in archery is second to none, and overall, that makes the sport an incredibly relaxing and soothing experience.

2. Reading

Reading is incredibly healthy for your mind. It boosts relaxation and mental acuity, allowing your mind to engage entirely in another world and releasing you, for a time, from the stresses and pressures of the world around you. By doing so, reading allows you to engage with an incredibly relaxing and meditative process that keeps your mind as clear and entertained as you could ever want.

3. Art

Drawing, painting, sculpting, modelling, and every other form of art are incredibly involved and meditative processes that allow the artist to throw themselves entirely into the process of creating something beautiful. By doing so the artist allows themselves to relax their fixations on the trials and pressures of their daily lives and to truly relax. This process is hugely meditative and wonderfully beneficial to their stress levels, allowing them to banish huge amounts of stress while simultaneously creating a beautiful work of art.

4. Football

As with most other forms of stress-relieving hobby, playing football allows you to escape, at least temporarily, from the stresses and pressures of your everyday life and simply enjoy the sport itself. Playing with friends and family helps to double down on the relaxing effect of the sport and, it so happens, that playing football is not the only way that the sport can allow you to relax your stresses.

Another way for you to relieve stress through football is through watching it with your friends and family. Watch parties are wonderful ways for you and your loved ones to get together and engage with the most important sporting competitions such as the Euro 2020 (Euro 2021 group tables). Watching these games together with your loved ones is a brilliant way to further reduce stress.

5. Model Building

Building models is a slow and delicate process and one that you can throw yourself into entirely. The experience of watching the model come together slowly, piece by piece, is hugely enjoyable and a brilliant way to mitigate and control your stress levels.

6. Writing Poetry

Finally, writing poetry is a wonderful way to allow you to bleed the stress from your mind. Poetry is all about transferring your emotion to the page and by doing so, you can find release from it yourself.

What Makes A Great SEO Campaign?

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SEO is one of the single most important elements of marketing a website. Rather than having to pay for adverts for years on end, SEO enables you to gain organic hits online. Of course, this process can take a lot of work and investment, but it can also save you a small fortune if you handle it correctly or hire an expert SEO agency like Australian Web Experts. To help you out with this, this post will be exploring some of the key elements that make a great SEO campaign.

Good Research

Research is key to every part of the SEO campaign you build. Not only do you need to research keywords, but you also need to learn about the specific market that you are working in. This can involve looking up information about your customers, though many companies will also want to know as much as possible about their competitors as they go through this.

A Specialized Approach

Every business is different, and this means that the approach that you take to your SEO should be based on the market you work in. Just like any marketing campaign, understanding what your customers will respond to is crucial during this process. Stellar SEO’s guide to SEO for lawyers is a great option for those working in the field of law, but you can find resources like this for just about every field on the market.

Gaining growing and sustainable traffic implies you are a company that can be trusted and a valued partner. A b2b seo agency can assist you with building your reputation and trust within vendor relationships. Effective SEO is a massive part of this process and can be invaluable when implemented correctly.

Regular Content

Google and other search engines like to see websites that are actively posting content all the time. This helps to raise your reputation, while also giving you the chance to target loads of keywords. Most successful websites will produce one or two blog posts each week, giving them the chance to rake in new hits on search engines without having to spend loads of money on adverts.

No Plagiarism

Search engines are very good at reading written content, and this means that they are able to tell when websites share the same wording. This can be very bad, especially if you published your content after the other instances of it that can be found on the web. You should avoid plagiarism at all costs, even if you are running an eCommerce website and have been given product descriptions from other companies.

Constant Monitoring

While many companies stop working on SEO when they get the results that they want, keeping your engagement up is going to require constant monitoring and changes. Your new blog posts and other content can help with this, but you can also change the content you have when you notice keyword preferences changing across the web. There are loads of tools that can help with this.

SEO can be one of the hardest parts of marketing for many companies. While this area is well-documented online, there are a lot of secrets that you will only be able to learn through experience. The more time you spend working on this, the easier it will become, but you will still need to put effort into it for the lifespan of your website.