How to Start a Business From the Ground Up

StrategyDriven Starting Your Business Article |Start a business from the ground up|How to Start a Business From the Ground UpDeciding to start a business is a huge step in your professional and financial world. There are many boxes to check to ensure that every aspect of your business is set up for success. Check out these tips below on how to start your business from the ground up.

Determine Your Products

This may seem obvious, but start by nailing down what it is you want to sell. Are you looking to sell products, services, or lifestyles? Once you roughly decide what it is you want to provide to others you will need to grow your audience. This is the group of people or companies that want what you’re selling. With the power of the internet, it will be somewhat easy to start an audience that supports your business before you even consider opening a brick and mortar store! Focus on providing high quality products and great customer service to your customers – this will help you to build a loyal customer base to keep your business alive.

Decide Where to Build

Once you have a functioning business online that wants room to physically grow, open a store! This gives the customers a place to come and interact firsthand with your products and you, making for a stronger connection with your customers and a large creative canvas for you to decorate. When choosing where to build or place your store, consider your budget and location. Maybe your dream location or building isn’t in reach for you right now because you can’t afford it – no worries! Select a cheaper option and keep your eyes on the ideal location for down the road. The location of your store is super important – it provides your customers with your products so you will want it to be convenient. For example, if you own a pizza store, consider putting it next to a bowling alley or shopping center. People will gravitate towards areas they are familiar with.

Depending on where you build your business you might need some additional help. You might need to pave cement, use environmental cleanup, or build a new foundation. Remember that these steps are worth it in the long run for everyone’s safety and your business’s longevity. Having good bones is part of what turns a good business into a great one.

Design with Thought

When designing your store, do everything for a reason. This is your business and it should reflect your passions and cares. Choose a color theme because it matches the brand image, select certain materials to reflect your products, or include specific decor to emit the feeling you are trying to create when walking around your store. Once you get through the nitty-gritty details of decorating, you can focus on how to supercharge your property business. Again, remember your budget and do not be afraid to hold off on certain pieces until you can afford them. While the design and look of your business is important, customer service and quality products are still what make a business successful. Picking and choosing what you want to include in your business’s image is all a part of the fun. When building your business from the ground up, remind yourself why you want a company, strive for quality, and always focus on the happiness of your customers and employees.

How To Get Funding Through Horizon Europe?

StrategyDriven Managing Your Finances Article |Horizon Europe|How To Get Funding Through Horizon Europe?Horizon Europe is an ideal funding program for startups or SMEs working their way through the innovation ecosystem in Europe. Horizon Europe has a budget of €95.5B for seven years between 2021 and 2027; this budget boosts sustainable development and competitiveness in the EU. Furthermore, the program supports the innovation ecosystem in Europe, and it has pillar III, where startups find vital opportunities.

Between June 23 and 24, the European research and innovation days take place. These days signify the annual flagship event on research and innovation for the European Commission. In the event, there was a policy-related discussion that hints at an upcoming opportunity to learn about the Horizon Europe program for entrepreneurs; the opportunity is slated for info days 2021, which is between June 28 and July 9.

This post further looks into the investment strategy of Horizon Europe and how startups can apply for funding opportunities.

What is Horizon Europe’s Mission and Scope?

The Horizon Europe program strives towards three goals, including strengthening European scientific and tech bases and the European Research Area. Also, the program aims at boosting Europe’s competitiveness, jobs, and innovation capacity. The third target seeks to deliver on the EU’s ambition for a sustainable transition to meet citizens’ priorities.

Horizon Europe has a three-pillar structure; this information is necessary when finding open calls for funding. The three pillars include excellent science, global challenges and European industrial competitiveness, and innovative Europe pillars.

The Excellent Science pillar is in support of frontier research projects to boost scientific competitiveness. In contrast, the global challenges and European industrial competitiveness pillar invests in societal challenges research. On the other hand, the Innovative Europe Pillar through the European Innovation Council aims at making Europe a front-runner in market-driven innovation.

Furthermore, the pillar seeks to develop the EU’s innovation landscape in association with the European Institute of Innovation Technology with research, education, and innovation projects.

Recently, the Horizon Europe program introduced the concept of missions for increasing the funding’s effectiveness further. The mission revolves around commitments for solving global challenges, including climate change, food security, and cancer. In addition, missions operate as a portfolio of actions; they include research projects and policy measures while bringing experts in business, innovation, media, science, and civil society together. By November 2021 latest, the projects should be up and running before engaging business communities and citizens in the implementation.

What Are the Funding Opportunities for Tech Startups and Companies?

As mentioned earlier, Europe’s budget is around €95.5B for 2021 to 2027; the budget includes €5.4B from NextGenerationEU for boosting recovery and future resilience and additional reinforcement of €4.5B. Furthermore, the European Defence Fund implements Horizon Europe while the Euratom Research and Training Program complements it.

The program tackles global challenges and European competitiveness with over half of its budget while innovation projects are about €13.5B. Furthermore, with the European Innovation Council (EIC) addition, the program increases support for breakthrough innovation. EIC is a one-stop shop that leverages private finance to help innovators, especially SMEs, in the space of scaling up, increasing agility, and creating future markets. Due to the program’s novelty, the EIC has a budget of €10B for 2021 to 2027. Also, the funding opportunities will be more than €1.5B in 2021. Also, the program earmarks 70% of its budget for SMEs.

The funding and tenders portal allows access to the calls for proposals. Calls give detailed information on research and innovation issues that proposals applications should address.

The EIC has an open round of €1 billion in the innovation category. Therefore, startups can apply for grants up to €2.5M and receive direct equity investments between €500K and €15M. The EIC Accelerator aims at investing in innovations that have significant Green Deal innovations impacts for economic recovery, strategic digital, and health tech. Furthermore, asides from financing, companies benefit from business acceleration services in the ecosystem, including access to top investors, expertise, and partnership opportunities. The funding’s first deadline already has over 801 complete applications, which is a strong response. Also, the full applications’ next cut-off date is October 6, 2021.

The Energy harvesting and storage technologies grant program is another innovation-focused open call. The program will be open till the end of September 2021. As long as an SME, large company or small consortium has five independent legal entities, they can apply. Proposals should address innovative technologies that combine clean, low cost, and high energy density harvesting and storage. In addition, the proposal should also address innovations for the renewable energies combined harvesting and storage or devices for electrochemical storage and advanced materials.

Horizon Europe also supports partnerships where the EU, member countries, and their private sector commit to developing and implementing research and innovation activities. The European commissions’ partnership with Breakthrough Energy is an example, and they support the catalyst project for making competitive cleantech solutions in Europe

Conclusion

The Horizon Europe program provides funding for startups and SMEs. With the numerous funding opportunities, all you need do is apply for grants. If you need more help with this topic, check out https://www.emdesk.com/horizon-europe and hit the ground running. Whenever there is a call for a proposal, always pay attention to the research and innovation issues your application should address.

Tips on How To Drive More Sales

StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Drive Sales|Tips on How To Drive More SalesAnyone who wants a successful business needs to work on their sales techniques. It simply is not good enough to create an excellent product, stick it up on the shelves and expect it to sell itself.

Although you will make some sales that way, in order to maximize sales and profits and push your business forwards and grow, you need a fully-fledged marketing and sales strategy that considers every aspect of the sale, from the packaging to the individual customer. Remember, there is a lot of competition out there, and even if your product is far superior in every way to your competitor, if they have done the hard work of getting to know their customer and created a rapport with them, then they will sell more. In the end, it pays dividends to do the backgrounds and develop strategies and plans to drive more sales.

Focus on Your Brand

It’s all about excellent branding these days, and if you have not spent time and money on developing your brand, you will be falling behind. Your brand is like a foundation that all your sales and marketing material can hang off of. Moreover, it is something that your customer and, just as importantly, your staff can believe it. It is a great logo and coloring, and much more. It is a complete ethical framework with visions and goals that aim to improve society. It is also all the core values that you believe in, and it is all about the company culture. When your sales team and your marketing material use key messages in their pitches, that all go back to this foundation. This makes the company appear coherent and true to its word. People want something to believe in, so give them that. Being able to tap into the way your customer thinks and connect with them on a deep level will help you drive sales. Your brand is something that should be instantly recognizable from a core message, your sales team needs to be fully on-board with this idea, and all platforms need to comply.

The website is key and needs to demonstrate all these things, so that when a customer is interested, that can find that foundation there. Also create a brand narrative that incorporates all these ideas which is on the website. Also, consider a unique and hard-hitting story that sparked your inspiration to create the company in the first place. In a nutshell, branding is very important, and it may be an idea to sit down with a few instrumental people in your team and develop it if you haven’t done so already.

Define Your Customer

If you want to target your sales material, you need to have a clear understanding of who your key customer is. You need to pose some questions to create an ideal customer type, think about the demographics, whether or not they are likely to have children, how affluent they are, what interests do they have, their likes and dislikes, etc. Knowing who you are targeting your sales pitches and marketing material at allows you to create focused and targeted material. To help you get an idea of who your customer is, you should use toll such as social media. You could monitor the competition’s social media accounts as well, or if you do not have your own, yet. Social media will allow you to develop great insights into how you customer things. You can even post questions and ideas and see what comes back. When you start understanding your customer a little better, you may be able to work out the types of keywords they would use when typing something into Google when searching for a product that you sell. That means you can load your website with keywords and ensure your marketing material uses them too. Defining your customer and understanding what makes them tick is how to generate more sales and make better products.

What Problems Are You Solving

A product is created with a specific problem to solve in mind. You need to clearly define this problem with reference to your target customer. So, think about how you are adding value to your specific customers’ lives. You need to understand their lives pretty well to be able to do this because if you are not adding value, your product will not sell. So you need to focus on the benefit your products will serve. By doing this, you will ensure that the people you want to attract are attracted by your sales pitches.

Track the Competition

It is important that you monitor your competition so that you can develop your business’s competitive advantage over them and stay on top of potential new trends that they are benefiting from, among other things. Take a look at all the material you can and investigate their products too. Look at the language, images, keywords, etc., they use in their marketing material. Look at how their customers interact with them on social media. You could perform a competitive analysis that can give you insights into how your company is performing against theirs. Think about how you differ. What is your USP (unique selling point)? What benefits do your products offer in comparison? What is better about your product. What weaknesses can you exploit? The better you know the competition, the stronger your sales pitches can be.

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Use A Multi-Platform Strategy

These days you can use a variety of platforms to get your products out there. Don’t just focus on a single format. What’s more, the vast majority of them are free. You can use social media such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to advance your brand and promote your products. Creating a point strategy is key in the overall effectiveness of this. Social media is a great way to build relationships with customers and track the effectiveness of a particular post to further refine and update your marketing and sales material. Also, remember you can utilize your own blog to your advantage. Load it with keywords, and create new content regularly so it stays relevant, and Google finds it more easily. Also, consider Amazon and Amazon seller 3rd-party software from D8aDriven. Do not limit yourself to a single promotional avenue.

Pricing

Choosing the right price to sell your items at can be tricky. Too high and it turns people off, too low and people will question the quality of your products. You need to do quite a lot of market research in this field and think about where you stand in comparison to your competitor. If you have made a case that sees your brand a synonymous with quality, then you may well be able to charge a premium. You need to over-promote the quality aspect so that this issue is driven home, and people see you as superior in quality.

Packaging

Packaging is essential to the overall customer experience, and it will be one of the last times you can contact your customer to make an impression. Quality packaging that helps promote your ethical consideration, such as sustainable packaging, goes a long way to boost credibility. Also, something that is beautiful and creative to open makes the process a lot more alluring. These customers will remember your brand and are more likely to buy from you again. Additionally, they are more likely to be willing to pay that little bit extra. Any contact you can have with the customer should be jumped upon and exhausted.

Focus On a Strategy to Keep Your Customers

Once a customer has bought a product from you, you need to find ways to keep these customers. Packaging with a card and an offer in it is a good strategy. Also, when a customer buys from you, ensure you get their email address so you can add them to your email list. Freebies and offers sent via email are also good ideas. Also, think about content. Great content such as blog posts and vlogs that are designed to connect with your customer and entice them into using you again are a must. Use your social media pages to your advantage too.

Get Feedback

If you really want to know what your customer is thinking, ask them. There are many ways you can do this, from a poll on social media, to creating a questionnaire and linking to it from a social media site. You could put a postcard in the packaging material, or just a link to an online questionnaire. Ask what your products lack, ask about any specific problems that you may not have considered, ask what they like and dislike. It really is up to you.

Inside Information

Advise your customer on your company’s visions, make them aware of why you are creating specific products, and how you came up with this idea on a personal level. Tell them about a product that you have in development. Your customers would like to hear about these new things, and you will be able to develop trust.

How to improve mental health and happiness at work

StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Mental Health|How to improve mental health and happiness at workApproximately one in four people in the UK will have a mental health issue each year. These statistics alone should serve as a reminder of why it is so vital to take care of yourself and check up on those around you – we all need help now and again!

Last year, the government published a Thriving at Work study, which found that many workers with mental health issues experience stigma at work. This research was intended to ensure that employees receive the assistance they require in their communities and continue to succeed.

Employees who are satisfied in their jobs outperform the competition by 20% and salespeople that are happy close 37% more deals, giving you a significant advantage.

Here are a few things that Bulldog Digital Media does to keep its spirits high. This will be an excellent starting point if you want to enhance mental health at your workplace.

Introduce team days out

It’s normal for anyone to experience stress at work. While it’s sometimes unavoidable, knowing when to take a break is essential so that you can appreciate all of your hard work! To guarantee that you are connecting over non-work topics, organise regular team outings. These events are always enjoyable and go on for hours as a result of the laughter.

Introduce bring your dog to work day

Dogs have shown to have a favourable influence on those who suffer from anxiety, sadness, and/or tension. You should think about bringing these dogs to your job! Dogs are much more than adorable fluffy animals; you should consider adopting one!

Employees listen to each other

Feeling valued at work is critical. If you have the opportunity to develop and learn new skills while doing something you love, you’ll be in a beneficial atmosphere — an atmosphere that you really want to be in 5 days per week! At the end of the day, if your team isn’t happy, your business will not run effectively. Teams should therefore be a top priority when it comes to investing in them.

Employee skill training

Your team should be inspired to achieve greater heights through training courses, conversations with more experienced teammates, seminars, and anything else. Not only that, but our apprenticeship program gives prospective employees with little expertise a chance. Tiring job hunting may have a significant influence on your mental health, and apprenticeship programs do indeed relieve a great deal of stress.

Other factors might also play a role in mental health issues, but one person at a time, we can all make an important impact. Have a nice day and take care of yourself!

9 Ways To Show Your Employees You Care

StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Show Employees you Care|9 Ways To Show Your Employees You CareEmployees that feel valued are more productive. People who feel appreciated are more likely to go above and above for the company. They’re more likely to consider themselves responsible for their contributions to a project. Above all, they’re happy in their jobs, which means they’re less inclined to quit.

Leaders who ignore opportunities to engage with their team and show appreciation to their staff are robbing themselves of a valuable tool for establishing a loyal, long-term workforce.

Employee Appreciation Day is the first Friday in March each year, but don’t wait until then to show your appreciation for your most valuable asset. Make employee gratitude a daily habit rather than an annual occasion. Here are nine excellent methods to express your gratitude to your employees:

Take Small Steps That Add Up To A Significant Difference

Appreciation does not necessitate grand gestures. Send a handwritten note of thanks, an email, or a phone call of support. Even the smallest gestures can leave a lasting impression. Even providing details for services such as workers’ comp can go a long way to showing you care.

Open Up New Possibilities

Giving your staff as many possibilities as possible is one of the finest methods to win their hearts and minds. Allow them to take on major tasks, such as a high-profile project or a new leadership post, or pay for a workshop or conference.

Make It Unique And Personal

Make your statements of gratitude and recognition as detailed as possible. Don’t just say “nice work,” but elaborate on what impressed you. “Thank you for having the bravery to speak up in the meeting,” for example. When everyone else was afraid to talk about the subject, it made a tremendous difference in breaking the ice.”

Demonstrate That You Have Faith In Them

It sends a powerful message to your staff when you can demonstrate your trust in them. In other words, you’re telling them that their work is good enough that they don’t need you to keep an eye on them.

Make Modifications On The Inside

Ensure that your team gets the tools they require to execute their jobs, including up-to-date technology, adequate lighting and HVAC, and comfortable, ergonomic furniture. Consider adding features like a break room or a lounge based on suggestions.

Make Time To Communicate With Them

Leaders have a lot of responsibility, and it’s easy to become engrossed in your work and neglect your team. Making the time to connect with your staff is one of the best ways to show them you care. Find out how they’re doing at work and in their personal lives.

Make Mentoring A Part Of The Organization’s Culture

There are newer employees in almost every firm who would benefit from being matched with an experienced colleague. There’s no better way to transfer important information and give beginners a support system right from the start than to develop a formal mentorship programme or a more casual buddy system.

Assign Ownership To Them

Giving employees the keys to a project that is relevant to their knowledge and interests is a certain method to push them to do their best. Allow the project to be based on the employee’s ideas if at all possible. Other employees will be encouraged by seeing their colleague’s inventiveness rewarded, not simply because the employee will be empowered to grow and achieve.

Be Open And Honest

Honesty should be expected, although it is more difficult at times than others. Many people assume you shouldn’t discuss bad news, yet such conversations–as tough as they may be–show you care enough to share even the most difficult truths. Honest and straightforward feedback will earn you respect and help you achieve your goals.

The bottom line is that if your employees understand how much you value them, there is nothing they won’t do to help you and your team.