Retail Security: Tips and Tricks for Businesses

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StrategyDriven Risk Management Article |Retail Security|Retail Security: Tips and Tricks for BusinessesIt’s a busy time of year for retailers, whether you sell your products in-store or online.

Naturally, you’re going to be experiencing a high level of demand from customers. More people will be visiting your store and website, which means your security needs to be perfect. If it isn’t, you’re playing a dangerous game, as it only takes one individual to wreak havoc on a business; whether it’s by stealing expensive goods or hacking sensitive online data.

But don’t worry, though, as this short guide is here to help all retail managers. Let’s dive into the tips and tricks.

Install High-Quality Security Cameras and Alarms

Firstly, it’s important to make sure that your retail store is covered from the outside to the inside with appropriate security measures. Of course, security cameras and alarms are the best course of action, but you should install an interactive system rather than a traditional one. What this means is that you will be able to monitor your cameras and alarms in real-time through your own devices, such as smartphones and computers. Plus, you’ll have access to professional support from your provider when anything goes wrong. To get started, visit http://www.quickresponse.net/slider-detail/asap-psap

Limit the Number of Customers Allowed in Your Store at One Time

Nowadays, people are a lot more conscious about their health, which is why mask-wearing and hand sanitizers have become incredibly common. Therefore, it’s recommended that you consider limiting the number of people allowed in your store at one time, especially if the government is advising that you do so. This way, shoppers will be able to buy your products more efficiently without being overcrowded.

Plus, fewer people in your store means managing crime is made easier.

Hire a Security Guard

A security guard is one of the best deterrents when it comes to potential criminals. When somebody walks into a retail store planning on stealing some goods, they will automatically think twice when they see that there is a security guard (or guards) on sight.

Keep Stock Rooms Locked and Secured

Although most goods get stolen out front, it’s still a good idea to keep your stock rooms locked and secured. Also, only the relevant employees should have access to them. For example, cashiers likely won’t have any good reason to go into the stock rooms, so subsequently shouldn’t have access unless their roles change.

Store Customer Details Safely Online

If you also sell products online – or collect a lot of customer contact details digitally – then you need to make sure your cybersecurity is good.

Otherwise, you’ll risk having sensitive data stolen, such as bank details, which will then damage your brand’s reputation.
To boost your cybersecurity, it’s often a good idea to outsource it to a reputable cybersecurity company. Or, you can handle everything in-house, from installing anti-virus software and backing up your important data every couple of weeks.

Conclusion

If you’re a retail business, then you should use all of the tips from above. They will help to bolster your online and in-store security, protecting you and your customers to a better standard.

Tips on How You Can Grow Your Business

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Grow your business|Tips on How You Can Grow Your BusinessEveryone wants to succeed in the business world, yet not everyone achieves the goal since some lack the tools, skills, and attitude to grow their businesses. Many start their businesses thinking that they will open their doors, turn on their computers, and start making money even as the business grows. Unfortunately, this has never been the case since growing a business is more challenging than many think and needs many sacrifices.

Here are six simple steps you can use to help your small business grow and achieve the success everyone is hoping for.

Enhance Creativity

Always be in the business of looking for ways to improve your business and make it stand out from the many competitors. One of the ways you can use to reach the market is through proper branding through a design cloud that is fast, flexible, and affordable. This will change how your business uses graphic design to reach the target market.

Stay Focused

“Rome was never built in a single day; thus, starting your own business never implies that you are going to start making money straight away and grow. As much as it will take you time to grow, always stay focused as people recognize you in the market, and with time, you will succeed. Besides your long-term goals, make sure you also focus on the short-term goals that are very necessary to grow to newer heights.

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Keep Good Records

If you want your business to succeed, you must keep detailed records of your finances, assets, and even liabilities. This will help you know where your business is, the hurdles you have to overcome to grow, and the steps you need to take to achieve your goals. In addition, knowing your financial position backed with the records will give you time to strategize on how you can overcome any challenge and be ahead of your competitors.

Be Organized

If you want to grow and enjoy much success in your business, organization is vital as it will help you complete tasks in the proper order. First, you have to create a to-do list that will help you plan your day and stay on top of tasks to be done. Then, as you complete every job, you must check it off to ensure you don’t forget any of them.

Make Sacrifices

The lead-up to growing your business is hard work and sacrifices right from when you open your doors. In most cases, you have to put in extra effort and spend more time at work than with your family. You will have to make both financial sacrifices and time to stay ahead of your competitors, who are also coming up with better strategies to be ahead of the curve.

Conclusion

Instead of growing, approximately 20% of businesses fail in the first two years of operation, while another 45% fall in the first five years. The failure to grow can be associated with a lack of strategies and a proper plan. The tips mentioned above can help you achieve success and help your business grow.

Healthcare Industry: Top 3 Hard Skills for Your Resume

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StrategyDriven Professional Development Article |Healthcare Industry|Healthcare Industry: Top 3 Hard Skills for Your ResumeAre you a healthcare professional applying for a job? If so, there are several skills you need to have in your resume to secure an interview and ultimately get your dream job. These skills include soft skills and hard skills. Employers in the healthcare industry value hard skills just like soft skills.

Hard skills are abilities that include doing specific tasks on the job. You can learn these while doing your professional studies, through vocational training, or even when employed. Hard skills are specific to processes and tasks like using tools, equipment, or software. Read on to learn more about the top 3 hard skills you need and examples of how to include them in your resume.

Marketing Skills

Marketing skills include making sales, advertising products or services, and consumer knowledge. You may need them as a healthcare professional to help boost sales and gain more patients for the organization.

Also, these skills are inclusive of technical and digital skills that you may need in providing online healthcare marketing services. Most organizations have moved from the traditional way of boosting their sales to modern platforms such as social media. Therefore, several marketing skills such as SEO, digital advertising, content creation, storytelling, and data-driven communication have become more relevant. Having these skills will be an added advantage to your resume.

To show your marketing expertise for your resume you can refer to this example:

  • Created 10+ SEO healthcare campaigns and grew organic traffic by 60% in 8 months.

Management Skills

You could be a nurse, a doctor, a physician, or any other healthcare professional applying for a job. You must have collective abilities that include decision-making, business planning, communication, delegation, etc. These skills will come in handy in your job description regardless of your specialization.

These abilities will help you lead your team and effortlessly take care of all your roles and responsibilities in your department. Do enough research on the best ways to prove management skills in your resume. Better still, refer to this example:

  • Boosted engagement for our healthcare programs by 60% through increased facetime with colleagues.

Note, your examples should refer to a specific managerial skill as in the example above that proves good communication.

Presentation Skills

You may have done a presentation about specific topics in your high school class, college, or to a panel of professionals in your previous job. It is not any different for a healthcare organization. You will need presentation skills to pass across information about issues or even products and services to your colleagues or consumers.

Presentation skills are abilities you have in graphic design, data analysis, preparing slideshows, reporting, visual communication, among many others. Moreover, having soft skills like confidence will come in handy in perfecting this skill.
You can prove how savvy you are in your presentation skills by referring to this example:

  • Assisted the resident doctor with preparing slideshows in PowerPoint for a presentation.

Conclusion

There are several other skills that you can add to your resume apart from management, marketing, and presentation skills. Analytical, technical, writing, computer, and design skills are also important. Do thorough research on the best way to prove your specific hard skills in your resume to secure that interview and the job in the healthcare organization.

A Brief History of Monero Explained

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StrategyDriven Editorial Perspective Article |Monero|A Brief History of Monero ExplainedAmong the top cryptocurrencies in the world, Monero (XMR) made a name for itself as one of the best digital currencies for anonymous transactions. Its focus on privacy and security attracted a large number of users from all sides of the legal spectrum. While Monero is one of the most well-known coins in the realm of crypto, it may be surprising to some people that the famous privacy-oriented currency started as a humble grassroots movement in 2014.

Learning more about Monero’s history can shed some light on its background and the values that govern its direction. As such, new users and traders can determine for themselves whether Monero, with all of its features and complex history, should be a part of their portfolio or not. Before even considering Monero as a crypto investment option, people should press pause in their search for the best XMR wallet and take a look first at a quick rundown of Monero’s history below.

What Is a Fork?

Before talking about Monero, users need to learn about forks first. A fork in cryptocurrency is very different from the fork that the average person knows. Rather than a pointed eating utensil, a fork in crypto refers to a change in blockchain protocol.

To illustrate this, think of blockchain as an exceedingly long train track. When a fork happens, the track splits, with the original rail going one way and the fork heading to another. The fork and the original rail share the same background and history, but they are heading in different directions.

Forks happen for a variety of reasons, but they can be summed up into three things:

  • To add new functions
  • To improve upon weaknesses
  • To resolve any disagreements in the community about the crypto’s direction

This is the case for many cryptocurrencies, including Monero. Many altcoins are forks of preceding cryptocurrencies, which develop over time to form their own identities.

The Long, Winding History of Monero

The history of Monero can be described as a long fork story. To get to Monero, users need to learn about two other leading characters first: CryptoNote and Bytecoin.

CryptoNote is not a cryptocurrency. It is more accurate to define it as a new protocol or technology which powers up a new line of cryptocurrencies. CryptoNote was first described in a whitepaper written by Nicholas van Saberhagen (which is a presumed pseudonym) in October 2013. The new protocol addresses some of the key issues surrounding Bitcoin about privacy by providing a way to keep users completely anonymous in the blockchain.

Bytecoin then enters the stage. Bytecoin is the flagship coin of CryptoNote, but it ran into a critical problem. Developers realized that 80 percent of the coins that could be mined for Bytecoin already existed, which severely limits its mining potential. A Bitcointalk forum user who went by ‘thankful_for_today’ decided to fork from Bytecoin and encoded a fresh set of ideas into a new coin called BitMonero.

While thankful_for_today presented interesting ideas for the new coin, the community disagreed with its direction. Hence, other open-source developers decided to fork it in 2014, which ultimately led to the birth of Monero.

The term “monero” means “coin” in Esperanto and quite aptly so. Esperanto is a widely-known artificial language developed back in 1887 with the aims of becoming a universal second language, mirroring accurately what Monero–and crypto in general–hopes to achieve in terms of currency.

Who Created Monero?

In its inception, Monero had a core team of developers with five members. Three of them were anonymous, and the other two were publicly known. Today, there are seven members, which, similar two the previous group, only have two members known in public. Riccardo Scagni, well-known by his username “Fluffypony”, was one of the first five and still serves as Monero’s main developer today.

Controversies Around Monero

The story of Monero is not complete without its controversies.

Monero gained an incredible amount of traction in 2016 when it captured the interest of the dark web. Alphabay, one of the biggest darknet market sites, along with a smaller darknet store called Oasis, integrated Monero as a payment option that summer. The following year in July, when authorities shut Alphabay down, they discovered that a significant portion of the store’s revenue came through Monero.

Aside from these, there are also multiple reports of coinjacking and ransomware, which, unfortunately, take advantage of the anonymous properties of Monero.

Based on these reports, it becomes clear that while Monero offers users well-deserved privacy and security in their finances, there are ill-intentioned individuals who use it for illegal means. One of the biggest topics of debate in the crypto world is striking a balance between the good and the bad because, while Monero is known for the latter, it still has a lot of potential for the former.

Overall, Monero’s history has a lot of ups and downs, and it is difficult to predict how it could change and improve over time. For that, users, traders, and developers alike all need to keep a watchful eye and see for themselves where it could go next.

Key post-Brexit tax and customs changes

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StrategyDriven Editorial Perspective Article |Post-Brexit|Key post-Brexit tax and customs changesThe financial, political and tax world in the European Union has changed for good. One word Brexit, i.e. the UK leaving the European Union, has a huge impact on the European economy, population migration, the UKs domestic economy. For businesses, the most significant changes relate to customs and tax issues.

What after Brexit? Tax issues

The financial, political and tax world in the European Union has changed for good. One word Brexit, i.e. the UK leaving the European Union, has a huge impact on the European economy, population migration, the UKs domestic economy. For businesses, the most significant changes relate to customs and tax issues.

Despite Brexit, the UK will continue to have a VAT system and the government has retained VAT procedures similar to those previously in place. Nonetheless, companies trading exclusively within the European community should familiarise themselves with the changes and take additional steps to prepare for the new reality of the UKs exit from the EU.

Movements of goods

Previously, all movements of goods between the UK and other countries were made on an intra-Community supply of goods basis. VAT on goods imported from the UK was accounted for on both the output and input VAT returns. However, for goods supplied to the UK, a preferential tax rate of 0% was applicable if the relevant conditions were met.

Currently, the situation with the movement of goods is as follows. VAT is changed to import tax. In this case, according to VAT regulations, the tax obligation arises at the moment when the customs duty arises on goods imported into the European Union. Thus, the tax must already be paid when the goods are cleared through customs. While it is usually possible to recover this tax, it must be paid immediately. In addition, companies have to wait for its reimbursement, which significantly affects the liquidity of businesses importing goods from the UK.The good news is that companies exporting goods to the UK will have the opportunity to use the simplified procedure, in which they will not have to pay VAT as soon as the goods arrive in the UK, but will settle it later.

EORI number

Companies trading with the UK will also need to have an EORI number. All traders are required to use this number for any customs transactions within the European Union. If you do not have a UK EORI number, companies should start the process of registering one as soon as possible.

Transport times

In the past, large logistics companies that move goods across the Channel used to have vehicle transport times calculated to the nearest minute. Now, following a change in tax regulations, time for the customs procedure must be added to each delivery, regardless of the mode of transport.

What is the impact of Brexit?

The UK is among the top ten countries in the European Union in terms of the movement of goods. Moreover, the top three suppliers in Europe are countries that are also the UKs main trading partners, that is Germany, the Netherlands and France. And it is these countries that have experienced the most commercial turmoil after a possible Brexit. In terms of industries, Brexit has the biggest impact on the automotive, food, computer, machinery and chemical sectors.

Below is a list of suggested actions companies should take to prepare for Brexit.

Supply analysis. Analyse the rules in place for their impact on new customs and tax obligations. Carrying out the EORI number registration procedure. Appointment of a customs agent or preparation of appropriate software. Registration in the customs systems of the Ministry of Finance. Determination of correct tariff codes. Contact and establish procedures with a logistics company. Consideration of VAT registration in the UK. Review and modify accounting systems to comply with relevant regulations.