The Top 15 Shows That Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Should Watch

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Whilst starting your own business is both exciting and fulfilling, it can also be exhausting. Never ending work hours and a lack of weekends can mean at times, all you fancy doing is sitting back, relaxing and watching your favorite box set on TV. If you’re interested in maximizing your downtime however, we’ve found the best TV shows that every entrepreneur should watch, to make sure that down time is not only guilt free, but invaluable.

1. Dragons Den

If pitching for investment isn’t already nerve-wracking enough, imagine doing in front of some of the countries most successful business people and on TV. That’s what the brave entrepreneurs on Dragons Den have to do. The current panel includes business greats such as Peter Jones, Deborah Meaden and Jenny Campbell.  Watching Dragon’s Den is great for getting tips on how to pitch, an insight into what kind of questions you may get asked and probably most importantly- what not to do. Think you can take on the dragons? The show is open to applicants- enter the den if you dare!

2. Girl Boss

Inspired by the bestselling book ‘#GirlBoss’ by Sophia Amoruso and based on her start-up story, this Netflix original shows how Sophia went from broke to running the multi-million dollar fashion empire, Nasty Gal. Sophia starts by selling vintage clothes, but as her business starts to grown, she learns about all the ups (and downs) of running your own business.

3. Billions

If you want a lesson in power struggles, Billions is the one of you. Set in New York, it tells the story of the U.S. Attorney Chuck Rhoades, who boasts the title of never having lost an insider trading case. In Billions, he is taking on Axelrod, a (corrupt) hedge fun tycoon. What follows is a battle of intelligence, ambition, influence and ultimately power.

4. I Give It a Year

In this show, Baroness Karren Brady (who you may remember as one of Lord Sugar’s advisers on ‘The Apprentice’) meets with entrepreneurs who have just taken the leap and decided to start their own business. One year later she goes back and revisits them, to see how far they may (or may not) have come. The types of businesses vary from episode to episode- one of our favorite episodes involves one entrepreneur tackling the constant battle of trying to keep your cup of tea warm. A dilemma indeed!

5. Undercover Boss

Ever felt like your previous management was a little ‘out of touch’ when it came to the day-to-day running of the company? In Undercover Boss, the company leaders go undercover in the guise of a new employee within their own company. With the change of perspective, problems are uncovered they hadn’t realised were occurring and relationships with workers are both forged and strengthened. A great programme to help you change your own perspective on how to run your company, as well as proof of why you should always maintain a working knowledge of every aspect of your business.

6. Empire

Empire is a fictional drama, focused on the company ‘Empire Entertainment’ and it’s CEO, Lucious Lyon. When Lucious learns his life may be cut short due to health issues, Lucious must pick between his sons to decide who should take over his multi-million dollar company. With an ex-wife adding more drama to the mix, Empire shows the potential consequences of mixing family and big business.

7. How It’s Made

Ever looked at something and wonder how on earth they made it? How It’s Made has the answer, by looking at how everyday items are created and manufactured, covering everything from foil to chewing gum. It gives you a great insight into what is required for different items and may help you uncover the secret as to how to take your prototype to the next level. Or perhaps you have a better idea when it comes to how something is currently made… Either way, you’ll be inspired (and sometimes in awe) of the manufacturing processes that goes into those things we take for granted everyday. This show is also great for getting to grips with supply chain management as well as the basics of product design.

8. The Profit

The Profit follows Marcus Lemonis (Camping World CEO) as he invests $2 million dollars of his money into companies that are struggling to stay afloat, with them giving him a percentage of their future profits in return. Instead of giving them the money and expecting them to go it alone, Marcus offers his experience, expertise and knowledge, to help the businesses get back onto the right track for a fruitful future. Some will thrive and some won’t survive, but you can learn valuable lessons along the way by watching their journeys.

9. Mad Men

Set in New York in the 1960’s, Mad Men follows Don Draper’s power struggles at his Madison Avenue advertising firm and how he balances his position at work with his home life. A great insight into how the advertising industry operates combined with enough fictional drama to keep you binge watching those episodes. If you’re getting stuck on finding a name for your company, you can find out more here. Investing in company branding and advertising only to find your name is already taken is a costly mistake to make!

10. Shark Tank

A spin off from Dragons Den, this American reality TV programme shows entrepreneurs pitching for cash from successful millionaire entrepreneurs in exchange for equity. The sharks do not hold back in their assessment of the contestants businesses, with their harsh questioning sometimes bordering on brutal. The sharks include Kevin O’Leary, Barbara Corcoran and Daymond John. However, if the sharks like the sound of the business pitching, deals can be made then and there. A dramatic cut down of a longer pitch, it still captures the intensity of pitching for investment and is a must for any entrepreneur.

11. The Apprentice

This British reality TV show follows multiple hopeful entrepreneurs competing against each other for an investment in their business idea. The contestants are given weekly business challenges in which they work in teams, with one contestant being fired each week from the losing team. The final winner gets £250,000 and Lord Sugar as a 50% owner of their new venture. The weekly challenges vary and show not only the talents of the candidates, but also the importance of team-work when striving to reach goals.

12. Gordon Ramsey Kitchen Nightmares

In this reality TV series, Gordon Ramsey takes his foul mouth and flaring temper to various restaurants that are struggling to stay afloat. After uncovering what is going wrong in the business, Gordon tries to help turn it around. From awful food and stubborn management, to shabby interiors, Gordon often ruffles a few feathers in his bid to create a viable restaurant business for the owners. Not only great dramatic viewing, it shows the importance of customer experience and being open to feedback.

13. House Hunters

House Hunters is a US show that follows the journey of people looking for a new home. With the realtor working hard to make their customers dreams comes true, this show is a lesson in knowing what your customers wants, and shows how emotional reasons can overtake financial sense when it comes to consumer purchases.

14. Silicon Valley

Despite being a fictional comedy show, Silicon Valley was influenced by the experiences of it’s co-creator (Mike Judge) during his time working in Silicon Valley. The show is the story of Richard- a computer programmer who works alongside his intelligent friends to try and tap into the booming tech industry with their start up Pied Piper. Living in the home of the leader of their start up incubator, this show will help you laugh and unwind whilst getting an insight into the lives of those living in Silicon Valley.

15. How I Made My Millions 

When you start your own business, you trade in huge risk for potentially huge reward. This programme tells the story of individuals who took exactly this risk and for whom it has paid off, creating million dollar businesses. Instead of showing the journey as all roses, this programme shows the reality and the hard work that goes behind creating a successful business. A great one to keep you inspired during those scarier moments in your entrepreneurial journey.

Key Practises You Must Get Right To Grow Your Small Business

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Too many businesses fail within their initial stages, and you don’t want yours to be next. That’s why it’s crucial to optimize your business procedures right from the start. It will be much easier to implement them when you only have a few staff, rather than waiting until you have dozens or even hundreds.

Hiring

If your company is small, then every team member is crucial. For example, let’s say you have a team of five. Every person is responsible for 20% of the workload. Imagine if your new hire is simply not performing. That takes your business down to 80% effectiveness. Now imagine another staff member suddenly quits without notice. You’re suddenly down to 60%.

The smaller a company is, the greater the importance of each employee. It doesn’t matter if a large company hires a few bad apples because it will have hundreds of other workers to take up the slack. Unfortunately, you don’t have that luxury.

Make sure you develop a comprehensive hiring process to weed out lazy and unreliable workers. Have a look at qualityeducationandjobs.com to learn more about what you should be looking for.

Accounting

Make sure you hire a good accountant and make sure you document all your expenses and revenue closely. Any bookkeeping stuff ups can cause chaos throughout your company, potentially land you in tax trouble, and impair your ability to plan for the future.

Marketing

If you want your business to grow, then you need to get it seen. The best way to do this is to develop your online presence as much as possible. If you’re not familiar with social media marketing (you should be), now is the time to learn. You want to start developing posts that connect with your audience.

You should also aim to get your company site seen on Google. If you have no idea how to do this, then it may be time to learn about SEO (search engine optimization). This involves a variety of processes to get your site ranking on the highest page possible. The easiest and most efficient way is to develop content that is relevant to viewers. This could be in the form of articles or videos.

Quality Control

It’s easy to think that because your business is small, there is no need to implant major quality control procedures. Why it does depend on your industry, it usually pays to implement these procedures sooner rather than later. Imagine you send out an order that is completely wrong, all because of a simple mislabelling mistake. You may end up losing a customer who would have gone on to spend hundreds or thousands. While human error will always occur, it’s important to minimize it as much as possible.

Final Thoughts…

These practices are crucial to almost any business, regardless of their industry. If you’re a small business owner who wants to level up to a medium sized business, then you need to get your procedures perfect.

Turning Your Catering Biz Into A Really Dishy Proposition

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Let’s assume you already have the culinary talents and the dedication to customer satisfaction that are crucial to any successful catering enterprise. Besides providing food to satisfy at events, celebrations, and so on, you are also going to have to nail the image of your business. People don’t just want good food, they want good food from someone they can trust as a professional. Here, we’re going to look at how you make sure your catering biz is a tempting dish from any and all perspectives.

Make sure you are legally good to go

If you are just starting off on a freelance venture and trying out cooking for small events around you, make sure that you have all the licenses you need for a catering business. Many people will start a business off with a few trial runs for families and friends, ensuring that they get a good enough reception to start putting time, money, and effort into it. Unfortunately, many of these people keep building without realizing that they are going to need to be licensed to start charging people money for their services. If you plan on serving alcohol with your food, then you are going to need a separate license for that, too. If you can’t confirm you are fully licensed to clients, they are less inclined to trust you.

Create an online menu

As soon as your business kicks off the ground, you should try to make sure that you have some kind of online presence. Caterers are used to roaming around for their work, and often don’t have a set premises that can attract people with curb appeal. You can set up a Facebook group, but it shouldn’t serve as the “home” of your business. Take your business online and invest in a professional looking website that details your services, offers a menu, and enables potential clients to find you much more easily. A search engine optimization campaign can help you direct more local traffic to your services with little cost, too.

Tell your story

Whether it’s on your website on in brochures, make sure that you are starting to build a brand unique to your business. Your own business name, logo, and aesthetic will make up the core imagery of the brand that helps you build recognition and an image that stands apart from your competitors. But food provides a sensory and emotional journey and you can kick that narrative off with a brand story. Your brand story can talk about the inspirations for your menu and what got you started, or it can focus on the needs of the client, talking about providing convenience and comfort for those who need food quickly. Figuring out your story means figuring out which market you’re appealing to and what they want to see and hear.

Be specific in your services

Your story does not, however, tell the audience everything they need to know in detail about what services you are going to provide. It is a common mistake for brand new caterers to fail to tell clients whether they are going to be providing cutlery, what areas they can serve, even how many they can feed. Your focus on marketing your menu can distract you from some of the more crucial elements of the service that they want to hear. If you haven’t decided what level of service to offer, it’s a good idea to look at what clients look for in a caterer and figure out what you can provide without cutting too deeply into your profits. Make sure the details are listed clearly on your website and any brochures or long-form marketing material you publish.

Look the part

Your marketing and branding doesn’t end when you get the part. In fact, that’s where it starts. We are going to assume that professional caterers don’t need to be told about how to make good food or how to present it well. However, it’s wise you take the same approach to your very being, too. If you want to convince people you are dedicated to your field, then you might want to consider a uniform that makes you look like a food service professional. If you have a van or another business vehicle you use to reach venues, events, or clients, then consider investing in branding for the van, too. Not only does it cement a serious working aesthetic, but it also functions as a traveling advertisement for your services.

Speak the part, too

Professional caterers are expected to be able to communicate in detail about many different elements of the business you are in. You are going to be explaining not only your services, but your menu, specific tastes, and all sorts of other details. If you aren’t entirely confident or feel like you have trouble expressing yourself clearly, it may be worth looking into getting lessons in communication or reading books that can help you express yourself and be a little more confident. That confidence in communication will give the image of confidence in your cooking, as well.

Don’t let the strain show

As you become a more successful caterer, you are likely to become busier and busier. You might be taking on more events and clients than ever before, and you may be catering for larger crowds than you have handled in the past, too. It can be a stressful environment and you may be managing the business on the side even when you and your team is in the middle of a job. It’s important you don’t let that strain show, so it’s worth using catering management software to help you streamline all the organizational parts of it. Dealing with messy notepads or bloated Excel sheets can make it much harder to keep your cool, which can show in front of the clients and is not a flattering look.

Leverage the power of social

When you create a new dish, what is the best way to show it off to get those potential clients’ mouths watering? Having pictures to go with the menu on your website can make it even more compelling. In terms of marketing, however, food is especially powerful when published through social media. Twitter is a must-have marketing platform for any business that operates online. For food businesses, such as caterers, however, Instagram can be even more valuable. Good food has aesthetic appeal and you can use that to attract much more business, build your brand, and attract new clients through the right visual-focused social platforms.


Know your best bits

After you finish an event, it’s a good idea to review what you have learned. CRM tools can help you manage correspondence, details, and feedback from clients that can help you gather data on what works and what doesn’t. You can start to compile data based on what menu choices are most popular and which aren’t. This way, you can stop spending money on ingredients you don’t use as much and look into replacements. You can also gather feedback and see if there are any trends in which parts the clients liked, in particular, or which can be done better. Know your best bits and keep adapting your menu to maximize your profits. Even if you don’t agree with a client, it doesn’t matter. If a menu choice is costing you more money that it makes, it needs to be cut.

Keep building the network

It’s not only your reputation and image with the clients that matter. You also want to make sure that you have a firm presence within the event planning industry. Other caterers, wedding planners, and venues can all be highly valuable contacts for you. You can gain referrals from them, for instance. When caterers have a full schedule, they will often recommend an alternative. Event planners and venues often have links with local caterers. Build your links within the industry by visiting trade fairs and finding networking events near you on a regular basis.

Full mouths are good for business

Filling mouths is what you do but you should be filling them with praise as much as food. If your clients are happy and seemingly willing to shout it to the world, make good use of that. Word of mouth is one of the most effective marketing practices out there and, as food is such an emotional product, it is one of the easiest industries in which to acquire and leverage word of mouth. Ask them if they would leave a review in your Google listings or a testimonial online. Encourage them to spread the word through social media or follow you. You can even incentivize them with, for instance, a free taster or a voucher if they help you successfully gain a referral.

Food for events isn’t just a practical concern, it’s an emotionally driven purchase. Food is tied deeply to subjective enjoyment, so making it attractive as possible is in your best interests when attracting clients. The tips above should ensure that your business has an image that’s impossible to resist.

What Is Procurement?

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Procurement is a term you will hear often in business, but it may not be one which you are instantly familiar with. Procurement is all about making sure that all products a company gets are from trusted suppliers and are of good value. For example, if you had a company whose sole focus was to be environmentally friendly, the procurement team would make sure that their suppliers were environmentally friendly and that all product is sourced naturally wherever possible.

Why is it important?

Procurement is a huge part of your business strategy and it is vital to get it right in your business. If you think about it, over half of your business revenue is used to source materials and products for your company to sell on, so procurement is a department which needs to be managed correctly. You can buy Sertica’s procurement software for better management of your procurement team and this can make life much easier when researching for the correct suppliers. Making sure that the correct decisions are made with products and suppliers is absolutely essential for any business.

Visibility

In the procurement process, one of the important things to think about is visibility. Visibility means that as an organisation, you can see exactly where your money is being spent, and in turn, you can make changes to save the business money and be more successful as a result. Segmentation is a strategy which is often used for monitoring spending as it puts spending into different categories to make it easier to see what impact each type of spending has on the business.

The procurement process

The process of procuring items can involve several different steps, and here is a basic rundown of those steps which are involved here:

  • Identify requirements
  • Authorize purchase request
  • Identify suppliers
  • Make inquiries
  • Get quotes
  • Negotiate terms
  • Make a decision
  • Creating a purchase order
  • Sort out shipping
  • Receive invoices
  • Make payment

Is Procurement Purchasing?

Most people use the term purchasing and procurement as the same thing, but they are different in the fact that purchasing doesn’t concern itself with the sourcing and researching of suppliers, it is only concerned with the shipping, making an invoice and paying for the goods. Procurement is a department which you should have alongside the buying department in your business for maximum efficiency.

Learn more here about how you can use software to enhance this area of your business easily and give you a head start above your competitors for both purchasing and procurement.

Using technology

In this day and age, we are lucky enough to have software for pretty much any business process, and our procurement process is no different. Because the process of procuring items can be complicated, technology can help massively by organising data and comparing different quotes to come up with your final decision. It can make life much easier and allow for more productive working on the case.

If you don’t already have a procurement manager or team in your workplace, now is the time to take that leap and hire yourself a new member of the team. Procurement is a vital role in any business, and it can make a massive difference to your success and growth in the industry.

How to Run Your Business in the Most Cost Effective Way

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Running your company in the most cost effective way possible should be your number one priority right now. If it’s not, that suggests there’s something wrong. So why is this so important? Most business owners assume that things are being run efficiently and cost effectively, but that’s often not the case at all. Making those kinds of assumptions as an entrepreneur is almost always a bad idea.

You’ll be surprised by the many ways in which your business is probably throwing money away right now. It’s something that you can’t let continue because the sooner you look into it, the sooner you’ll realise that you’re throwing away resources unnecessarily. We’re not going to look at some of the things you can do to make your business operate in a more cost effective kind of way.

Outsource Certain Minor Things

There are are some things that you simply shouldn’t waste time and money hiring people to do. For example, something like data entry is something that’s very simply and very mundane. That’s why you shouldn’t be afraid to outsource certain minor issues and problems that might be present inside your business. Make them problems for someone else to deal with.

Put Stuff in the Cloud

The cloud offers you a fantastic way to save money because it’s all about switching stuff from your servers and putting them up in the cloud freely and easily. You don’t have to worry about running servers and paying for the electricity that powers all this stuff. It’s something that’s definitely worth considering and looking into if you haven’t had any experience with cloud computing and storage just yet. So it’s about time you started putting more stuff in the cloud.

Embrace Green Ideas

Running your business in a green way is one of the shortest and most obvious ways to make your business more cost effective and efficient. If you install water limits so that water can’t be wasted, you’ll save money. If you produce some of your own energy reserves, you’ll save money. And if you cut the amount of paper and cardboard you use, you’ll save money. When you go green, you save; it really is as simple as that.

Keep Modernising Your Advertising and Marketing Strategies

If you’re still persevering with advertising and marketing strategies that are well past their sell by date, you’re only going to run into disappointment sooner or later. Those strategies will produce ever diminishing results, and they’re not cheap. The modern ways of reaching people via targeted online ads and social media content is much more cost effective. So if you’re still living in the past, it’s time to drag yourself into the future.

Choose Tools and Components That Reduce Wastage

Depending on what kind of sector and industry you’re working in, there are all kinds of tools and components that can help you to make less. If you’re working in manufacturing, for example, you can use a flow meter to help keep things safe, secure and efficient. There are plenty of other examples of similar components that you can make use of in your place of work too, so this is something for you to look into.

Travel Around Less

Business travel can be really expensive, even if you’re just travelling across the city. Of course, you do still have to do a little travelling in order to run a successful business, especially if you want to go global. But you certainly can minimise the amount of travelling you’re doing by embracing conference calls and things like that. With modern tech, you don’t need to travel to discuss things with your clients, partners or suppliers, so why waste the time and resources?

Be More Careful During the Recruitment Process

Your recruitment process is something that you should definitely try to perfect as soon as possible. This is a cost effectiveness issue because it’s all about making sure you hire the right people the first time. When you hire the wrong people, it can unbalance, undermine and massively damage your business. It can set you back years, so it’s vital to get it right the first time.

Your business is going to have to operate in an efficient and cost effective way if you want it to be a major success going forward. No business succeeds if it’s wasting money on a continual basis, so it’s time to get things in order and make your business even more profitable and sustainable than it is already.