Got Employees AND A Home Business? Make Your Home Safe To Work

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Home Business|Got Employees AND A Home Business? Make Your Home Safe To WorkA lot of business owners work from home these days – it’s a flexible working arrangement, and works out in favor of most modern career minds. And when you’ve got a home business, the world really is your oyster! You create and innovate when at home, and you talk to customers and solve their problems from your own desk, and that really helps to boost your confidence and your business acumen.

But when you get the chance to expand, and bring an employee or two into your home business, a few changes might need to be made. After all, you’ve got liability on your doorstep now, and that means you need to create a space that’s safe for work. But how do you get started with that?

Try to Contain the Footfall

If you’re working out of a residential area, you’re definitely going to want to pay mind to this tip most of all; the neighbors might start getting annoyed about the visitors coming and going all day every day! You might want to start scheduling meetings and hangouts away from your house, and in a nearby cafe or restaurant.

But if you cannot quite manage that on your calendar, you’ll have to make an extra effort to try to contain the amount of people in your home, first of all. How? Only call people in certain days. And also make sure any employees in your home are kept to certain areas – if you don’t want people heading upstairs, make sure it’s cordoned off!

Highlight the Problem Areas

Your home might have a lot of problem areas to it, seeing as you live there, possibly with quite a few family members. There could be a lot of mess, or there could be some repairs that need to be done in your personal time – you need to be sure your employees never run into trouble when coming across these areas. So what can you do? You can highlight them!

Of course, you’re not going to want a professional person to notice just how messy your home might be, but if there’s an element of danger involved, it’s important to do so. For example, if you’re getting your wiring redone, or you’ve got some plumbing issues, taping the area off with a bit of reflective tape will naturally highlight the problem to even the most unobservant of eyes. If you want someone to keep away, use a bold color, especially if you’re going to be working quite late into the evening!

Keep Things Quiet

And finally, try to keep the noise down. Maintain a quiet working environment – try to keep your voices at conversation level and no higher, and always use silent powerpoints and human driven presentations more often than not!

A home business is going to need an extra hand or two, at some point. Make sure you’re ready to accept more and more people into your home on a professional basis. It’ll save the carpet at least!

6 Tools You Need for Your Construction Business

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Construction Tools|6 Tools You Need for Your Construction BusinessIf you’re working in construction, then you’ll know there are some key tools you just can’t do without. Having quality tools you know you can rely on is a requirement for the job and helps you to carry out your work to the highest standard.

While there are some tools that are an added luxury, there are some that are absolutely essential for the job. When it comes to these tools, make sure you’ve got quality equipment to rely on when you’re out on the job.

Cordless Drill

When you’ve got a cordless drill that serves as an electric screwdriver and can quickly drill holes, you save yourself so much time and hard work. Manually putting in screws with a screwdriver is time consuming and can quickly lead to arm fatigue, but with a cordless drill you can add screws in seconds.

With no cord, your cordless drill is portable and easy to use, and you’ll find the battery life is pretty impressive.

Hand Saw

Everyone should have a hand saw whether they’re in construction or not. It might be a basic piece of kit, but the hand saw is useful in so many situations. From small DIY jobs to big construction jobs, there’s a place for the hand saw.

For small cutting jobs, a high-quality hand saw will save you time and give you a high-quality cut.

Tape Measure

There aren’t many jobs you can complete without a tape measure. Precision is vital in construction and without a tape measure you’re just guessing.

The tape measure is small, lightweight, and easily fits in your pocket, but it’s an invaluable part of your equipment.

Adjustable Spanner

Why have a whole set of spanners when you can get an adjustable spanner that does the same job? The adjustable spanner can easily be adjusted to fit all kinds of nuts and bolts.

An adjustable spanner between 10” and 14” will help you speed through a variety of jobs.

Spirit Level

Where the tape measure is there to make sure you’ve got your measurements right, the spirit level is there to make sure everything is level. There’s no point getting something the right length if it’s sloping when it’s not supposed to be, and the spirit level is an easy way of making sure this isn’t the case.

Of course, you can get digital spirit levels now, but the old-fashioned ones still work great and get the job done.

Adhesives and Sealants

Bonding two things together is often an important part of a construction project and those bonds need to maintain sealing properties, so having the right adhesive or sealant is vitally important.

Depending on what materials you’re working with you will need different types of adhesives or sealants, so it’s important to understand which products you need.

The right sealant will ensure that whatever your constructing is weatherproof, waterproof, or fireproof depending on what you need, and give your job a high-quality finish.

How to Boost Your Retail Store Sales with Task Automation

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StrategyDriven, Business Management, Retail Sales, Marketing Automation, Lead Generation,Every business owner needs a little more time and money on their hands. But both resources can be hard to come by, especially if your everyday tasks are bleeding you dry.

Enters task automation and you can save the day and your sanity. Task automation saves you a lot of time and money, while allowing you to close more sales on autopilot.

Thanks to automation, you can effectively boost productivity, lower costs and offer better customer service online and offline.

With a clever automation strategy, your cash registers keep ringing and you spend less time on mundane and repetitive tasks.

At the end of the day, you end up with more time and money to channel towards business growth. And when you hit your growth goals, automation scales with you making your job easy.

With the preamble, continue reading to learn how you can easily boost sales in your store(s) with task automation.

How to Use Task Automation to Boost Sales

Automation uses software to carry out most of the tasks that were traditionally performed by a team of people.
Nowadays, and thanks to advances in technology, you can automate many tasks including marketing, lead nurturing, sales, daily operations and customer service among others.

In the following section, we cover several areas you can automate in a bid to increase sales while saving tons of time and money.

That out of the way, let us get down to business.

Marketing Automation

Businesses spend a huge amount of money marketing their products and services. Usually, most businesses don’t achieve the desired ROI thanks to poor execution, human error and so on.

Automating your marketing strategy can save you a lot of money and time. If you run a website for your store (and you should), automating your marketing efforts include adding features such as newsletters and social media.

Once a visitor sign ups to your newsletter, you can send them automated emails to convert mere subscribers to ready-to-pay customers. To automate opt-ins on your website, you can use a service such as OptinMonster and Thrive Leads among others.

If you didn’t know, email is a powerful marketing channel for online and offline businesses. You can easily send automated offers to your customers, which can boost both online and instore purchases tremendously.

Most email marketing providers offer you automation with a basic plan. For popular players in the industry, checkout MailChimp, AWeber and Campaign Monitor among others. Once you sign up, you can offer free content on a regular basis to win over customers, a practice known as content dripping.

Further, you can schedule social media posts that feed your social media marketing campaigns on autopilot. You don’t need me to tell you that posting on various social media platforms daily can eat up a lot of your precious time.

To be on the safe side, you can pick a few hours to schedule a month’s (or a year’s) worth of social media posts, and automate everything with a tool such as Hootsuite or BuzzSumo among others.

Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing involves actively participating in the customer’s journey from lead acquisition to purchase and beyond.

Many first timers to your businesses aren’t ready to purchase. However, you can turn the tables in your favor by automating lead nurturing – the process of converting a mere visitor to paying customer.

For starters, you must respond to contact requests immediately. If you delay your responses to customer queries for more than 30 minutes, you are 23X more likely to lose leads left, right and center.

What to do? Automate the contact process. How? Automate email/SMS responses that are sent out as soon as the visitor contacts your business.

As soon as you send out the canned response, automatically assign the lead to a sales rep who then follows up immediately. The prospect appreciates the fast response times, and you smile all the way to the bank.

Additionally, you can incorporate an automatic system that helps you to master phone calls. Such a system allows you to win leads you’d have otherwise lost due to phone tag.

On top of that, follow up with networking connections to generate more leads. However, following up manually can cost you a lot of time. You can automate the whole process, so you can follow up on prospective customers while saving time.

You can automate lead nurturing using a combination of tools such as email marketing, LeadSquared, Zapier and so on.

Sales Automation

Netting that one elusive sale doesn’t end with lead nurturing. Once you or your team has qualified a lead, it’s time to move on to the next phase; closing the deal. But inefficiencies can arise and kill the sale when you’re so close.

Your best bet is to automate the sales pipeline. There are couple of stages involved in closing the sale, and the fewer problems you have in the workflow, the better your bottom line.

A typical sales pipeline involves four main stages namely:

  • Identifying the new opportunity harnessed via lead nurturing
  • First contact when you or your sale representatives contact the prospect
  • Engagement, where your team finds out the prospect’s needs
  • Qualification, when the sales representative goes full throttle and closes the deal

To avoid problems, it’s best to automate the sales pipeline, such that the sales team focuses entirely on the hottest leads, without wasting time on trivialities.

With a great sales automation strategy in place, your sales team can move the lead from stage to the next without any hiccups, saving you plenty of time and money.

On top of that, you should also engage with interested leads who are not ready to buy yet. With a little automated persuasion, you can convince such leads to make the leap and become a customer.

Other than that, always welcome your new customers with automated welcome emails/SMS/phone calls. A huge chunk of customers loves welcome emails, and if you do your homework, you can even score repeat business automatically without trying hard on your part.

For sales automation tools, we recommend EngageBay sales CRM, Pardot, Hubspot Sales, and Keap (formerly InfusionSoft) among others.

Office Operations

Daily office operations can take a lot of time. On top of that, many stores don’t carry out next-day tasks, which results in huge losses. The best scenario for all businesses is to boost employee engagement and productivity.
And did you know you can leverage the power of automation to boost employee engagement, productivity and achieve consistent store execution? That’s right, you can automate plenty of instore tasks to save time and money, boost employee morale and promote effective customer service.

You can easily automate tasks such as office communication with a tool such as RetailZipline. Additionally, you can use the same tool to automate sending and receiving of important documents, set up daily task checklists, and foster store participation via surveys.

Other than that, you can automate inventory tracking (you can use Zoho Inventory), job applications, employee onboarding (you can use RetailZipline) and so much more.

Other Areas

You can further automate areas such as:

  • Events such as instore sales or networking events
  • Ecommerce including tasks such as recovering abandoned carts, updating credit card numbers, generating repeat business, etc.
  • Customer service such as making it easier for customers to seek help, gauging client satisfaction, asking for referrals by offering small gifts e.g. coupons, remembering client birthdays, and cleaning your email lists among others

Conclusion

Task automation can save you a lot of headaches, time and money. Provided you know the right strategy and tools to use, you can easily automate your business.

As a store manager, HQ or district leader, it is important to invest in task automation to take your business to the next level.

Have concerns, suggestions, favorite tools or questions? Please share in the comments. Cheers to happy automating.

How a smarter phone system equates to safer spending for any business

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Phone System|How a smarter phone system equates to safer spending for any businessThe phones your business uses may be a central tenet of your operations, or they may barely even register as an after-thought. However, in every modern business it is an advantage to be able to have a proper conversation over the phone with someone at a distance. And for every business, therefore, it can be worth considering investing in a smarter phone system.

Smart telephone systems can look like an unnecessary upfront cost, but there are several reasons why upgrading your phone systems can represent an absolutely solid investment which will offer savings in the long term for any kind of business. Read on for our guide to the advantages to smarter phone systems.

How can you make your phone system smarter?

Smarter phone systems can reduce your costs and remove several different administrative needs. If you currently have to pay for both landline and mobile office phones, with confusing contracts, it can make sense to move to a service which is hosted on the cloud. While most of us associate “the cloud” exclusively with computing needs, such as file and image storage, the term more generally refers to secure, supported services provided in real time over the internet. The most commonly known effect of any cloud service is to save on server space and ease pressure on I.T. requirements at your office space.

It is possible, however, to have your phone services provided over the cloud as well. This would mean that all your business’ official phones would run on a single contract, and this also avoids the hidden costs of on-premise PBX network. This can be a particular advantage if your business is split across multiple locations, as it avoids the need for either expensive landline options or two different on-premise PBX systems.

How to upgrade your phone system

To upgrade your system, you need only look online. If you choose a cloud phone system by Gamma then you will be able to tailor your package to your company’s needs and size. One advantage here is a system which is compatible with a wide variety of phone handsets and headsets. With an app interface and administrative settings manageable from a mobile, your employees and freelancers have greater flexibility to work from home.

This freedom for employees to work from home while retaining access to their work phone and documents allows for a clearer relationship between management and home workers. This can allow for a greater level of telecommuting from your staff. In turn, this can have positive effects on your business’ carbon footprint and lead to increased productivity in cases where the reduction in commuting time has a positive effect on the mental and physical health of your employees.

The flexibility to increase telecommuting offers up whole new realms of possibility for reducing spending and reducing the amount of office space you need. When this is combined with the savings possible from being free of the costs of landline or on-premise PBX systems, choosing smarter phone systems is clearly the way forward.

Seven Ways To Prepare Your Business For Expansion

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Business Expansion|Seven Ways To Prepare Your Business For ExpansionKnowing when and how to take your business to the next level is an important skill for any business owner, whether you own a startup or a nationally recognised company. If you’re successful in your current market but feel like you need more of a challenge, expanding nationally or internationally needs careful strategy planning. Put your business through these top tips to get it expansion ready.

  1. Set attainable goals for your business. Make sure these goals are specific and measurable, such as taking on five new accounts by the end of the financial year, or increasing revenue by $1million in the next six months. Goals you can measure can be tracked so you know if you’re on track to meet target or if you’ll need to push harder to reach them. Set out a plan. How will you get from your current position to the goal?
  2. Can your company manage the growth? Do you have the capacity to manage the planned growth? Can you afford it? Do you have enough staff or will you need to bring in more? Can your suppliers meet a higher demand? Is your office large enough to cope with more staff? Make sure the answer to all these questions is yes before you start to grow.
  3. Do you have the right management in place? You need someone at the reins who is ambitious, driven and capable of taking your business into a larger market. Like Tully Rinckey, consider bringing in a new CEO or other management who can help you to grow. Look for people with experience in growing business who can advise and steer the ship successfully.
  4. Don’t be afraid to adjust the plans. You’ll inevitably learn more as your business grows. The industry may change, or the market may shift direction. Be ready to respond and adjust targets and plans to get there if you need to. There’s no point in sticking hard to a goal that is no longer relevant. It’s important to be flexible.
  5. Be realistic about your company. Are you already established in your field and working successfully? If not, don’t try to grow too early. Focus instead on becoming an established recognised name at your level. Growing too fast won’t help you at all. Is there a demand for what you do? You can’t grow if there’s not enough demand for your business. Some businesses just work better small, and that doesn’t mean you’ve failed.
  6. Does your company owe money? Debt can snowball easily, so before concentrating on expansion try to clear or pay down as much debt as you can. A fresh slate will make growth much easier. A debt snowball method can help you to cut down your debts easily.
  7. Are you already growing? If you’re experiencing steady growth each year, with an increase in demand for your business, this is an excellent sign that it’s time to take things up a notch. Expand with more staff to take on a higher demand for your work and keep things profitable. If you’re not growing, it’s probably not the right time to expand.