When Should Your Business Outsource Expert Advice?

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Outsourcing|When Should Your Business Outsource Expert Advice?Sometimes in business it’s useful to call upon expert advice rather than trusting your instincts. You can hire advisors for pretty much anything, but there are a few times in particular when such advice can be valuable. Here are just a few key times to seek advice.

Handling complex legal matters

Business law can be complex and that can be times when its worth getting advice to ensure that your company is meeting all the legal requirements that it should be. Advice may also be necessary when putting legal defence measures in places such as trademarks and health and safety measures, as well as making claims against other people. You can use sites like Lawbite to find a legal advisor suited to your cause.

Making difficult financial decisions

There may be times in business when you need to make difficult financial decisions. This could include finding ways to cut costs or searching for ways to find extra funding. Financial advisors can be useful to call upon in these situations and may know the best route to take in order to save you money. They may also be able to help you get out of business debt. There are many firms out there such as like Sterling & Law that specialise in giving financial advice to businesses.

Solving tech issues

Modern businesses are very reliant on technology. When this technology fails, expert advice if often needed – especially in the case of viruses and bugs. Outsourcing IT support via a company such as Frontline could help to keep your business protected. Such companies are able to offer support remotely so that you don’t have to wait for an IT technician to come out to your office.

Taking on your first employees

The decision to hire your first employees is a big step and requires putting in place multiple measures. This includes having a payroll system, adequate health and safety, insurance and the ability to afford their wages and other legally entitled benefits. Companies like BrightHR can help you with this, guiding you through all the requirements that you need to meet before you hire your first recruit. HR services may also be able to help with other employment-related queries.

Improving your marketing

Many forms of marketing can be DIYed, but sometimes it’s useful to seek some professional advice to ensure that you’re going about it the right way. Marketing consultants may be able to help you identify your target audience and the best ways of reaching them. They may also be able to help you work within a budget. Companies like Red Sky Strategy specialise in giving out marketing advice that is specialised to each client. Other companies may be able to offer specific advice catered to certain marketing strategies such as SEO or social media marketing.

How to Make Your Office Safer For Everyone

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Office Safety|How to Make Your Office Safer For EveryoneSome company bosses think that their main priority is making a profit, or to their customers, but both of these approaches are wrong. The first is making sure that the staff are happy and safe. It doesn’t take long to tell the difference between a company that values its staff, and one that doesn’t. A big part of this is making sure that they’re able to work safely. Maintaining your health and safety standards may not be the most glamorous aspect of running a company, but it is important. Below, we take a look at a few ways you can make sure your office is safer for everyone.

Assess the Dangers

Before you can see how to protect your staff better, you need to figure out what you’re protecting them from. If it’s been some time since you’ve given much thought to your health and safety, take a look at your office, and identify anything that could be dangerous. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, then hire an outside expert to perform an assessment for you. Once you know the threats, you can reduce the chances of them happening.

If Something Goes Wrong

Though you can reduce the chances of something going wrong at your office, you can never get rid of the threat altogether. There’s always a chance that something dangerous will pass, such as a fire. While you can’t always control what happens, you can control how you respond. If you’ve trained your staff of what they should do in case of a fire, and have smoke curtains for buildings installed, then you’ll significantly reduce the chance of harm. You’ll want to hold training sessions with your staff every few months so that everyone is fully informed of what they should do.

Long-Term Health

It’s important to keep in mind that the dangers of working in an office aren’t always immediate. An office worker’s health can be compromised over a long period. For example, if they’re sitting too long, and using the computer too much, then they could end up with back and eyesight problems. As a responsible boss, it’s up to you to ensure that the health of your staff isn’t harmed just when they’re doing their job. Look at installing sit/stand desks at your office, and encourage workers to take a ten-minute break from the computer every hour.

Additional Training

Even with all the best intentions, it’s always possible that something happens in the office that affects a worker’s health. You can make your worksite extra safe by offering training to all of your team. If they know the basics of first aid and psychological help, they’ll be able to help a worker who has injured themselves or who may be suffering from burnout. The latter is especially important; office work can take a mental toll on a person. If you train your workers to spot the signs that another worker may be suffering at work, then you’ll be helping to ensure your office is a happier and healthier place.

The Importance of Business Intelligence Software and Why It’s Integral for Business Success

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StrategyDriven Tactical Execution Article | The Importance of Business Intelligence Software and Why It’s Integral for Business SuccessIn the digital-first, customer-centric world we live in today, managers and business owners must deal with information overload. That is the reason why they are always looking for ways to derive greater intelligence, control, and understanding from their data. Adopting a business intelligence (BI) strategy is one of the best ways to deal with this problem, but most organizations have been slow to integrate it within their business systems. This is mainly down to a lack of knowledge, as businesses still don’t know, where to start, what it involves, and how long it’ll take for them to see any benefits.

There’s no denying that business intelligence software is crucial in helping organizations make reliable and timely decisions about their operations. It ensures that the business can access reliable information and make insightful decisions by reacting in real time. Business intelligence software has played a major role in helping organizations meet their challenges like narrowing margins, high customer expectations, and global competition.

Most businesses are still using traditional methods, which makes it harder for them to make decisions, as the information is stored in separate applications and databases. How quickly and accurately a company responds in this technology-driven competitive market is the main difference between success and failure. Business intelligence technologies have several functions that improve their performance, and one of them is reporting. It plays a key role in business intelligence, as it allows the decision makers of the enterprise to support their work. The discovery of essential data patterns (analytics) is also done through reporting, which is another key role of business intelligence.

Some of the standard functions of business intelligence technologies include predictive and prescriptive analysis, business performance management, text mining, benchmarking, and online analytic processing. Business intelligence refers to the application, tools, and good practices that are used to access and analyze data to optimize or improve the performance of the business. It converts raw data into relevant information that enables tactical and strategic insights to make effective decisions.

Business intelligence software is a technological process, which collects and processes data to attain actionable information. It allows users to acquire information quickly and transfer them to the proper personnel to make the right decision. Business intelligence tools have been around for a long time, but it was only accessible to large enterprise, who had the infrastructure and resources to implement this technology.

However, thanks to the advancement of technology, even small enterprises now can access business intelligence software through cloud computing.

The Main Benefits of Business Intelligence Software

Any organization that wants to remain relevant in the competitive market of today must adapt fast and real-time integration of business intelligence software. Most organizations today have changed their modes of operation so they can adapt to modern business intelligence technologies. However, there are still plenty of organizations that are under the assumption that business intelligence software isn’t user-friendly and is complicated.

That’s a misconception about business intelligence software since it is user-friendly and can be adopted quickly by an organization, while it ensures maximum profitability by smoothing the decision-making process. Businesses that have adopted this technology in their systems are thriving in all the challenges they are facing at any stage of their projects. Business intelligence software also allows small and medium-sized enterprises to reduce their cost of operations by identifying areas that have higher costs of expenses and finding measures to reduce them.

The best thing about business intelligence software is that it allows businesses to have agile operations and is often the difference between operating on profits or losses. To give you a better idea, we are going to discuss some of the main benefits offered by business intelligence software:

1. Better Business Decisions

When a business adopts business intelligence software, its management can easily identify all the financial and customer data, production data, current data, and business aspects of the organization. This information will allow the management to synthesize and analyze the products and investment reports, which will help them make better business decisions that benefit the organization.

2. Enables Faster and Accurate Planning, Reporting, and Analysis

Business intelligence software offers real-time information, which helps it provide accurate reporting solutions as it can connect with an extensive range of data. The software can plan and analyze informed business solutions, which reduce potential risks and allow a business to achieve faster growth. Not only that, software solutions like Conexiom can import unstructured data from multiple sources into your system of records streamlining your workflow and improving efficiency. 

3. Enhanced Speed of Decision-Making

Business intelligence software not only helps businesses make better decisions but also helps increase their decision-making speed as well. Without business intelligence software, an organization will be spending a lot of time implementing decisions, since they’ll need to cover business aspects one by one before making any decision. This is a time-consuming process, and with business intelligence software you cut down on the speed of decision-making.

4. Increased Business User Satisfaction

There is increased user satisfaction for the software because business intelligence offers better decision-making, reporting, and accurate analysis. It helps the business maximize its limited resources by using cost-effective solutions that allow business growth and enhance user satisfaction.

5. Customer Behavior Insights

Business intelligence software holds the key for identifying customer behavior patterns, as it determines customer responses and helps the business achieve market profitability by helping it retain customers and attract new clients.

6. Accurate Decision-Making

The best part about the business intelligence software is that it not only allows real-time decision-making but also enables accurate decisions to be made that will benefit the business. For instance, if your competitor decides to reduce the prices of their products, you’ll need to come up with a counter price for your product that is lower or similar. This decision will take some time to be implemented, as you’ll need to determine the impact of your profits after the price reduction. However, when you’re using business intelligence software, you get rapid and informed decisions that allow your business to stay on top of its game.

7. Increased Collaboration between Business & IT Units

Business intelligence software and systems have enabled growth collaborations between IT and business units. Any organization that aims to grow its operation must ensure that its business and IT units are working together, and this can be achieved easily with business intelligence software.

8. Offer Personalized Services

Business intelligence software is user-friendly and comes with a feature that personalizes information or data by making it easier to use and understand. The feature also ensures smoother collaboration between users in the organization and ensures a smoother transfer of data.

9. Track KPIs with Notifications and Alerts

The business intelligence software tracks the KPI by evaluating the current status and metric value against a target using specific measures that will send alerts to the user. These notifications allow users to come up with the right solutions or measures.

10. Identify Opportunities for Revenue

Revenue growth is essential to all organizations, and it is one of the main purposes of business intelligence software. Finding new revenue opportunities opens new doors for business and allows it to thrive and transform its operations. The software analyzes marketing strategies and campaigns to create important reports and insights on the best sources of high returns on investment.

11. Reduced Cost

Enterprises that struggle to sort out their financial statements are going to struggle in the long-run, and that is where business intelligence software plays such a major role. It helps find areas where the organization can cut down its costs, and the software helps to collect raw data on areas where there are high expenses and provides solutions to bring them down.

12. Better Operational Efficiency

Every business is striving to improve its operations, as it helps them take the next step in their development. However, to do that, businesses must monitor and measure their performance, and business intelligence software helps businesses come up with different activities that help drive business success. The software covers highly used metrics like productivity, performance, and employee satisfaction to ensure better operations in the organization.

13. Higher Quality Data

Data comes in all shapes and sizes, and some can be more complicated to understand and operate, which makes it difficult for organizations to take advantage of data-driven insights. There is a data visualization tool in business intelligence software, which allows for easier recognition of data. This feature is incredibly useful since it allows data to be converted into a better method or quality, which can be easily accessed.

14. Create a Data Culture in the Organization

A lot of organizations are guilty of data clustering, which leads to data manipulation and data loss. Business intelligence software is extremely useful when it comes to handling the data of a business since it allows easy collaboration and communications among members whenever data is updated. Users can also track data and its changes since notifications are sent to everyone.

15. Self-Service Culture

One of the biggest things about business intelligence software is that it promotes a culture of self-service in the business. Users can easily access data and easily manage it even if they aren’t familiar with the statistical analytics. Adding, creating, and manipulating data is easy, and this ensures cooperation between the different departments in the business.

5 Steps To A Running A Better Business

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Running a Business|5 Steps To A Running A Better BusinessBeing a business owner is a great career to have, but the position can also be stressful and overwhelming at times. What will help you succeed is if you don’t ever get too comfortable in one place and are always striving to better yourself and your business.

The five steps below will give you more insight into what you can be doing on a regular basis to improve your office environment and run a smoother operation overall. Set goals and track your progress so you can see what changes are working well and what you should be doing more of going forward.

Monitor Your Employee’s Actions

Ultimately, what goes on under the roof of your business is your responsibility and people will be turning to you for answers on all sorts of matters. Take the time not only to get to know your employees on a personal and individual basis but also be proactive and continuously monitor your employee’s actions. Should you suspect criminal activity in your office, then contact a local law firm that can help you win your case and prosecute the offender.

Track Your Finances

How successful your business is over the long-term essentially depends on how profitable you are or not. Be aware of what money is going out and coming in by consistently tracking and monitoring your finances. What you want to avoid is encountering surprises when it comes to your money and budgets. You may even want to consider hiring a financial director to help you with this task if you’re too busy attending to other important matters.

Find A Partner or Mentor

You can run a better business by bouncing ideas off of other people who you trust. One option is to hire a partner to help you run your company or a mentor who can advise you on how to approach your future. Keep in mind you don’t have to do all the work yourself and that sometimes having an outside or different perspective can be helpful.

Delegate out Tasks

One way to free up some of your time so you can focus on the more important and higher level business initiatives is to learn how to delegate tasks to your employees. What’s most important is that you trust them to get the job done right and avoid micromanaging them and acting like you don’t think they can handle the assignment you give them. You’ll be able to run a better business when the work is evenly distributed to the appropriate people based on skill level.

Request Information in Writing

While it’s okay to make verbal deals, it’s essentially not a done deal until you have it in writing. Get in the habit of documenting all that goes on with your business, vendors, and clients, so you always have records of your conversations and contracts. You will be able to run a better business when you’re wise about making sure all that is said on any given day is written down, especially if it’s important to you and how your business functions.

Taking Care of Your Small Business’ Tech

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Business Tech|Taking Care of Your Small Businesses' TechNowadays, we are becoming increasingly dependent on technology. In our day to day lives, we use it to communicate with our loved ones, schedule our lives, and find answers to pretty much any question that pops into our head – to name just a few tasks. Business, in a similar way, are incorporating increasing amounts of tech into their functioning. Many workers spend most of their day behind a computer, laptop, tablet or smartphone screen to get all the necessary facets of their work complete. We use it to communicate with customers, clients, and our target demographic too. So, it’s extremely important that you ensure your small business’ tech is up and running at all times. Without it, work wouldn’t get done and you could lose out on significant profits. So, here are a few things that you can do to keep everything running smoothly!

IT Support

Every small business should have IT support of some sort. IT workers can survey your systems, making sure everything is ticking over properly. They can monitor your tech and identify any problems that may be in the pipeline, working to eradicate them before they establish themselves. If problems do occur, they can help to rectify them as quickly as possible – minimising disruption to your working day and operations. You may want to have your IT support team in house. This means taking on a team to work within your company and only for your company. But this tends to be the territory of larger businesses who can provide IT support workers with space and a base to operate from. If you’re operating on a smaller scale, you might want to consider outsourcing this work. Reliable companies like ClearFuze Networks, Inc. can take the hard work off your hands, a weight from your shoulders and do the work to an extremely high standard!

Update Software

Make sure to run regular software updates on any of the devices that are being used in your workplace. The majority of us are lazy and are easily tempted into clicking the “ignore” or “remind me in an hour” options when software updates are presented to us. But make the time to update. There are so many benefits that come hand in hand with updating – the updates are there for a reason, not just for the sake of it. You will generally end up with a better version of the software that you are using – it has been improved, may be easier to use, more aesthetically pleasing, or more functional. Software updates can also help you to become less prone to being hacked by individuals with bad intentions. The longer a particular piece of software has been running, the longer people have had to figure it out and try to break into it. If you have the latest version, fewer people are going to be able to break in. So, this is a security measure too!

These are just two different ways to take care of your small business’ tech. They’re simple to implement and will make all of the difference to your business and how it runs. So, take a look into the area today and start making changes!