Many factors can make or break your business, including scaling your operations towards growth. At some point in your business demand could rise rapidly resulting in a sharp spike in sales. Of course, this scenario is good news for every entrepreneur. Still, it can also spell doom for you if orders begin to fall through the cracks because of poor communication, insufficient staff, or inadequate production capacity. But before you jump in full force, you need to consider capacity and capability among other critical factors. Listed here are some keys to successfully scaling your business.
Plan your success
Scaling in business is when a company is leveraging resources and increasing revenue.
Before you scale your operations, you need to plan your growth in that regard and set goals. How big do you want to grow, and what does success look like for your business? Also, set milestones for your business and a time frame for you to hit them. Remember, these plans and targets must be realistic, and the strategies set out to achieve them must be concrete. You should cover what your business offers and if your market is ready for expansion because scaling a marketing agency is different from expanding a restaurant.
Check your finances
You should have an in-depth understanding of your finances. You can involve third parties to handle research and hire a competent team to help you do that. What are the short and long-term funding requirements you need to execute your strategy? Are you sure about the source of funding?
Housekeeping
As you expand, it should be central to your company to find updated customer contacts, and you might need a reliable CRM tool to help. There are other important questions you will need to answer. For example, will you be able to process salaries in a timely and efficient manner? And can your system scale to match a bigger team? Are your accounts up-to-date and accurate? Do you have tools and resources to keep it that way as you scale?
Your apps will not magically become efficient as you scale, so you will still have the same problems you have now. Do all these checks so your business will have a good foundation as you scale operations. You will also need to consider if your business is in a conducive location to accommodate the expansion? If you are expanding your team, is your office space and enough budget for this?
Your employees
As you scale your operations, you’ll probably need to hire more employees and bring specialists for critical positions. You cannot be right or wrong in the way you scale your team, but it is something you may not be able to avoid. Do not be in a hurry to hire because it may lead to even faster layoffs. Also, your brand may suffer, and it may affect team performance and cause financial instability.
Growth can mean huge profits or unhappy customers due to low delivery capacity. What makes the difference is how you do it. These tips are helpful, but you should find solutions that are tailor-made for your business.
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Running a successful business is hard work, not least in the post-pandemic era. Consequently, then, the need to avoid the threat of wasting your resources is greater than ever. Otherwise, you may find yourself in a seriously damaging situation.
Here are five simple steps to avoiding waste in the key areas of operation. Getting them right won’t suddenly guarantee success, but it will certainly boost your chances.
1. Implement Operational Analysis
Most business owners like to think that their operations run smoothly. In reality, almost all companies could do better. The Overall Equipment Effectiveness method is a very powerful tool. It can lead your business to greater success by improving production speeds and accuracy. All companies now rely on machinery like never before. So, you simply cannot afford to fall into the trap of assuming everything is perfect.
With the right analysis model in place, you can quickly correct any shortcomings.
2. Seeking Value For Money
In business, you will inevitably make a wide range of purchases. From materials to services needed to support the operations, it’s imperative that you get the best value for money. Getting a better deal on electricity, insurance, packaging supplies, and IT support can yield big savings. In turn, this will remove the pressure to generate more sales or charge larger prices. In turn, this can only put you in a stronger position.
Just be sure to remember that ‘cheap’ doesn’t always mean ‘value’.
3. Fully Utilize All Available Space
When looking at overheads, the commercial property rentals or purchases will naturally sit at the very top of the list. As such, it’s imperative that you learn to make the most of it. Click here to learn more about the best storage solutions for warehouses, store floors, and factories alike. On a side note, you may wish to consider outsourcing some jobs as this will conserve valuable room for other tasks. IT and customer care are two common options.
When you make the spaces work harder, it can save you from premature expansions.
4. Know Your Audience
Building a customer base is a difficult but very rewarding task. While every entrepreneur knows that they must spend money to make money, you can’t fall into the trap of simply throwing money at it. The harsh reality is that a lot of demographics won’t be interested. Identifying your place in the market allows you to prevent marketing budgets being spent on the wrong people. As such, conversions should soar even with reduced spending.
Better still, you’ll find it a lot easier to work out which marketing plans have worked.
5. Tax Requirements
Meeting financial obligations is non-negotiable. However, many entrepreneurs make the mistake of doing it in-house. While it may seem like a cost-cutting strategy it’s not. Accountants know where deductions can be made, which will easily cover their fees. You can click here to find business accountants for your firm. When the financial savings are coupled with the fact you can spend more time actually working on the business, it’s a no-brainer.
When time, money, and resources are used in the right way, success will follow.
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Your business must change, and it must grow alongside your customers, marketplace, and industry. Suppose your business does not evolve and change over time. In that case, it will struggle to maintain its place within the industry and within customers’ and clients’ hearts, which could be detrimental to the future success of your business. To ensure that your business does not slide down the slippery slope into oblivion, it is important that you focus on change and growth and that you embrace and nurture it wherever possible.
Why Your Business Needs Change
If your business is to compete and grow, then change is required. You cannot expect to keep going the way you are, not changing a thing and in return, expect to reach new target markets and audiences. You have to be flexible and adaptable to your new target audiences and customers; you have to change to meet new growing market concerns. If you do not adopt change, then you will stay stagnant.
Seeking Adequate Funding
You can go down the route of organic growth, but this can be quite slow and unpredictable, and is this really what you want? Organic growth can be cheap, but cheap isn’t always the best route to take. To get the best results, you will need to seek adequate funding. Having funding in place will allow you to plan your business growth and change and be in control of whatever gets thrown your way. Having adequate funding and finance behind you can ensure that you can reach the new target markets and audiences you want to and, most importantly, need.
Adapting and Moving Forwards
Having a plan for growth and a plan for development is necessary no matter how much funding you are seeking. Understanding where your new markets are and how much cash it will take to reach them is essential for growth success. Having a plan in place also acts as a blueprint to which you can refer in periods of change. Change within business is not always welcome or appreciated, but change happens for a reason, and if you plan to welcome it, then you can be prepared to adopt it no matter how it changes your business.
Why Accurate Reporting is Essential
When you put together a plan for development, it is important that your report contains accurate data. Having all of your information together and collated in one place makes planning and execution a lot easier. Utilizing business intelligence and getting a provider on board to focus on training and consulting is essential if you want to achieve success. Inaccurate, difficult to read, or just downright messy data can put you off growth and change, which is not what you need in an everchanging world.
Staying Focused and Motivated
Driving your business through a period of change and through growth can take a lot out of you as a business owner, so it is important to remain motivated and focused. Keeping in mind what you want to achieve and why will help keep you on the track to success.
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Technology is incredibly important for all of our businesses. No matter what kind of company you run, there’s probably some kind of technology that helps you manage customers, advertise your products and shorten the amount of time you spend on administrative tasks. Sadly, technology can get extremely expensive over time. With many companies switching to a subscription-based business model, it can be difficult to keep track of all the costs of keeping your business up to date.
So here are a few tips to help you approach your technology upgrades with a smarter and more streamlined strategy.
Identify problems before you consider upgrading
First, make sure you identify problems in your workflow before you go spending your company’s money on solutions. It’s extremely important that you take a slow and steady approach when it comes to upgrading your company’s technology, especially if your workflow is already well-defined. Attempting to upgrade portions of your work processes can lead to disaster if you’re not planning it correctly.
While technology can help you innovate, it needs to address a problem or challenge that you’re facing. For example, if you find that your employees are spending too much time on a particular task, then you need to focus on ways to assist your employees to finish said tasks. If you don’t identify a problem before you invest in new technology (or worse, you actively create an issue in order to “buy” a solution for it) then you’re going to end up wasting money and time.
Identify the companies that can help you innovate
It’s a good idea to identify what companies you can work with to help you solve your business challenges. There are some companies that operate at the forefront of technological innovation, constantly producing new products, machines, and software that actively solves challenges that real businesses are facing.
A good example of this would be Blue Iron Foundations & Shoring, LLC. The Giken Silent Piler is their latest machine that enables piling to take place with drastically reduced vibrations and noise. This has allowed construction companies to operate very close to homes without disrupting the neighbourhood. This has helped construction companies garner positive feedback from local communities, and it’s solved a challenge that is currently plaguing many companies in the same industry.
Find consultants that you can trust
One of the issues with hiring a consultant is that they’re often given a bit too much trust. It’s very easy for a consultant to abuse their position by introducing a problem and also suggesting a solution. This is something that entrepreneurs tend to do by accident because they’re not presented with the data that shows a problem in the first place. Instead, they blindly trust their staff or a consultant because they have too much faith in them.
If you’re the one in charge of decision making in your business, then you need to look at the data that points to a problem in your business. From here, you can start making smarter decisions by actually calculating the return on your investment and if it can make your team more productive.
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At this point, pretty much everyone is familiar with artificial intelligence, or AI. Thanks to movies such as The Matrix, Terminator, and well, AI: Artificial Intelligence, most people are aware of the concept of intelligent machines. But although AI is a real and genuine technology, the potential and tangible applications of modern AI advancements are far from what Hollywood movies and novels by authors such as Philip K. Dick would have us believe.
AI is the future’s wave of adaptive learning, which involves utilizing programs to learn from data. As AI learns from the fed data, it advances and becomes more complex, reliable, accurate, and secure. Therefore, AI brings many adaptive learning benefits to education, businesses, and sectors of society. AI paves the way for more machine learning and other AI-related opportunities to drive industries to rapid digital transformation.
In fact, real AI is mostly applied to business development and science projects where data-driven derivatives and goals are the primary focus of a given strategy. In simple terms, AI applications are primarily focused on gathering, analyzing, and sorting data, much like any other computer program. However, where AI is different is in its machine learning capabilities.
What is Machine Learning?
What is machine learning? Well, machine learning is the concept of an AI developing its own repeatable output based on the data analysis from repeated input. For example, Facebook’s machine learning algorithm, DeepText, analyses posts and displays the ones that it thinks you might find interesting based upon your previous post-browsing history.
DeepText isn’t the only machine learning tool that you are exposed to on a daily basis. Netflix’s video suggestions, email spam filters, and even certain video games are all examples of machine learning that you probably use on a daily basis and don’t even realize.
Over the past few years, the power of machine learning and AI has become a viable tool in business development because of the analytical and data processing capabilities of modern hardware and accompanying software tools.
Benefits of AI and Machine Learning
Machine learning algorithms attempt to understand all data, applying learned concepts to new data sets to enhance performance and accuracy. Just imagine the functions and capabilities computer programs can do with these technologies.
Here are the benefits of AI and machine learning:
Businesses can provide excellent customer service
Eliminate manual errors because of precision and accuracy
Automation reduces manual tasks, such as data entry and computation
Improve decision-making with forecasting and real-time reporting
Reduce cybersecurity vulnerabilities and threats
Improve productivity and time management
Companies utilize AI and machine learning to stay competitive. Having the right AI/ML tools in place can help a business reap the above benefits, making an edge to attain goals and objectives for long-term success. But what AI and machine learning tools do you need for your business?
Common AI and Machine Learning Tools
Large corporations such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google apply their own machine learning tools to their own business and have developed consumer-level AI suites for use by other businesses that don’t require knowledge of complicated AI programming and can be used for specific data analysis and modeling.
Some of the most useful AI suites include:
Google Cloud AI
Amazon SageMaker
Microsoft Azure AI
MonkeyLearn
Obviously AI
One of the most robust and technological machine learning tools available, Google AI powers the company’s own algorithms and provides multiple data-driven features while Amazon SageMaker comes as part of the extensive Web Services suite with an ability to perform custom ML datasets, and Azure AI from Microsoft is an impressive suite with many real-world applications as well as analysis.
Two AI tools that aren’t from huge corporations are MonkeyLearn and Obviously AI. MonkeyLearn is a very user-friendly text analysis MLAI and Obviously AI provides natural language analysis for forming predictions based on specific input.
Google Cloud AI
Launched in 2008, Google Cloud AI is mainly a compounding structure for integrating the useful features of cloud computing into a single, manageable platform with Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) options for secure cloud services. However, the system also provides feature-rich machine learning tools as standard that can be utilized in a variety of ways.
One of the most powerful AI and ML systems available, Google AI prides itself on being able to take under-researched problems and find solid, scientific solutions that advance the state-of-the-art in the field. Google also has a mission to make its AI system available to everyone and apply the technology to solve some of the world’s most pressing humanitarian and environmental issues.
The suite comes with many impressive AI applications that you can integrate directly into your deployment and productivity pipeline almost immediately:
Contact Center AI; allows you to automate your call center interactions with customers.
Documents AI: can read and extract data from your documents with algorithms that can look for fraud, data entry errors or receipt mistakes.
Recommendations AI: can deliver personalized recommendations for each of your customers based on their previous interactions.
Amazon SageMaker
Part of Amazon Web Services, SageMaker provides multiple machine learning bindings for some of the most widely used and powerful programming languages available such as Python, Ruby, and Java which allows the creation of custom datasets and algorithms in addition to an impressive collection of preexisting ML systems that can also be incorporated into cloud computing.
One of the most impressive features of SageMaker is its support for other ML platforms with which it can integrate for even more productivity and increased workflow. Google Brain’s open-source platform TensorFlow is compatible with SageMaker as is Tableau. Both of these are focused on business intelligence and deep learning with traditional ML at their core.
SageMaker is one of the most powerful, scalable ML platforms available with many useful features:
Clarify; reduces bias in ML that could help you find suitable employee candidates or customers.
FeatureStore; allows you to select from multiple pre-existing feature groups that can be applied to your specific requirement model.
Data Wrangler; this allows you to manipulate and convert data from one type to another, useful for such things as data modeling, calculation, and visualization.
Microsoft Azure AI
As the world’s leading software manufacturer, Microsoft is no stranger to complex data and advanced programming such as AI and ML. Also a cloud compounding service, Azure AI provides SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS capabilities with support for many of the best and most flexible programming languages available, along with their frameworks, with the suite’s emphasis being on software development by utilizing data sets, storage, and management features.
The business applications of Azure are impressive and the platform has been built from the ground up to accommodate business processes that accelerate development and rapid deployment in scalable, automated, and reproducible ML scenarios using specific data, models, and processes.
While most other ML platforms can be used for a broad range of applications, Azure AI is laser-focused on business development strategy:
Video Analyzer; allows you to obtain real-time analytics from played and streamed videos.
Azure Cognitive Search; add feature-rich data sets to your search functions such as autocomplete, geospatial filtering, and keyphrase extraction.
Adaptive Machine Learning; user friendly interface with advanced features allows you to develop ML scenarios with either beginner or expert knowledge.
MonkeyLearn
One of the best Software-as-a-Service machine learning tools around, MonkeyLearn provides a feature-rich set of machine learning capabilities at a low cost that can provide useful insights for any business, but is especially popular with small to medium-sized businesses as one of its best features is that no coding is required.
Using MonkeyLearn’s user-friendly interface, you can develop topic-specific models for ML datasets such as keyword extraction, text to tag conversion and text classification features such as sentiment analysis, topic labeling and intent detection; true machine learning that can boost the productivity of any data-dependent business.
Some of the most useful features of MonkeyLearn include:
Text Extraction; analyzes data so you can pick out features, keywords, or entities such as “14” screen size”, “free delivery”, or “Disney”, respectively, for example.
Text Classifiers; analyses data so you can classify text according to a topic, intent, or sentiment.
Integration; MonkeyLearn can further increase your ML capabilities by integrating with other popular programs such as ZenDesk, Google and MS Office, and Rapidminer.
Obviously AI
Another excellent machine learning application, Obviously AI uses natural language processing as a means of producing prediction models based upon specific input datasets. The platform requires no programming and operates via a user-friendly point and click interface in order to upload data and model a scenario for prediction with naturally written questions.
The MLAI then works to predict a specific outcome based upon the questions input and a predefined prediction column, then it can accurately model such things as revenue forecasts, lead conversions, and loan repayment probabilities in minutes, saving both time and money.
Basic on the surface, but extremely complex at the core, Obviously AI’s best features include:
Complex Models; the app comes with built-in models that you can use right away for predictions.
Ease of Use; the intuitive and user-friendly UI facilitates high-level machine learning with no expert knowledge of coding.
Business-Boosting ROI; predictions with the app allow you to make informed decisions that can increase sales, detect fraud, or estimate paywalls and customer willingness to pay.
A Binary Decision?
It is pretty clear that machine learning and AI are driving the future of many industries, with large corporations at the wheel. Google, Amazon and Microsoft are empowering businesses of all sizes and across all sectors to advance their strategies with the inclusion of AI analytics, automation and prediction models.
The capabilities of AI and machine learning seem almost limitless and from a business perspective are able to extremely reduce the amount of man hours and, therefore, finances required to perform specific actions such as document analysis, categorizations and data extraction.
As AI and machine learning become more prevalent throughout all business sectors, one should ponder the questions; where does this leave the necessity of the human mind and what will be the human cost of such technological innovation?
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Many factors can make or break your business, including scaling your operations towards growth. At some point in your business demand could rise rapidly resulting in a sharp spike in sales. Of course, this scenario is good news for every entrepreneur. Still, it can also spell doom for you if orders begin to fall through the cracks because of poor communication, insufficient staff, or inadequate production capacity. But before you jump in full force, you need to consider capacity and capability among other critical factors. Listed here are some keys to successfully scaling your business.
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