Essential Tools Coworking Spaces Need To Survive

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Coworking Space|Essential Tools Coworking Spaces Need To SurviveThe business world is changing. More and more professionals have chosen to embrace an independent career, whether as a freelancer or a solo entrepreneur, to reach out to their audience. Similarly, more and more businesses support remote working options and encourage their employees to manage their working hours as and where they see fit. As a result, coworking areas have become a popular alternative to the typical office space. For commercial property managers, launching a coworking space is a fantastic opportunity to tap into the changing work environment.

However, with a variety of choices for remote workers, coworking offices need to be smart about their offering. It takes a lot more than a cozy chair and good WiFi to appeal to the modern workforce.

A user-friendly booking system

You need to think of your coworking service in the same terms as an Airbnb rental property. You never know when the next remote team will need a space to meet and cooperate. That’s precisely because life can be full of unexpected surprises that you need to make it as smooth and easy as possible for your users to book out the space they need.

Taking inspiration from Airbnb, you need a booking platform that lets people manage not only the space they need but also the payments and cancellations in real-time. A smooth booking flow ensures you can make the most of last-minute bookings. Besides, it also helps canceled spaces to be remarketed to future users in a matter of a few clicks.

Customizing equipment for that last-minute client visit

Typically, remote businesses tend to book coworking spaces when they want to organize a meeting with partners and clients. As a result, they want to make sure they can receive their guests in the best possible situation and boost their reputation in the process. While providing meeting rooms is a no-brainer, you also need to consider last-minute branded stationery needs. Remote teams tend to buy their stationery, which means that when employees get together, they’re likely to have an inconsistent arrangement of pens and notebooks. You can help to create a homogeneous impression with a stationary room where they can find everything they need.

Additionally, adding a programmable laser cutter to engrave their logo on the chosen items can bring everything together. If you’re unsure about how cutters work, you can find the reviews of Boss laser here for clarification. You can even make personalized stationary part of your premium package.

StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Coworking Space|Essential Tools Coworking Spaces Need To SurviveA high-quality coffee machine that everybody can use

You can’t picture an office space without a cup of coffee. If you are going to retain your clients, you need to invest in a quality coffee machine that can be set to make everybody the perfect brew. What does it matter?

Ultimately, remote teams are known to choose coffee shops as a working base, so providing high-quality brew will ensure they don’t ditch you for a local Starbucks’ or any other coffee chain with good WiFi.

Attracting remote businesses and entrepreneurs is no easy task for coworking companies. Building a working space that suits people’s needs is crucial to create a list of loyal and returning clients. More importantly, once you’ve set the basics – WiFi, furniture, decor, etc. –, you need to think outside the box to become the indispensable partner of remote workers’ success.

Ways to get your business off the ground this year

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Get your business off the ground|Ways to get your business off the ground this yearGetting your business to a point where you feel completely comfortable with its level of success can be quite difficult. Establishing a consistent turnover is a relief for any business owner, and it can be particularly hard to achieve at the start of your business’ life. Getting your company off the ground takes a business plan that is carefully thought through and is flexible enough to change as you hit bumps in the road along the way.

Loans

The reality for many businesses is that some big investments will require a business loan. New machinery or facilities that would aid your company’s growth can be incredibly pricey, and sometimes it is just more effective to pay off the full cost in gradual instalments. Loan brokers such as ONYX Finance, which specialize in financing commercial businesses are always the best institutions as they come armed with plenty of expertise.

Support

You may be surprised by how many local business services there are for companies who are just starting out. Contacting an agency that supports local businesses, particularly start-ups, could give you some much-needed advice. It’s not always easy to contact other like-minded businesses, and local resources and fairs are a great way to network and find information.

Promotion

If your marketing and promotional strategies are lacking, then now is the time to have a bit of a reformation. Unfortunately, when you’re starting out, there’s no room for retiring and shy wallflowers. As well as social media, a website and a recognizable brand, you must promote your company effectively. You can even try quirky ways of promoting yourself, such as having a company car that has your business logo wrapped on it. These somewhat guerrilla methods of promoting your company are sometimes surprisingly effective.

Upselling

If you have ever been out for dinner, and the waiting staff have asked you if you are interested in purchasing a deal that gets you slightly more for your buck, then this is upselling. It’s possible to do this in any business: you’re just making customers aware of what other products you have to offer. This encourages customers to purchase more, which is ultimately what you need to get your business up and running. Be careful not to cross the line into pushy territory, as this could put customers off.

Reward

Incentives for customers to come back and use you again is key for encouraging loyalty. It’s this loyalty that will inspire word of mouth and help to aid the promotion of your company. It’s a competitive world in business, and you will need something appealing to hook in clients. Give them a reason to return to you again: a discount or freebee is the most common route.

If you want to get your business off the ground, then the safest route is to get advice. The best way to know how to succeed is to know what not to do. You can find this out by chatting to other companies and working with local business support services.

Why Companies Hire an External Consultant to Help Them

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |external consultant|Why Companies Hire an External Consultant to Help ThemMany companies hire consultants but how widespread is the practice?  The consulting market across the world is valued at 262 billion dollars.

Are you trying to figure out why companies hire an external consultant? Read on to learn how consulting professionals can help your business.

Expert Advice

Do you ever have problems that seem beyond your experience? Perhaps they’re not unique to your business. They’re outside of your area of expertise.

There will be a consultant that’s solved that problem before and can offer you the benefit of their expert advice. It needn’t be a major project or a long term relationship.

For example, you might have a small technical problem with Office 365. You need someone who can advise on products from Microsoft pay now and get it fixed quickly.

Specialized skills are expensive to develop in-house and you might only need them occasionally. Better to buy the expertise in when you need it and reserve your investment for core activities.

Change of Perspective

An external perspective can be very helpful sometimes. When you and your team are too close to a situation it’s difficult to see the wood from the trees. A fresh external perspective can often help to see things that you don’t see.

One reason why this phenomenon occurs is that being involved in the day to day running of the organization encourages feelings of attachment. The emotional connection tends to limit how you see the possibilities available to you. An external consultant has no such limitations and is open to different perspectives.

Wider Experience

An external consultant that works with several companies in an industry can bring their wider experience to your business. Your problems may have been faced and solved by other companies in your industry. A consultant can share industry best practices with you.

A consultant may also be able to identify ways in which you can gain a competitive advantage. Their industry experience may help them see opportunities for your business that you could never know about unless you had worked for other industry players.

New Life

Have you ever felt like your team needs some inspiration? The same people, facing the same problems in the same old ways. It can be depressingly predictable that they will get the same poor results.

A new team member, even if it’s for a short period of time, can re-energize the team. An external consultant can bring a breath of fresh air and excite everybody. Newly motivated, the team can go on to achieve much more than you expect.

Support the Team

Sometimes your team has an increase in workload and pressure that it can’t cope with. It’s time to draft in some help but recruiting more people is expensive and slow.

New, directly employed team members might be able to fill the gap but what do you do when the crisis is over? You might have to let them go. That can be difficult to do, de-motivating for your existing people and bad for your reputation as an employer.

You don’t always need a long-term increase in the team’s resources. It may be that you just need an extra pair of hands to help support the team through a temporary crisis. Time to draft in an external consultant.

External Consultant’s Connections

External consultants typically work for a series of clients or even a number of clients simultaneously. This means they develop a network of connections. These relationships may be very valuable to you.

The consultant’s connections may give you access to potential new customers. It may provide you with new suppliers that may be better than the ones you have. These connections could be your connections too as part of the consultant’s services.


Change Management

Change is a constant reality but it’s no less of a headache for that. External consultants are very helpful agents of change. They can identify the need for change, manage the change program or support the change.

Because an external consultant has not worked in the organization for some time, they are limited by the natural resistance to change that many people have. The status quo has no merit for them. They are psychologically free to make the change happen and get help others to do so too.

Independent Party

Any organization has politics going on all the time. Vested interests and personal power plays may at best limit thinking. At worst it can sabotage the corporate strategy.

The objectivity a consultant can bring to the company can help business decisions break out of petty politics. An independent consultant can elicit more truthful feedback from stakeholders such as employees or customers if they feel that their views are being handled independently.

Take the Pain

Some situations in business life can be painful. “Downsizing” or “letting people go” are sanitized terms for what can be unpleasant for the people involved.

An external person can sometimes handle these situations with both compassion and professional detachment. This may make the process easier for both the people being let go and the people doing the letting go.

Back You Up

When you are making a proposal for a change or project it can sometimes be difficult to get a hearing from the decisionmakers in the company. Sometimes, internal voices don’t have the credibility of external ones.

Have an external consultant run their eyes over the data or the details of a plan. It can provide legitimacy for the proposal that the decision-makers need. It can also be helpful if other parties, such as a bank, want validation for a financial business plan.

Knowledge Transfer

When consultants are hired they aren’t always brought in to do a task. They may be brought in to enable others to do it. This training makes any change sustainable by transferring knowledge from the consultant to the company.

Problem to Solve?

Do you see an opportunity for an external consultant to make a difference to your business? Perhaps there is an opportunity to add value or a problem to solve. An external consultant might make all the difference.
Browse our website for more business tips.

How We Prioritize at Sticker Mule

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article | How We Prioritize at Sticker MuleOrganizations are the sum of their decisions. Those that prioritize well prosper and those that don’t falter. At Sticker Mule, prioritization is the most important thing we do. Our growth accelerates as we prioritized better, but there’s always room to improve.

What prioritization is not

Most literature on prioritization is terrible. It leads you to believe prioritization is about time management or how to use to-do lists. This way of thinking neglects that priorities are what make or break businesses.

Consider that Amazon started as a bookstore in 1994 and grew to $147 million within 3 years. Today they employ 500,000 people who handle $200 billion in revenue. They picked the right projects and grew at an extraordinary pace.

Other retailers had different priorities and either failed or are much smaller. Walmart could be Amazon, but they did not prioritize the Internet and now they are worth half as much.

What prioritization is

Prioritization is picking the right tasks to maximize impact. That means finding high impact tasks and avoiding low impact ones. Usually the highest impact tasks are elusive. We don’t know the highest impact projects we could pursue right now.

Prioritization might sound stressful, but it’s not. Most tasks won’t affect us. Consequently, we shouldn’t stress about the backlog of tasks we “need” to do. We need to keep our minds free to pursue high impact ideas, when they present themselves, by neglecting low impact ones.

Prioritization categories

It’s unproductive to precisely categorize every task, but it’s useful to roughly classify them in your mind. Prioritization improves with practice and thinking about these categories helps us improve.

  • Growth vs. costs – It’s generally better to use our time to grow revenue than reduce costs. Time is finite. Cash isn’t.
  • High vs. low impact – High impact is better, but completing lots of low impact tasks can be worthwhile if we complete them quickly.
  • Enduring vs. temporary – Tasks that provide enduring value are preferable to those that deliver value temporarily.
  • Definite vs. potential – It’s better to pursue improvements with definite benefits than those with potential.
  • Short vs. long term results – Quick wins are preferable, but you can build competitive advantage pursuing ideas that yield results in the long term since others tend to neglect them.
  • Related vs. unrelated tasks – Sometimes related tasks are completed more efficiently when grouped together. For this reason, we often do low impact tasks that pair well with high impact ones.
  • Estimated time to complete – All else equal, tasks that can be completed faster are preferable.

Questions

Ask yourself these questions periodically to improve your ability to prioritize:

  1. What’s the most impactful thing you can work on?
  2. Did you correctly identify the problems you are facing?
  3. Do you know the most important problem to solve next?
  4. Can you replace any planned tasks with better ones?
  5. Can you delete any especially low impact tasks entirely?

Conclusion

We aim to embed a passion for prioritization into our culture. If you think similarly and want to join our global team, we are hiring.

About the Author

Anthony Constantino is the cofounder and CEO of Sticker Mule. A factory guy at heart, Anthony oversees an operation that spans 16 countries in 4 continents with customers including Google, Facebook, Twitter and many of the world’s best brands. He’s determined to make Sticker Mule, already the Internet’s favorite printing company, the absolute best place to work and shop.

Tips For Introducing Automation To Your Business

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Business Automation|Tips For Introducing Automation To Your BusinessAutomation is all over the place in business these days. From things like programming software to help you to complete different tasks that are based on some conditions, you can really increase the speed and efficiency of things. It can massively increase the accuracy of the processes, especially for things like marketing and recruiting. That will then free up some time so you can better focus on some bigger, and more important work to boost and grow the business.

It can seem a little tempting to then dive in and start looking to automate everything. But it can be a good idea to have a plan in place that will help you to make the most of the time and resources that you need, in order to actually automate. It can take some time to set things up, but once it is up and running, it will make it all much simpler.

Test and Implement Solutions

One thing that you can do to find the best automation tools that you need, is to give each team in the business, an area to be in charge over. They can be in charge of testing and implementing it, to make sure that they know what they need to work. You’ll be able to see that the amount of resources that you will be saving will be quite astonishing, and that your members of the team will soon feel comfortable in adopting the new ways of doing things. In my opinion on of the most comprehensive solutions is this simple software named Frevvo.

Calculate the ROI of Automation

Automation isn’t something that is always going to be simple and easy. You need to make sure to then estimate the time and the money that automating a process will be able to give to you, and then compare it to the time and the cost that it will all take to automate those processes. If you take some time and money now to get it all sorted, then you can look at recouping that investment and seeing if it is going to be worth it in the end for you. Think about making sure to prioritize automating the processes that will save you the most time and that in the end, will have the biggest return on your investment.

Think Long Term

When you are automating, it is important to think about what will make the most sense in the long term of it all. You should make sure that whatever solution you have has the ability to grow and adapt to changes in the future of your development. One of the worst things that you can do is to start becoming dependent on a solution that you don’t actually have limited control (or no control over). For example, an issue could be something like cloud-based storage and systems. These are the kinds of things that third-party apps are known for, that can make the difference.

Day to Day Items

Automation for some of the bigger things that your business has to deal with will save you a lot of money and a lot of time. But it is important to remember that there are plenty of smaller day to day things that you should deal with and automate as well. It can help to save you a lot of money as well, and it will mean that your day to day work isn’t taken up with daily small things that can be time consuming to organize and arrange. You could arrange for laundry and towel deliveries, for example, if you have a hotel or other similar business. Then you don’t have to even think about it; it will just be collected and then you can go from there. The same thing goes for things like refuse collections. You could look into some cheap bin hire and then go from there with arranging someone to take it away each week, for instance. There are large things to automate, for sure, from payroll to marketing. But there are a lot of things that are smaller, and that aren’t necessarily going to grow the business. If they are automated, then it can save you time each day, leaving you time to do the bigger things that are going to make a difference to the growth of your business.

Go Slow and Prioritize

Automating workflow can take up a lot of time and resources. Both of these things you’ll be able to recover in leaps and bounds, especially if things are done well. There is also a large learning curve that is involved with automation, so make sure that you don’t rush into things, and that can make a large difference. You could start by creating a list of some measures that will have the biggest impact on the company, and then you can prioritize how much work or effort, and even risk, is involved with each element.

Keep High Quality Control Standards

Automation, like with any computer system, will start off with issues, and could even get some bugs over time. Sometimes these things will become pretty obvious, and could just be seen as oversights. But other times, there are some things that will result from some unlikely boundary conditions. You need to subject some of your automation procedures to the same degree of quality and quality control that you would do for any product development, or other areas of your business. Once this kind of automation is deployed, then it is very important to monitor it closely, as well as being able to measure its effectiveness, in order to make sure that it works as expected.

Start Off Simple

Automation is a little like digging a tunnel. You know what you want it to look like, but you’re not sure what you will uncover along the way. It is best to begin with some areas that are useful, but still something that is simple. When you are learning, keep things simple. Then you will avoid a lot of wasted time, resources, and start to learn about your organization and the infrastructure that it has. If you’re able to do those things, then it will help you to maximize your productivity gains, while you prepare for some bigger things.