Protecting Your Small Business: How to Cover the Basics

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship ArticleThe market offers a lot of opportunities for small businesses to thrive at the moment. There are more chances to expand than ever before, despite many market uncertainties. You have the internet turning the world into one global market and allowing you to tap into more potential customers.

Rapid growth, however, should never blind you from establishing a strong foundation for your small business. As tempting as growing at an incredibly pace may be, your business will not survive market challenges when it doesn’t have the basics covered properly. You need to protect your small business and there are several things you can do to get started.

Understand the Laws

One of the first things you need to do when you want to establish a strong foundation for your small business is understanding the laws. We’re not just talking about the local laws that govern the city you are in. You need to take the time to understand the laws in different markets you are operating in.

There are several things you want to dig into. First, you need to understand the employment law of the city you are in and other areas in which you plan to hire employees. You also want to get yourself accustomed to the financial laws.

Once you have these two basics covered, venture into other areas of the law that also affect your business, including marketing and advertising law and intellectual property law. These regulations affect how you can protect and market your products and services in different markets.

Understanding the law isn’t always easy. There may be jargon and specific regulations that you cannot understand even when you try. This is where having a good business lawyer comes in handy. Your lawyer can help draft the contracts you make and keep your business in compliance with the law at all times.

Protect Your Assets

Next, you need to start thinking about protecting your assets. Assets are valuable resources that every small business leans on at different times. The office you use, the office equipment you bought when you first started your business, the cash and financing options you have, employees filling key roles, and other assets of your business are equally important and are worth protecting.

For most tangible assets, you have insurance options to look into. A building insurance plan can help protect your investments and equipment. Business insurance offers coverage against interruptions, allowing your small business to remain healthy even in bad situations.

Other insurance policies protect the business against liabilities. Workers insurance, for example, is designed to not only keep employees covered but also to protect the business from financial risks associated with workplace accidents. You can even go a step further and provide additional insurance coverage for employees.

Speaking of going a step further, many small businesses now take active steps towards protecting their key employees. While business lawyers help protect your business from legal matters, you can have a team of lawyers on the side of your employees when they face their own legal problems. Advocates like the experts you can find on this website are worth retaining.

Work on Your Cash Flow

Cash flow is king. The only way your small business can grow is by maintaining a healthy cash flow at all times; well, at most times at least. Cash flow dictates how you handle expenses and income. When you have a healthy cash flow, you can keep up with expenses without an issue. An unhealthy cash flow, on the other hand, often leads to bigger financial issues for the small business.

Market uncertainties certainly make creating and maintaining good cash flow harder, but it is not an impossible thing to do. You just have to be smart about balancing your expenses with your income.

Timing is everything. Earning $20,000 from a project is great, but the amount isn’t as useful when you have $15,000 worth of expenses to pay before your invoice for that project clears. You will end up with $15,000 worth of expenses that you cannot cover, causing a serious disruption to your business cash flow.

Fortunately, you also have more financing options to utilize these days. Short-term loans, long-term financing, and project-based advances are some of the financial instruments you can use to keep your business running smoothly while you wait for the big invoices to clear.

Diversify Whenever Possible

Another thing you want to do to further strengthen the business is diversifying. Relying on a single source of income isn’t how you survive a competitive market. You need to find additional revenue streams so that the business can continue to operate smoothly in different situations.

Additional revenue streams don’t need to come from a separate business entity or another operation. Adding a product that is aimed at different market segments is a good start. Diversifying is also achievable when you cater to online and offline customers. These two groups of customers behave differently and complement each other.

Some small business owners even go as far as developing passive revenue sources for their businesses. Similar to financing options, you also have more investment instruments to add to your portfolio. For instance, you can rent out a portion of your office that you don’t need to other businesses. You are basically generating passive revenue on your asset.

Proceed with Care

Running a small business means taking a lot of risks along the way. When that big order comes in, your instinct will tell you to grab it right away. This is a good mindset to be in, but that doesn’t mean you should make reckless decisions.

With every decision you make, be sure to calculate your risks and explore ways to manage them. You need to be extra careful with every step you take, even when you are certain that the step is good for the business.

Risk management is a natural part of running a small business. When you know how to manage your risks properly, implementing the tips we covered in this article and turning your small business into a big success is easy to do.

StrategyDriven Enterprises

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StrategyDriven Enterprises, LLC

StrategyDriven is dedicated to providing executives and managers with the planning and execution advice, tools, and practices needed to create greater organizational alignment and accountability for the achievement of superior results.

We help our clients create and execute a clear, forward-looking strategy – translatable to the day-to-day activities of all organization members – that’s critical to their realizing success in today’s fast paced market environment. Not only does a compelling, well executed strategy align individuals to a common purpose, it ensures that purpose best serves the company’s mission.

The StrategyDriven website provides access to a wide array of best practice business planning and execution tools, streamlined process flows, how-to articles, example-rich podcasts, and customizable ready-to-use program management templates. Premium Members receive access to over 200 members-only articles, whitepapers, models, and tools and templates; providing an in-depth look into critical business performance areas; placing specific focus on the alignment of organizational standards, programs, and behaviors to the optimal achievement of mission goals. Sevian Business Program purchasers receive fully implementable business performance improvement processes out-of-the-box, enabling the acceleration of business growth and heightening of operational efficiency needed to significantly improve bottom line results.

Collectively, our products offer business leaders the opportunity to access the knowledge of a highly educated and experienced staff without the associated overhead expense.

At StrategyDriven, our seasoned business leaders deliver real-world strategic business planning and tactical execution best practice advice – a blending of workplace experience with sound research and academic principles – to business leaders who may not otherwise have access to these resources.

Contact StrategyDriven Enterprises, LLC

Phone: (770) 765-3692

Email: [email protected]

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Insuring Your Bottom Line: Why Contractors Insurance is Necessary to Your Business

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StrategyDriven Risk Management ArticleContracting occupations, like electrician, insulation worker, mason, plumber, roofer, carpenter, and painter, all have unique features, including risks. Clients and employees can get hurt and a contractor could be held liable and be left with costly medical bills. Where general liability insurance prove invaluable in addressing some of the common risks contractors may confront, contractor insurance can offer contracting business owners protections where expensive setbacks that deal with operations/product, errors, contract dispute could greatly affect their business. Let’s look at why contractors insurance is paramount to your business and complete liability protection.

General Liability Protection

This is the basis of all contractor insurance policies and covers two main types of protection:

  • Bodily injury: Provides for medical care for a contractor or someone injured by a contractor’s employee on the job, and also includes coverage for legal defense if a contractor is sued for damages.
  • Property damage: Provides coverage for damage caused to a property by a contractor or an employee, even damage to a third-party property.

Completed Operations/Product Coverage

Completed projects can have issues or cause damage and contractors insurance provides coverage for any products a contractor sell or distribute, and helps with the expenses for claims related to completed services, for example, poorly installed wall shelving that results in injury to the property owner.

Commercial Auto Coverage that Fits Your Business

If your contracting business requires the use of commercial vehicles for a part of its operation, then adding commercial auto coverage to your contractor insurance is a great way to protect your business against unforeseen accidents that may be related to road conditions, weather, or collision with other motorists. Coverage may include collision damage costs, medical expenses, and damage from a specific natural disaster.

Errors and Omissions Coverage

Taking a job with the intention to do impeccable work doesn’t always lead to that result. It is possible for errors to occur, like an electrical job error that result in a fire. With a contractor’s insurance that covers errors and omissions, you can protect you and your business from claims of negligent acts, errors or omissions during a project that causes a monetary loss for the client. This coverage may extend to business owner, employees, and subcontractors of the business.

Contract Liability Coverage

This coverage comes in handy in a contract dispute and is essential, especially if you regularly hire independent contractors who possess limited or no insurance coverage.

Workers’ Compensation Protection Coverage

Having workers’ compensation protection should be a smart addition to a contractor’s insurance. Employees are key players in your contracting business and worker’s compensation protection is beneficial if an employee gets injured on the job by helping to cover medical treatment, and may even provide a portion of lost wages if time off from work is required because of the injury.

Contractors insurance is necessary to protect your business, assets, and employees. General liability protection may not be enough to provide the peace of mind that you will need to continue daily operations when costly claims hit your business. Contractors should think about the types of protections that are beneficial to their business and acquire a policy accordingly.

Stunning Strategies to Help Your Business Ace Health & Safety

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StrategyDriven Risk Management Article
 
Health and safety needs to be a primary concern for any business in the world. If you don’t have the right health and safety mandates in place, you are going to suffer as a business. Nothing is as important these days as health and safety, and you need to make sure you have strong health and safety procedures in place. There are a lot of things you can do to ensure this, and it is vital for the business.

If you are compromised at all with health and safety, you are going to find that your business will be suffering from accidents, lawsuits, and a damaged reputation. This is why you need to do what you can to ensure you are the most safe and secure company you can possibly be. These strategies are going to go a long way toward helping you get the best health and safety mandate possible.

Understand Health & Safety

You have to understand how much health and safety matters in the world of modern business. It is important that you take a look at health and safety and understand what it is, and why it affects the business. Health and safety is how you protect your employees and the future reputation of the company. Businesses with poor health and safety mandates are the ones that wind up struggling.

Ensure Your Employees are Protected

It is also important that you make sure your employees are protected on a daily basis. This means that they need to be trained properly so that they understand what health and safety risks there are in the business. Effective Operational Health and Safety Courses will teach them what they can do to make themselves safer on a daily basis. It is also important for you to get online and look at what you can do to make the workplace safer. You might consider digital security, or here is some protective gear you may want to introduce into the business. Ensuring your employees are protected and kept safe is one of the best ways of acing health and safety.

Fire Drills are Important

You also need to do as much as you can to ensure you have proper drills in place. A fire drill is an essential part of the business health and safety mandate. If a fire breaks out in the business, this can be very destructive, so you need to know how to react in the event of a real fire. This is something that makes a fire drill so important for the business and will allow you to keep your staff safe, and the business assets protected.

Incident Reports

There are a lot of things you can do to improve the way you conduct health and safety in your business. But, one of the major things you can do is to keep logs and incident reports anytime something happens. This is important from a legal perspective, but you also need to refer back to it and understand why the incident might have occurred, as well as how you might be able to prevent it in the future.

As you can see, these are just a few of the wonderful strategies in place that you can use to help boost health and safety. Try to focus on what you can do to improve the working conditions for your employees, and make the working environment safer. These are some of the things that will go a long way toward helping you run the business faster.

Why Your Business Needs Insurance

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship ArticleOwning a business can be very rewarding, but it’s a lot of hard work too. As a business owner, you are responsible for the well-being of your business, which includes managing employees, inventory and other assets. So what can you do to make sure you’re properly managing all of these assets and that your business is protected?

Commercial insurance is every business’s best friend. Whether something happens to your inventory or you need to pay worker’s compensation to an injured employee, commercial insurance can help you deal with it. In fact, everybody who owns a business should have some form of commercial insurance — and here’s why.

Legal Requirements

Although you aren’t necessarily required to insure your business, there are certain types of business insurance which you may be required to carry. Any business that has employees is required to carry worker’s compensation insurance. This type of coverage will pay for worker’s compensation claims if an employee is unable to work due to an injury.

Worker’s compensation coverage can cover a range of costs, from medical bills and bills associated with recovery to missed wages and funeral costs. Not only are you generally required to have worker’s comp coverage, it’s a smart idea to have it anyway since worker’s comp claims are usually quite large.

Protecting Your Inventory

If you run a brick-and-mortar business with a large amount of inventory that keeps your business afloat, lost or damaged inventory can be devastating. Even a small fire could significantly cut into your profits. When you have good business insurance, though, these losses are softened significantly. Many business insurance providers will even allow you to purchase a specific insurance policy for your line of business to make sure all of your industry-specific losses and perils are covered.

You can also purchase commercial vehicle insurance if you have a fleet of vehicles. If an employee gets into an accident on the job, damages to property and the vehicle may be covered.

Make sure you talk with your insurance agents about what you need to have covered. Different commercial insurance policies may only cover losses from certain events, in which case you may want to purchase additional coverage to protect yourself.

Downtime

Sure you may be young and spry when you start your business, but that can quickly change. If your business relies on you being around to make important decisions and handle managerial tasks, commercial insurance can cover you in the event that you become disabled or ill. This can be the difference between your business failing or staying afloat if something happens to you.

Liability

One of the toughest things for any business, whether large or small, is being held liable for the injury, illness or death of a consumer. Fortunately, business insurance with product liability coverage can help you absorb some of the damage. You can also purchase general and professional liability coverage to further protect your business in the event that it’s held liable for something.

Choose Wisely

Like any form of insurance, there are a lot of options when purchasing business insurance. It’s important to have some understanding of the different types of coverage and what your business needs before you buy. You don’t want to purchase coverage your business doesn’t need, but it’s crucial to make sure your business is covered.

Before you purchase a policy for your business, make sure you shop around with a few different providers to get an idea of the coverage they offer and the premium you’ll have to pay. Read reviews and ask around about different life insurance settlement companies and agents to make sure you’re getting the best coverage with the best service and price.