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Are You Prepared For The Future?

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StrategyDriven Professional Development Article |Future Planning|Are You Prepared For The Future?The future is something that most people do not want to think about. The unforeseen can sometimes be quite overwhelming, but the pace at which the future is approaching us is even more so. When it comes to the future, there is so much to think about – from the family you may one day have to the career aspirations you hope to achieve to the house you may one day purchase. You will hope for financial security and a life of comfort and happiness and good health.

The problem is that most people fantasize about this happening but do little to make it happen. It is up to you to ensure that the future progresses as you envisioned, which is why planning is important.

If you want to have a financially stable future, you must begin when you are young. Sure, you can always figure out an economically secure future in your 30s and 40s, but the sooner you start, the better off you will be.

Set achievable goals

If you want to save for retirement or intend to buy a house one day, you must begin with the potential that is right in front of you. Planning your near future will make a huge difference in how you feel. When you have completed the smaller objectives in front of you, you will have a much better picture of your long-term future.

Make financial plans

So you know what you want in the end, but how do you intend to get there? What plans do you have to ensure that your income grows in the way you want it to? Financial planning entails paying off loans and tracking your spending to determine what you can afford and when. Start paying off the loans that are costing you the most in interest first, and then proceeding from there. Considering the interest you owe on them, credit cards should be the first to go. Your financial plans should include what you owe on your house and other expenses, and whatever is leftover should be set aside for investments. If you’ve established a savings goal, you can determine how much you can put into your future and how much you need right now.

Think about your career

When planning your future, begin with what will get you there: your job. Your work will take you as far as you can go, so if you want to increase your salary, you should start searching for a better job as soon as possible. You can then set out a strategy for where you want to be in ten or twenty years’ time. This gives you time to recertify if appropriate, or to find out which companies you need to be a part of to thrive elsewhere. There are all kinds of opportunities out there – just find the right one for you.

Your future is dependent on your plans now, and time moves so rapidly that you can not wait for the future to happen before taking action. Create a list of the things you need to prepare for, and you’ll be better placed to deal with anything unexpected that life throws at you.

Top Tips For Starting A Courier Business

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StrategyDriven Starting Your Business Article |Courier Business|Top Tips For Starting A Courier BusinessThere is a lot of business available for couriers, especially at the moment, when demand for online delivery is even higher. Despite this demand, a lot of people are unsure about whether or not they ought to venture into setting up a courier company or business. Whether you are new to the delivery industry or have been working for another courier company are have the experience to consider starting up a company of your own, follow some of these tips to help you make those all-important first steps to get started on your new business and your courier delivery service.

Make A Business Plan

Like any new business, you need to make a clear business plan before you start doing anything else. Your business plan should include your expenses, competitive pricing, and profit margins. You must have a clear vision of how you will be able to make money and what kind of courier work you intend to take on. Establish where you will get new business from and think carefully about how you will retain clients. You can use delivery quote comparison sites to secure some new business, especially when you are starting out and still have a limited marketing budget. The clients you find through services like that could become your regulars and loyal customers if you can provide a good level of customer service.

Get Your Vehicle

You need to decide if you will buy or lease your delivery vehicles. You will need a practical vehicle that is safe, reliable and has a good fuel economy. If you decide to buy a vehicle, make sure you get it checked out by a competent mechanic (click here for a truck inspection service) before you part with your cash. Make sure you include the depreciation in the value of your vehicle in your business plan too.

Organize Office Space

If you set up an office in your home, contact your local zoning office to make sure that you are legally able to run a business from your home, according to local laws. If you decide to rent office space instead, consider location and cost, and add these into your business plan.

Purchase Materials And Equipment For Your Courier Business

The materials and equipment that you will likely need for your courier business might include things like cell phones, two-way radios if you’re hiring one or more employees, office supplies like envelopes, pens, pencils, and notebooks, a GPS unit, and computer software to help you to track pick-ups, deliveries, invoicing, and bookkeeping. You might also want to purchases gas cards for your employees and ledgers and to track the usage of gas and how many miles have been driven every day.

Start Marketing

Get your marketing underway. Start by contacting some local businesses to market your courier services. Lawyers, banks, corporate offices, notaries, hospitals, medical offices, and individuals in your local community may have all need of a good courier. Have a brochure made that will highlight the information about your offerings, such as the services that you offer, your operating hours, your delivery options, and your contact information. You can advertise your courier services in online and print business directories. Go to local trade shows and conferences for small businesses to network with potential clients. Set up a simple website that includes your contact details too, and use delivery comparison websites to help you to generate your first leads until you can secure some regular clients.

Start Hiring

Hire one or more employees if you think you want to be the one who manages the offices and not be the one out making pick-ups and deliveries. Make sure that before you hire anyone you carry out a thorough background check and credit check before you hire them to work for your company. All your employees must have clean driving records, and reliable transportation if you want them to use their own vehicles to make deliveries. If you want to make the deliveries yourself, you will need to hire someone that you will manage the office. Make sure you have the correct qualifications before taking them on to do this.

Delivery Options

Decide early on whether you will offer different options for delivery, such as one-hour delivery or an overnight service. You will also need to decide the type and size of materials delivered, whether you will be offering more specialist delivery services such as confidential material or oversize items.

Develop A Pricing Structure

For example, decide whether you will charge less for letter delivery than you would for a heavier parcel. If you are going to offer same-day or one-hour delivery, think about the time and effort it will take for you to provide these services.

Estimate Your Ongoing Costs

When you decide on the pricing for your services, you need to remember to take into account all your expenses and make sure that these are covered and you will still turn a profit by knowing your ongoing costs so you can set your prices and rates accordingly. Take into account the cost of petrol or diesel, and vehicle maintenance when you set up your price structure. Cash flow can be a problem for any new business so you should make an estimate of what you will earn in your first year as part of your business plan and work out how many jobs you will need to take on in order to cover your costs and make a profit.

Check Your Insurance

An accident or other unexpected problem can cause some serious problems for a new business. Make sure that you have insurance that is suitable for a courier company. Make sure you insure the contents of your office as well as your vehicles and your employees.

When you set up a delivery or courier business, you need to work out revenue streams and expenses as well as thinking about how you can win business. These tips should help you to get on your way.

5 Ways to Reduce Work-Related Stress

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StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Article |Work-Related Stress|5 Ways to Reduce Work-Related StressIt is common knowledge that a balanced life is a happy life. However, actually achieving a balanced life is another matter entirely. If you have a demanding professional life, finding balance might feel next to impossible. While it may seem like changing jobs is the only way to reduce work-related stress, there are changes you can make right now to relieve pressure and improve your mental health.

Get organised

Developing an organizational system might seem like adding extra work to your plate but having a detailed plan will significantly improve your time management. While it may take time to set up at first, the payoff is well worth it. Having all your tasks scheduled out according to priority will give you peace of mind that everything will get done and reduce any anxiety you might be feeling about the pile of tasks you have to complete.

There are many programs to help you get organized, including:

    • TeuxDeux
    • Notion
    • Google Calendar
    • Play around with them to find what works for you.

Delegate tasks

If you’re a perfectionist, you might find it challenging to share the responsibility with others. However, if you’re struggling to keep up with your day-to-day tasks through no fault of your own, it’s time to offload some of them onto someone else.

If there isn’t anyone who can help you out, write down all the tasks you work on in a day, and track how long it takes you to complete each one. Are any of them taking up more time than they should? If so, strategise ways to make these tasks more efficient and take your proposal to your boss.

Take advantage of technology

While technology has made it difficult to disconnect, it has also simplified many aspects of life. With new technological innovations coming out all the time, there’s sure to be some kind of program or software to help you free up some of your time.

For customer service representatives or self-employed business owners, you can visit this page to sign up for a virtual chat assistant to answer customer queries when you’re engaged with other tasks. It’s also a good idea to look into software options to see if there are programmes that can help make your tasks more efficient.

Set boundaries

Finding balance in your life doesn’t just happen – you have to make it happen. Turn off email notifications outside of business hours and remind yourself that you shouldn’t dwell on work when you’re not there.
Whether it’s crafting, hiking, or spending time with family and friends, actively block out time in your schedule to do the things that bring you joy.

Ask for help

If you’ve done all you can to make work more manageable but are still struggling, it’s time to ask for help. While viable solutions will vary according to industry and your unique situation, set up a meeting with your boss to discuss the challenges you’re facing and the steps you’ve taken to address them.

One of several ways your employer can support your mental health is by implementing self-care policies in the workplace. It’s always worth having a conversation to see what solutions you can come up with together.

We Need To Talk About What It Takes To Ensure Your Website Is A Success

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Website Design|We Need To Talk About What It Takes To Ensure Your Website Is A SuccessYou’ve created a business and you’ve built a website for said business; maybe this was recently or perhaps it was years ago, but you’ve realised that your website just isn’t doing what it’s supposed to. It’s not ranking well in search engines and it’s visibility is shot, and then there’s the fact that you’re barely converting any leads. What’s going on and why is your website failing to do its job?

If you find yourself in this situation, the most important thing is not to panic – yes it’s frustrating that your website isn’t doing what it’s meant to do, but there are lots of simple ways to remedy this. Believe it or not, fixing a poorly running website is easier than you think, it’s just a case of knowing what to concentrate on, and where to focus your time, money and effort.

Bearing that in mind, below are a few tips and suggestions for the ways in which you can ensure that your website is a success. For everything that you need to know, have a read of this.

Start with an audit

Not sure what’s going on with your website? The best thing that you can do is to start out with a website audit. There are tools online that you can use to do your own website audit, or you can opt to outsource the task to a specialist. How you go about this is up to you, what’s important is that you’re able to gain the visibility that you need to understand where the fundamental issues lay within your website, thus allowing you to fix these issues.

Upgrade and enhance your SEO strategy

A key aspect of improving how your website ranks in search engines like Google is SEO, and if your site’s SEO isn’t working effectively this means that your site won’t rank highly in search engines. This is extremely problematic as research shows that as a rule of thumb, internet users tend to navigate towards the top few sites listed in search engines, rather than navigating further down the page, so you need your site to be ranked in the first few sites within the search engine. Working with SEO specialists, like Smoothstack, can help to make increasing how well your site ranks in search engines a little easier.

Focus on your content

Remember, content is only king when that content adds value. It’s all well and good churning out website content, from on-page content to blog content, but if that content doesn’t offer value to your audience, then it holds no value. The key to creating high value content is to think about the kinds of information that will be valuable to your audience, as well as ensuring that all content is interesting, insightful and relevant. Not sure how to create content that adds value? Work with a content specialist to learn more about achieving content success.

There you have it, everything that you need to know about helping to ensure that your website is as successful as possible and ranks well in search engines.

5 ways to create a productive and happy working environment

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Working environment|5 ways to create a productive and happy working environmentEvery business owner wants their operations to run smoothly. A place where staff get on well, communicate, and are as productive as they possibly can be. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work that way as personalities can clash, employees can become complacent, and animosities can form.

The good news is that there are many things you can do that can help send your business in that direction. Here are 5 ways to create a productive and happy working environment.

Don’t be too strict

Having policies and procedures is all well and good, but if you micro manage or don’t cut staff a bit of slack once in a while, they will eventually get sick of it. As long as the necessary work is being done, leave them to it.
If you need to intervene from time to time, that’s fine but if your team is self-driven, hardworking, and efficient, let them do their thing. If you don’t, it could backfire tremendously.

Create a welcoming space

An office that looks nice is far more enjoyable to work in, so if yours requires some TLC, you could reap the rewards by giving it a bit of an overhaul. Freshening up the décor, changing furniture, and adding accessories such as high quality custom planters or wall art will make your space feel far more welcoming. This is beneficial not only in terms of client perception but for your employees too.

Socialize once in a while

If your team doesn’t socialize, it’s worth trying to do so once in a while. Whether it be a game of ten-pin bowling, a meal, or a few drinks at the local bar, spending time together outwith the office environment will help you to get to know each other on a different level.

It usually results in better communication when you return to the office, which should, in turn, increase productivity and improve the working environment for everyone.

Reward hard work

If your staff have been working exceptionally hard or have met all their targets, reward them for it. It could be a monetary reward such as an annual bonus, for example. If you prefer to give something a little different, shopping vouchers or a nice bottle of champagne will always be well received.

Rewards make employees feel like their hard work is paying off, and they will be more inclined to continue working hard to make your business a success.

Ask for ideas and feedback

If an employee thinks you are listening to them, they will be more inclined to go that extra mile, so where possible, ask for ideas and feedback. There can be a lot going on in the background you don’t know about, so letting them know your door is always open will benefit everyone.

You are likely to be party to far more information than you would usually be, and they will feel like they can freely offer suggestions or opinions.

Most successful businesses usually have a team of happy and motivated employees lurking in the background, so if that’s something you can replicate, you will reap the rewards in the long run.