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Business Owners: Are You Taking On Too Much?

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It’s fair to say that starting a business is not for the feint of heart. And in those early days, you, as the business owner, are likely to be doing everything, from basic accounts through to cold calling prospects. And it’s a way of life that will start to feel normal over time.

However, as your business grows it will be impossible to do everything you need to with maximum efficiency, and there’s every chance your levels of service will start to slip a little. Stress will become the norm, and your business will feel like it is beginning to creak.

The reason is simple – you are taking on too much. And at some point in time, you will need to start thinking about handing over the reins to others, relinquishing a little bit of control of your business, and start being more efficient. Let’s take a look at some of the key areas of your business for which you should seek out help.

StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article
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The Basics

First of all, have a think about the tasks that you spend a lot of time on that don’t make you any money. Let’s say that when you are out selling your product to prospects, you generate $1,000 a day for your business. But you only have time to do this for four days a week, as one whole day is taken up doing paperwork. Effectively, you are paying $1,000 for someone to do basic admin tasks that you could pass on to an assistant for anything between a fifth and a tenth of the price. Not only that, but the extra day selling it frees up will earn another $1,000 for your business, so you win in more ways than one.

The Systems

Your IT network is likely to be vital to your business, as it is for many companies these days. However, if you are running it all yourself, it can be incredibly draining on your time and resources. Handing over the reins to managed IT services can be a huge help and take away a lot of your stresses and strains. The company you hire will be responsible for keeping your system running, maintenance, and updates, leaving you free to focus on the money-making activities in your business.

The Marketing

You understand the inner workings of your business more than anyone else. But it’s not necessarily a good thing. It’s all too easy to get wrapped up in your business and not be able to see it how your target audience sees what you do. Hiring an external marketing team to come in and take over your marketing efforts can pay off, as they will approach your business with a fresh pair of eyes. They will see it as your customers see it, and bring in new marketing tactics into the mix.

The People

Finally, you can employ people to do all the tasks listed above, of course. But one thing you have to bear in mind that managing people is a full-time job in itself, and it will change the way you work almost entirely. So, if you do plan to take on full-time employees, consider hiring a human resources professional first. They will be critical in ensuring you are complying with employment law and establishing a safe and vibrant company culture.

A Customer’s Wish Is Your Command

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article
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The way that customers view your business is paramount to it’s success. If your customers are unhappy with the way that they’ve been treated; you will find that they never come back to you again. Some people in this world are incredibly petty. And, the littlest thing can cause a whole lot of trouble. So, it’s worth making sure that you cover all the bases when it comes to your customer’s service. To help you out, this post will be going through three areas of customer service. And, the ways that you can make sure that they’re running at optimum efficiency. Now, all you have to do is get to work!

Social Media

Social media is one of the greatest gifts given to businesses. For one, it can help loads with marketing and advertising. But, along with this, social media can also be a great place to host some of your customer service. Most people have a social media account of some sort. So, you have a good chance of them being able to reach you through this method. Twitter is probably the best place for customer services. It pairs a simple platform, with a good messaging system and no fuss. Unfortunately, as your business gets bigger looking after customer service on a platform like this will become a fulltime role. You will need to have a staff member dedicated to this job. But, they can also do some other work with social media.

Part of treating your customers well is providing them with easy and accessible information about your products. Customers won’t often go out of their way to learn about your business. But, if they find a Facebook post that they like the look of; you might just real them in. Thankfully, this won’t take as much time as customer service on social media. And, there are even tools available to help. If you can dedicate a day to working on social media, you can set yourself up for months. Making loads of posts at once is a great way to make sure that your content remains consistent. Once you have a stockpile, you can use a tool like Buffer to have the posts that you make automatically posted onto the sites of your choice.

Email/Livechat/Phones

Support comes in various forms. And, one of the best for small businesses is email. A lot of companies have email support because it gives them a way to have cases handled in a timely fashion. Agents won’t be stuck on the phone or on livechat. Instead, they can read an email and get to work. When you provide you users with the chance to email you, it’s critical that you have the right kind of email address. It should match the web-address of your website. And, it should include a word like support somewhere. Most customers will prefer to get their support like this. It enables you to give them all of the information they need in a way that they can use it at their convenience.

Next up in the mix comes live chat. If you want to have live chat support for your customer; you will have to have some staff to cover it. Thankfully, though, you won’t have to have many. It’s not uncommon for live chat operators to be working on 5 or 6 chats at once. This gives you the opportunity to cover a lot more ground. And, will enable you to have issues resolved very quickly. You can have software added to your website that will allow you to have live chat features. This sort of extension will have to be installed by a professional developer, though.

The most traditional form of support comes with phones. Having your customers being able to call your business can have a huge impact on the support that they get. Talking to a human is one of the easiest ways to have something resolved. And, a lot of people know it. Most small businesses won’t have the resources to cope with this on their own, though. So, the help of a virtual call center company could go very far. This sort of service will enable your calls to be mainly handled by a computer. Then, only the ones that need to come to the business will.

Feedback

The feedback that you get from customers is invaluable to your business. It gives you an insight into how your customer think you are doing. And, it can provide you with new ways to improve your business. So, it’s critical that you read the reviews you get. And, in some cases, it can even be worth directly asking for reviews. This should always be done when you’ve had a customer experience encounter with someone. Gathering feedback can be done on your own website. Or, you can use a survey making tool to collect the data for you. The data that you receive is very important, and you should always have a record of it.

Feedback can be a hard game to play. It’s easy to monitor the feedback that you ask for. This information will be stored on your own servers. So, you’ll be able to access it whenever you want. But, the reviews that you get on websites like TripAdvisor and Google Reviews won’t be. Instead, they will be in some far off part of the internet. Thankfully, though, you don’t have to go through every last site to find them. Feedback management software comes in loads of different forms. Some services can monitor different sites for you automatically. But, some will have to be set up by hand. Either way, these are very powerful tools that can give a clear picture of your businesses reputation.

Hopefully, this will inspire you to start trying to improve your customer experience. It’s important to take into account what people think of your business. A lot of companies will let these areas slip and end up with a very bad reputation. Unfortunately, companies can only work like this if they provide a service that no one else does.

Steady Growth Builds Business Success

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Many new business owners make the mistake of trying to build their companies too quickly. They spend money before their firm is secure, and that leads to cash flow issues. In some instances, things get bad, and they have to abandon their ambitions and start all over again. To stop that from happening, it’s essential that you create a growth plan when you’re first starting out. It shouldn’t take a long time, and there are plenty of business advisors willing to assist. The tips on this page will help you to get things right, and they could push your operation to the next level. It’s all about taking things steadily.

Don’t employ permanent staff until you have reliable income

There are lots of alternatives to hiring permanent staff that you should consider. For example, you could contact local recruitment agencies to get the assistance you require. You could also ask friends and family members if they’re willing to help out. You could ask your lawyer to develop temporary contracts that only last for three months. That would mean you aren’t obliged to cover an entire annual salary if something goes wrong. You never know what’s going to happen when you’re just starting out. So, it’s best to play it safe and limit your outgoings as much as possible.

Don’t rent premises until you can afford the annual fees

The second biggest mistake people make relates to renting facilities. At some point, you will need a dedicated office or warehouse for your operation. However, you don’t want to rush into anything until you have lots of cash in the bank. Work out the annual fees and then compare them to your monthly income. The guys from Guardian Business Center say that is the best way to protect your venture. At the end of the day, you would struggle to meet your financial responsibilities if you experience a slump in sales. The debt you amount could end up crippling your company and leaving you will no choice other than to close it down.

Don’t expand into new territories until you’ve dominated your home market

Trading overseas is an excellent strategy for increasing sales. The guys at PCA Predict highlighted that fact recently. Even so, it’s not something you should do before the time is right. You have a home market in which you should aim to dominate. If you haven’t exhausted potential customers in your country, it doesn’t make sense to look elsewhere. You should only do that when your sales stagnate regardless of how much you spend on marketing. That is a good indication that you have saturated the market, and you need to move on to a new territory.

StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article
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Just remember guys; slow and steady wins the race. If act too fast, you might end up harming your chances of success. So, you need to take your time and perform careful assessments of any ideas you might have. Only act when you believe it is in the best interests of your company. If there are any uncertainties, you should wait until you’ve found a way of clearing them up.

Forget Digital Marketing & Go Old School

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article
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With more and more white noise filling the internet on an hourly basis, it is becoming increasingly hard for companies to get their voices heard.There is just so much competition online, and no direct consumer competition, just competition to get seen, to even be stumbled across. What’s more, there are now hundreds – if not thousands – of online marketing strategies, each with acronyms that require Googling: SEO, PPC, CTA, AIDA, CTR, CLV, CRM, MoM and a thousand others.

As such, a lot of companies and a lot of marketing executives are steering away from digital marketing options and heading back toward more traditional options. They are veering back into the realm of physical marketing and giving their potential customers something they can touch and feel and experience. And here are the best of the bunch, that is to say, the most effective of the lot.

Advertising In Papers

Recent research by neuroscientists has shown that paper-based adverts tend to be more memorable and more impactful than digital ones. This is especially true with regards to direct mail strategies. The reason for this is paper-based ads are easier to process mentally and thus they made for far improved brand recall. A lot of this is to do with the habits we have gotten into as a society of tech users. When we are watching an advert on Youtube, we aren’t concentrating on the message of the brand or anything but that skip advert button. The same goes for any pop-up ad, we instinctively look for that cross that will allow us to carry on without batting an eyelid. This means that digital marketing is losing its impact, while physical marketing has never lost ground.

Get On The Road

Of course, by this we mean, get yourself to some trade shows. If you are not present at a trade show then you are missing out on a massive chance to grow your exposure, and to people who interested enough in your industry to have bought a ticket to attend. Of course, the stigma around these is that a banner amongst a conference center full of banners is not going to have any impact, and you are right. That is why it is worth looking at what more you can do to improve your booth and raise your voice, and going to get that much more from Steelhead Productions. What we are saying is, there are experts out there, people who will be able to make you look like the leading professionals and industry experts in your sector.

Older Customers Like It Physical

A lot of older customers don’t respond to digital marketing efforts for two main reasons; they don’t trust the internet and they don’t respond to adverts. That means that if you are solely focussed on digital marketing strategies then you are missing out on a huge sector of potential business and potential business that tends to spend money. That is where good old-fashioned physical mail comes in; something that falls through their letterbox, get’s picked up and read. This is what older customers know and like, and it has proved to work in garnering sales and spreading through word of mouth.

The Digital Entrepreneur’s New Business Checklist

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In today’s fierce business climate, new entrepreneurs are far more likely to target online audiences instead of offline ones. Running a company in the digital arena can reduce overheads while the potential for profit is far greater also.

Those possibilities should not fool you into thinking that the journey will be easy. Competition in the online arena is stronger than ever. If you aren’t prepared for the battles ahead, your business will inevitably follow the same path as the vast majority of failures.

StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article
Photo courtesy of Max Pixel

Perfect your strategy with these factors, and you should be just fine.

  • Invest in the quality of your team. From successful recruitment drives to promoting improved motivation, those steps to a productive staff are key. After all, you are essentially putting the fate of your entire operation in their hands. If they perform well, the business will too. Combine the perfect internal team with the help of remote-based freelancers, and you should be set to thrive. As they say, teamwork makes the dream work. Do not forget it.
  • Appreciate the importance of your website. As an online business, your domain is the most important asset of all. It shouldn’t simply promote products. It should additionally generate trust from the consumer. Hiring an ecommerce agency to get your platform in perfect health is advised. Unfortunately, if the selling systems are lacking, transactions won’t be completed. Without sales, the entire company is destined to crash and burn.
  • Be prepared for the worst at all times. All business operations will encounter low points. But prevention is the best form of protection and can reduce the damage greatly. This could range from keeping the working environments safe to factoring in potential returns. Gaining this sense of control won’t only limit the risks involved in business. It’ll also help you make education decisions when growing the company.
  • Understand the needs of your customers. First and foremost, finding your place in the market will allow you to target your primary audience with far greater effect. Consumers don’t only deserve smooth transactions, though. Many online businesses fail to focus on customer care, but yours mustn’t fall into this trap. Even if it means using a virtual assistant service, attending to the ongoing issues of the clients is critical. Otherwise, one bad episode could see them take their custom elsewhere. Conversely, positive experiences should bring long-term loyalty.
  • Keep an eye on spending. Spending money is a necessary part of running a business, but excessive overheads will pile on the pressure. Finding the best deals on operational costs like energy rates will inevitably increase your profits. As well as maximizing short-term profits, this can also buy more time for the venture. The vast majority of failures occur because they run out of money before reaching sustained profitability. So this could be a killer component.

Following the right blueprint won’t guarantee success. After all, you still need to produce great products while marketing your goods in a suitable fashion. Nonetheless, those strong foundations will increase your chances.

If nothing else, adopting great habits now will serve you well in the future too.