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Advice For Becoming A Better Entrepreneur

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article | Entrepreneur | Advice For Becoming A Better EntrepreneurWhile it’s nice to be able to say that you’re an entrepreneur, it’s an even better feeling to be able to prove to others that you’re a successful business owner. Luckily, you can use the following advice to help you become a better leader and boss so that you can experience a bright and prosperous future.

It’s ultimately up to you and your responsibility to overcome any obstacles you’re facing and improve in areas where you’re falling short. Remain patient with yourself because you’re more likely to develop as time goes on and you gain more experience and expert knowledge of your field and business. Most importantly, follow your passion and try to have a little fun while you’re at it!

Admit to Your Weaknesses

Become a better entrepreneur by admitting to your weaknesses and what you don’t know. For example, you may realize you need a digital marketing plan in place but don’t know the best way to implement one. In this case, work with a company such as Webpresence.Digital that can help your business thrive online by increasing leads, boosting sales and building more brand awareness. It’s not always about being able to perform each task yourself, but knowing who to turn to that can help you achieve your goals.

Learn from Others

Be observant and willing to learn from and listen to others if you want to improve your abilities as an entrepreneur. Be thirsty to take in new information and open to hearing different approaches to solving problems. Find a mentor who you can turn to for input and will keep you on track when you’re unsure of how to proceed in the future. Commit to nurturing long-term business relationships with other professionals and customers as well.

Proactively Manage Your Finances

The financial health of your company is one area you aren’t going to want to ignore as an entrepreneur. You need to know that you’re running a stable company and don’t want to be continuously encountering surprises when it comes to your money. Be proactive about managing your finances by setting budgets and holding regular meetings to discuss the status of your business and your profits. If your schedule is full or you need assistance, hire an accountant or financial director who can help you keep your books in order.

Take Care of Yourself

Another piece of advice if you want to become a better entrepreneur is to take better care of yourself. Running a company is hard work and will require a lot of time and energy on your part. Put your health and well-being first, and you’ll likely find you’re more productive during the day and don’t feel as tired. A few tips include:

  • Following a schedule
  • Eating healthy meals
  • Exercising regularly
  • Managing your stress
  • Getting plenty of sleep

Be diligent about putting your needs first above all else, and you’ll find you’re a lot more pleasant to be around and can reach your goals quicker. While your business is important, so is making sure you have a lot of natural energy and aren’t always getting sick.

4 Areas Your Business Should Be Focusing On This Year

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StrategyDriven Business Performance Assessment Program Article | Business Performance Improvement | 4 Areas Your Business Should Be Focusing On This YearThe reality is that if you try to take on too much at once with your business, this approach may backfire on you. It’s better to focus in on a few essential initiatives than it is to spread yourself too thin and, in turn, end up accomplishing nothing.

There are four areas in particular that your business should highly consider concentrating on this year if you want to experience more success. Take time to review the following ideas and then think about which areas you’re performing well and which ones could use more of your time and attention so that you can come up with a plan of action for moving forward.

1. Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is one area you definitely want to focus on this year if you’re going to run a better business. It’s important to collect feedback and track your customer service performance, so you know exactly how you’re doing. The happier your customers are, the more likely it is that your business will receive positive reviews online and that consumers will start talking about you with each other and spreading the word about why it’s a wise choice to do business with you.

2. Health & Safety Obligations

Additionally, commit to following health and safety protocol and running a safer business this year. You’ll avoid unwanted situations this way and be able to retain your employees because they’ll feel safe and protected coming to work each day. Properly ventilate and extract dust and waste by using products from Integrated Air Systems to help you achieve this goal. This way, you’ll reduce the risk of equipment breaking down or someone getting sick or hurt because of unsafe working conditions.

3. Employee Retention

Another area your business should be focusing on this year has to do with employee retention. The truth is that people are more willing to change jobs these days if they’re unhappy at their current employer. Keep your employees satisfied and motivated by assigning them challenging tasks and rewarding them fairly for their efforts. Be willing to gather feedback from and listen to your employees so you can create an even more attractive work environment.

4. Innovation

Your business should also be concentrating on how to innovate your products or services in the upcoming year. Going along with business as usual might be the easy answer, but it’s not what’s going to help you stay relevant or get ahead of your competitors. Hold brainstorming sessions with your employees and use your creativity to come up with new solutions that are impressive and newsworthy.

Conclusion

Achieve better results with your business this year when you’re focusing on improving in the right areas. Use these tips to help you set more specific goals about what it is you wish to accomplish and what challenges you need to overcome in the future. Start by coming up with a plan of action and then writing down specific details about how you’ll properly execute each objective.

Four Ways to Overhaul Your Company Website

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article | Four Ways to Overhaul Your Company WebsiteIf your company’s been around for a while, it’s likely that your website has been, too. If that’s the case, you may well find that design trends, features and styles have moved on from the point at which you dusted off your finished site. The web design world moves fast – and consumer attention moves faster. If customers arrive on your website to the impression that you’ve not updated it for a number of years, they’ll instantly judge you for it. You’ll lose business as a result. As such, here are four ways to overhaul your website in favor of something a little more snazzy, modern and sleek.

Rebrand

While this is not necessarily a web-based overhaul, it is something you should consider if you’re in any case about to entirely change your website’s appearance. A rebrand will echo through-out your website, and as such it’s best to cover both a rebrand and a web redesign at the same time, in the same cohesive process. Get your design team on it immediately, or outsource to de-sign professionals who’ll help you achieve your vision.

Hosting Platforms

The very base – the foundation – of your website is its hosting platform. If you’re about to go through an overhaul, it’s certainly worth considering whether you ought to change hosting providers at the same time. In recent years, cloud hosting has become particularly favored in the web design world – something that you’ll not be using in your current legacy website.

Restructuring

Many companies are so used to their existing website that they fail to recognize some glaring failures in terms of its structural layout. Even if there are no failures per se, the gold standard for webpage and site map layout is always changing, which means your website is almost certainly behind the curve, confusing web users and alienating potential custom. When you overhaul your website, be sure to restructure it in such a way as to smooth all click-throughs and open up pathways for your traffic to pass easily through.

Redesigning

Now it comes to the more visual side of your site’s revamp. Here, you’ll want to go with some of the most exciting design trends to be taking place in 2019. Mini-animations, activated by the scroll function, have become something of a dominant trend for websites in the past year, and continue to dominate the ecosystem for businesses aiming to look ultra-modern and super-slick. Engage with these trends visually in order to bask in the admiration of your site’s visitors.

A Word of Warning

While website overhauls are incredibly important in order to keep your business modern and functional online, you shouldn’t erase your old web pages until you’re sure that your new and revamped website is entirely bug-free. A second word of warning: be sure to bear in mind that repeat customers may be shocked by a very different website appearing when they go to visit yours. Take steps to reassure these customers, and to keep some consistency with the old de-sign.

These four tips – and brief words of warning – should help you conduct a thorough overhaul of your company’s website, updating your appearance and functionality for the trends that are dominating 2019.

Five Networking Tips for Entrepreneurs

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Networking is one of the lesser appreciated talents that the world’s most successful entrepreneurs have mastered. It is not an easy skill, either. Knowing how to network is a fine line between making friends and actively seeking out business partnerships. You cannot become best friends with everyone you meet, after all, but you do need to make a good enough connection to trade favors with each other. Reaching that stage can be incredibly difficult because if you aren’t careful people will only see your efforts as wanting of something. To properly master the art that is networking, try adopting these top five tips.

Skip the Sales Speech

If you go into any new relationship with a goal to sell products or gain a favor, you will most likely fail. Only a very few people have mastered their charm to the point where people will be willing to help out or buy something new from the get-go, especially if they weren’t expecting you. So, skip the sales speech and instead start a conversation. It is far easier to connect with someone in an organic conversation than it is if you give them an elevator pitch.

Help First, Ask Later

One of the easiest tips to follow and arguably one of the best is to find out what you can do for someone else. Be proactive about networking. This way will help you make connections, diversify your portfolio and skills, and of course give you an acquaintance you can later ask for help. You don’t need to be best friends with people, but you do need to foster mutually beneficial relationships.

Take Notes and Keep Track

Try as best you can to keep track of information about the person in question. Keeping notes in your contacts app can help you stay in touch and give the personal touch all at the same time. Try to keep track of both corporate information (their job position, who they work for, etc.) as well as personal information (if they have allergies, for example). People respond when they feel like you care.

Collaborate

Another way to network is to collaborate. This way you can put effort into fostering one relationship, and then meet others in that niche or industry in a far more organic way – being introduced. As a bonus, you will also be working in a new field or project on the side that can further your career and show your ambition.

Host Your Own Event

Finally, consider hosting your own event. If you are a consultant or own business, for example, you can organize an event, create a great atmosphere, offer free drinks served by professional bartenders from services such as eventbartenders.com, and get key people from your industry to attend. Then, as the host, you can get to know each and every one of them with a position of authority. They will be interested in knowing you because you took the initiative to create a great event everyone in your industry will be talking about. In turn, you can make new business relationships and connections.

Networking is a never-ending task, but it should never be seen as a chore. Instead, connect with people. Try to gain insight from them, help them, collaborate, and even host them. By doing this you not only network with people, but you set yourself up as a huge name in your industry.

Three Ways to Make the 4AM Club Work For You

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StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Articles | 4AM Club | Three Ways to Make the 4AM Club Work For You“Early to bed, early to rise makes a [wo]man healthy, wealthy and wise.” – Ben Franklin

You’ve heard it said a million times before: the early bird catches the worm, and in the opinion of many highly successful people, the phrase is much more than a cliche. The benefits of an extremely early morning routine have been touted by so many self-made celebrities that the “4 AM Club” has become a part of the public vernacular. Any web search will pull up a dozen articles with contradictory research on the benefits and downsides of the routine, along with firsthand accounts of people “taking the 4 AM challenge.”

These trials are often full of negative impressions: disorientation in the dark hours before dawn; a mid-afternoon slump that belies productivity; and by dinnertime, the inability to form coherent sentences. And then, almost as quickly as it begins, the challenge is over, sworn off forever as an unrealistic, unachievable, and borderline inhumane goal.

Yet 4 AM remains the magic hour for many world changers like Oprah, Michelle Obama, and Tim Cook, and experience has taught me why. In my world, it’s a time of quiet, focus, determination and accomplishment.

My routine is not without naysayers. An 8 PM bedtime with a 4 AM wake-up call has made me the subject of much critique over the years. Many people feel uncomfortable with my choice, claiming that my practices are unhealthy and not sustainable for the long term. Yet I’ve found deep joy in the practice.

As an entrepreneur and the mother of a growing family, high-paced days at my desk and endless days on the road, are only outpaced by high-energy evenings and weekends with my family of five. My favorite use of this early morning time is for my own personal development and self-care so that I can be at the top of my game during the remaining hours of the day. By waking up at 4 AM, I’m able to routinely take time for myself. I work out while listening to audiobooks, I meditate while I stretch, I prepare a healthy breakfast — and most importantly, I tackle my most critical work of the day while enjoying my espresso — all before 7 AM.

If this is something you’ve wanted to try but haven’t yet managed to find success in, here are a few keys I’ve found to making this routine not only possible, but extremely enjoyable as well:

Check your DNA

Have you ever referred to yourself as a “morning person” or “night owl”? We typically use these terms to indicate our preferred time of productivity — but they can signify something much more fundamental to our being. Our tendency to be productive at certain times of the day is often hard-wired in us, an internal clock that’s determined by our DNA. This genetic predisposition is called our chronotype. If you identify as a night owl, then you can stop reading now. This method is not for you and it never will be. In fact, research shows a correlation to weight gain, diabetes, and heart disease if you try to force an extra early wake-time when your DNA is telling you otherwise. But if you feel like you do your best work in the morning, or maybe you’re not sure, than the 4 AM club could be for you.

Check your Watch

The key to making this system work, and to sustaining it, has everything to do with getting to bed at the right time each evening, and being consistent about it. Knowing the exact number of sleep hours that support your peak performance is requisite to success — mine is eight. While I can certainly make accommodations when my schedule forces me to get less sleep, more than a few nights of that in any given month effectively compromises all the systems that work together to make me successful in my day-to-day life. Without enough sleep, my motivation to exercise is zapped, my food choices start moving in a downward spiral, and my productivity at work takes a nosedive.

Check your Excuses

If you’re going to take a shot at creating a new early morning routine, you must go into it knowing that this is a no-excuses kind of practice. Follow the 21/90 rule — on average, it takes 21 days (or three full weeks) to form a habit. If the system seems to work for you, another 90 days (about three months) practice is recommended to turn it into a permanent lifestyle change. That said, you can bet your money on the fact that the first few days will be brutal. The first morning your alarm goes off at that other-worldly hour, your instinct will be to hit snooze with your inner voice pleading, “just a few more minutes.” A few more minutes inevitably turns into another hour or two, which is not getting you any closer to seeing if this system really works for you. Try combating this sleep trap by using the Rule of 5 as soon as you hear your alarm go off. When you hear the buzzer, count to five, pop up, and start moving out of bed, no matter how you feel about it in that moment. It’s totally normal to move through the motions of the first part of your morning like a zombie at first, but don’t let that stop you from making a routine of it for a least three weeks. Watch out for that sneaky 10-day slump too — for some people, the excuses come out after we feel like we’ve accomplished something, and we let our guard down.

Above all, know that every person is wired in their own way, and successful habits look different for everyone. Do not try to define yourself by what works for others — instead, let them inspire you to find your own routines that drive you toward your goals.

StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Articles | 4AM Club | Three Ways to Make the 4AM Club Work For YouJudith Nowlin, Chief Growth Officer with Babyscripts. Judith created iBirth™, a mobile care companion for pregnancy, birth and postpartum, to help healthcare practitioners deliver better health outcomes for women and children in the United States and beyond. The original idea for the app was born out of her prior decade of service in maternity care. The technology platform she and her team built has since impacted nearly 1 million families on their journey toward optimal health and wellness during one of life’s most precious times. iBirth was acquired in June 2018 by Babyscripts, Inc., the leading virtual care platform for obstetrics. You can find her here