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Don’t Have Your Own Website Yet? These 5 Arguments Will Make You Reconsider

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, Don't Have Your Own Website Yet? These 5 Arguments Will Make You Reconsider

The online world has become lucrative for businesses of all sizes and localities. When looking at the sheer number of businesses with websites, it might be shocking to find out that some businesses have yet to go digital.

If your business has not opened a website, the time to do it is now. There are several business-friendly reasons to start your own website. Once you are ready to go, let Decisive Sites help with the entire process.

1. Everyone is Online

Nearly everything is online today. Consider the size of social media platforms and the growing reach of online banks. The immense amount of people are either watching or creating a streaming video on the Internet. If your business isn’t there, you are missing out on opportunities that you might have never considered.

Without a website, your business does not exist online. No one can find you and no one can add to your coffers. Everyone is missing out if your business isn’t available to an online audience.

2. The Internet Never Closes

If you have a brick-and-mortar shop, your business most likely has limited hours. Yes, there are some businesses that are open 24-7, but they require expensive staffing during that time. This isn’t necessarily the case with a website. The Internet never closes, so your online business would be available to anyone at any time. You don’t have to be online if someone wants to buy something from your site. You could wake up in the morning and deal with sales then. But, if you don’t have a website, your sales can only happen when your doors are open.

3. It’s Cheap to Make and Maintain a Site

Websites are not expensive to run. You can get started for much less than you expect. Of course, you can always upgrade to bigger and better things. But, to get started, you don’t need much. It is just as cheap to maintain the site, too. Business owners can do it, or you can hire someone to do that for you. Business owners quickly realize that their website is worth every penny, especially when they start seeing sales add up. As well as being fairly cheap, it’s also very easy to maintain your website as long as you choose the right provider. There are numerous debates surrounding Squarespace vs Wix, but it’s really up to you to see which you prefer. They both offer simplistic, but professional templates that will make your website user friendly and effective.

4. Your Reach Grows

If you have a mom-and-pop shop in your community, your reach is rather small. But, once you open up a website, your reach can grow exponentially. Customers in other states and countries can find you and place orders. This can be an exciting prospect for many business owners.

5. Your Customer Demographics Grow

Along with growing your reach, you can grow your customer demographics. With a website, you make yourself available to people who shop online. Your brick-and-mortar shop might have a customer demographic that is older in age, as older people tend to frequent local shops. But, once you open up a website, your business immediately attracts a younger demographic, simply because young people use the internet. If you can make your website design mobile-phone friendly, then you are certain to grow your demographics to a younger customer base.

A Small Business Owner’s Emergency Preparedness Checklist

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article | Entrepreneurship | A Small Business Owner's Emergency Preparedness ChecklistIf a natural disaster were to impact your city or town, would your small business be prepared for it?

Many small businesses are, unfortunately, not ready for emergency situations. It’s why about 40 percent of small businesses end up closing down following natural disasters and other emergencies.

You can avoid this fate by creating an emergency preparedness checklist for your small business. You should be especially mindful of doing this if your small business is located in an area that gets hit with a lot of hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and other weather-related emergencies.

Take a look at some of the things you should do as a small business owner to protect your property and, more importantly, yourself and your employees.

Identify Potential Emergency Situations

There are some emergency situations that will pop up out of the blue and catch small business owners completely off guard. If, for example, a car drives through the front of your business, that’s not something you would have been able to predict.

But most of the emergency situations that small businesses face have to do with the weather. And while some of these situations can catch small business owners asleep at the wheel, most of them should be things that are on your radar.

Depending on where your small business is, it could be subjected to:

  • Hurricanes
  • Tornadoes
  • Earthquakes
  • Blizzards
  • Flash Floods
  • Wildfires

Your emergency preparedness checklist should include details on how you’ll respond to each of these things. But it all starts with identifying which of them are most likely to impact your small business.

Figure Out Ways to Respond to Each Specific Type of Emergency

Once you know which types of emergency situations your small business could potentially face, the next order of business will be to figure out how you’ll handle each one. This will require some careful planning on your part.

Sit down and take a look at each type of emergency situation and think about how it could affect your small business. This will help you decide what you’ll need to work your way through an emergency situation.

For instance, if your small business is positioned right in the middle of a city that gets hit with bad hurricanes every few years, you’ll need to find the best ways to respond to hurricanes. You should plan to do it by:

  • Boarding up windows and doors prior to a hurricane touching down in your city
  • Moving electronic equipment to a place where it won’t get wet if water makes its way into your small business
  • Securing anything that could get washed away during flooding in your area

Every emergency situation is a little bit different and will require you to take different steps. The key is outlining a detailed response plan for each individual situation.

Outfit Your Small Business With the Right Tools to Handle Emergencies

In order to respond to emergency situations, you’re going to need to have more than just response plans in place. You’re also going to need a series of tools that will help you carry your plans out.

Prior to a hurricane, for instance, you’ll need to have everything from hammers and nails to plywood and sandbags on hand to prepare your small business. Without these things, it’s going to be difficult to get your small business ready for an emergency.

Yet, you would be surprised to see how many small business owners wait until the very last minute to try and obtain these tools. Some end up not being able to get the tools they need to shore up their small businesses and make emergency situations worse for their businesses.

See which tools you will need to respond to different emergency situations and invest in them long before you ever have to pull them out. It never hurts to have these tools stored away since you never know when you could need them.

Put a Communication System Into Place for Emergency Situations

Communication is going to be of the utmost importance when an emergency situation strikes.

You’re going to need to communicate with your employees to let them know what you need them to do to keep your small business safe. You’re also going to need to communicate with other small business owners in your area so that you can lend a hand to one another.

And of course, you’ll need to communicate with your local police station as well as your local fire station in many cases. You might need to have them come out to assist you with an emergency.

Figure out who from your small business is going to be communicating with others during an emergency situation. Whether it be you, your general manager, or someone else, there should be a point person in place for all communication efforts.

Get Out Ahead of Emergencies as Best You Can

As we mentioned earlier, it’s impossible to predict all emergency situations. There are going to be emergencies that sneak up on you from time to time.

But you can get out ahead of many emergency situations by paying close attention to what’s happening in the news. If there is a hurricane threatening to touch down in your city, you can map its progress and see how much damage it could potentially do to homes and businesses in your area.

This will help you prepare for emergencies so much better than you would be able to otherwise.

Start Checking Items Off Your Emergency Preparedness Checklist Today

You don’t have to allow a hurricane, an earthquake, or another type of emergency to cripple your small business. By creating an emergency preparedness checklist, you can limit the amount of damage that an emergency does.

Use the tips listed here to formulate your own emergency preparedness checklist based on the potential emergency situations your small business might face. You won’t have to worry about an emergency shutting your business down for good when you prepare for it ahead of time.

Read the articles on our blog to find out more about the emergencies that could bring your small business to a halt.

The Services That Can Pull Your Business Together

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There are many services that you should be trialing for your business, with trialing being the key word here. Your business should have a lot of services that it relies on, and these will grow over time. From the moment you establish yourself as a trading business, you will begin building those connections. You’ll find yourself an accountant who can help you manage your books. You’ll dabble in companies that offer marketing solutions. And one by one, you’ll have a team of people who you rely on to keep your business ticking, without even thinking about it. But there are no doubt going to be some services that you might be missing out on at the minute, simply because you’ve been managing it in house, or haven’t thought about it before. But it’s these services that might mean the difference between steady growth, and struggling growth. So, keep on reading, and we’ll show you what services we think you should look into.

StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article | Entrepreneurship | Business Services | The Services That Can Pull Your Business TogetherCustomer Related

Customer related problems are ones that we’ve all experienced at some point or another. In fact, the biggest headache we often have problems with customers, is trying to retain them, and trying to bring in new ones. And that’s often because we don’t understand how to build and secure that relationship with them, and work on it so that your customer base only keeps on growing. WhiteOwl is just one company that can help you to do so if you choose their CRM service. CRM stands for customer relationship management, which will be right up your street if this is what you’re struggling with. It will focus on customer relationships, and building bridges with them so that you can progress. The more your business grows, the more important this is going to become simply because there’s just so much to try and understand in terms of customer relationships and how to keep them strong, and you might have so many age ranges to try and connect with, that will require different tactics to be used.

Financial Saviours

Financial saviours are what nearly every small business is looking for. It’s hard to find a small business that has not long been established, that isn’t struggling financially. Often the investment can be crippling, especially when profit is slow to build. So, the perfect people to liaise with, are business financial advisors. These can help you to decide where your money should be going, where you might be able to get more from, and how to progress your business financially. All you have to do is find a trusted one that can understand how your business works.

Investment Gurus

Investment is one you should be thinking about as soon as profit starts to build. It’s so easy to find an investment route that will suit your business. From small investments to big investments, you can use them all depending on the profit you have to play with. But an investment broker can help you properly manage them, making sure that you’re getting the most out of them, rather than losing out all of the time.

How To Turn Around Your Under Performing Sales Team

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Your sales team is at the heart of your business and when they perform well, the business thrives. But when they are not performing so well, your business is in real danger. Unless you can turn things around and get your sales team working again, your business could fall apart completely. In some cases, it might just be that you’re going through a slow period and things will pick up again soon. But if sales figures are low for an extended period and things don’t seem to be turning around on their own, you need to start making some changes. Here’s how you can improve your underperforming sales force.

StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article | How To Turn Around Your Under Performing Sales Team

Identify The Problem

The first step in fixing your sales team is identifying where the problem lies. For example, you might be getting plenty of qualified leads but your sales team is not closing that many deals, or maybe they are not getting enough leads in the first place. You may also find that certain employees are underperforming compared to their coworkers and you need to focus on those people in particular. The best way to identify the problem is to look at your sales data. If you use  a good salesforce dashboard, you can see all of the data about your sales team and how they are performing. By looking over all of this data, you will be able to identify exactly where the blockages in your sales pipeline are so you can start working towards a solution.

Generate More Qualified Leads

Sometimes, your sales team is struggling because you are generating leads but they are not qualified leads and so they cannot convert many of those customers. If that is the case, you should focus on targeting your marketing efforts more effectively so you get more qualified leads. Using digital marketing is a great way to reach more people and, most importantly, reach the right people. Spend some time thinking about who your target market is and how you can create marketing campaigns that will resonate with them.

Motivate With Targets

A lack of motivation could be the reason that things are slowing down. When people have a goal to reach for, they work a lot harder and sometimes, employers do not give their sales staff big enough targets to hit. People may be motivated initially, but if they are hitting their targets easily and you are not raising the bar, they will start to be complacent. It’s important that you set dynamic goals for your sales team so they always have something to strive for.

Improve Training

If customers are progressing to the final stages and then dropping out, that’s a sign that they are not very good at closing deals. In that case, you may want to consider improving your training. Giving your sales team more tools that they can use and helping them to improve their phone manner will make it a lot easier for them to convert those customers.

If you spend some time rethinking your sales team, you should be able to identify the problem and fix it before your business falls apart.

5 Tips to Improve Productivity in the Workplace

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article | 5 Tips to Improve Productivity in the WorkplaceAccording to experts, inefficiency can cost you between 20% to 30% of your business profits. Have you taken a hard look at your current operations? If you haven’t done so, you should get on it as soon as possible.

You may think it’s difficult to improve productivity in the workplace, but that’s far from the truth. It can be as easy as finding ways to motivate your employees and streamlining your operations. Don’t know where to start?

We’ve got you covered. Here are our top 5 tips to increase productivity in the workplace today.

1. Create a Positive Work Environment

As a business owner and leader, it’s vital to create a positive environment where your employees feel comfortable. Aim to motivate them through monthly events such as leadership workshops. You should also consider setting up a breakfast bar and other facilities to make your office space more comfortable.

2. Promote Employee Wellness

Healthy and happy employees make the dream work. You should always promote and prioritize your employees’ wellbeing. You can do this by scheduling wellness clinics at your offices or creating a fitness challenge to motivate employees to take care of themselves.

You should also promote talking about mental health as well. Try to make your employees feel comfortable enough to ask for a day off to prevent any burnouts.

3. Harness the Power of Technology

Believe it or not, using the most advanced technology can help you increase employee productivity. It’s important to take a look at your operations at an organizational and departmental level. Remember every department is a piece of the puzzle.

An example is how many businesses miss the mark when designing their accounting operations. When companies don’t streamline processes such as paystub generation, employees may be spending too much time completing these tasks. If this situation sounds familiar, you should consider a paystub maker such as Paystubs.net.

4. Set Up an Employee Development Program

Academic degrees and experience provide employees the knowledge needed to meet their job requirements. However, the best employers promote employee growth.

Establishing an employee development program or academy can help your employees grow. Focus on providing in-house seminars and courses to improve their skills and efficiency.

5. Empower Your Employees

You can empower employees by delegating tasks and guiding them. Make sure to monitor your employees’ performance to ensure they’re making the right choices. An empowered employee will contribute to your company’s success.

A great way to empower employees is by establishing a mentorship program. Under this program, company leaders will mentor your employees. This empowerment program will help you develop in-house talent for any need that arises in your organization.

Can You Improve Productivity in the Workplace?

As a business owner, you can improve productivity in the workplace. It will come down to implementing the best measures to motivate your employees. The first step is analyzing your operations and pinpointing where there’s room for improvement.

Focus on providing your employees with the best tools and creating a positive work environment. A good practice is asking your employees how you can help them. It may seem difficult to increase employee productivity, but we’re confident our tips will help you take your business to the next level.

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