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Smart Ways To Enhance the Efficiency of Your Business

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Business efficiency|Smart Ways To Enhance the Efficiency of Your BusinessEvery entrepreneur and business manager is constantly working to improve the efficiency of their business. Business efficiency entails maximizing your outputs from your input and making the most out of your resources.

Failure to notice stagnation or regression in your business can ultimately lead to a decrease in profits or the eventual closure of your business. It is, therefore, essential to apply smart tactics to improve the efficiency of your business. They include the following;

Delegate Duties

While delegating duties might seem obvious for business owners, it is often quite difficult to practice. Many entrepreneurs hold their business close to their heart, and they prefer to have a direct hand in everything involved with it. While prioritizing the quality of your products or services is quite okay, checking on every small detail rather than delegating can lead to wastage of everyone’s valuable time.

Instead, consider delegating responsibilities to the most qualified employees and entrust them with performing the task well. Doing this gives your employees the chance to learn new skills and gain leadership experience, which are ultimate benefits for your company.

Assign Tasks According to Skills

Knowing the behavioral styles and skills of your employees is vital for maximizing efficiency. For instance, a creative and extroverted person who thinks out of the box will probably be the best at pitching proposals to potential clients. However, they may not show the same excellence when it comes to a more detail-oriented and rule-intensive task.

Efficiency doesn’t call for expecting your employees to be great at everything. Instead, it requires that you determine that an employee is suited to perform a specific task before you assign it to them. If they cannot perform the task as expected, it means you might have to find someone else whose styles and skills match your needs.

Outsource Intelligently

Intelligent outsourcing can make your business run efficiently without alienating your employees and customers. The best way to do this is by outsourcing the non-core activities of your business. For instance, you can find a company specializing in human resource management and payroll or outsource for QuickBooks bookkeeping services if no one in your team is savvy with accounting.

Outsourcing also allows you to focus on the core activities that make up your business. You can also put the money you saved up from outsourcing into marketing, innovation, and any other aspects that are vital for the smooth running of your business. It also allows you to focus your attention exactly where it belongs and see a quick boost in the productivity and efficiency of your business.

Automate

While some entrepreneurs are reluctant about automating their business, it is also likely that their businesses are incredibly inefficient. Technology is a vital tool for improving the efficiency of your business, and you should consider incorporating it as soon as possible if you haven’t already done it.

Automation doesn’t mean that you have to replace your employees with robots and software. It only requires that you incorporate such technology to increase the efficiency of your workforce. You can also use software to host meetings, which saves a lot of time and money used for travel to the meeting venue.

Incentivize Your Employees

One of the best ways to encourage your employees to continue performing exceptionally is by giving them a reason to do so. You can achieve this by recognizing them whenever they do a good job, making them feel appreciated, therefore increasing their productivity.

Ensure that you take every individual’s preferences and needs when rewarding your employees. In addition to simple words of gratitude and appreciation, you can give them incentives like a handwritten note, taking them out for a meal, or implementing a workplace wellness program.

Make Communication Easy

Miscommunication or the lack of communication is another aspect of inefficiency. While a meeting can sometimes solve this problem quite easily, they are difficult to schedule, and you may end up wasting a lot of time.

Fortunately, all the available technology makes it easy to have streamlined communication at all times. Whether you opt to utilize a fast-paced chat system software or easy face-to-face conversation via webcam, you can ensure that your employees get the relevant information as fast as possible. Effective communication can also sidestep confusion and ensure that your employees can get to work and improve the productivity of your business.

While selecting the tactics that will help improve your business’s efficiency, you must first identify the issues present and then work to determine their solution. You should also keep in mind that working for your business efficiency is a continuous process that requires you to continually find loopholes and work towards implementing an effective solution.

5 of the Most Useful AI/Machine Learning Tools for Your Business

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |AI Machine Learning Tools|5 of the Most Useful AI/Machine Learning Tools for Your BusinessAt this point, pretty much everyone is familiar with artificial intelligence, or AI. Thanks to movies such as The Matrix, Terminator, and well, AI: Artificial Intelligence, most people are aware of the concept of intelligent machines. But although AI is a real and genuine technology, the potential and tangible applications of modern AI advancements are far from what Hollywood movies and novels by authors such as Philip K. Dick would have us believe.

AI is the future’s wave of adaptive learning, which involves utilizing programs to learn from data. As AI learns from the fed data, it advances and becomes more complex, reliable, accurate, and secure. Therefore, AI brings many adaptive learning benefits to education, businesses, and sectors of society. AI paves the way for more machine learning and other AI-related opportunities to drive industries to rapid digital transformation.

In fact, real AI is mostly applied to business development and science projects where data-driven derivatives and goals are the primary focus of a given strategy. In simple terms, AI applications are primarily focused on gathering, analyzing, and sorting data, much like any other computer program. However, where AI is different is in its machine learning capabilities.

What is Machine Learning?

What is machine learning? Well, machine learning is the concept of an AI developing its own repeatable output based on the data analysis from repeated input. For example, Facebook’s machine learning algorithm, DeepText, analyses posts and displays the ones that it thinks you might find interesting based upon your previous post-browsing history.

DeepText isn’t the only machine learning tool that you are exposed to on a daily basis. Netflix’s video suggestions, email spam filters, and even certain video games are all examples of machine learning that you probably use on a daily basis and don’t even realize.

Over the past few years, the power of machine learning and AI has become a viable tool in business development because of the analytical and data processing capabilities of modern hardware and accompanying software tools.

Benefits of AI and Machine Learning

Machine learning algorithms attempt to understand all data, applying learned concepts to new data sets to enhance performance and accuracy. Just imagine the functions and capabilities computer programs can do with these technologies. 

Here are the benefits of AI and machine learning:

  • Businesses can provide excellent customer service
  • Eliminate manual errors because of precision and accuracy 
  • Automation reduces manual tasks, such as data entry and computation
  • Improve decision-making with forecasting and real-time reporting
  • Reduce cybersecurity vulnerabilities and threats 
  • Improve productivity and time management

Companies utilize AI and machine learning to stay competitive. Having the right AI/ML tools in place can help a business reap the above benefits, making an edge to attain goals and objectives for long-term success. But what AI and machine learning tools do you need for your business?

Common AI and Machine Learning Tools

Large corporations such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google apply their own machine learning tools to their own business and have developed consumer-level AI suites for use by other businesses that don’t require knowledge of complicated AI programming and can be used for specific data analysis and modeling.

Some of the most useful AI suites include:

  • Google Cloud AI
  • Amazon SageMaker
  • Microsoft Azure AI
  • MonkeyLearn
  • Obviously AI

One of the most robust and technological machine learning tools available, Google AI powers the company’s own algorithms and provides multiple data-driven features while Amazon SageMaker comes as part of the extensive Web Services suite with an ability to perform custom ML datasets, and Azure AI from Microsoft is an impressive suite with many real-world applications as well as analysis.

Two AI tools that aren’t from huge corporations are MonkeyLearn and Obviously AI. MonkeyLearn is a very user-friendly text analysis MLAI and Obviously AI provides natural language analysis for forming predictions based on specific input.

Google Cloud AI

Launched in 2008, Google Cloud AI is mainly a compounding structure for integrating the useful features of cloud computing into a single, manageable platform with Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) options for secure cloud services. However, the system also provides feature-rich machine learning tools as standard that can be utilized in a variety of ways.

One of the most powerful AI and ML systems available, Google AI prides itself on being able to take under-researched problems and find solid, scientific solutions that advance the state-of-the-art in the field. Google also has a mission to make its AI system available to everyone and apply the technology to solve some of the world’s most pressing humanitarian and environmental issues.

The suite comes with many impressive AI applications that you can integrate directly into your deployment and productivity pipeline almost immediately:

  1. Contact Center AI; allows you to automate your call center interactions with customers.
  2. Documents AI: can read and extract data from your documents with algorithms that can look for fraud, data entry errors or receipt mistakes.
  3. Recommendations AI: can deliver personalized recommendations for each of your customers based on their previous interactions.

Amazon SageMaker

Part of Amazon Web Services, SageMaker provides multiple machine learning bindings for some of the most widely used and powerful programming languages available such as Python, Ruby, and Java which allows the creation of custom datasets and algorithms in addition to an impressive collection of preexisting ML systems that can also be incorporated into cloud computing.

One of the most impressive features of SageMaker is its support for other ML platforms with which it can integrate for even more productivity and increased workflow. Google Brain’s open-source platform TensorFlow is compatible with SageMaker as is Tableau. Both of these are focused on business intelligence and deep learning with traditional ML at their core.

SageMaker is one of the most powerful, scalable ML platforms available with many useful features:

  1. Clarify; reduces bias in ML that could help you find suitable employee candidates or customers.
  2. FeatureStore; allows you to select from multiple pre-existing feature groups that can be applied to your specific requirement model.
  3. Data Wrangler; this allows you to manipulate and convert data from one type to another, useful for such things as data modeling, calculation, and visualization.

Microsoft Azure AI

As the world’s leading software manufacturer, Microsoft is no stranger to complex data and advanced programming such as AI and ML. Also a cloud compounding service, Azure AI provides SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS capabilities with support for many of the best and most flexible programming languages available, along with their frameworks, with the suite’s emphasis being on software development by utilizing data sets, storage, and management features.

The business applications of Azure are impressive and the platform has been built from the ground up to accommodate business processes that accelerate development and rapid deployment in scalable, automated, and reproducible ML scenarios using specific data, models, and processes.

While most other ML platforms can be used for a broad range of applications, Azure AI is laser-focused on business development strategy:

  1. Video Analyzer; allows you to obtain real-time analytics from played and streamed videos.
  2. Azure Cognitive Search; add feature-rich data sets to your search functions such as autocomplete, geospatial filtering, and keyphrase extraction.
  3. Adaptive Machine Learning; user friendly interface with advanced features allows you to develop ML scenarios with either beginner or expert knowledge.

MonkeyLearn

One of the best Software-as-a-Service machine learning tools around, MonkeyLearn provides a feature-rich set of machine learning capabilities at a low cost that can provide useful insights for any business, but is especially popular with small to medium-sized businesses as one of its best features is that no coding is required.

Using MonkeyLearn’s user-friendly interface, you can develop topic-specific models for ML datasets such as keyword extraction, text to tag conversion and text classification features such as sentiment analysis, topic labeling and intent detection; true machine learning that can boost the productivity of any data-dependent business.

Some of the most useful features of MonkeyLearn include:

  1. Text Extraction; analyzes data so you can pick out features, keywords, or entities such as “14” screen size”, “free delivery”, or “Disney”, respectively, for example.
  2. Text Classifiers; analyses data so you can classify text according to a topic, intent, or sentiment.
  3. Integration; MonkeyLearn can further increase your ML capabilities by integrating with other popular programs such as ZenDesk, Google and MS Office, and Rapidminer.

Obviously AI

Another excellent machine learning application, Obviously AI uses natural language processing as a means of producing prediction models based upon specific input datasets. The platform requires no programming and operates via a user-friendly point and click interface in order to upload data and model a scenario for prediction with naturally written questions.

The MLAI then works to predict a specific outcome based upon the questions input and a predefined prediction column, then it can accurately model such things as revenue forecasts, lead conversions, and loan repayment probabilities in minutes, saving both time and money.

Basic on the surface, but extremely complex at the core, Obviously AI’s best features include:

  1. Complex Models; the app comes with built-in models that you can use right away for predictions.
  2. Ease of Use; the intuitive and user-friendly UI facilitates high-level machine learning with no expert knowledge of coding.
  3. Business-Boosting ROI; predictions with the app allow you to make informed decisions that can increase sales, detect fraud, or estimate paywalls and customer willingness to pay.

A Binary Decision?

It is pretty clear that machine learning and AI are driving the future of many industries, with large corporations at the wheel. Google, Amazon and Microsoft are empowering businesses of all sizes and across all sectors to advance their strategies with the inclusion of AI analytics, automation and prediction models.

The capabilities of AI and machine learning seem almost limitless and from a business perspective are able to extremely reduce the amount of man hours and, therefore, finances required to perform specific actions such as document analysis, categorizations and data extraction.

As AI and machine learning become more prevalent throughout all business sectors, one should ponder the questions; where does this leave the necessity of the human mind and what will be the human cost of such technological innovation?

Title Your Real Estate Career Should Enhance Your Life, Not Define It

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StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Article |Real Estate Career|The Pitfalls Of Overindulging In Your Real Estate CareerVolatility and uncertainty are two words that clearly define the current state of the real estate market. Still, regardless of the changing landscape in real-estate investing, it has sparked many individuals to strike the opportunity of making the most with the Covid-19 induced economic recession. As a result, alongside the sudden surge in cryptocurrency investing, more people are looking into real estate careers as a way of guaranteeing their financial freedom in the long term during the current market downturn.

However, while we strongly commend those grasping their future by their hand, we have reason to believe that many newcomers are wrongly motivated by dreams of catching the wave of economic recovery and timing the market in their favor. And, while it’s entirely possible to set yourself for life with the right decisions in place, defining the next few years to come by your real estate career alone without recognizing the risks will set you up for failure and regret.

A Market Of Opportunity And Equally Terrifying Risks

It’s true that during trying times is when life-changing opportunities present themselves. Still, we must also look at it because the same market also carries equally terrifying risks that could do the same damage otherwise. And all it would take is one slip-up or a single moment of getting too ahead of yourself for one unnoticeable detail to leave your attention and make everything you’ve built up crumble to your knees. Plus, considering that the real estate market is more than capable of recreating this situation a hundredfold, newbies must proceed with this new career with caution.

  • Soaring Demand And Limited Housing Supply: Currently, there’s soaring demand for new homes and a minimal housing supply to top it all, making it a seller’s market and a dream for those already holding key properties to offer. However, the same situation was reflected during the housing crisis, and if the pessimists were to be proven correct, it wouldn’t be long until an event to pop the bubble. Sure, prices are high, and you’ll get multiple offers, but don’t take on too much.
  • Global Shortage Restricting New Developments: We’ve established the people want homes. They want them now, but the depleted global supply chains make it near impossible to start new housing developments because we are currently facing shortages. For example, lumber has drastically risen in price now that the US is facing a shortage of resources, making the prospect of building new homes less financially feasible.
  • Home Sales Are Unexpectedly Plunging: Lastly, despite the enticing home prices that appeal to sellers, existing home sales are down by 2.7%, and the current trend points to more decline. Therefore, you might not even be able to sell a home. The indicators show an explicit contradiction between demand and the realized home sales, making it even riskier for those new to their real estate aligned professions.

But Value Your Career And Safeguard Your Livelihood With Competence

Of course, we are by no means dissuading people from investing in a real estate career because it’s a career path that will inevitably teach you methods of guaranteeing long-term financial security. However, given the volatile and uncertain nature of the current real estate markets, you must safeguard your livelihood with competence instead of overindulging yourself with career goals and yet-to-be-realized dreams.

1. Know Your Way Around The New Marketplace

Times are changing, and the same is happening to the real estate marketplace, so you should start to know your way around it as soon as possible. From connecting with key stakeholders and making valuable strategic partnerships, you could quickly grasp the overall market sentiment in your locale and position yourself to make the most profit in the ideally safest way possible. For example, understanding trends in homeowner insurance helps you approach your clients’ interests better and more professionally.

2. Understand The Change In Homebuyer Demand

People want different things from a house, and with the new normal, homebuyers’ behavior is also shifting toward the emerging needs and challenges brought about by the global pandemic. For example, now that remote work is here to stay, and there will always be a reliable remote workforce staying at home, expect an increased preference for homes that could offer separate office space. So, when renovating or fixing up a property, always consider how you can meet the change in homebuyer demand.

3. Balance Your Risk Appetite

Last but not least, we recommend that you balance your risk appetite and acknowledge when you’ve bitten off too much than what you can handle. Far too many uncertain variables are currently at play, and if you don’t have enough liquid cash to meet an unexpected crisis, the market will liquidate your assets for you and put you back in square one or, worse, in more debt.

Don’t Stretch Yourself Too Thin.

In conclusion, you don’t want to stretch yourself too thin by focusing too much on your real estate career without recognizing the red flags all around you. Take a step back and always analyze every deal you plan on doing so you can mitigate any looming risks beforehand.

Five Important Factors When Choosing A Courier Service for Your Home-Based Business

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Courier Service|Five Important Factors When Choosing A Courier Service for Your Home-Based BusinessOver the years, delivery services have increased amongst families and individuals as a convenient way of sending and receiving items from distant locations, saving them a trip or two. In recent years many people have left the corporate industry, or due to circumstances, they are forced to work from home. As a result of predominantly working from home, essential items need to be delivered home from various locations.

For those who run businesses from their homes, to help you operate smoothly, courier service becomes an integral part of your business. Several courier services cater to service local and nationwide deliveries depending on your home-based business delivery needs. When choosing a suitable courier to service your business, you need to consider a few critical factors.

Service Type

With different courier service companies around, they too vary in the type of services which they offer. Some courier services differ in locations covered, such as local, national, and international scope. Another differentiating factor is the type of cargo carried, whether it’s individual parcels, supply inventory, automobile spares, or perishable goods; some services are specific to the kind of items they transport.

On-Timing Performance

Time and the tracking of parcels are essential when it comes to delivery services; the speed and route location of the delivery needs to be taken into consideration. The aim is to deliver the parcels before or no later than the promised timeline to the customer. Whether it’s an urgent 24-hour request, as offered by Texas Couriers, or even two days, on-time performance is always a top priority. Choose a courier company that can share tracking and delivery status checks in real-time, via mobile app or web.

Safety and Security

When choosing a courier service, the safety and security of your goods are a massive consideration. Courier services need to prove their safety and security policy of any items or parcels carried. Whether your recipient receives damaged packages or nothing at all that speaks to your reputation as a business, especially when working from home, you can come across as unreliable. You could be transporting a parcel with confidential information, and the last thing you want if having that information leaked.


Pricing

As a business, pricing will always be a factor when outsourcing services like courier service. The cost of the service will determine your profits made from a particular sale or service rendered. Courier companies will price their services according to the parcel size, weight, and delivery location of the parcel. Making a critical comparison of pricing with different companies is essential because companies will charge you different service rates for the same service and delivery time.

Additionally, as discussed by Interchange Pros (https://www.interchangepros.com/b2b-payment-solutions/), you need to see whether the company offers any robust B2B payment solutions. After all, you can save a lot of money using such service offerings.

Customer Feedback

Customer reviews are a great way to scrutinize the reputation of a courier company before you even work with them. This will give you a picture of various customers finding the courier service delivery; you can learn about customer’s experiences with security, timings, and prices. Considering customer reviews is an essential factor when deciding on a courier company, especially if you use the delivery service for the first time.

What Can You Achieve With An Economics Degree?

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StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Article |Economics Degree|What Can You Achieve With An Economics Degree?An economics degree will support your employability in numerous spaces, paying little mind to the business you work in. There is solid interest for profoundly numerate alumni all through the worldwide work market, and the generally adaptable logical and critical thinking abilities created by financial matters understudies implies that vocations in financial aspects are amazingly wide going and different.

Banker with eco degree

Banking vocations are well known with financial matters graduates, offering degree for high profit and have an appeal for market analysts. According to some experts from this custom term paper writing help, graduates with a foundation in financial matters are especially esteemed for parts in monetary control, monetary arranging, hazard examination, information investigation and consultancy.

With an emphasis on keeping the monetary prerequisites of customers and organizations on target, banking professions are generally worried about exhorting and offering types of assistance for a scope of banking customers and purchasers.

Accountant with economics degree

To turn into a certified accountant you’ll require further proficient capabilities, however numerous bookkeeping jobs are accessible to the individuals who considered financial aspects. In bookkeeping jobs you can work across various enterprises, zeroing in on observing the monetary circumstance of an association, business or person. Vocations in bookkeeping normally center around recording, ordering, deciphering and imparting monetary information.

Finance consultant

Market analysts and financial aspects specialists are at the core of the business world and monetary counseling. Financial aspects graduates may discover positions in huge and medium-sized associations where monetary exploration is required. The part of a monetary specialist needs inside and out information on financial speculations and models, careful scientific and critical thinking abilities and numerical capacity.

Monetary experts in the space of financial aspects would fill comparable jobs yet may work for various customers rather than only one association, creating reports and exhorting on business system. Exceptional industry information and attention to corporate account is fundamental in these jobs.

Data collector and manager

A statistician is a business proficient whose job is to assess and inform on the effects regarding monetary danger and vulnerability. Utilizing information on both business and financial aspects, statisticians give reports and devise techniques on the most proficient method to reduce these dangers. Most passage level occupation jobs in this field are inside benefits and protection, however later on you may have the chance to move towards territories including banking, venture, and medical services or paper writing services in helping with statistics homework. Statisticians ought to be gifted in science and order insights, yet in addition ready to impart complex information successfully to non-specialists.

Alternative jobs

With a foundation in economics it appears the sky is the limit. Other regular financial matters vocations and jobs incorporate reviewer, stockbroker, backup plan, business chief, retail merchandizer, estimating investigator, analyst, monetary advisor and sales rep.

Yet, how would you be able to manage a financial aspects degree if nothing unless there are other options requests to you? Indeed, you may need to likewise think about these more extensive choices: business knowledge, global turn of events, human asset the executives, IT, news coverage, law, the board, statistical surveying, governmental issues, advertising, social examination and tax assessment. Or then again, you could even turn into a business visionary and go into business!