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How Transparency Can Benefit Your Organization

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StrategyDriven Business Communications Article | How Transparency Can Benefit Your OrganizationTransparency in communication has become more common in all sorts of enterprises. In the nonprofit and responsible profit sector, candor and authenticity are considered high value. Customer loyalty tends to increase when there’s an emphasis on transparency. Leveraging the power of a good story, transparency is a positive alternative to a competitive, secretive attitude; it’s a more compassionate way to function. For stakeholders, trust is a major issue; transparency helps facilitate it. Consider several ways that transparency can benefit your organization.

Relationships With Investors

If you’re building a relationship with a possible investor, increasing the trust level can be facilitated with the wise use of transparency. There’s a good bit of competition for funding, and investors want to recoup their money as soon as possible. It may be daunting to decide how you want to present your brand story; the assistance of professionals such as PR firms in Portland Oregon can get you started in the right direction. Judicious transparency indicates that you’ll be honest and thorough with your business plan and consistently keep investors in the loop.

Community Trust

In this case, your “community” is everyone you come into contact with — it’s not only a geographical designation. Transparency is all about awareness of the social norms of your customers and stakeholders while having sincere communication content and style. While it’s important to have a reputation for honesty and integrity as sort of a baseline, portraying an image of absolute perfection is unsustainable, unrealistic, and may backfire. Keep it real by being straightforward about the bumps along the way, and describing how you’re overcoming them.

Employee Morale

As you build your organization, transparency with employees is a valuable investment, especially in the early stages. Higher productivity, more confidence and creativity, and less turnover are associated with greater transparency. You’ll also build your word-of-mouth reputation in the professional community.

Customer Relations

Customer confidence starts from a foundation of trust, and transparency helps build it — particularly if you’re a human service provider. Firms like a healthcare PR company Portland can help you craft your message so it resonates with customers. Your organization gains credibility if customers see moments of vulnerability within a framework of integrity and commitment.

Depending on your type of organization, there are many ways to be transparent and professional. Take a look at similar businesses and see how they’re effectively weaving transparency into their stories, and mine your own experiences to craft a compelling message.

Recession Survival Tips: How Your Business Can Come Out Stronger

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Finances Article |recession survival|Recession Survival Tips: How Your Business Can Come Out StrongerDid you know that almost 18 million people were unemployed in the USA in June 2020? The ongoing fight against the Coronavirus has led to unpreceded financial losses and a bleak outlook for the future.

If you are a business owner you are no doubt interested in recession survival. What can you do to ensure that your business stays afloat?

Take a few minutes to read our in-depth article to find out what you can do.

Reduce Your Outgoings

When a recession hits, it affects everyone. This means that you can use this as a bargaining tool with creditors.

First, you should call your landlord and negotiate rent terms. If you have been on the premises for some time and have built up a good relationship with the owner, you will have a strong bargaining position.

Landlords will always want to retain good tenants rather than search for new occupants that may or may not be as reliable as you.
This is the first step in your recession survival strategy. If you want to know why a strategy is so important you can learn more from this page.

Collect Owed Money Quickly

Recessions tend to become gradually worse as more and more businesses are affected. This means that you should try to collect any debts as quickly as possible before debtors are unable to repay.

You can offer incentives such as a small discount for fast payment. However, ensure that any larger incentives are not offered to every customer.

Why? Because of your next goal.

Retain Existing Customers

Simply put, retaining customers is easier and cheaper than finding new ones. In fact, customer loyalty can make the difference between survival and sinking during a recession.

If you offer low prices, communicate regularly with existing customers. Emphasize the need for the cost-effective pricing you offer during a recession.

If you do not offer the cheapest prices on the market, emphasize the quality of the product you offer and the need to invest in quality during hard times.

Listen to your customers and offer them the best incentives you can. Do your best to meet their exceptional needs during an exceptional time.

Layoffs: Do it Quickly and Kindly

Laying off employees, especially long-serving employees, is never easy. However, when possible, try to do it early in the recession and while showing compassion and preserving dignity.

Early layoffs that are well planned will reassure the remaining staff that their place is valued and assured. This will prevent unnecessary anxiety and possible staff leaving of their own accord.

Recession Survival and Other Necessary Skills in 2020

Not even world leaders saw the COVID-19 crisis coming. And no one could have predicted the full economic tidal wave that came with it.
However, this does not mean that your business is doomed in the coming recession. By applying these recession survival tips, you can ensure that your business stays afloat and even registers growth.

If you are interested in learning more about business and lifestyle developments, then we are here to help. We gather the latest information and bring it to you via our feed. Take a look today!

How to Lower Your Small Business’s Operating Costs

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Finances Article |Operating costs |How to Lower Your Small Business's Operating CostsIt can be difficult yet rewarding to keep a small business up and running. There’s a lot of work that goes into keeping things out of the red.

Whether you’re looking to reopening or just need to cut down your current operating costs, there’s much a small business owner can do. Keeping your operating costs down is the number one thing any business can do to help ensure they can stay in the green and continue to grow.

Would you love to spend less? Read on and we’ll walk you through a few key suggestions on how to cut costs and run smoother as an operation.

Embrace New Technologies

Are you still running archaic old systems and doing everything by hand? Isn’t it time to take a few steps forward and be part of the modern age?

There so many different software programs out there that can help to streamline your business operations. What area of your business operation is slowing you down? There is more than likely a program or online system out there that can help you out.

Accounting, website hosting, marketing, payroll, on and on. If you have a problem, there’s probably a technical solution that you can embrace. From the TurboTax to the free paystub generator, someone out there has created a solution for you.

Why embrace tech? Because tech creates efficiency. A computer can do something at triple the speed we can and often at a higher rate of accuracy. If you can reduce the need for direct labor, you’ll cut back on the time needed for various tasks.

You’ll also be able to eliminate some needed manpower and that can decrease the amount of money you’re putting into wages as well. Tech might even be able to improve the way you approach certain processes in your business, cutting out unneeded steps and providing cheaper alternatives.

Consider Outsourcing

It can cost a lot to keep employees on your payroll the whole year-round. On top of wages, you’ve got health insurance and various budgets to worry about. It might be enough to sink your whole budget outright.

It doesn’t have to be, however. If there are certain departments that you don’t really need to have year-round, you could always outsource them. Many companies do this for a variety of departments: tax accounting, human relations, or even customer service.

Instead of hiring someone full-time, outsourcing allows you to pay for these services only when you need them. That can greatly help to lower your overall cost and to raise the efficiency of each dollar that you spend.

Advertising and marketing is another area that you could benefit from outsourcing. For many business owners, running an entire marketing department isn’t worth the investment that it provides. It can be a real headache.

However, outsourcing your marketing and advertising needs to another company can help get the results you want at a fraction of the cost. This can really pay off as time goes by.

Look for Better Rates

Have you been working with the same shipping company for years? Maybe you’re not doing the work at finding a business partner who will really provide you with the kinds of prices you need to stay profitable.

One way to cut operating costs is to take a serious look at your vendors list. Where are you spending the most money, and might it be possible to get the same product or service from another entity for cheaper?

Even if you’re considering leaving, the current vendors you work with might consider negotiating down in order to ensure you’ll stick around as a client of theirs. If you compare prices from different vendors, you might be able to pit them against one another and get them to bring the price down.

Getting new quotes if it’s been a while since you’ve done this kind of research can ensure you’re getting the price you really deserve.

Create a Green Workspace

Did you know that creating a green workspace can do more than helping out the planet? It can also provide a positive impact on your bottom line.

It’s true! One of the benefits of many green practices is that they are more energy-efficient. Energy efficiency as it relates to your budget means cheaper bills.

Switch out all the light bulbs in your office for green-friendly fluorescent lighting and you’ll be surprised at how much you save on a yearly basis. Improving your heating and cooling systems cans also help to shave dollars off.

If you can cut your office’s reliance on disposal products you’ll also be able to save money there. Recycling and reusing products lessen the need to buy more. Encouraging multi-use water bottles, mugs, plates, and so forth will help Earth and help your wallet.

Swapping back to a normal coffee pot as opposed to those single-use coffee cups can provide big savings as well. A normal tin of coffee can produce hundreds of cups of coffee as opposed to the very few that a pack of cups will create for the same price.

It may be difficult to get your team to adjust to these kinds of changes right away. With a little work, however, you can create great change and cut some of your costs.

Learning to Lower Your Operating Costs

It can be hard to run a small business, especially in the current climate. However, embracing some of the above tips and tricks can help you to lower your current operating costs.

If you can successfully keep these costs down, you’ll be well on your way to a brighter tomorrow. Need more financial advice for the office? Keep scrolling our blog for more.

How to Streamline Your Business and Reduce Expenses

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Streamline your Business|How to Streamline Your Business and Reduce ExpensesStreamlining is in every business’s best interest. Operating a clunky business is costly. You need to pay to keep all the essential components together and juggle with operations. It’s a nightmare both for outright costs and for time wasted. Despite what many businesses may think, there is a very good chance that they are inefficient in at least one way.

Audit Your Business

Any efforts you make before auditing your business have the potential to have been a complete waste of your time and resources. You might know of a problem, yes, but without that audit, you don’t know why it is a problem or what the best method is to go about fixing it. The best solution might be to improve a different area of your business entirely. Until you do an audit, you will never know.

Automate Your Business

Auditing your business will give you a clear idea of what needs to be done. In most cases, automating specific tasks will immensely improve your business and employee relations. You just need to know which tasks to automate to see the most significant improvements. Data management systems are incredibly clever and can help make steps that took minutes or even hours and days take seconds. HR, inventory, and data collection are three areas that often see the most significant improvement in productivity when automation is introduced.

Invest in Closed-Loop Systems

Waste is waste. If you manufacture items, you want to make use of the scraps and cut-offs just as much as the main bulk of the virgin material. If distilling is included in your process, then you will want a closed-loop system that will reduce loss and help you optimize your manufacturing process. Do try to choose items that work together. Your new pdx.gold extraction unit should work with the rest of your system, for example.

Make Money Out of Your Waste

Following on the closed-loop suggestion is to make money out of your waste. You won’t always be able to recapture raw materials in a closed-loop machine. Instead, you will want to look at creating a closed-loop business partnership. Find businesses that need your scrap and waste and are willing to pay for it. If your scraps are metal, paper, or other similar raw materials, then you can make money back on an item you used to have to pay to dispose of.

Invest in Regular Training

If you want your workplace to be efficient, your employees need to know the best way to do that. This applies to those working on a manufacturing floor and your office. Train on optimal data input, on how to operate machinery, and even make an efficient system so that all items and equipment have a place and can be easily located in seconds.

Go Paperless

Try to reduce the number of materials you need. Going paperless is just one of the most apparent routes you can take. Today, computers can handle important tasks like document comparison, redlining, and similar tasks. To put into perspective just how much you can save, consider that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is looking at savings in $1.5 billion in the next decade just by going paperless. Though your business likely isn’t cutting down 2 million trees each year to feed its paper habit, the savings are still there, and you can and will see a difference for your business.

The Best Marketing Strategies for Young Companies

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Marketing Strategies|The Best Marketing Strategies for Young CompaniesYoung companies should have only one thing on their mind: growth. Growth is almost always achieved by getting new customers, and new customers are almost always achieved by reasonable, effective marketing. That’s why marketing is such an essential thing for startups to nail. When looking for funding at any stage, a strong customer base will make the whole process infinitely easier. Here are some strategies your company needs to be considering getting customers at that early stage.

PR

PR can be much cheaper than advertising and is perfect for establishing credibility and getting new potential customers to hear from you. Good PR needs to be creative and involve exploiting the brand niche that you occupy (if you haven’t identified your niche and done solid branding work do so before you do any marketing at all, it’s essential). Take the case of Patrick Finnegan. He was a 17-year-old who wanted to do venture capitalism in New York City, so he went to the PR and marketing company Big Machine Agency. They realized that they could position him as the business face of GEN Z, somebody who was young enough to know about all the youth trends that many consumer companies want to hop on. After spinning this, they paired him up with a celebrity photographer to build a story for him that caught attention in lifestyle and finance blogs.

Email Marketing

This is at the other end of the spectrum to an exciting PR campaign, but email marketing is still essential because it’s still so effective. It allows you to boost customer loyalty and attract customers to your startup for almost no money at all, especially if you’re a good writer. You can gather email addresses from people who visit your website by offering incentives or by directly asking potential customers you meet for their emails. It’s essential to offer more than just free advertising – offer free guides, infographics, content – whatever you think will bring potential or existing customers value. You should also make it easy to unsubscribe, as that way, only those who are genuinely interested in your niche will attend to the emails, becoming more loyal customers, and focusing your marketing efforts.

StrategyDriven Online Marketer & Website Developer Magazine


Online Content

Start a blog. If you are dealing with customers and 99% of businesses (unless you’re sure they won’t find you online), you need to start a blog or offer some form of content regularly. Bill Gates said it in the 90s – content is king. It’s the reason that most people use the internet if not to look for a solution to a problem. Make sure that those interested in your niche have access to both by making your site as valuable as possible to them. Regularly posting fresh, engaging, and original content is essential for modern SEO, too, as Google is changing its algorithms frequently with the end-goal of delivering valuable content to customers. That means relying on keywords and SEO ‘tricks won’t last you very long and will have an opportunity cost as instead of bothering with those, you could be attracting real readers with good content.