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Choosing Your First Business Premises as an Entrepreneur: 4 Top Tips

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StrategyDriven Starting Your Business Article | Choosing Your First Business Premises as an Entrepreneur: 4 Top TipsMany entrepreneurs are used to working from home or working remotely, but if you’ve developed your brand and built your business substantially enough to move into the property market, you’ll want to find the perfect premises that work for you.

Finding your first physical building or office space to contain your business can be a daunting (and costly) step, but it should also be an exciting time that allows you to concentrate on moving your business forward.

Here are four tips for finding the right premises.

1. Choose to Buy or Lease

This is going to be an important first step, as it’s going to impact you financially. There are pros and cons to both options, and a lot of it is going to depend on your initial budget. As an entrepreneur, it might be that you simply don’t have an upfront deposit to buy a property, however much you would like to. Renting can be a much more flexible option for entrepreneurs, as you don’t need as much money upfront and you have the flexibility to leave the contract and find alternative premises when your business grows or changes in the future.

Of course, buying can be a great investment if you’re looking to make money from a property, and it also allows you more freedom to make any desired changes to the building.

2. Think Carefully About Your Location

For certain businesses, location is everything. If you are a physical store or if you are going to have consumers or clients visiting your property on a regular basis, being stationed in a location that is easily accessible will be a must. You should think about being close to public transport links, busy towns, and city centers.
If your business doesn’t depend on external visitors, you still need to think about commutability for your employees. If your property is quite remote and some of your employees do not drive, it is going to be difficult for them.

3. Consider Any Renovation Work

You may find the perfect property, but it may take a little extra to make it the most suitable for your budget. Renovation work can be factored in, if you have the means and budget for it.

With buying, you have more freedom for renovation, but renting may also be flexible if the landlord is happy for you to take care of the renovations yourself. Always remember to get professional guidance on large jobs, such as reroofing from Lidoran.

4. Stick to Your Requirements

Know in advance what you require from a building and stick to it. Don’t compromise on requirements, as the daily workings of your business will suffer in the long run. You need to think about:

  • General office space
  • Warehousing space, if necessary
  • Parking facilities
  • Other facilities, such as a cafeteria
  • A reception or lobby

Conclusion

Finding a property is all about preparation and budgeting in advance. Knowing what you need ahead of time will ensure that you can then price-match your requirements with what you have, and make a more informed decision regarding affordable properties and whether you buy or lease them.

Finding Talent In All The Right Places

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StrategyDriven Talent Management Article | Finding Talent In All The Right Places

A business is only as good as the people who run it. This can seem like a vast oversimplification, because systems, protocols and automated tasks can also help a business run. But sooner or later, even these will fail without maintenance from specialized personnel. Furthermore, not only does our business rely on the talent we hire, but the talent of other firms, too. You trust that your hired electricians will ensure the office lights stay on, and you trust that your accountant is adequately calculating your books.

Yet of course, we can only exercise the talent decisions we have proper control over. So – where to start? This is a worthwhile question to ask, because it can both increase the talent we acquire as well as helping you find further avenues in making that a possibility.

So – where do we begin here? After all, why some personnel may last longer within your firm and some may only be here for a short duration, ensuring competence is rife throughout your firm can aid you in more ways than one.

Outsourcing

Outsourcing is an essential task when it comes to replenishing your talent for certain tasks. With Snupit you can find essential talent for certain jobs, in a temporary fashion. Furthermore, this can help you with remote working possibilities that create a sense of immediacy, which is essential in today’s intensive, quite opportunistic world. There’s also no hard and fast rule suggesting you cannot make full-time relationships with outsourced staff, allowing a business to path the holes of their talent shielding from now into the future. It all depends on your particular requirements, so be sure to stay honest about your needs.

Talent Acquisition

It can be worthwhile to head on recruitment drives from time to time, or to use headhunting services to ensure high-level executives are interested in your more prominent positions. Talent acquisition practices and services like this will help you avoid wading through resumes that have little value for the complexities of your job, and will give you the means to stay direct in your approach. However, talent acquisition programs can also mean giving someone a chance, such as working with local prisons to ensure their work outreach programmes bring some good to society.

University Visitations

Of course, finding a talented individual you can mold as one of your employees can be a great pursuit, because they’re unlikely to hold the bad habits other seasoned professionals can struggle with, or may find hard to adapt alongside your particular method of working. University visitations can be a worthwhile place to start as far as this is concerned, as recent graduates are all-too-happy to gain offers of employment, while you are gaining someone fresh and inquisitive and motivated to better themselves. Who knows? With an attractive package, they may stay at your firm for decades.

With this advice, we hope you can more easily find talent in all the right places.

Which Countries Love their Beer the Most?

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Beer|Which Countries Love their Beer the MostWe all love our beer. Regardless of country of origin, beer enthusiasts exist all the world over. Whether you’re enjoying a pint in the pub with a friend, sharing beers with a group while watching some sports, or kicking back after a long work week with your favorite IPA, beer is one of those things that everyone loves (and has a strong opinion about).

It will come as a surprise to no-one that the UK and the United States are two of the world’s largest consumers and manufacturers of beer. But which one gets the top prize? Let’s take a look at the countries where beer is most popular.

You might be very surprised to learn that when it comes to top countries for beer consumption per capita, that neither the United States nor the UK are even in the Top 10. Shocking, right? As it turns out, beer consumption per capita is highest for Equatorial Guinea, closely followed by Seychelles, Gabon, proving that African Nations certainly love their brews. Rounding out the top five are Czech Republic and Lithuania, proving that Eastern European nations love theirs as well.

While these numbers are a little surprising, they shouldn’t be. Beer is a great unifier, a beverage that has been around for centuries and is beloved all over the world. It is especially popular in countries where sport is a huge cultural factor, and each of these countries fits the bill.

Of course, the UK and the United States, as well as other western countries such as New Zealand, Australia and Germany love their beer too, especially if the sheer number of breweries and microbreweries that have cropped up in industry in recent years are any indication. Both the UK and the United States have seen a huge boom in the percentage of these microbreweries in recent years, with “craft beer” and custom IPAs, gose, lagers and stouts growing more and more in popularity on the daily.

These innovative microbreweries have taken the industry by storm, relying on recent trends and ever-changing tastes to bring unique flavor and technique to the art of brewing beer. These days, you can easily buy a hazelnut-chocolate stout at your favorite pub, or pick out a six pack of prickly pear pale ale at your local grocery store, just as easily as grabbing that old standby of Budweiser or Guinness. These breweries release new flavors and ideas with the seasons, in order to keep up with trends and popular demand.

Latin American beers or Cervezas can be counted out, either, as these are growing in popularity among beer enthusiasts around the world, as more and more microbreweries crop up in Central and South America.

One thing is sure: beer is just as popular as it ever was. While tastes and varieties might change, and enterprising young brewers unleash their creations onto the market, the one that will always stay the same is a love for the brew itself, regardless of culture or country.

Valuable Natural Materials: Three Things to Keep in Mind About Limestone Extraction

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StrategyDriven Tactical Execution Article |Limestone Extraction|Valuable Natural Materials: Three Things to Keep in Mind About Limestone ExtractionLimestone is a great building material for exteriors and interiors of buildings. Limestone is also an ingredient in concrete and other products. Limestone has been a popular building material for centuries because it is relatively common and easy to extract and make into building materials. A limestone quarry is a kind of open-pit mine where blocks of stone are cut and moved to a location where they can be made into slabs that are then polished and cut into tiles, countertops, and building facing material.

What is Limestone?

Limestone is a natural stone consisting of carbonate sediments containing skeletal fragments of long-dead sea creatures such as coral, mollusks, and foraminifera. The minerals in limestone are aragonite and calcite. This stone is formed over millions of years of sedimentation. During the formation process, it is soluble to water and weak acid solutions. Because of this, cave systems and karst landscapes are formed.

Limestone contains impurities such as sand, clay, iron oxide, organic remains, and other materials that give it its pattern and color. For this reason, limestone will have unique colors and patterns at each extraction site. Limestone is a popular building material because it is fairly common and easy to work with. Limestone can be cut into building blocks or thin plates used as a building facade.

Quarrying Limestone

Limestone is a natural product of the earth and must be extracted by different methods. Limestone Quarry methods determine the quality and beauty of the limestone. Quarries or open mines are used to extract limestone and many other types of rocks used in the building and other industries. Methods of extracting rocks in the quarrying process include digging, heating, wedging, and blasting. The blasting process includes drilling holes with machines and filling them with explosive powders and tamping materials such as ash, clay, fuses and wiring. Then, an electric power supply is used to fire the fuses and explosives. The explosions help to remove sections of limestone from their natural bed.

There are different methods of running quarries and of safely extracting limestone. The best manufacturers use quarrying methods that result in the best slabs of limestone with the least damage to the area surrounding the quarry. When all the limestone has been extracted from a site a large hole is left which can fill with water forming a lake.

Before a quarry is started there will be an analysis of the resource to determine if there is enough good-quality limestone to make the quarry economically viable. This often involves a geological study. The quarry must be licensed and meet local environmental requirements.

Three Considerations For Limestone Extraction.

Three considerations for choosing and using limestone include:

  1. Is limestone suited to the building project? There are other natural stone products to consider. Some are harder than limestone and some have different textures and colorations. Consider the pros and cons of each material. For instance, limestone is susceptible to acids so using it on the exterior of a building where there is acid rain might present maintenance problems over time.
  2. How was this limestone quarried? Some limestone extraction companies use quarrying methods that are bad for the environment. Architects and builders should use suppliers of limestone building materials that use environmentally friendly methods of extraction and manufacture.
  3. Is the chosen stone within the budget and is there sufficient quantities of matching material? This is a natural material and if the job runs short, it is not possible to make more to match.

When the right limestone material is chosen for a building project, the results can be very durable and attractive. Limestone is fairly common and therefore budget-friendly. It is a durable attractive choice for building projects.

How to Reach Your Target Customers More Effectively

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Reach Your Target Customers|How to Reach Your Target Customers More EffectivelyWhen your business is looking to get off the ground and start making sales, it’s essential to think about your target customers and how you’re going to reach them. It’s certainly one of the most difficult tasks you’ll face and there’s no easy way to do it. But there is a wide range of techniques you can make use of and take advantage of when you want to reach the right people. Learn more about that below.

Start with the Process of Defining Your Target Audience

First of all, you’re going to need to define your target audience. It’s impossible to appeal to the right people when you don’t even really know who the right people are. You should try to make sure that you choose an audience that you know is going to be interested in what you’re offering, and you can carry out market research and use focus groups to get a better idea of this.

Consider Direct Mail and Email

A really traditional yet still effective way of marketing to people is to hit them directly with direct mail. This works because it puts something directly and physically in front of your target customers, and it means they can’t really ignore what you’re presenting to them. Email marketing is also something that’s really effective and should be considered.

Use Referral Marketing Techniques

Referral marketing is one of the best techniques to make use of when you’re looking to target specific groups of customers more effectively. Referrals work well because they’re provided by people already in your target market. For example, if you’re looking to target women aged between 35 and 45, the chances are that a customer fitting that profile will refer someone they know that’s also in that same demographic.

Work with Relevant Influencers

If there are particular influencers that you know have an impact on your target audience and that they have a great respect and fondness for, you should reach out to them. See if they might be interested in working with you to promote your product. This kind of paid promotion is much more authentic and direct than simply putting an advert in front of people, so give it a try.

Make Use of Targeted Ads

It might also be a good idea to use targeted adverts to promote your business and the products or services it’s trying to sell. These are more effective than other kinds of ads because they target specific people in particular demographics, and that’s what you want to when you’re trying to connect with a clearly defined target audience. Facebook ads are particular good for their targeting capabilities.

If you’ve struggled to reach the right people so far or you simply want to get off to the right start with a new business, these tips and ideas should help you to reach people effectively and appeal to them directly, so be sure to make the most of them going forward from here.