Category: business coach

Growing Your Business: The Need To Know Essentials

Scott Asai1 Comment

Collaborative post – may contain affiliate links

Taking the plunge and setting up on your own is one of the hardest, but most rewarding challenges that you can take on in your working life. More and more of us are opting to set our own rules (and working hours), find our passions in life, and creating something true to ourselves. Getting a start-up running smoothly is no small matter, but once you are operation and even turning a profit, a great challenge lies ahead: how to go about expanding. Sometimes knowing where to start can be the biggest barrier, so set your sight on progress and remember the basics below.

Find Other Businesses to Partner With

Sometimes, expansion can be as simple as finding partner businesses to work with. By pairing up, you gain the benefit of each other’s resources, including staff time, customer data and facilities. The trick is finding a company that has compatible – not competing – interests and identifying areas of mutual benefit to present to them. Getting serious about networking can help you find suitable partners, where both companies can bring something to the table. It’s a excellent way to expand sales without usually needing to invest in costly infrastructure.

Locate The Investment You Need

Financing an expansion effort can be almost as much of a hurdle as gaining the cash to set up in the first place, but you do have the bonus of a track record of success to help persuade investors. There is quite a lot of government funding available from economic development authorities to help your business grow – so check the U.S Small Business Administration as a starting point, before seeing what is out there at a local level too. You may require a small business loan to purchase equipment or make an investment, so look for credit unions and the rise of specialized lenders such as Kabbage, who support online retailers, or Biz2Credit. Remember to include a budget for marketing your new offer too.

Get Help With Hiring The Best Talent

If you need bodies to expand, then making recruitment mistakes can be costly and time-consuming, just when you most need to focus your efforts. So it may be worth calling in a recruitment professional in your sector to help with the hiring. Not only will the best ones already have an overview of key players in the market, but they’ll be able to take on some of the administrative burdens and pre-screen new candidates for you. If it’s your first time hiring, they can also help you to avoid legal pitfalls by ensuring that you have the correct policies, legal cover and employers liability insurance in place.

Consider Your Location

If you’re expanding operations, often you’ll need to consider new premises. You may just have been working from a co-working space or a home office before, but expansion means you’ll need to house new people and equipment well. Find space in a dedicated start-up hub that offers access to in-house legal and marketing services, or consider setting up a custom space – perhaps you could fit out a warehouse space or consider a fabricated best steel building to house a tailor-made set-up? When you source your new space, factor in future projected growth as well and future proof your premises for future expansions.

Creating Good Employer/Employee Relationships

Scott AsaiLeave a comment

Collaborative post – may contain affiliate links

No one wants to be a jobsworth when it comes to being a manager, and being the boss of a business often gives us an air of authority that can be used properly and abused in equal measure. However, it’s finding a good balance between work and play with your employees that makes the workplace a lot more enjoyable to be in, and your employees a lot happier when receiving instructions. So if you’re looking to foster better relationships between you and your employees, here’s a couple of tips for your consideration. You know your workplace, so apply them where you can.

Set Boundaries from the Beginning

You want your workers to trust you, and crafting such a bond takes time and good planning. It’s most easily done however by creating acceptable boundaries, as a constant flow of give and take often breaks a lot of trust on both sides. Don’t be an overbearing boss that your employees need to set boundaries specifically in return for; keep work to work hours and keep your expectations realistic.

Ending up with needing to run a disciplinary trial or other such behavior extremes can be avoided when you’re firm but fair from the beginning, so check out www.elliswhittam.com for ways to put this into practice. Knowing what you can and can’t do as a boss to lead your more errant employees in the right direction means you’re less likely to make a mistake that can damage a career, and keep them around for longer to do good work.

Recognize Achievements

Everyone likes receiving praise, and no one will appreciate this more than your employees when they do a good job. Being able to pinpoint to them what they’ve done right and where they could improve is great in terms of constructive criticism, but make sure it’s fair and really could help them.

No one appreciates being shouted at or being sent passive aggressive emails, so be outright with what you want to say so a message is clearly gotten across. Otherwise you may never get a proper result in the tasks you set them; words have different meaning for all people after all.

Get Feedback

We don’t know we’re doing things right unless people tell us, so make sure you get the feedback from the people you work with on how your run your business concerning them. You can do this via an anonymous survey, really allowing people to be honest with what they want to say to you, or you can ask them in person.

This is often a more personal touch, as we can see people’s body language at the same time, which helps to show up how they interact with you. Don’t let it become a formal occasion, and make sure they know no harm to their job will come out of it.

If you think you’re a good boss, make sure you really are in how you act towards your employees. Wanting better is a good sign!

Create an Affordable and Unique Office Space by Converting a Warehouse

Scott Asai1 Comment

Collaborative post – may contain affiliate links

Property developers have been converting warehouses into homes for many years now. As more and more businesses move their operations out of the city and into other locations, inner-city warehouses are becoming available for purchase for reasonable prices and they can become promising developments for anyone willing to invest.

But should you convert an old warehouse into an office? In this article, we’ll be going through some of the positives of taking this route, but we’ll also explain a few concerns that you should keep in mind as well.

Great value for money

For business owners that are looking to grow, warehouses present an enticing deal. They’re relatively large meaning that you have plenty of space to work with. This means it’s possible to keep a part of the warehouse for product manufacturing or storage and use the rest as office space. This is a great way to get a 2-in-1 deal so that you don’t need to hire external warehouse space or look for alternatives for storage.

However, this does mean that you’ll need to renovate it completely, but having such a large blank slate means that you can do virtually anything with it. For large open areas, you’ll need suitable commercial grade pendant lights which can be relatively expensive if you need to cover a lot of ground. If the warehouse is large enough, you might even be able to build a second story that is used for office purposes or meetings with clients and investors.

Overall, the value proposition is a great one. You’ll get a lot of space for your money and you have the ability to customize it to your liking. Just keep in mind that failing to budget is a common pitfall that could turn your warehouse renovation project into an absolute nightmare, so make sure you’re aware of the costs and speak to several contractors before investing your money.

Safety considerations

It’s a good idea to keep safety in mind when you’re renovating a warehouse. They’re not exactly known to be the most sturdy buildings in existence and there’s a good chance there could be some structural damage or compromised areas that need to be fixed before it’s suitable to be renovated.

This means that you will need to hire a safety inspector to determine if the structure is safe enough to work in and use. You may also need to hire another safety inspector once you start bringing in industrial machines or build tall shelves to store all of your stock. If your warehouse is large enough to have forklifts operating, then you’ll need to obtain licenses and also teach your staff how to use them.

In short, a warehouse represents an affordable and unique method of getting the office space needed to grow your business, but it’s not as simple as hiring a contractor to freshen up the place and then moving in with your employees. There are many considerations to keep in mind, but it’s well worth the end result.

Design Team Essentials: Free Reign And Grounded Minds

Scott AsaiLeave a comment

Collaborative post – may contain affiliate links

The design is an industry that is full of different people with both creative and scientifically logical minds. You have the bold and brave who will approach design as an art form, creating 2D and 3D models using advanced software. On the other hand, you have designers that will look to make complex interiors workable and futuristic with circuits and electrical appliances coexisting to bring humanity closer to tomorrow. Regardless of which category you fall in to, leading a group of people with various and at times repelling personalities can be daunting. Any business that has a design team be it an automotive manufacturer, movie studio, marketing agency and or technology company, the essentials are always the same. You need a great mix of people and advanced systems to get the most out of your projects. It’s therefore farsighted to make sure you have these systems ready and lined up before you go ahead with any task.

Balance creatives with grounded minds

Ask half the design graduates in the world why they took an art and design degree at university they’ll explain how they want to see their imagination come to life. The other half will say, they want to use their logical and experimentative mind to see how far they can bring humanity into the future. Any team that is worth its weight in salt, will always have a fine balance of these two kinds of designers. The somewhat combative question will always pop up and that being, which kind of person should be in charge of a project? The simple but perhaps controversial answer is, the logical, grounded person. Creativity is great, but its nature is to be formless and work within a realm where instability is actually a positive attribute. The leader of the design team in your business, should be able to know and fully comprehend the limitations of the company itself as well as the state of the tools available.

Giving free reign of needs

Every team will want to set its own parameters. Of course, the leader has the largest say as his or her authority includes communicating what the group needs. The simple truth of the matter is that some design teams want to build their own software and hardware structures from the ground up. Not every business owner will be tech savvy and least of all knee deep in the complexity of any speciality other than their own. But with companies like http://www.altium.com/ designers have the opportunity to create their own PCB hardware from scratch. They can choose their components from a list of varying kinds, each with attributes relevant to certain crafts in the industry. From start to finish they’re also able to take anything out and replace it in the virtual design interface. Easily edited and shared among the entire team, this kind of company offers advanced circuit systems for those wanting specific capabilities.

The essentials of every design team are the brilliant minds themselves. Balance the grounded and logical brains with the outlandish and creative souls that make the design industry so exciting. Don’t be afraid to give them the reigns and let them create what they need to give you the best of what they have to offer your business.

3 Technologies You Need for a Successful Startup

Scott AsaiLeave a comment

Choosing Tech that Will Help Your Business Grow

Collaborative post – may contain affiliate links

Opening a new business is exciting because it’s a creative venture– you spend a lot of time making decisions that will shape your company’s brand and affect its success as it grows. No pressure. One of the biggest decisions you’ll make about your business is what kind of technology infrastructure your company will need to be successful.

Here are three things that your company absolutely must have in the beginning to make sure everything goes smoothly later on:

  • Local technology consultant
  • Solid data security
  • High speed internet access

Your Tech Consultant is Your New Best Friend

Perhaps the single most important investment you can make in your company’s technology strategy is hiring a technology consultant. Your consultant will learn about your business like it’s their own. That means that they can help guide your tech decisions from the launch of your company and continue to offer advice as your company grows. Having someone help you figure out which technology solutions fit your startup’s specific needs is a tool you can’t afford to skip.

Securing Your Data Is Essential

According to Symantec’s 2017 Internet Security Threat Report, an estimated 229,000 cybersecurity web attacks are blocked every single day. It’s absolutely imperative that your company secures its sensitive information. Some basics you should have in place:

  • Firewall protection for your local network and all company computers
  • Anti-virus software that includes software to detect phishing and other online attacks as well
  • Secure wireless network
  • Back-up of all your business’s data
  • Plan to recover data in case of emergency

Keep Your Internet Up To Speed

No matter how big or small your business is, high-speed internet is no longer an option– it’s essential. Slow internet will limit your business’s ability to grow and succeed because so much business these days relies on the web to connect you with your customers. Plus, high-speed internet opens up the door for you to invest in important tools like online data backups, VoIP, and other technologies you wouldn’t be able to support with a slower connection.

Choosing technology for your startup is one of the biggest decisions you’ll make about your business, and it will shape how your company develops down the line as well. Make to include a technology consultant, data security plan, and high-speed internet in your tech infrastructure, and you’re startup will be all set for success.

How To Grow Your Business with Humor

Scott AsaiLeave a comment

Photo courtesy of  Andy-Eskha

Guest Post by Misa Chien

They say laughter is the best medicine. But did you know you can grow your business with humor?

Michael Kerr is the author of The Humor Advantage: Why Some Businesses Are Laughing All the Way to the Bank. He works to empower leaders to improve company culture through increasing the energy level of employees.

Kerr’s work empowers leaders to grow their business with humor. “In all my previous work experience, as a manager, as a leader, I was always known for my sense of humor,” he says. “I saw the benefits of humor in the workplace.”

After being in a position where the company culture seemed draining and unexciting, Kerr focused on the use of humor in building up a more energized culture. “That’s when I had this ‘aha’ moment and realized that I think there’s a lot more to this humor than just a nice to have,” he says.

He began by researching and attending conferences of how to use humor to improve company culture. Now he helps lead business leaders implement those valuable tactics he’s learned to grow their business.

Less Stress and More Success

In his book, Kerr has a chapter that introduces the importance of lowered stress levels is connected to more success.

Stress strongly influences employee retention.

“I think the pace of change has gotten so crazy,” he says. There are a number of contributing factors to stress in life: caring for family, technology, work, leisure. “And I think a lot of the stress in so many workplaces is from poor leadership where they don’t feel valued or appreciated,” he says.

The solution: Laughter

So how can companies deal with this level of unnecessary stress? Kerr’s solution is simple: laughter.

“It’s a fun solution at the same time,” he says. “We know from research that laughter is one of the most effective ways of relaxing us. Just from a physical response, we know laughter can ease stress.”

But the benefits of laughter don’t just stop at the internal level. Laughter and a good attitude can help us build networks and relationships at the workplace. “It creates an environment where we want to work together as a team,” he says.

He also adds that humor helps employees reframe what are perceived as problems into a more realistic perspective. “We do have to remind ourselves that stress is in the eye of the beholder. It’s not the things that happen at work that stress us out, it is our interpretation of those things that is the source of stress.”

Humor allows people to lighten up and enjoy life, both at work and home.

Types of Healthy Humor

Certain types of humor fair better in the workplace than others. The type of humor used is connected to how effective and influential it will be among leadership and coworkers.  

“Everything that I’m talking about in the book is about good and safe humor – humor that laughs with people, not at people,” he says. “Humor that tears down barriers, not humor that builds barriers; that laughs in the supportive, creative ideas as opposed to humor that laughs at people’s suggestions and ideas.”

Grow your business with humor that encourages and builds others up.

The two kinds of humor to implement that lead to increased mood and company growth are affiliative humor and self-enhancing humor.

Kerr describes affiliative humor as, “the tendency to tell jokes, make humorous observations and say funny things as a way to reduce tensions in the workplace, to facilitate relationships,” he says.

Self-enhancing humor, he says, “It’s about having a humorous outlook. It’s about keeping one’s sense of humor in the face of stress.”

Practicing these styles of humor greatly improves the attitudes of the workplace at all levels.

The other styles of humor, aggressive humor and self-defeating humor, shouldn’t be used to boost company culture.

Laughter Leads to Longterm Growth

So laughter supports a positive company culture. How can you grow your business with humor?

“What we know from so much research…we know that culture is a key driver of business success,” he says. “It is what drives our success. We know it’s your number one competitive advantage.”

Some other benefits of laughter in company culture he mentions:

  • Lower employee turnover
  • Lower absenteeism
  • Increased sales
  • Improved customer service
  • Lower presenteeism

Goals are essential to business, but those goals should also be accomplished within the context of having fun and enjoying the ride.

“Great cultures don’t just happen,” he says. “Everybody says they’re great, but there’s a difference between saying and doing. And what the great companies do so well is they’re intentional about their culture. They recognize that you can’t just buy your culture; you have to build it day in and day out.”

To encourage others to join in on your culture, create engaging content and advertisements that demonstrate the fun they want to attract in hiring talent. To grow your business with humor, it all comes down to culture.

Resources

Michael Kerr’s business, Humor At Work

The Humor Advantage: Why Some Businesses are Laughing All the Way to the Bank  

Author

Misa Chien is an asian model signed with LA Models and cooking mom based in Los Angeles.  Her food blog, Nom Nom TV, specializes in blog posts such as soba noodle recipes all the way to the top items to buy at 99 ranch market.

The Startup Pitfalls That You’ll Unwillingly Step Into

Scott Asai1 Comment

Collaborative post – may contain affiliate links

When you fail to hit your targets, you might turn to blaming your bad luck as the reason that you’re not doing too hot. While it’s completely understandable that you would be frustrated, you need to come to grips with the cold, hard truth; it was your own fault. You are in control of your business and you are the one that controls its success or failures, so it’s important to learn from your mistakes and move on after you’ve analyzed them. If you want a better chance of running a successful business, then here are a couple of common startup pitfalls that you’ll need to avoid at all costs.

Forgetting About Your Life

Operating your own business is incredibly stressful and a lot of hard work. As such, it’s important to remember that you have a life outside of your business and you should do your best not to forget that. As much as you want your business to succeed, it will all be for nothing if you fail to look after your own health or your commitments outside of your job. Don’t marry your work; make sure you save time to spend with your friends and family so you don’t overwork yourself. If you need convincing, take a look at this article from afterninetofive.net to learn why overworking yourself is never a good idea.

Failing to Budget

Money makes the world (and your business) go round. Without money, you won’t be able to pay employees, expand your business, advertise your products and so on. This should be fairly obvious, but what might not be obvious is that you actually need to budget for your business as well. Whether you hire an accountant or do it yourself with cloud accounting software, make sure you’re always in the green and that all of your expenses are optimizing so you aren’t wasting money. If you feel like you’re in financial trouble, then services like Businesslineof.credit can be a fantastic helping hand that will drag you out of that pit. Every business will need a loan at some point whether it’s to grow the company or expand their operations, so don’t neglect it.

Neglecting Analytics

The best way to learn what’s going on with your business is to use analytics. By analyzing your business and recording data such as how your customers respond to certain changes on your website or what demographic your products are popular with, you can use those statistics to create better products, marketing campaigns and so on.

Aiming Too High

And we also can’t forget that aiming too high is a legitimate concern that you should be careful of. If you try to take on giants in business by considering them your rival, then you’ll quickly learn that you simply cannot compete with them. Know your place in your industry and gradually work your way up. Don’t think that you can overtake any business within your first year of operating because it takes a lot of work to grow.

Do What All The Millennials Do: Make Your Business A Success

Scott Asai1 Comment

Collaborative post – may contain affiliate links

It seems we can’t go anywhere these days without hearing about some form of success story when it comes to business. Millennials creating smartphone applications that take over the world, becoming digital pioneers in a fast-paced and ever changing business environment, ad literally thriving not just driving under the overwhelming pressure. It certainly seems to be the inspiration for many others to follow suit as more business are being started up each day and with the promise of the a new year in full flow, now is often one of the most popular times to do it. But how do you ensure that your idea becomes a success? I wanted to share with you some of the things to consider to ensure that your business gets off the ground.

Having the right support in place

One thing you have got to consider when going into business or starting up on your own is having the right level of support around you. You may be an expert in your field and industry, know the service you provide inside out or the product you have created like the back of your hand, but you can’t always be the expert in every aspect of running a business. A good entrepreneur knows when they need extra guidance or support. That might mean computer network support where you have a company take care of things like cloud storage or handle your systems if things don’t go to plan. It might mean outsourcing to a digital agency who can come up with striking social media strategies or help your website be seen amongst the sea of other competitors out there. Choosing your support network is vital, as there will be areas that you can control yourself.

Knowing exactly what you want to do and how you want to achieve it

It is also important for you to know exactly what you want to do with your business model and how you plan on achieving it. This is how you can then strategize your business moves to ensure that you get your business to where it needs to be. This is the time to work out a business plan, know exactly how you plan on financing each move and then being open to ideas and change because business can be a very fast-paced environment and it’s important to ensure that you can also be flexible.

Embracing digital services

It’s now more important than ever that any new business embraces the world of digital. More is heading online these days and with consumer behaviors changing, it’s important that a business honors that and makes changes or at least gives customers the option. A decent website, being present on social media and ensuring that you have a decent marketing campaign could be the key to success.

A lot has to do with work ethic and attitude

Finally, while a lot has to do with how you make your business work you can’t forget that the only way it is going to happen is through hard work and dedication. Your attitude to your business and to life itself needs to be proactive and positive. Hard work will get you places.

The Wonderful Benefits of High-Quality Content for Your Business

Scott Asai2 Comments

Collaborative post – may contain affiliate links

One of the most underrated aspects of business is high-quality content. This can cover a huge range of different components in your business, and in this article, we’re going to be discussing a couple of the most important ways to use original high-quality content.

What Type of Content Could Your Business Use?

The word content can be rather vague, but in most cases (at least, when relating to businesses) it means any kind of writing, video or photos that can be consumed by your audience. Here are some examples of content that you should always ensure are of high quality.

  • Product descriptions – When adding products to your business, their descriptions, specifications and any additional information should always be professionally written so that they convert leads into paying customers.
  • Blog posts – If you’ve attached a blog to your business, then all of those blog posts need to be relevant to your business in some way and written to a quality standard. You don’t want amateurish writing attached to your business, which is why it’s important to focus on quality over anything else.
  • Press releases – A press release is going to be publicly seen by many news outlets and industry influencers, so make sure you hire a professional service to write it for you unless you have talented writers at your disposal.
  • Website news – Any news post on your website should be able to excite existing customers and pique the curiosity of new ones.
  • Social media posts – Despite Twitter being focused on short-form writing, it’s still important to structure your social media posts.
  • Guides – Any tutorials or guides that are written for your business should be relevant to the products or services you create. For instance, a guide on how to use a certain product you release is greatly appreciated, assuming it’s written well.
  • Video content – Content doesn’t always need to be written words. It can be videos as well, so make sure you don’t neglect this as an option.

The Benefits of Well-Made Content

The benefits are numerous and wide spreading. Quality guides and videos will draw people to your business. Professionally-written product descriptions will convert far more leads into sales than you could if you wrote them with no experience. In addition, social media posts will help expose your business by improving your online presence.

Finding the Right Creators

Whether you look for the services of an inbound marketing agency or search for freelance writers to help you out, there are thousands of creators out there that are willing to help you bolster your business. Just don’t forget that content can be more than just words on your website or blog. Content can be videos on a YouTube channel and they can also be images or infographics.

Summary

In short, don’t neglect to focus on the content that your website publishes. From product descriptions to videos and guides, everything that you publicly show to your audience will be an extension of your business yourself, hence why it needs to be written professionally.

Go Green in 2018

Scott AsaiLeave a comment

Collaborative post – may contain affiliate links

If there is one thing you should do for your business in 2018, it is go green. We all have a duty to protect the environment and to do our bit to ensure the sustainability of our planet. The trouble is that a lot of business owners do not know where to start, assuming that it will be too difficult to do anything substantial. In fact, a few small changes can go a very long way. With that in mind, read on to discover some of the ways your business can go green this year.

  1. Go digital – One of the best ways to be more environmentally family is to move your files and records online. If you currently keep paper documents, you are going to be wasting a considerable amount of resources. Instead, you can migrate your business to the cloud, and you will no longer rely on endless amounts of paper. Plus, this can be a much more efficient and secure way to run your business.
  2. Encourage green commuting – How do your employees get to work? Do most of them use their vehicles? If so, you should try to encourage green commuting, for example, carpooling, biking, and walking. Of course, you may need to offer incentives to encourage this, but it is definitely worth it.
  3. Maximize natural light – There are many reasons why you should maximize natural light. Needless to say, this means that you are going to be relying on less energy, which is great for the environment. However, there are knock-on benefits too. This includes the fact that you will lower your energy bills considerably, and you will boost productivity levels and the atmosphere of your working environment.
  4. Bring the outdoors in – Have you considered bringing in desk plants? This will bring some nature into the office environment, making it more pleasant. However, it also makes your offices cleaner, as plants improve indoor air quality by producing more oxygen and offsetting any chemicals that are released into the working environment.
  5. Embrace renewable energy – Green power sources, for example, wind and solar energy, are more accessible than they ever have been. Options range from large-scale wind farm to rooftop solar installations. This means that any business, of any size, has the ability to make the switch to renewable energy sources.
  6. Start a sustainability team – Another way to go green in 2018 is to create a sustainability team. They will be responsible for raising awareness and helping your company to achieve more with regards to their environmental impact. Projects can range from sourcing green cleaning supplies to creating a more effective recycling program.

So there you have it: some of the easiest and most effective ways to go green in 2018. Follow the tips that have been mentioned above, and you can ensure that your business is playing its role when it comes to protecting the environment. Not only is this helpful for our planet, but it will boost your branding strategy in the process too.