Archives for June 2018

Construction Site Essentials That You Should Never Forget

June 5, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

Construction sites are often seen as dangerous and chaotic places, especially if you’re doing something like building a skyscraper. However, people don’t realize that construction sites are surprisingly safe and organized places–at least if it’s being run by a manager that knows their stuff. If you’re planning on managing a construction site in the future or just want to learn a bit about how construction sites are organized, then here are a couple of site essentials that you should never be without.

Construction Site Essentials

Generators

Where are you going to get the power to use all of your equipment? Generators of course! Don’t expect to just get a really long extension plug to the nearest wall outlet–that would be incredibly silly. Make sure you invest in a generator to keep your lights and equipment powered so you can continue working efficiently.

Security

Site security is incredibly important and should not be neglected. The last thing you want is for delinquents to sneak onto your site and start stealing things, breaking equipment or potentially slowing down your progress.

Cabins

Offices and restrooms are important. If you have a lot of workers on site, then you may want to invest in a canteen as well. These cabins are usually inexpensive to hire and they can simply be dropped down onto your site from a crane.

Toilets

Construction sites are busy places and workers will be staying around for a long time, meaning they’re eventually going to have to take a break, eat and even go toilet. Instead of forcing them off the site and into the nearest cafe, get yourself a portable toilet. You can find more info here about portable toilets

Safety Equipment

No construction site is complete without ample safety equipment. Keep this gear in a safe place such as a cabin so that it’s not stolen or lost and make sure you have everything you need. This will often include hard hats, high-visibility clothing and first aid kits.

Cranes

You’re likely going to be doing some heavy lifting, so make sure you have a crane on site. Whether it’s to lift heavy bags of waste out of the site or drop large numbers of reinforced bars to be used as materials, it can save you a lot of time and effort.

Waste Management

If you’re demolishing a building or going to be spending a lot of time digging up land, then make sure you’ve got sufficient waste management processes to clear it out effectively instead of expecting your workers to drag out the waste one bag at a time. If you are going to be excavating land, make sure you hire an excavation company.

Trained Staff

Lastly, make sure you have trained staff in your workforce. The last thing you want is for poorly-trained staff to hurt themselves or other people. While a construction site is typically a safe place, a clueless worker can easily endanger the lives of others. Make sure you have an efficient workforce if you want your project to be successful.

3 Possible Reasons Your Business Is In Trouble

June 4, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

Running a business is eternally fraught with potential troubles, and you need to make sure that you are doing everything you can to keep it in the best possible way at all times if you want it to stay afloat. The truth is that to do that, you need to be able to know how to actually keep your business out of trouble – and that means being able to identify the possible reasons that it is in trouble in the first place. In this article, we are going to look at a few possible common options for why your business might be struggling, and this is something which you might want to look into at your earliest convenience if you care about keeping your business going strong.

It Is Uninsured

One of the biggest problems you can have in business is to find out that you suddenly suffer great financial turmoil, or that you need to protect yourself in future as best as you can. Not having insurance for a range of possible situations could mean that you are in a lot of trouble indeed, and this is one of the first things that you should therefore look into if you want to keep your business out of trouble. Thre are an umber of different kinds of insurance you might want to look into getting for different possible situations, ranging from basic contents insurance to the professional indemnity insurance you can see at https://www.qdoscontractor.com/professional-indemnity-insurance. Make sure you have whatever you think is necessary for your business type – it could be all you need to do to keep yourself out of trouble in future.

You Don’t Listen To The Customer

Another early warning sign is that you have a hard time actually knowing what the customer wants, possibly because you simply don’t listen to them well enough in the first place. Not paying attention to the customer can mean that you end up doing things which lose them in the long run, and you might even find that your business reputation worsens over time as a result of this too. Make sure you are always paying attention to what the customer ha to say. By doing so, you will be able to make the right moves in future and keep your business out of trouble in the long term.

It’s Not Original

Ultimately, you need to have an original business idea if it is to work as well as possible – and that means that you should work on this first and foremost if you want to get it done right. If your business is basically unoriginal, then it will likely mean that you are not going to be able to keep it out of trouble, so make sure you have considered that if you are going to try and keep your business afloat for longer. Having originality will ultimately save you hugely form future turmoil, so this is more important than you might think.

‘Off the Shelf’ or ‘Tailor Made:’ Which Tech Is Best For Your Business?

June 4, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

No matter what sort of business you are in or industry you serve, the chances are that in some way your company will be heavily reliant on technology. There is a huge range of choice out there, however, which can make the simple task of choosing a piece of software or a tool confusing and bewildering.

In fact, one of the biggest decisions you will make as a business owner is your choice between an off the shelf technology or something tailor made and custom built precisely for your needs. The big question is – which is best?

In this guide, we’re going to run through everything you need to know about the differences between off shelf and custom built technology to ensure you make the best possible choice. Let’s get started straight away with some of the basics.

Business Technology

Off the Shelf vs. Custom Built – the Key Differences

First of all, let’s take a look at what we are talking about. Off the shelf technology refers to products like software that has pre-built integration, are available to anyone, and tend to be sold by vendors to millions of different customers. Think Microsoft Office and you will be somewhere close to the relevant ballpark. Custom built tech, however, is a bespoke solution that is built purely for your business. For example, custom software development companies will look at your exact business needs to come up with a solution that fits you perfectly. As a rule, tailor-made technology solutions are thought to be the more expensive of the two – but is this really the case?

The cost

The idea that off the shelf tech solutions are more expensive than a custom built alternative is simply untrue. The myth stems from the fact that because of their vast reach, off the shelf solutions will often appear to be moderately priced. With a custom build, you will be paying for something developed for you alone, so there will obviously be a cost attached to that. But it isn’t that simple. When you buy generic software, you pay for a lot of features that you just won’t use, whereas, with something made for you, everything is relevant to your business. Furthermore, you have to bear in mind that performance is often an issue with a generic product – you have to take time and use resources to seek out the best possible solution for your business, and even then you might not get a perfect match. In terms of value for money and bang for your buck, it is almost always best to take the custom built route.

The service

Finally, you also need to consider the level of service you will get from each possible solution. As a rule, buying off the shelf means that your business makes up only a tiny fraction of the tech company’s business – it simply won’t be their priority to cater to your individual needs. With a tailor-made solution, however, the company will have a smaller set of clients, and a lot more focus on keeping you happy as a result.

Conclusion

If you are serious about your business, at some point you need to find a system and the technology that works specifically for your business. Off the shelf, solutions may well do a job for you, but ultimately you will be at the mercy of the selling company. Tailor-made alternatives give you more control and power – and more value for money. What are your thoughts?

A Holistic Approach In Business: A Simple Guide

June 4, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

The team “holistic” has been misapplied over recent years, and many of us now associate it with health, well-being, and even vaguely “New Age” principles. It’s easy to see why this happens, but it’s also to undersell the value of holisticism.

At its core, holisticism is a very simple — but very powerful — concept. The term “holistic” is defined as follows:

When thinking from a business perspective, we can disregard the “medicine” usage. The philosophical usage, however, is extremely beneficial. The “comprehension of parts of something as interconnected” is a useful way of describing a business; the “parts of something” are the different departments, and they form the whole— the company in and of itself.

How does a holistic business approach differ from standard business style?

Modern approaches have broken businesses down into sections. There’s the accounting team, the marketing team, the sales team… and so on and so forth. All of these departments operate distinctly from one another; they have their own management, their own staff, and usually their own separate part of the company building.

A holistic business would still be able to practice this separation — which is inherently useful — but it would also seek to see the overall, inclusive picture. Each department would be evaluated for their inner strengths and weaknesses, but also regarding how they relate to every other aspect of the company.

For example, the marketing department may be planning to launch a campaign. They are waiting for content production to send them the copy required for the campaign, but content production is lacking, so the marketing department’s efficiency is severely impacted. Standard business analysis would tell you that the marketing department is failing and that the content production department is failing. However, when viewed on a holistic level, it’s actually clear only one department is falling behind— content production. This means you can focus remedies and resources on the content production department and actually drive to the heart of the issue every time.

How can I introduce a holistic business approach?

Involving Staff — Credit: https://edubirdie.com/

Bring together staff from across the company on a regular basis. You may already do this at management level — for example, with the heads of department — but it’s important for staff at all levels to spend time with colleagues from other areas.
Use the appropriate technology. Department-relevant tech and software is all well and good, but you also need to introduce the likes of SAP Business One to oversee the operation as a whole.
Respond to what you learn. If you discover an area of the business is lagging and impacting other areas, you have to take action to improve the problematic area by dedicating time and resources to finding a fix. Knowledge isn’t the be-all and end-all of holisticism; you then have to action what you have learned in an effort to improve the operations of the overall business.

In conclusion

Above, we have focused on negative aspects of a holistic business, but holisticism is also beneficial when things are going well. With the improved analysis and resource management that a holistic business affords, you can be sure of making the most of every business situation— which, in turn, should help to deliver the business growth and success you hope for.

Redesign Your Website With These Useful Tips

June 2, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

Once you create your professional website, you can’t just then forget all about it. Sure, you won’t need to be quite so hands-on, but it is something that you will need to keep on coming back to in order to ensure that it is still serving its purpose. Not only that, though, but you might need to redesign it at some point further down the line.

Do you think that the time has come to redesign your site? Don’t worry; you might not need to do an extensive redesign, but some updates and improvements will always make the site a lot better for all your users. Here’s a quick guide to some of the things you might want to include in your redesign.

Don’t Forget The Sitemap

First of all, it’s now crucial that all websites have a sitemap somewhere on them. Not only does this give your SEO rating a little boost, but it also helps anyone who lands on the site to navigate around without too many issues. There are lots of online guides you can use that will help you create a sitemap, but if you ever have any problems, you can always ask a website designer to add one to your site. Don’t forget about this important feature!

Put Mobile First

Fewer people are viewing websites on laptops and computer screens, and are now instead viewing the internet on smaller screens on their mobiles and tablet devices. So, it’s really important that you put the mobile responsiveness of your website first. This just means that it needs to be designed in a way that makes it easy for mobile users to view it and to navigate around. If it isn’t optimized for mobile, then you might find that you end up losing some web traffic.

Improve Your Use Of Photos And Graphics

One feature of a website that most company owners neglect is the use of photos and other graphics. Ideally, you should consider taking your own pictures so that you don’t have to rely on generic stock images. Not only will using your own images help give your site a much more personal feel, but it also means that you won’t have to worry about crediting the images incorrectly. Which could end up being the case when you use other people’s photos. Make sure that you also incorporate some other graphics, such as embedded YouTube videos.

Add Some Landing Pages

Want to make sure that your revamped website is still high in Google’s SEO rankings? There is one way you can guarantee that; you just need to add some more landing pages. These are single pages that are dedicated to one product or call to action.They need to feature plenty of content that has been peppered with some SEO keyword phrases so that Google’s search engine picks them up whenever anyone searches those phrases. Ideally, you should think about one landing page per product or service that you offer.

Combine Social Media

These days it is also necessary to make sure that you incorporate your social media platforms onto your website. You can do this by adding some social media buttons onto the site – these will link directly to your profiles on the likes of Twitter and Facebook, and are a great way to encourage people to follow you on those sites.

Adapt The Site For Future Content

Once your site is up and running, you need to keep on adding more content to it. All of this fresh content will help to improve the SEO ranking and will give customers and web users a reason to keep on returning to the site. So, it’s important that you redesign your website keeping in mind that there needs to be a means to add new content whenever you want to. The best way to do this is to add a blog. That way, you just have to post to the CRM whenever you want to add a new blog post.

Test It Before You Launch

There is no way of knowing whether or not your new website works well without using it yourself. You need to use and test it before you launch it so that your user experience isn’t hindered in any way. It’s a good idea to get a few people to test it out so that every potential issue is discovered and nothing is missed.

Once you’ve revamped your website, you should notice an increase in all the web traffic that comes your way.