Archives for July 2018

Watch Over These Crucial Company Areas

July 23, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

Keeping watch over your business is essential to make sure everything is going well. You need to be able to monitor key areas so that you know when things need to change. Are your employees following procedures? Are the same mistakes being made all the time? Has the new policy you’ve implemented had a positive effect? Watching closely over your business helps you to catch errors quickly, see what’s working for you, and detect areas that are in need of improvement. If you’re wondering where you should focus your attention, there are some top areas that can benefit from higher levels of vigilance.

Risk Management, Safety and Health

Managing risks for your business has a huge number of benefits. Firstly, it’s often required by the law to take care of some aspects of health and safety. It’s your duty to make sure your employees and customers are as safe as possible at all times. Secondly, preventing accidents and dangerous incidents at your company saves you time and money. If anything happens, sorting out the mess can be expensive and time-consuming. You should monitor your health and safety procedures to ensure they’re being implemented and that they’re also effective.

Essential Policies and Procedures

Safety isn’t the only issue that you might have to consider when it comes to regulatory compliance. There can be various other regulations that you might need to follow if you want to comply with the law. These could include financial regulations, employment rules, and perhaps consumer protections. It can be useful to have a tool to monitor your policies and procedure so that you can make it easier to keep track of everything. If you want to keep your business modern and up to date, don’t rely on outdated methods of managing your policies. Choose tools that make it simple to oversee everything.

Finances

Keeping a close eye on your company’s finances is obviously essential. You should have internal checks to help you pick up on any potential mistakes and make sure everything is going smoothly. However, it’s also a good idea to get a third-party service involved if you want to check that your finances are correct. Financial audits can help you to get a better understanding of your finances and pick up on any errors that you’re internal staff might have missed. Making mistakes with your finances could have significant consequences, so picking up on them early is vital.

Supply Chain

Your supply chain is important to monitor too, particularly because you have to deal with people who are no part of your company. You can do a number of things to make sure that different parts of your supply chain are functioning well. Carry out inspections to monitor how things are going and see what needs to be changed. Take a close look at timings and the satisfaction of your staff, customers and suppliers to see what’s working and what isn’t.

Watch over these important areas of your business if you want to find success. Knowing what’s happening across your company is vital.

The Careers Where You Can Make A Difference In The World

July 23, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

A career is a funny thing. You get up each morning and go to work for someone else, and for what? Usually, the answer is money or power or responsibility. Others do it because they are on autopilot. Not too many people will say that they want to change the world. Helping others is commendable but it involves putting your hopes and dreams to one side and concentrating on strangers.

As unappealing as this is in the beginning, the world of work can get you down. When money is just a thing, there needs to be something which excites you and gets you out of bed. Making a difference is a deal breaker, so here are four industries which might be of interest.

Healthcare Career

Healthcare

Becoming a nurse or doctor is obvious. The problem is the exclusiveness of the industry. As well as getting accepted into medical school, you have to be the sort of person that can handle seven years of intense studying and no sleep. Therefore, a hospice role can be an excellent alternative. Medical Carts for hospice care mean there are shortcuts which will fill in the gaps. Plus, it’s more about the level of attention. Although they are dying, they deserve to enjoy their last moments and you can give them that pleasure.

Police Officer Career

Police Officer

The police have gotten a lot of criticism recently for the way they handled certain incidents. However, it’s worth pointing out that they vow to uphold law and order. As humans, officers will make mistakes and they deserve to deal with the consequences. Still, being a policeman or woman requires intervening in people’s’ lives and making them better. From catching criminals and putting them behind bars to attending domestics, you have the power to make a difference. Not everyone will agree, yet it’s the nature of the job.

High-School Teacher

Teachers, in general, are molders on young minds. But, the people in positions in high-schools are on the front lines because their students are impressionable. Between the ages of thirteen to eighteen, kids need mentors that will put them on the right track. Yes, it might include shouting and yelling and snitching on them to their parents. Perhaps there will be threats and tears. In the end, a teacher has to help set a young person up for life. Teaching math or science or English and grading homework are essential parts of this process. Show them how to act and they will follow suit.

Scientist Career

Agricultural Scientists

Food is in short supply in certain areas of the world. People in Asia and Africa get it the worst, and families starve as a result. Tech means scientists are on the verge of an epic breakthrough – genetically modified crops. Understanding how to cultivate food without the usual resources is a cure for hunger. Millions of people, from men and women to young children will benefit as their life expectancy will increase. There is no better way to make a difference than to give someone the gift of a longer life.

Don’t you agree?

Fatal Foibles That Can Flummox New Freelancers

July 20, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

The younger generation has a much harder time in the present day job market than their parents did, despite (on paper) having some pretty big advantages over them. Today’s twentysomethings tend to be better educated than previous generations and despite the pervasive stereotypes that depict them as slothful, indolent and self obsessed; going into paroxysms unless they have access to their social media feed, they tend to be a hardworking and reliable bunch when given an opportunity to prove themselves. It’s proving themselves, however, that’s the rub for many young graduates entering the workforce. Even graduates who got great grades struggle to find graduate level work and all over the world graduates pour out of higher education institutions and into non-graduate low pay, low skill jobs that waste their talents. Furthermore, many employers expect entry level employees to first put in months at a time as unpaid interns. For those who don’t have the luxury of parental support, this is simply untenable.

Millennials Self Employment

But the younger generation aren’t just staring down the barrel of a difficult job market; they’re on the cusp of an economic revolution in which the gig economy is changing the way in which we trade goods and services. In the face of an inhospitable job market, yet with living costs proving more and more challenging to even well paid graduates, more and more young people are turning to self employment as a means to earn a crust. Indeed, it’s estimated that around 47% of millennials in the workforce freelance at least in some capacity. And make no mistake, earning a living as a freelancer has some distinct advantages. It’s a way to make a living doing what you love and what you’re good at. It gives you the opportunity to hone your administrative, organizational and entrepreneurial skills as you manage your business and hustle new clients. It provides excellent networking opportunities and allows you to really take your career, your livelihood and your life into your own hands rather than slaving away in a job for which you’re overqualified and underpaid.

But in lieu of a proper retirement plan, sick or holiday pay and any sort of job security, freelancers cannot afford to simply scrape by. They need to ensure that they’re firing on all cylinders and making good money so that they can save responsibly and plan for the future. That means avoiding these working and productivity foibles which could either compromise the quality of your work, limit your income or decimate your work life balance…

Going in cold

The good news is that there are no shortage of businesses who are desperately in need of the skills and attributes you bring to the table who don’t have the budget to take on new staff and use freelancers to achieve the best of both worlds. The bad news is that it could take some time for you to build up your reputation and establish enough of a clientele to make freelancing sustainable. While many freelancers are always hustling for new clients, it behoves you not to quit your day job (sorry) just yet and to establish yourself as a freelancer in your spare time, scaling up your operation until you’re ready to go full time.

Failing to charge what you’re worth

It’s possibly the most common foible among nascent freelancers, especially those who have only recently graduated. Their lack of experience gives them a disproportionately low sense of self worth. While experience can certainly sharpen and hone your skills, your talents as they are now are still an eminently marketable commodity.

Many new freelancers get a lie of the land on sites like People Per Hour and try to race their competitors to the bottom in the hopes of getting more clients. The trouble with this mentality is that the best clients are motivated by quality rather than price. Moreover, if you start off with lower rates and garner a handful of clients who reward you with more business, you will place a long term cap on your earnings as you’ll be afraid to increase your prices lest you alienate them..

Relying on “handshake agreements”

When you’re starting out in the freelance game, it’s all too easy to neglect the legalities that could end up protecting you, your reputation and your budding business. While handshake agreements can and do work in the freelance marketplace, it’s important to protect your interests with contracts, especially for new clients, and send invoices which can be traced and chased. You can use any of these free invoice templates if you don’t want to start from scratch. A paper trail will not only protect you legally from non-payment or disputes, it will make you better at managing the business side of freelancing.

Freelancing

Wasting time staring at a blank screen

When you’re working for yourself, productivity is everything. Productivity can make the difference between a good month’s pay and a great months’ pay. It can make the difference between landing top tier clients and staying on the breadline. One of the biggest productivity sapping things you can do, however, is waste time staring at a blank screen. Yes, everyone gets creative block. Yes, it can be enormously frustrating. But if you try and fight through it you’ll end up frustrated or produce poor quality work that you throw out as soon as you cast a fresh pair of eyes on it.

When your creative mojo abandons you, don’t be afraid to take a break. Get out of your home office, go for a walk, read or do something to relax your mind and recharge your batteries and don’t come back to your computer until you’re raring to go.

Trying to race yourself to the finish line

AT the same time, an equally counterproductive strategy is to try and race yourself to the finish line day after day. If you have a particularly fecund Monday and get all of your work finished by 2pm yet the following day you call it a night at 6 or 7pm that’s simply the nature of the beast. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to rush to an early finish. The quality of your work will suffer and while you may find yourself making your deadlines, you will return to your computer the next day to find a whole lot of revisions waiting for you.

Steer clear of these bad habits, and a long, happy, fulfilling and rewarding career as a freelancer awaits.

The Greatest Trades in Wall Street History [Infographic]

July 20, 2018 by Guest Post Leave a Comment

Wall Street is not a place for the faint of heart. Stock market trading is a cut-throat world where judgments could either make or break a person’s future. While most traders will base their activities on discernible market trends, some might choose to go against the grain and take an enormous gamble which defies all market logic. Every so often, though, the left-field trade is the one that sets a person up for life.

In the infographic below, creators Easy Life Cover profiled 10 astute traders who took bold decisions and ultimately saw their faith rewarded handsomely. Any list of Wall Street legends should start with the original shark Jesse Livermore. Nearly a century after his most famous moment, he is still held in awe by all those who partake in stock trading, for it was he who shorted the notorious Wall Street crash of 1929. Be selling stock at a high before its value plummeted, he ended up $100 million richer, and that was almost 90 years ago, so it would equate to billions today. He continues to be held as the benchmark towards which all modern traders aspire.

Closer to the modern day, few called a stock shock as brilliantly as Jim Chanos. When Enron was buoyant at the turn of the century, the auditor went short on the company’s stock as he knew from analysing their accounts that a storm was brewing. Once the energy firm collapsed, amid the stunned masses was a substantially richer Chanos, who knew something that very few could ever have envisaged.

The list of legendary traders makes for impressive reading, but for every Livermore or Chanos, there are numerous others who put their necks on the line on Wall Street and were literally made to pay for their poorly-placed faith. Here’s 10 of the best to have ever played the stock market game.

The Greatest Trades in Wall Street History

Understanding An Industry Before Getting Involved

July 19, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

Startup Strategy

When you’re trying to start your own business, it can be very tempting to rush the process which you have to go through. A lot of people will find themselves entering fields which intimidate them, often causing issues when it comes to growing in the future, and this is a shame. Before you start working in an industry, it is critical that you have a good understanding of it. To help you out with this, this post will be going through some of the key traits which you have to know about before you start work, along with some tips to help along the way.

The Value: It will be impossible to know how much scope your business could have if you don’t understand the value of your industry. In some cases, you could be entering into something worth billions. In others, though, you may find that there isn’t enough money to go around with you in the picture, making it hard to get to work. A lead supplier, for example, needs to know the global value of their market, along with the prices which people pay in individual countries. This can enable you to find the very best place to make your sales.

The Clients: A lot of small businesses don’t care much about establishing their demographic before they get to work. Impacting your marketing, sales, and other aspects of your business, though, this sort of research is incredibly important, and it could make your future much easier. Google should be enough to help you to do this, with loads of blogs posts and articles being available to give you an idea of where you need to go with your work. Being able to appeal to the right people can be a very powerful tool.

The Competition: Having an idea of the companies you will be up against is also a good idea. By looking at your competition, you will be able to figure out where they have gone wrong, finding the gaps in the market which you can use to push your business forwards. There are loads of websites which can help with this, with business directories being incredibly powerful when they are used correctly.

The Rules: Finally, as the last area to consider, it can be easy to overlook the rules when you are learning about your industry. In reality, though, this is probably the most important thing on this list. In some cases, you will find that there are strict laws in place which dictate how your company has to run. Some industries won’t have this at all, and you will be able to work in the way which is most comfortable to you, but it will still be worth doing the research.

Learning an Industry

With all of this in mind, you should be feeling ready to take your industry head on, learning about all of its intricacies long before you sink into it. In the future, this will make your life much easier, especially in complex trades.