Archives for October 2019

Are You Ready To Make A Career Change? [infographic]

October 31, 2019 by Guest Post Leave a Comment

For most professionals, their career paths are hardly straightforward. There are likely a number of twists and changes that happen as they grow more familiar with what they truly enjoy — and what they don’t. Whether you’re in college changing your major again, or a mid-career professional looking to make a big leap, changing directions is a part of life. Our increasingly digital world makes it easier than ever to find what we truly want out there — which can sometimes make settling hard.

According to a recent study the average person changes jobs 12 times in their careers, and most Millennials expect to change jobs every three years. So if you’re considering a switch, you aren’t alone.

Are you ready to make a career change? It can be scary to consider hopping careers and starting over. Your pay may decrease, and you could end up back at the bottom of the ladder once again. Additionally, it can be hard to ensure that you’ll even like a new career if you’ve never done it.

However, many people overcome these doubts and make the change. There are many benefits to remember as well. Switching jobs is often one of the best ways to get a significant raise, and setting out on your own as an entrepreneur can create a limitless earning potential. Even if you do take a pay cut, the satisfaction you gain from working in a job that is fulfilling and enjoyable can be more than worth it.

So if you find yourself among the 63% of workers who say their job causes them to drink and cry regularly, don’t hold yourself back. While your job should challenge you to learn and grow, it shouldn’t make you so unhappy that you’re resorting to unhealthy behaviors.
If you’re still on the fence, check out this handy flowchart by Turbo that can help you decide if you’re ready for a career change:

Can Your Seasonal Business Survive Year-Round?

October 30, 2019 by Sally Phillips Leave a Comment

With the holiday season about to kick off, many seasonal businesses will be shifting their operations into high gear as they prepare for their peak period. Every month, around 534,000 new businesses are launched and a significant percentage of them are aimed at catering to customer demands of a specific season like Easter, Christmas or even summer. For any business owner, there are a lot of misconceptions and fears about starting a business, which are magnified for those launching a seasonal one. While it is true that seasonal businesses face some unique roadblocks throughout the year (and particularly during off-season), the key lies in planning ahead and being adaptable throughout the year.

Get Your Cash Flow Management Right

For seasonal businesses to survive, owners must focus on two main pillars: good cash flow management and maintaining control of your costs. Around 82 percent of small businesses fail due to inconsistent cash flow. For seasonal businesses, this worry is enhanced as sales can slow or be practically nonexistent during those off-peak seasons.

This is where good cash flow management comes in. In your peak seasons, create a dedicated reserve fund where you set aside a small percentage of your sales for those slower months. Also, you can time invoices and offer credit options so that you can have payments still coming in during those off-peak months. However, be careful since the downside to offering a credit option is that there is a chance of debtor defaults. A good credit collection policy and a well versed, efficient team are needed to ensure your accounts receivables collections stay on track.

Make Operational Adjustments

The other main aspect of ensuring your business’ survival is taking control of your business costs, particularly in the off-season. Minimizing your costs in those times means you end up with fewer expenses to account for in a time where receipts would have slowed. While some expenses like loan repayments cannot be removed completely during those months, there are ways to cut expenses.

Start with your opening and staff hours. During recruitment, make it clear to employees that offseason hours would be part-time. Alternatively, if you find that the costs of running the business during off-peak seasons exceed any projected revenue or you are unable to service your debt, it may be wiser to close your business. In this case, you may qualify for a discharge of your debts to cover outstanding creditors due to the drop in income. If you are renting an office or factory space, consider a seasonal lease or subletting it in the slower months. However, be sure to establish clear communication channels for the business and let customers know in advance of your changed hours. This avoids any confusion on whether the company has stopped trading, and what hours it is open.

Focus On Off-Peak Marketing & Research

The months when your sales and manufacturing have slowed is the perfect time to focus on other parts of the business, such as marketing, customer research and building your business’ brand. Take advantage of your downtime to formulate a good marketing campaign or come up with unique ways to build your brand offline and online. You can also use this time to conduct market research and customer surveys to identify the trends and changing demands of your target market. You can then incorporate these into your product or service offerings when you do launch your line for the season or when buying supplies for your peak season (if your business is more of a middle man). Keep in mind to keep advertising/ market research activities cost-effective since profits would have slowed.

Make Use Of Forecasting For Expenses

Forecasting comes in useful for those seasons where sales and customer traffic picks up. In the lead up to these periods, businesses have to spend more on preparing for increased business including hiring additional staff/extending work hours, increasing inventory and an increase in variable expenses such as electricity. However, due to the slower months, many businesses find themselves unprepared financially for this bump in costs. Forecasting helps businesses estimate and then put away money/arrange financing to cover these costs. For a cost-effective option, business owners can opt to do the work themselves with the help of business forecasting apps or software. Alternatively, you can choose to outsource it to a business planning and projection professional.

Seasonal businesses do come with a set of distinctive challenges you need to be ready for but they are not insurmountable. Ensuring sustainability of seasonal business centers on planning ahead and the creation of off-peak safeguards. Do this and your business stands a formidable chance of being one of the 50 percent of businesses making it past its initial years.

Building Your Dream Team: 5 Fundamental Skills to Teach Your Employees

October 30, 2019 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

Employers often look at the duties of a potential worker and hire based on this alone. However, every employee needs certain skills to be successful in his or her job. The following are a few skills that employers should consider teaching if they appear to be lacking in the workplace.

Communication

Although communication covers many different means of employee engagement, this is one skill every person needs on the job. When workers interact with each other and understand the goals and objectives, it becomes easier to function as a single unit. This is of great importance as it ensures brand consistency, something consumers look for when choosing where to spend their money. Furthermore, communication must be clear to help establish the workplace culture and the patterns of the workplace. If a company is struggling in this area, help is available in training your employees to communicate more effectively. Businesses that invest in communication training find they benefit greatly from doing so.

Innovation

Thinking outside of the box is crucial in many business situations. In fact, when a problem arises, it may be the gateway to the development of a new product or solution that the company can share with others and benefit from. However, many employees lack the skills needed to look outside of established patterns and find new ways to solve existing problems. This is one skill every employee needs to be taught, as new ideas are always good for a business even if they don’t work out in the long run.

Conflict Resolution

Workers often spend long hours in each other’s company. As a result, conflicts may arise. Although it might seem easier to ignore tensions in the workplace, doing so is never wise. While the issue may blow over with time, the underlying problem likely remains and a new conflict will escalate more rapidly. For this reason, every business should teach employees how to resolve conflicts properly. If they lack this skill, productivity in the workplace will diminish and relationships may be damaged. Invest in conflict resolution training to ensure all employees have the necessary skills to prevent this from happening.

Stress Reduction

An employee who is under a great deal of stress will be less productive. Encourage workers to take a break when needed and help them find the right balance between work and home. While many believe these two entities should be separate and distinct, what happens at home carries over to the workplace and vice versa. For this reason, every employee should be trained in stress reduction techniques to ensure the organization is not harmed due to excess stress on the part of its workers.

Time Management

Employees must complete tasks in a timely manner. A failure to do so could lead to a loss of clients, decreased productivity as other employees wait for the worker to carry out the assigned task, or missed deadlines. Every worker in the organization needs to understand how to prioritize certain duties while leaving others for slow periods. It may be the employees need to see where they fit into the overall picture or it might be providing guidance on how to get everything done in an effective way. However, this is one skill that must be taught for an organization to operate efficiently.

These are only a few of the many skills every worker should have. Others include organizational skills and patience. If help is needed in training employees in these areas, don’t hesitate to seek it. A company that does so finds the rewards of its efforts are significant.

What Are the Top 7 Challenges Commercial Engineering Companies Are Facing Today?

October 30, 2019 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

Running a brick and mortar business in today’s predominantly digital world can be challenging. Consumers today want immediate contact and answers and almost as fast results. This makes it difficult for just about any business, but when you are involved in commercial engineering – an industry where it takes time to plan safe, accurate structures – it creates extra obstacles.

Commercial engineering is a term that encompasses all industries from industrial to recreational engineering. If a building is being constructed or renovated, a commercial engineer is required. Engineering also covers addressing potential problems that may occur in the future and designing structures that will mitigate or fix those issues before they happen.

But to complete a client’s project within a budget, in the agreed upon, specified time frame, and within the requirements of commercial zoning regulations takes careful planning.

Because of these considerations, commercial engineering is one of the most challenging industries to work in today. Those in charge or and working in these companies must acknowledge and overcome many obstacles, like these 7 challenges faced in the industry today.

7 Challenges Commercial Engineering Companies Must Overcome

Although the term “commercial engineering” is used to cover a wide array of projects, it often is found hand-in-hand with the following services:

Land planning, creating plans for buildings, and anything that requires the drawing and analysis of plans
Zoning, rezoning, permit applications, applications for special exemptions or special use permits
Managing construction on and off-site, including obtaining insurance for such
Running and analyzing feasibility and environmental studies to create a macro picture of the finished product before any time, money, and effort are put in further
Surveying the property before, during, and after construction
Whole-site engineering, from the water resources to the infrastructure
Preparing documents, including permits, construction documents, and all other applications and contracts
All aspects of civil engineering, including cordoning off roadways while construction is underway, working with the city or county to construct new entryways, and abiding by all ordinances

It’s a complicated job, but somebody’s got to do it.

As all of these aspects are considered, though, there are always obstacles that keep the commercial engineer from being able to simply do their job in a manner that takes them from point A to point B directly, such as:

1. Taking the environment into consideration. Yes, the ecosystem should be a priority in every new building. However, the current climate crisis makes it extra challenging for engineers who are constantly working to predict and reduce damage from environmental stimuli before it happens.

The climate in which a commercial engineering company like Cochran Engineering is predominantly working will determine where their main focus in this area is given. With the significant damage to industrial and residential buildings in hurricane-prone areas, engineers must plan their structures in such a way that damage from floods and winds is mitigated.

Similarly, those who build in zones where wildfires are rampant must work to find ways to reduce damage from heat and fire. This same concept applies to commercial engineers in any climate with the potential for severe weather.

This often means that top engineering companies are working ahead of the current available materials and solutions to find new, improved ways to help protect the environment and their projects.

It’s why engineers must consider everything from the way their plans may cause pollution to the potential to use what they are working on to create sustainable and environmentally-friendly energy solutions.

The impact that the commercial engineer’s design may have on future generations means that ignorance is not an excuse. The engineer must stay up-to-date and ahead on environmental pollutants, damage caused by other buildings, and problems with infrastructures around the world so that they don’t make the same mistakes.

2. Water accessibility. Once commercial engineers have determined that what they are doing will not impact the environment detrimentally, they must then figure out how to make clean, fresh, sustainable water accessible throughout their structures.

This obstacle is a common one that often requires working and planning together with the county or city to access fresh water and hiring commercial plumbers to create a network of pipes that cover both drinking water and septic system access.

Ensuring that the water used meets or exceeds the quality standards set by the EPA is part of this job, as well. There are federal standards that must be adhered to, and these standards may change.

Today’s knowledge makes this aspect of engineering more important than ever in the past. With so many mistakes made in history due to ignorance of science that caused significant, widespread health conditions, it’s crucial that the water systems be clean and free of pollutants.

3. Ongoing education. Technology is in a constant state of flux. It’s ever-changing. Since commercial engineering covers such a broad range of factors, it’s crucial that those working in the industry are always staying up-to-date with the changes.

Commercial engineers must be on the forefront of every field in their industry. They should be aware or ahead of changes in protecting the environment, water stabilization and zoning regulations and laws. But they also need to stay update on computer technology and new, improved programs released that could make their work more efficient and faster.

4. Security. No one in today’s society is immune to potential cybercrimes. For those working in commercial engineering, where so much of the work is done in the shareable cloud or on networks, cybertheft is a major concern.

As a commercial engineer, it’s not only important to secure your own company’s access to sensitive data, but it might even be on the agenda to design and create software programs that use new technology to prevent cybercrime yourself.

5. Increasing supply costs. Online shopping makes it easy to price-check and many consumers want the lowest price without taking into consideration quality. To attract customers, commercial engineering companies may bid low after looking into current rates for the raw materials necessary to complete the project.

The problem arises when, by the time the client signs the contract and the labor begins, the raw material prices have escalated significantly. Unless you have specifically stipulated that the client must pay the difference in materials, which is often what scares away the consumer, you will have to eat that cost yourself, cutting into your profit.

Big commercial engineering companies are able to get better prices by buying in bulk, but small companies stuck in this same predicament are financially impacted when raw material prices skyrocket.

6. Irrational deadlines. Contemporary society lives in a constant state of immediate gratification. Many clients will expect deadlines that are not feasible and will threaten to go elsewhere if they are not met.

Some companies will turn those clients away, choosing safety and careful planning over a potentially turbulent client. But other companies will strive to meet those impossible deadlines, especially smaller companies who need the business and word-of-mouth advertising.

The problem with irrational deadlines, aside from the added stress and safety concerns when planning is rushed, is that you can’t control the zoning and permits. Clients who are given a timeframe when an aspect of the project will be met are usually unhappy when that date is delayed, even when it’s not your fault.

Permits require time and reliance on people you have no control over, so if you agree to irrational deadlines, be sure to warn your client ahead on the areas that may delay the project and include those areas on your contract.

7. Insurance. Commercial engineering companies are responsible for obtaining insurance coverage for multiple aspects.

If you have employees, you most likely have to offer them the minimum coverage required by federal law. This can get expensive, even if they are paying their share. Health insurance premiums on average go up 6% every year, with the employer compensating for at least part of this increase.

Additionally, you may have to have general liability coverage for any construction delay or defect, coverage for accidents that happen during your project, and worker’s compensation insurance.

The insurance premiums alone can put a small commercial engineering company out of business if they are not careful with their planning or if a major incident occurs.

Engineering is a Tough Field, But It’s Rewarding

Commercial engineering is extremely difficult, even with all of the computer software designed to make it simpler. For those who have the calling and skill to work in this industry, it’s a rewarding career.

Not everyone can handle the multitasking, higher level thinking, and micro and macro planning required to work in commercial engineering. These aspects alone make it difficult to find competent employees or business owners, but adding in the other 7 challenges faced in the industry today makes it even harder.

The extreme difficulty commercial engineers face, though, means that they are in high demand. Even with all of these obstacles, having a reputable commercial engineer working on a project with you means that your final outcome will be done right and last for the long-term.

How Your Business Can Bounce Back From A Cyber-Attack

October 29, 2019 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

A lot of small business owners assume that most cyber-criminals will target the big companies because they hold more data and they have a lot more money. But in reality, it’s the smaller businesses that are the biggest target. A big business has the capital to invest huge amounts of money in cyber-security, which means that they’re a much harder target for criminals. But smaller businesses often lack the funds or maybe they just neglect security because they don’t think that they’re a likely target, which means that hackers will go for them. Even if you have security measures in place, there is always the risk of a data breach, so it’s important that you have a plan in place to deal with it. Here’s what you need to do if you are the victim of a cyber-attack.

Secure Your Systems

The first thing that you need to do is secure your systems so no more data can be taken. The sooner you can identify how somebody gained access to your data and plug that gap, the more data you can save. A quick response here can limit the damage in a big way and you may not lose too much sensitive data if you are lucky.

Assess The Damage

Once you have secured your systems, you need to start rebuilding things. A cyber-attack can impact your business in a lot of different ways, and you need to work out the full extent of the damage. It’s important that you know exactly what data has been stolen because if you have lost customer data, they will need to know. An attack could also be used as a way to shut down your website as well, so check that everything is still online. Once you know exactly what damage has been done, you can start repairing it.

Restore Files

If you have lost files in the attack, they need to be restored so you can get things up and running and the business can continue operating as normal. It’s important that you have everything backed up properly so it’s simple to restore. If you don’t already have a backup, you need to find out more about setting one up from your IT services. Without a backup, your files will be lost for good and that will cause you no end of problems in the future.

Inform Customers

This is the worst part of the process for you, but it’s something that you can’t avoid. If customer data has been stolen, it puts them at risk of fraud, so they need to know about it. If they don’t contact their bank quickly, they may have money stolen from their account and that is going to make things a lot worse for you. If you call up customers right away, inform them of the situation, and apologize, you may be able to salvage the relationship and retain those customers.

As long as you take these steps immediately after a cyber-attack happens, you will be able to limit the damage and rebuild your business.

Hire (or train) Cyber Security Experts

Once you’ve done all that you can to mitigate a cyber attack, the next step is to make sure it never happens again. Preventing data theft and preserving data integrity needs to be a priority moving forward. Nothing is worse or more damaging to a business than a second cyber attack. Hire an experienced cyber security expert to join your team so you can put the right safeguards, processes and procedures in place. Or, consider sending a current employee back to school so they get the training they need to properly protect your business in 2019 and beyond.