Contributed Post - Mike McRitchie | Resume and LinkedIn Profile Writer | Telecom Marketing Content Writer

Dangerous Things That Happen If You Clip Your Employees’ Wings

May 2, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

You are the brain, the heart and the central nervous system behind your SME. You are the reason it exists and you’re the one maintaining the standards and values that make your business stand out from your competitors and keep your loyal customers and clients coming back again and again. But as vital as your skills, knowledge and expertise are to the smooth running of your business, no entrepreneur is an island. Your employees’ contribution to the success of your business cannot be overlooked. It’s their hard work, their ingenuity, their imagination and their dedication that’s gotten you where you are today. As such, you owe it to them to develop them and help them to achieve their dreams and invest in their ongoing development.

There are many reasons why entrepreneurs fail to develop their employees adequately. Perhaps they’re wary of the expense and disruption caused by training and development. Perhaps they’re worries that if they make their employees too attractive to their competitors they’ll risk talent flight. Or perhaps their vanity won’t allow them to let their employees exceed them in ability, knowledge or competence. While all of the above are understandable to an extent, there’s absolutely no reason why an employer should deliberately deny knowledge transfer, as you’ll see in this fascinating article on the subject; http://blog.stevetrautman.com/you-are-here-knowledge-transfer-defined/. If you withhold opportunities to benefit from your knowledge including training, performance management and continuing professional development it can have some seriously detrimental effects on your business…

You bottleneck their efficacy

Entrepreneurs should be extremely wary of bottlenecking how well an employee can not only do their job, but deal adaptively to the day to day problems your business faces. Employees need to feel that they can bring their creative problem solving abilities to bear on the issues they face at work. If they do not, they will lean more heavily on their line managers or on you. This does not improve anyone’s productivity, least of all yours.

Your turnover rate will soar

Recruiting and developing new employees is a costly and time consuming enterprise and entrepreneurs generally want to spend as little time and money on it as possible. As such, many will employ retention strategies to make sure that their talented employees remain in house. If, however, you don’t develop intelligent and talented employees, they’ll quickly feel like they’re stagnating. They will get bored and their personal investment in their work will decrease incrementally as they find it less and less challenging, and ultimately less and less rewarding. Thus, your turnover rates will soar and you’ll be left not only with a dearth of talented and intelligent individuals but a plethora of costs in recruiting and developing their replacements.

You damage your brand’s reputation

Even the most dedicated employees will struggle to bring it to the yard if they feel that their employer doesn’t value them. Even if they’re well compensated for their work, if you show a lack of willingness to develop them their skills will stagnate and their commitment will dwindle. Inevitably this will have a negative effect on the standard of customer service they offer which in turn may cause irrevocable damage to your brand’s reputation.

Entrepreneurial Sacrifices You Need To Accept

May 1, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

The first few days, weeks and maybe even months of entrepreneurship are more exciting than anything else in life. It’s all big dreams, dent-free optimism and nerves-jangled by the endless possibilities of success. This is because entrepreneurs have something employees don’t: control over the future. They have a grip on their destiny and all it takes is a great idea (or two), true grit, dedication to the dream and the right skills. Have those things and you can build your wealth and leave behind a legacy.

That’s the shiny side of the coin. The other side is, rather, unfortunately, a much darker place an that’s because it is rife with sacrifice; the kind that needs to be made in order for success to be possible. Basically, the more you can give to the cause – the more you can invest yourself in it – the more attractive the rewards will be at the end.

So, without further ado, here are the sacrifices every entrepreneur needs to expect and make room for:

Sayonara Stability

The moment you decide to go it alone and start your own business, you leave behind all security in the hope that your idea will be a success. But there are no guarantees this will be the case. At best, you’re building on a rocky foundation and that’s because you have no idea which direction this will go or how you will need to adapt. The most obvious form of stability you will need to sacrifice is a steady job with a well-paying salary, but it could be some other kind of stability you need to sacrifice in order to move forward.

Bye-Bye Work-Life Balance

When you are in employment – even with work emails on your personal phone – the division is very clear. The moment you leave the office you are leaving work. It’s that simple. Unfortunately, this line starts to blur when you become an entrepreneur. You start thinking about business around the clock. And not always because you want to; sometime you just can’t help it. Instead of having a home life and work life, you’ll have a business life and business life lite. That said, you’re business time will feel more like personal time than ever because you’ll want to be there, which is a nice balance to have.

Money Is A Big Sacrifice

For the first two or three years of your entrepreneurial life, you’re probably not going to make much money. We know that sounds horrendous, but it’s a reality you need to get comfortable with. At the most drastic end of the scale, you’ll find yourself investing heaps of your own money (maybe your family’s too), and at the easier end of the scale you’ll have secured working capital from somewhere like twinfoldcapital.com. Either way, your safety net of a salary is gone. That said, you are the boss so you can decide on where the money gets spent and how much salary you’ll pay yourself.

Sleep Is A Thing Of The Past

You will have never needed sleep more in your life, yet you will have never found it so hard to preserve a healthy sleep pattern. It will be worry keeping you awake, all-nighters to meet client deadlines and getting up before the sun to get a headstart on your to-do list. But it will get easier and, even if it doesn’t, you will get used to it.

Is the ‘last mile’ in your company’s customers journey letting you down?

May 1, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

You’ve got a problem: too few of your website visitors are turning into leads.

This can be super frustrating. You’ve got a great social media presence promoting your side hustle. Your website is regularly updated with content. You’ve used Google Analytics and can see your ads and organic content are bringing in traffic.

Why is your sales and marketing funnel letting you down then? One likely reason is that the last mile in your customers’ journey is failing you.

What is the ‘last mile’ in the customer journey, and what can you do to improve it?

What is the last mile in the customer journey?

The ‘last mile’ is a sales and marketing term borrowed from the telecommunications industry. Broadband and telephone providers talk about the last mile when referring to the final copper wiring that connects the consumer’s home to the broader telecommunications network. Even if they have the best infrastructure in place, telecom firms still need to make sure this last connection is working – otherwise the whole enterprise is a waste of time.

In sales and marketing, the last mile refers to the final stages of the sales and marketing funnel. Just like the telecoms infrastructure, you can have all the sales and marketing funnel in place – a great SEO strategy, business listings on Google Maps, a website packed full of content, active social media and all the brochures and sales content to send clients. But, without the last mile in place, all that infrastructure is a waste of time.

The last mile in eCommerce is typically the shopping basket and checkout. In service companies and the B2B sector, the last mile is very often little more than the ‘contact us’ form. So, when we talk about improving the ‘last mile’ in sales and marketing, we’re talking about improving the customer’s experience when they have reached that decision to buy.

Why does the last mile go wrong?

If you’re frustrated about customers dropping off at the last mile, you’re not alone! Research suggests that a huge 70% of eCommerce customers abandon their shopping baskets during the last mile. That’s a huge amount of potential business lost!

There’s plenty of reasons that customers drop off at the last mile. As data from Statista shows, many customers drop off simply because they were only browsing and never expected to buy – they were probably never going to convert. Nonetheless, 21% of customers drop off because the process takes too long, and 25% say they leave without paying when website navigation is too complicated.

These are things you can change – often relatively easily. Imagine you could reduce last mile drop off by just 5% – the impact would be huge.

4 steps to improve the last mile on your site

If you’re running a side hustle or an online business, you might not have the time to build an elaborate website which closes that last mile gap. So, what can you do instead?

The good news is that there’s tons of tools, tweaks and cheats which make it a lot easier to close that last mile. Let’s look at some tactics and tools you can incorporate into your website to close the customer journey.

Include Calls to Action (CTA)

It seems like a simple change to make but including multiple CTAs around your website can have a huge impact on customer conversion. A CTA is a simple piece of website copy – usually a button – telling or asking the reader to do something. Use simple, direct CTAs with expressions like:

Book a free consultation today
Order now
Contact me today

The benefit: people aren’t left confused – CTAs mean visitors know what to do next and are therefore more likely to do as the CTA says.

Make your calendar visible

Do you provide any kind of service? Share your calendar live on your website. A simple live calendar showing when you are available means visitors know what times you’re free and can book your time.

The benefit: save yourself and your customers the tedium of sending emails back and forth. Instead, let them see when you’re free and book your time without the hassle.

Cut the steps required to book you and your services

No one wants to ‘sign up’ for an account when ordering something online – the pain of remembering passwords, sharing data with another company, being put on one more email list. Once people have decided you’re the company for them, don’t turn them off with a complex process – make things as easy and seamless as possible with simple scheduling tools.

The benefit: Anything you can do to reduce the number of steps needed to book your services makes it more likely for customers to finish that last mile.

Facilitate payment

As above, complex payment methods turn customers off in an instant. No one wants to jump through hoops to pay for a product or service – it should be as seamless as possible. Use common online payment services like Stripe and PayPal to make it easy as possible for people to pay.

The benefit: receive payment easily and securely, while making it super simple for customers to pay you.

Shorten the last mile with Book Like a Boss

If your website visitors don’t seem to be turning into leads, your last mile might be letting you down. The problem for so many small businesses, side hustlers and solopreneurs is that improving that last mile of the customer journey typically involves using a lot of complex tech and website optimization.

If you don’t have the time to tweak your website for hours on end adding plugins and APIs, tools like Book Like a Boss do the heavy lifting for you.

Using Book Like a Boss gives you a ready to use web page which includes a calendar where visitors can view your availability and book and pay for your services. You get access to an easy to use dashboard and can take your first bookings in minutes. To find out more, visit Book Like a Boss today.

Is It Time You Make The Right Investments In Your Business?

April 30, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

It all starts with an idea. It can hit you at any moment. Eating your breakfast, being out with friends in an evening, a Sunday morning reading the papers, the idea will come and it will feel like a switch has gone off in your head. For some, the idea can sit there patiently waiting for you to find the right time to take action. For others the idea can consume you quite quickly and you may find that you end up taking action quicker than you would expect. Starting your own business can be hugely exciting, especially if you feel so passionate about your idea and business venture. But there are certain aspects of your business that you may need to take some time to consider.

Investment in your business is essential, and sometimes it isn’t always monetary related. Investments into your idea can come from your thoughts, your consideration and even your time, as well, of course, is the investment in terms of money, be that from savings or investment options. I wanted to share with you some of the investments that you could make for your business. I hope it gives you the confidence you need to move forward.

Business Investments

A business location

One of the first things to consider will be where you work from. One of the obvious choices for a new start up business is to consider working from home. This gives you great flexibility. You can dedicate any free time to your business idea, nurturing it and growing it, as well as having low overheads in terms of costs. However, you may also need to consider, at some point, moving into an office or finding a business location that will work for you. It might be that you want a shop, or perhaps you like the idea of holding more stock to meet demands, so a bigger location with that sort of flexibility could be the answer. However, you also need to consider the overheads incurred with a retail premises or office location. Leases can be pricey, so finding the right one for you is essential to ensure that you keep profits in your business ready to be reinvested.

The website

So much is done online these days. We buy our groceries and have them delivered to our door, buy clothes and expect next day delivery on all sorts of times from online retailers. We share our lives online through social media, communicate and keep in touch with people on all sides of the world. We even look to search engines for advice, answers to questions and recommendations. So a website for your business is an essential aspect and one that will need your time and your investment to make it right. The website needs to be responsive, quick loading, but eye catching. It also needs to be visible online, so you may want to take into account keywords you use in the main body of the text, as well as investing in seo services Maryland.

Investing in your time

Your time is just as important as the money aspects of the investment into your business. After all, you are the main cog that keeps the business running and heading in the direction that you want. It is important for you to invest your time carefully. This is when outsourcing could be a potential way to ensure that your time is spent doing the things that will have the most benefit to your business. Time blocking and other time management techniques could really help you make more of your business.

Making investments for future profits

Sometimes you really need to be a forward thinker with your business. Making investments for your future profits as well as making decisions that will affect the here and now. This is when investing abroad could be the answer for your business and websites like https://www.propertyguru.com.my/resources/buy-property-guide/the-complete-guide-to-purchasing-a-property-in-the-subsale-market can advise on some of the best considerations you need to make. Future investments could also be thought over in terms of your business location and what you may invest in terms of growth.

Smartphone Business Application

Could a smartphone application be the answer?

A future idea that might be worth thinking about now in terms of investing in your business is some of the digital tools you will have. A smartphone application is definitely one to consider. So many people spend time on their apps on their phone, and they can sometimes find navigating an application far easier than a mobile friendly website. So you may want to invest in this sort of development for your business. Whether it will be an application as another shopping tool or purely informative, it could really benefit your business for the future.

Investing in your logo and your brand

Let’s face it, your logo and your brand is one of those things that are going to be remembered the most when it comes to your business, alongside the products you sell and the services that you offer. So investing in your thoughts when it comes to this is essential. You want to portray the right message and for you to be memorable, without over complicating it. After all, some of the most iconic brands are the ones we remember the most in terms of simplicity. A color, an image, a particular word. Follow the same process to developing your brand. After all, you only get one chance to make a first impression. Websites like https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/71902 could have some great tips and advice to get you started.

Thinking about different marketing techniques

Finally, marketing is one of the ways that you can get your business seen and many businesses are now seeing the power of social media and what it can potentially do for your business. A strategy can be a great way to help you remain consistent with your messages. But you may also want to improve your game in terms of the images you share, the video content you have and even taking advantage of in-house tools like Facebook lives or Instagram stories to give you another depth of advertisement and insight. Humanizing your business and giving it a voice can really help you to attract more customers, and social media is one of the easiest ways to do it.

I hope these tips help you to make the right investments for your business and the future.

Two Shades Of Green: Making Money While Saving The Planet

April 29, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

Over the last couple of decades, there have been loads of developments in the world of environmentally-friendly technology. With hundreds of companies throwing their hats into the ring, you wouldn’t be silly for assuming that most businesses are using this sort of gear. In reality, though, prices have been slated for being too high, and even the biggest claim that they are unaffordable. To beat this idea, this post will be exploring the world of environmentally-friendly technology, along with the money which can be made by those who are willing to buy into it.

In the US, industrial pollution accounts for almost half of the total pollution in the air. This comes from manufacturing, waste management, and loads of other industries, but there is something which can be done. Lean processes are designed to minimize waste and maximize speed by using precise modern machinery. In a lot of cases, these sorts of techniques are able to reduce a factory to producing as little as 2% of their old waste, saving money on materials while also resulting in higher yields. The machines may be expensive for this sort of work, but they can often be leased or bought on finance.

Renewable energy has been a very popular idea for a long time in the world of green science. Finding an energy source which doesn’t pollute and won’t run out is a modern miracle, and a lot of people are already taking advantage of it. Solar power is the easiest way for a business to harness the power of nature. Using your buildings, your roofs can be covered with panels, enabling the place to start producing enough energy to power itself, along with having some spare. Once the panels have paid for themselves, this could reduce your power bills to nothing. Along with this, though, it will also make your business a lot greener, and this is an excellent balance to find.

A lot of businesses don’t have the space or environment for a solar or wind farm, unfortunately. These resources take up a lot of room, and will need to have the right weather conditions to be effective. The best carbon offset providers can handle this issue for you, providing you with the means to fund a renewable fuel project elsewhere, offsetting the pollution which you produce. In the process, you could be helping a rural community to have power. Along with this, you will also be doing your part for the environment, even if you don’t make money. Of course, the reputation boost this will provide certainly won’t do your business any harm, and this makes the lack of return easier to bear.

With all of the options out there, it should be nice and easy for businesses to get started with their own environment saving ventures. Of course, though, it takes a long time for this sort of issue to become a priority, and this can make it feel like nothing is happening. Being one of the first is never a bad thing, especially when it comes to helping the world.