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

Find What Works For Your Company

April 16, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

What works for your company

If you have a ton of competitors, and they’re always ahead of you in the market, then you might not have found what is working for your company. Some people stick to the same processes, the same products, and the same sales technique. What you’re left with is a failing company. The market is ever changing, and what customers expect from a company is going to always be evolving. So, you should always be trying out new techniques and tactics to find out what works for your company. Just a few changes could mean the difference between success and failure. Here’s just a few changes that we think your business might need to make.

Increase Your Office Space

It’s so easy for a business to outgrow an office space, and it can actually really disrupt the daily working life for your employees. If they feel cramped and as though they have no space, they’re going to start getting on each others nerves. The last thing you want is a team of people who are bickering because they’ve been crammed into an office space so small. Even if your company isn’t big enough for a full blown office that takes up an entire floor of a building, you should still be checking out what small office space for rent there is and see if it will work for your business. The more space you have, the more room there is for creativity to flow. Just make sure you aren’t overspending, and make sure that everyone seems happy and motivated when coming into your office. If you do move, make the new office and bright and as interesting as you possibly can. It should help to keep your employees motivated during the day.

Driving Sales

Sales are the most important part of any business, but often companies don’t meet the level of sales they think they’re going to make. If this is happening to you, the first place you need to look is marketing. If you’re not marketing right, you’re never going to make the sales you need. Marketing is all about getting your name out there to the wider audience, and connecting with people who might not have known what your business was if it were not for your marketing campaign. If you’re not sure what’s going to work for your company, then you should definitely always be looking to outsource. There are companies out there with an extensive knowledge of different marketing techniques, they could help boost your business up another level.

Website Improvements

Even if you think your website is perfect, there will always be something that can be improved. For example, it could be that the servers you’re using crash once every month or so. To you, it might just seem natural, but whilst the servers are down, potential customers are turning away and finding another business. Find a trusted server you can rely on to keep your business online 24/7. You should also find ways to keep the design fresh and interesting. A business should be unique, and it should be exciting, this can be displayed easily through your website design.

Taking on the Technical Side to Business as a Creative

April 15, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

Technical Details as a Creative

In the world of business, we’re all very different. No two leaders will be the same. Because we all have our strengths and talents, and it’s often going to be those differences that make us great at business. However, you will also find that you won’t be great at everything. When you’re more of a creative person, trying to take on some of the more technical aspects of running a business can be quite tough. And when you find that you are struggling a little, it does seem quite silly to say that you’re going to just muddle on through and struggle. Instead, here’s what you need to do.

Do Your Research

As a creative, you’re more than familiar with finding inspiration. Sometimes it comes to you, and sometimes you have to go looking for it. Well, when it comes to handling the technical side of your business, you often have to take the more investigative approach towards making it happen. While your creativity may be the reason that you know your business will work, you still have to execute it in the right way. Doing your researching into the more technical areas that you don’t understand is a great way to make this happen.

Hire A Service

If you’re absolutely useless with anything too technical (or technological), then don’t force yourself to learn how to do it. You have to be able to play to your strengths. And it’s safe to say that technology might not be one of them. So hire a service such as Level 5 to take it on for you. When you bring in people to handle the key areas that cause you stress, you’re free to focus on your strengths.

Hire Technical Expertise — Photo by rawpixel.com on Unsplash

Choose The Easy Option

So this one is a bit obvious, but when you know that you aren’t too good at a certain thing, then find a simple solution for it. Whether that’s the most user-friendly piece of technology or software that you can find, or a product that comes with a service or some kind of assistance, sometimes choosing the easier option is going to be the best solution for you.

Hire An Employee

And when you know that you’re really useless at certain things, like web design, marketing, or finance, then there’s always an employee for that. If you want your business to grow, then hiring your first employee will always be on the horizon. So it could be the perfect time for you to think about bringing on your first member of staff.

Create A Partnership

Finally, when you really do know that you’re not that skilled at anything technical or business related, maybe you don’t want to deal with any of the business or strategic side of things yourself? As with many creatives, you may want to take the creative lead and leave everything else to somewhere who is more capable. By joining forces with an entrepreneur or strategic business person and letting them take the technical lead, you can still keep control in the company but only ever focus on the creative side of things.

How to Change Your Career Path

April 14, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

Change Your Career Path

If you fancy a change in direction this year, it can be a little intimidating to say the least. When we are in our teens most of us simply can’t decide what we want to do with our lives and that’s perfectly normal. We end up constantly changing our minds until we are pushed in a certain direction by our parents, our teachers or our grades. The thing is, when we reach our mid to late twenties we might find that this isn’t the career path we wanted, and it means that we need to find a new path to take. It can be daunting to change careers at any point in life, but with these tips it will be easier for you to go out and do what you were meant to do.

Are you happy?

Before you tart leaping into a new job role think about how happy you are in your role right now. Sometimes we hate our jobs and can’t wait to get as far away from them as possible, however sometimes we simply need to change the role within our industry to make us fully satisfied. If you find that you are kind of happy in your job but it isn’t quite what you expected, look closer to home when changing your career because you may not even have to change the company you work for, just the role.

What do you love?

The most important thing you need to bear in mind when you are looking for a new job is being happy. If you are going to spend most of your week doing one thing, what would you want it to be? It is crucial to work in a job you enjoy because you deserve to be happy. If you do something that you love you will be more likely to excel in the job and do better in the long term too.

Think of ideas

This is probably the most challenging part of finding a new career. A lot of the time we aren’t 100% sure what we want to do and this can make things very difficult when searching for a job. For example let’s say you love animals: there are a few different options you can go into which involve looking after animals and learning about them too. The key is to write a list of every animal related job you can find and go through them until you find a choice you like. You can do this with any subject and it will make things easier for you when you are looking.

Look at your options

There are thousands of jobs out there which are ripe for the taking, and you need to be able to narrow this down until you find the on which is perfect for you. Let’s say you want to work in medicine: you will be able to become a doctor wearing those signature Blue Sky Scrubs every single day and saving lives, you could be a nurse, a midwife, a lab worker and loads more. Think about what education you currently have and whether or not you will be able to study medicine or it’s many forms at college or university. If not, you need to look at something which requires less from you.

Talk to people

The absolute best way to find out what it is really like to work in a given industry is to talk to someone who already does. You can find people through your family and friends or even go on LinkedIn and find someone who is willing to give you some pointers and let you in in what it is really like working in a certain area. This will allow you to make an informed decision on what you want to do in your life.

Shadow

If you want to get a sneak peak of your chosen career before you actually start working towards it, ask someone in the industry to let you shadow them for the day. It will give you a good insight into what the job will actually involve and whether or not it is truly something you want to do.

Volunteer

If you want to try a new job you can always volunteer at the workplace for a few weeks so that you can get a full experience on the job role you will be working with. There are plenty of volunteer terrace options available to you, so take some time to find one close enough to your area to let you give it a try.

Educate yourself

For pretty much any career you choose to take on in your life there will be things you need to learn and qualifications you will need to gain. Make sure that you fully investigate what qualifications are required for your chosen career and once you have made a decision, go ahead with them alongside your regular job. This will allow you to retain job stability while you work your way up and become ready to apply for jobs you enjoy.

Use your skills

When applying for a new job make sure that you use your skills to do it. For example if you are applying for a marketing career, instead of simply creating a plain resume or CV and cover letter: use your marketing skills to make a fun and quirky flyer selling yourself to your prospective employer. Using your skill will help you stand out from the crowd and will likely impress your employer more than a simple list of what you can do.

Look within the industry

We have already touched on this point but we will take a look at it one more time in more depth. If you don’t mind your job but it isn’t everything that you want, it may be a case of swapping to another job within your industry. Let’s say you are a technical support analyst but you want to do something more business focused, you could instead become a project manager. If you can find a job role in your workplace which you would rather be doing, then this is the right role for you.

How to Inject Some Creativity Into Your Business

April 13, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

Being creative might seem like a vague thing to apply to your business, but when you apply creative thinking to business processes, you tend to find some of the most interesting and innovative ideas. That’s why you should work hard to make your business more creative on a day to day basis than it is right now. If you don’t get this right, you’ll soon find that your business becomes tired and boring without any fresh ideas.

Encourage Trial and Error

Trial and error has a bad reputation because to some people it can seem like you’re just trying things for the sake of trying them, without putting in much thought. But that’s not the way it has to be. Sometimes, trying new things can mean having to take risks and see how the turn out. You can then learn from the experience and aim to try something better next time around.

Change the Scenery

A change of scenery could be exactly what you and your team need. It’s easy to get too comfortable and too complacent in your office. So you could shake things up by changing the seating plan or maybe even moving to a new office entirely. It could be the spark you need to start doing things differently inside your business.

Make Your Marketing a Department a More Creative Place

Marketing is one of the areas that can get very stiff and boring pretty quickly if you’re not careful. You shouldn’t let that happen though and you can get this right by looking for ways to engage people in a more informal and at ease kind of way. Be creative and present your company as a laid back and relatable entity. Places like HIVE Digital Strategy can help you with being more creative with your marketing too.

Business Creativity

Create a Diverse Team of People Inside Your Company

Having lots of people from a range of different backgrounds could be exactly what your business requires. After all, when you have people from different backgrounds, you find that they bring different ideas and perspectives to your business as well. It’s something that’s very positive and should work well for you over the years ahead, as long as you combine this with real talent.

Don’t Make People Work to the Clock Quite So Much

When people feel under pressure to get things done at a certain time, they will feel rushed too. It’s very hard to be properly creative when you’re always looking at the clock and worrying about whether you’ll have all your work done by the deadline. You should relax things and give everyone in your team the chance to work on creative and out of the box ideas.

A little creative in your business will certainly take it a long way. You can’t underestimate the impact this will have in the long-term. By empowering your people and encouraging them to approach each new challenge with creativity and bravery, you will put your company in a much better position to find success.

It’s Time to Rethink Your Career and Get Qualified

April 12, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

Rethinking Your Career — Image Credit: Stock Snap

You’ve been doing your job well for several years. It’s fine, but that’s really all you can say about it. You go in, sit at your desk all day and then go home. The salary gets you by. The people are nice enough and you go for drinks every so often. The most exciting thing that happens in your day is the arrival of the sandwiches at lunch.

You need to have a rethink.

The average age of retirement is 62 and, unless you are ticking off the last couple of years, you definitely need to consider what you are going to do with that time. If you start work at 21, that’s a significant chunk of your life to be excited about sandwiches for. And when you think of it like that, it’s clear that you need to do something much more special with your life.

One of the main reasons that people tend to stay in dead-end jobs is that they have no idea what to move on to or how to get there. It’s natural to be a bit scared of change but having a little courage and taking the plunge will make a huge difference to your self-value, your confidence and to the world.

Is a Career Change Right For You?

Before you chuck it all for a new industry, do your research. And don’t make these 10 career change mistakes. But if you got past that part and still see potential, take these next steps to ready yourself for that next career move.

Identify the Qualifications that Appeal to You

The first step to figuring out a career move is looking at various courses and degrees that might appeal to you. Getting qualified is a great way to burst onto your new scene and it will give you a chance to see whether a job is suited to you. Even if you don’t end up using your new qualification to get into a new field, it might show your boss that you are determined to climb the ladder and encourage them to give you new challenges.

If you need to work while you study, online courses like an online masters in school counseling or a business degree are really popular options. This way you can work at your own pace and in your own time and you won’t be forced to move in order to study. However, do look at the value of the course before you agree to start. Look at the accreditations the school has and where the course could lead you before you pay.

Think About Your Current Skills and What You Want to Develop

The best way to choose a course is always to go with your main interests as this will keep your attention and lead to a much more fulfilling role. As you already know, there’s no point in doing something you don’t enjoy for your whole life.

Do think about your current skill sets and what you would like to develop. You will need to be prepared to work hard and do plenty of research on your own to make the most of this type of course. While you might assume that vocational courses are best, you can also do more academic courses if you want to. These may not lead directly to a new career but they will give you the time to think about what you really want and indulge your passions while you can.