Everything you want to know about shareholder management

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Shareholder Management|Everything you want to know about shareholder managementWant to improve your shareholder management strategies? This article explores everything business owners need to know about shareholder management.

Shareholders are an essential asset to a company. They are the ones that can help your business rise to new heights if they have a good reason to get on board with you. But managing these relationships can be a challenging task that is a corporate reality for many business founders.

Shareholders are, in essence, the owners of companies. While a small business can have just one shareholder, the founder, the story is different when it comes to a public company. Public companies can have tens, hundreds, or even thousands of individual and institutional shareholders, like mutual fund companies, pension funds, or hedge funds.

Now, these shareholders play a crucial role in the business’s financing, operations, governance, and control aspects. But, managing them can give business founders a tough time.

This article explains what it means to efficiently manage your shareholders and tips on how to do it!

Shareholder management explained

Capital is essential, making shareholders necessary for a company.

Shareholders are basically investors that give funding to a company in exchange for company shares.

Investment in the company also brings shareholders various rights, including:

  • The right to check the books and records of the company they invest in.
  • The right to vote on critical corporate matters, such as the board of directors.
  • The right to get dividends based on their investment.
  • The entitlement to take legal action against the company for misdeeds of its officers or directors.

Now, as the company grows and its capital needs increase as well, so does the number of shareholders.

This makes the equity in financial management in a company both crucial and challenging at times.

Shareholder management involves communicating with shareholders and keeping them updated on all ownership changes, documents, or other corporate decisions.

Tips on how to manage shareholders efficiently

Keeping shareholders informed about everything new about the company doesn’t sound that complicated. But this is only true if your business has a handful of shareholders. When you need to manage your relationships with a significant number of shareholders, this can turn into a time-consuming and overwhelming task.

Use these tips to manage shareholders efficiently:

Prepare well

The way you’ll manage your investors can be set right from the beginning, depending on how well you prepare to attract shareholders. More precisely, if you prepare well, you won’t struggle with disagreements caused by unrealistic expectations from your investors.

Selling your business plan well is also key to attracting the best investors out there. You may have the most innovative business idea. If you don’t sell it well, you may end up with a couple of shareholders that can prove to be very difficult to do business with. In contrast, if you present your idea perfectly, you may get an extensive list of investors to choose from, allowing you to select the ones you resonate well with.

Use a shareholder management software tool

Managing your shareholders shouldn’t take all your time and nerves. The good news is that you can stop wasting time and brainpower by managing your company investors with a shareholder management tool. Such a tool allows you to quickly onboard team members, import company data, and immediately benefit from having all the necessary information in just one place.

Build a communicative relationship

Besides using the right tool that simplifies your tasks in terms of managing shareholders, you also need to build a solid and open relationship with your investors. This way, shareholder engagement in corporate matters will indeed be beneficial and create a mutual understanding of the company objectives.

Be honest

When communicating with shareholders, you also need to be honest to leave no room for surprises. Like all businesses out there, yours will have its ups and downs. But even in those bad days, communicating openly and honestly will help you build confidence from your shareholders in the long term.

Good results will always satisfy investors, but even when there are troubles, an honest answer on why is that will help your shareholders see that you’re aware of the problem and have a plan to fix it, which will encourage them to trust you.

Add a personal touch

Building trust in the business world goes beyond offering honest data and statistics about your company. Sure, your investors aren’t there to make friends. They are there to make money. Yet, they will value a personal touch added to your relationship because it will help them build trust easier.

What’s more, when you make your investors trust you as a person, not just a company founder, they are more likely to also trust you with other project ideas you may come up with. For example, suppose you have an innovative business idea that you need financing for. In that case, if you’ve done well with gaining your shareholders’ trust so far, it’s very likely to find at least one interested person to follow you to your second business as well.

Stay silent when you’re down in the dumps

Every entrepreneur ever knows the emotional ups and downs of the” entrepreneurial roller coaster.” You probably do too. Now, while going through ups and downs is normal in the business world, it may affect your relationship with your investors if you’re not careful.

More precisely, investors expect you to be clear and level-headed when presenting your ideas and thoughts. And, this can be a bit hard when you’re down in the dumps, going through a business crisis.

So, to make sure that you don’t say the wrong thing or make the wrong choice, it’s always better to stay silent and find a way for you to gain some clarity over what to do and say next. Your investors will better appreciate a clearly formulated plan for a crisis than a chaotic meeting that only makes them wonder if they made the right investment choice with your business.

How To Supercharge Your Property Business

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Property Business|How To Supercharge Your Property BusinessWith the current state of the real estate market, it’s been difficult to find good opportunities for people to make money. There are many ways on how to make money with real estate, but some of them are more effective than others. If you have a property business, whether you’re getting started or not, you may be wondering what you can do to make things really take off for you.

To start, you need to have a clear understanding of your goals. What is the impact you want to make with your property business? Do you want to increase the revenue of the business, give back more to your employees, or engage more customers? Once you have a clear idea on what you want, then it is time for the next step. But to help you get there, you’re going to want to take these key points into consideration.

Making Money With Real Estate

There are many ways that you can make money with real estate. Investing in one property is not the only way to benefit from your purchases. There are other ways like flipping properties, investing in multiple properties, etc. Or, if you’re running a real estate agency, then you can use your expertise to sell homes or commercial properties and earn money that way.

The key to making money with real estate is having the right strategy and following through on it. Real estate is an extremely lucrative venture, but also very risky. There’s a lot at stake when it comes to your investments and you should know what kind of risks you’re taking when deciding on how much money you want to put into your business future. So come up with a plan and start to execute it.

Market Your Property Business for Further Growth

There are a lot of property marketing techniques that you can use to help grow your business. The most important thing is to know how to market your property business in a way that gets you the most clients and the best return on your investment. You can also turn to an expert real estate marketing company to help you if you’re not an expert at this. But overall, you need to be sure that you have a professional looking website and that you know your market. That way, you can drill down and work out the best ways to target them – whether that’s through advertising, direct sales, or using social media.

How Technology is Transforming the Property Market

With the advancement of technology, property has also been one of the markets that have been influenced here. The evolution of the property market is now driving sales technology. With this innovation, salespeople are now able to reach out potential customers with automatic phone calls and emails which help them convert more leads into sales. You can take a look at the different software packages that are going to make your job much easier and more efficient too.

3 Common Ways Your Construction Business Can Lose Money

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Construction Business|3 Common Ways Your Construction Business Can Lose MoneyStarting a construction business is one of the oldest business ideas in the book. When done correctly, it can lead to lots of profits, helping you lay the foundations of a construction empire. Unfortunately, lots of small businesses in this sector struggle to generate profits year in year out. They keep losing money, and on further reflection, it’s easy to identify why this is the case.

If you currently own and operate a small construction company, here are three common ways you could be losing money right this second:

Poor supplier relationships

Construction businesses rely on suppliers to gain access to all the different raw materials and equipment needed to run the company. You can’t perform construction work without all of these things and there are various building company suppliers out there that provide them for you.

The problem is that you are choosing bad suppliers for your business, meaning you’re paying too much money for the goods. As a result, this whittles away at your bottom line, making it harder for you to make a profit. The solution? Find better suppliers at more affordable rates, lowering the cost of overheads.

On-site crime

That’s right, on-site crime is a genuine issue that affects construction companies and can mean you lose money. It can happen through employees or members of the general public stealing things from your site. What tends to happen is someone outside your business sneaks onto a construction site when you pack up for the day, looking to take things for free. This can include some of the supplies we were just talking about, meaning you have to spend more money replacing them.

This is actually a bigger problem than you think, but it can easily be addressed by improving the security on your site. Start by installing mobile construction site cameras to deter both employees and members of the public from stealing anything. Something simple like this can keep your supplies at their standard levels, saving money.

Construction site accidents

Finally, a lot of small companies lose money due to construction site accidents. An employee gets injured on the job, leading to disruptions. This has a two-fold effect on your financial situation as a business. Firstly, you need to cough up money for any medical bills your employee encounters, seeing as they were injured on the job and therefore you’re technically liable. If you don’t, they can sue you for more money anyway.

Secondly, it can delay your operations, meaning you might have to discount your service for not completing it on time. Or, you could get bad reviews from clients, making it harder to find more work and to make more money. As such, improving construction site safety needs to be a top priority to prevent your business from losing a lot of money.

As you can see, construction businesses can lose money in ways that you may never have thought about. If you find that your business struggles to make a profit, it could be down to one or all of these three issues.

4 Ways to Find the Perfect Suppliers For Your Business

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Business Suppliers|4 Ways to Find the Perfect Suppliers For Your BusinessKnowing how to handle your business finances is one of the most important aspects of running a business, especially for small companies still trying to establish themselves as a name within the industry. One facet of your business finances is finding the perfect suppliers. You need a company that is affordable but not too cheap. You need dependability and excellent customer service to help you build a strong and prosperous relationship. How can you find these suppliers, though? Here are four places to look.

Make The Most Of Trade Shows

You should already know how trade shows can benefit your business if you’re trying to increase your reputation and brand awareness, but they are also useful if you are looking for partnerships, especially in the case of suppliers.

These trade shows are the perfect place to find out what different suppliers of equipment, technology, and other essentials can offer. You can see first-hand what they are capable of, and there are so many places to look that you can get an efficient and thorough idea all in a single weekend.

Rely on Word of Mouth

Word of mouth and recommendations are also effective when searching for the perfect supplier. Depending on the industry you work in, you can ask around for reviews or advice regarding different suppliers you have come across during your search.

For heavy machinery, especially with farming, you might hear plenty of good things about companies like Scherer, whereas companies looking for suitable technology to boost their infrastructure may get recommendations about the likes of Mailchimp for Salesforce. While you don’t need to make an immediate decision, you can narrow down your selection based on names that continue to come up.

Harness the Power of the Internet

The internet is your friend, as long as you know where to look. When searching for a suitable company, suppliers that use services like Google My Business are always more appealing. You can get as much information as possible, and it also shows they have their company in order.

Besides search engines, social media will also be beneficial, especially professional platforms like LinkedIn. You may need to sift through a lot of incompatible businesses at first, but this is one of the most effective places to identify reliable suppliers.

The Traditional Directory

Often, you can’t do much better than traditional methods. Although many businesses rely on the internet, traditional directories will have plenty of information, including email addresses and phone numbers that allow you to get in touch directly with potential suppliers.

Make sure you don’t ignore this directory, as it’s full of information and even suppliers that you may never come across otherwise. This is especially true of older businesses that are yet to make the full leap towards modern methods

Demanded and Supplied

Picking the right supplier for your business can be the difference between success and failure. There are a variety of reasons at your disposal to help you find the perfect supplier, so do make sure you explore all avenues before identifying a supplier that is right for you.

How to Find the Most Reliable Custom Sticker Printing Firms

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Custom Sticker Printing|How to Find the Most Reliable Custom Sticker Printing FirmsAdvertisement and marketing have always been integral parts of any business. Without them, it is next to impossible for your brand to gain recognition and reach unprecedented heights of success. So, either you already own a business or are planning to launch one, it’s imperative to devise marketing strategies well in advance.

Today, many organizations opt for reasonable marketing methods – ones that don’t require massive investment, but at the same time, can do wonders for their business. Customized stickers are also one of these methods that can turn your business idea into reality.

For instance, you have already prepared an incredible product with the most beautiful packaging. All you need is to choose the right printing company for the stickers. Sounds like an easy feat? It isn’t. One wrong decision might result in a flat design. Or worse, your order of stickers might not make it on time.

Unfortunately, brands usually consider stickers an afterthought – just selecting a website to upload the artwork file and receiving the stickers shortly after. However, your brand’s stickers deserve more than this.

Therefore, if you find yourself in the throes of picking the right printing firm, we invite you to view the following factors that are worth considering:

1. Consider sustainability

As with any other manufacturing process, sticker printing is also one that involves waste and can make a considerable impact on the environment. And while you wish your brand’s custom stickers to attain an extensive level of quality when they roll out of printing machines. First, however, ensure that the whole sticker printing process takes place in a sustainable environment.

Try to look out for a company that utilizes eco-friendly materials and has a proper sustainable plan in place to conserve energy. And if your brand is more eco-friendly, you can ask the chosen company to exploit recycled stock.

While a manufacturer, for sure, can’t entirely remove the environmental footprint. However, with eco-conscious material and printers, the firm can make only a marginal impact on the environment. And that way, everyone benefits – your brand, community, and the planet we all live in.

2. Read reviews

The sticker printing process is indubitably challenging, and you wish everything to go without a hitch with your chosen company. That’s why make sure to check the reviews about the company on various social media platforms and search engines. In this way, you can learn what others have to say about their experience with the company.

Positive reviews count a lot when coming to a final decision about finding the right printing company for your custom stickers. The more positive reviews, the more credible and trustworthy the printing firm is. However, if you notice any recurring patterns in negative reviews, consider it as a red flag.

3. Check out the quality of samples

Undoubtedly, your utmost priority is to get your stickers printed in high quality under the supervision of professional print technicians. Imagine you invested a fortune to get your custom stickers printed. But, everything went south when you saw that stickers didn’t turn out the way you wanted them to be.

Not only will it irk you to no end. But, it will also be a wastage of time, money, and endeavors. Given this, it’s indispensable to settle for a printing company that offers you samples. That way, you will have the freedom to check the printing quality. After all, you don’t wish to risk your brand reputation with faded prints and bland stickers.

You can also find the perfect printing company by inspecting the firm’s work, which they did for their previous clients. It will give you an accurate picture of whether your chosen firm has the experience and meets your standards.

4. Ensure excellent customer service

Is the printing firm you want to hire for your stickers known for offering the best customer service? If not, you might need to reconsider your options.

A professional sticker printing firm must be with you throughout the printing process for the best possible outcome. The customer care representatives should walk you through every step – from design ideas to the final finishes. Effective communication will allow you to ask any query you might have comfortably.

Therefore, ensure the company you choose is easier to contact, whether by email, phone call, or any other medium. In addition, you can test the level of customer support during the investigation process. Suppose the company fails to respond to your queries promptly and professionally. In that case, it’s best to let go of this option and find another firm.

5. Get quotations

Pricing plays a significant role in making the final decision. Hire the sticker printing company that charges the best price for precisely the high-quality sticker your business needs. During your research, ensure to get quotations from different printing companies. However, when getting quotes from various printing firms, make sure your comparison isn’t apple to oranges.

Choose the printing company that offers you the best quality services at a reasonable price. After all, you aren’t merely looking for affordability. Instead, you wish to have stickers that can provide brand value. It is relevant to note that custom-made sticker printing might cost you more than simple printing. The pricing of tailor-made stickers will depend on various factors such as delivery time, choice of material quality, the complexity of the artwork, and much more.

However, don’t forget to check the hidden cost as they might cause a massive dent in your finances later.

6. Is the firm reliable and experienced?

While getting affordable quotations and the best customer service is critically important, don’t forget that the experience also matters. On your quest to find the best custom sticker printing firm, ensure that the company has well-qualified and highly-skilled experts that can prepare the perfect products.
A professional printing company should know the art of printing every minute detail of your sticker in a way that looks flawless and unique. Also, ensure that the material your chosen firm uses is of top-notch quality, reliable, and durable.

Moreover, the experienced sticker printing company will know how to resolve any issue during the process and not compromise on the quality of the final product.

Final Words

To say that the sole purpose of stickers is to increase brand recognition would be a bit of an understatement. The fact is, stickers are the very first aspect of your brand that customers observe. Not only do they incite excitement among the customers, but they also tend to bring in huge returns on investments. And let’s not overlook the fact how sticker printing is significantly less expensive than billboards, banners, and television advertisements.

However, before settling on any decision, take your time and ensure that the printing firm you choose provides the best services and serves its clients well. And pour in the efforts to come up with flawless stickers that give an outstanding impression. Remember, custom stickers are your brand’s image and may have an influence on customers’ decisions. Therefore, it’s imperative to work with a company that values your stickers the same way as you do.