How to Make Your Retail Store a Success

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Retail store|How to Make Your Retail Store a SuccessLaunching and creating a store that sells clothes and other accessories is fantastic. It provides you with the chance to help customers find clothing that makes them feel happy and good about themselves, and it helps you earn a living too.

Whether you sell clothes that others have designed, or you make and sell your own clothing lines, setting up a store is one of the best ways to market what you have got to offer.

However, with so much competition out there, it can be difficult to stand out from the crowd. Taking time to create a store that is appealing and attractive to customers will ensure you get a decent footfall to your store (if you have a physical location). The same applies if you have an online presence either through your own website or selling platform. It has to be attractive and enticing, or people will not want to visit your store if it is not appealing to them.

Pay attention to the small details

In a physical store, this can be anything from the signage you use to the fixtures and fittings that you will use, including Retail & Display Mannequins that show your products off. Don’t underestimate how products can affect the design of your shop, and don’t underestimate how much lighting and color schemes can affect your customers. It can influence how long people browse for and, most importantly, whether they purchase or not.

Focus on your customers

Customers can make or break a store, so ensure your customers are at the heart of your business. Ensure that every customer has a good experience. Consistency and quality are very important in customer care and satisfaction. Unhappy customers can lose you business very quickly, so keep your customers happy. Monitor your customer care and service, and always ask existing customers for feedback. Any feedback you get will help you see where you are doing well and also where they may be any underlying problems or issues.

Stay competitive

You have a good product, so you will always get customers, right? Well, no, having a good product is one thing, but staying ahead of the competition is another. Very soon, there will be others emerging in your market, so you need to stay ahead of the game. You need to be introducing new stock that keeps your store fresh, and you need to be doing at least one product launch a year. A good product launch will keep your customers happy and keep them coming back for more time and time again.

Don’t be greedy

Making money is of course, nice, but people should always come over and before profit. It is much better to build a store that you will get repeat custom from overtime, than to be greedy and build a store that is here one minute and gone the next, or one that sells products at highly inflated prices. Opening a store is a marathon, not a sprint, so work hard to build relationships over time to help you make a living.

Legal Tips for Small Business Owners

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Small Business Owners|Legal Tips for Small Business OwnersAs the owner of a small business, it is essential that you consider the law in running your business as you will obviously want to make sure that you are operating above board and know how to protect your small business. A small business can struggle if they encounter any kind of legal issue, which is why it is so important to be aware of a few tips which could come in useful when it comes to abiding by the law and protecting your business. Read on to find out the best legal tips for small businesses and how they could help.

Choose the Right Business Structure

First, you need to make sure that you choose the right business structure and one which will protect your personal assets at risk if you encounter a legal issue. You will be able to protect your personal assets by forming a limited liability partnership or limited company, so it is important to spend some time researching what would be best for you.

Create Contracts for All Agreements

Many business owners make the mistake of not creating contracts for agreements, but this could prove to be costly down the line. This is why contracts need to be drawn up for every single agreement, which also helps to clarify what is expected and should stop any misunderstandings from occurring.

Create Terms and Conditions

Similarly, you need to create Ts&Cs in order to protect the business and to outline what is expected when a consumer enters an agreement with your business. Without this, you are putting yourself at risk of uncertainty and misunderstandings, so you need to establish the rules in order to protect yourself.

Protect Your Intellectual Property

You do not want other companies benefiting from your intelligence and creativity, which is why you need to use trademarks, patents, and copyrights to protect your intellectual property. Additionally, when you create a new idea, product, service, or anything else, then you should always do a patent and trademark search to avoid stealing intellectual property.

Find Reliable Lawyers

It is also important to do your research, find the best corporate lawyers in your area, and consider different potential issues. As an example, you will want to find an expert eminent domain attorney in the event of authorized companies trying to take your private property for public use, and they will be able to fight on your behalf to stop this from happening or secure the best possible amount.

Stay Current With Changing Laws and Regulations

Finally, you need to make sure that you keep up to date with changing laws and regulations as these can change and often. HR will help a business stay compliant and make necessary changes relating to employment law, which will stop you from encountering any issues.

Hopefully, these legal tips will be of use and help you to protect your business. In particular, small businesses need to be wary of the legal issues that can arise from running a business and make sure that they have the best protection in place.

3 of the Most Common Legal Issues Still Suffered by Businesses

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Legal Issues|3 of the Most Common Legal Issues Still Suffered by BusinessesRunning a business with employees, especially one with premises automatically grants you a duty of care to your staff. As an employer, you expect a certain level of professionalism from all of your staff members as much as they expect it from you and for their safety to be in your best interests.

But even the best employers and businesses run into legal issues from time to time, whether right or wrong, and even in 2021 businesses still face some of the same legal issues that have been around for a long time:

  • IP Theft
  • Health and Safety Issues
  • Discrimination or Harassment

Many businesses, especially successful ones, are often accused of stealing something from another entity such as a logo, a product idea, or even a name while employees claiming accidents at work have never been higher. Discrimination and harassment is still an issue for employers and great care should be taken to protect everyone involved.

Know Your Property

A developed piece of material work such as a patent, trademark, copyrighted work, or even a trade secret such as a manufacturing process (think Coca Cola) is known as intellectual property. That is a property that isn’t grounded in the physical world such as a car or a house but one that has been creatively generated.

Claims concerning IP happen all the time and many bigger cases include those against songwriters, patent holders, and manufacturers. Pop superstar Madonna famously lost a case against a Belgian songwriter over her hit song ‘Frozen’ while Nintendo narrowly won a case over a patent concerning how a user input device (controller) handles shared data streams.

You can initially protect your IP by identifying it, securing it, and labeling it as such with the use of official company logos, which are themselves IP. But the range of issues concerning IP is very broad and is governed by a complex set of rules so the best advice would be to contact a business law attorney should you find yourself worried about infringement or if a claim has been made against you.

Duty of Care

Business establishments of all kinds are deemed reasonably responsible for the wellbeing of everyone directly associated with them. You may have heard of people claiming accidents at work because of negligent safety measures and receiving large payouts. This happens all the time and for the most part, these could have been avoided.

Protection from claims of this nature is essential to a business as while some may be genuine, there is a culture of falsely claiming injury towards organizations which has led to some businesses becoming overly cautious, such as McDonald’s and their rigorous labeling of hot products. The cost of a successful claim against you could potentially run into hundreds of thousands of dollars, which for most companies would be unsustainable and could lead to loss of jobs, decreased productivity, or closure.

The best thing to secure against these kinds of claims is to actually develop strict health and safety procedures. Ensure all your staff are fitted with any safety gear they need and have been trained to use them, label and mark safety concerned areas of a building, and reasonably discipline staff members who don’t follow safety guidelines. Do all that you can do to adequately profess that any claim against your health and safety standards is due to the claimant and not yourself.

Everyone is Equal

The last few years have seen very high profile cases against celebrities such as Harvey Weinstein but what of claims of discrimination or harassment against companies. Well, it does happen. Recently, Viacom, the parent company of CBS, has had to suspend two executives over claims that they created a hostile work environment for women and people of color.
It boggles the mind to think that this kind of behavior still happens in this day and age, especially from grown and professional men, but the sad fact is that year on year, the US Equal Employment Opportunites Commission (EEOC) hears over 100,000 cases of discrimination in the workplace.

It would be a very sad day indeed for any business owner to hear that staff members are being discriminated against, for any reason, so you should go out of your way to educate all staff about issues of discrimination whether it’s racial, gender, religion or disability related. Proactively enforcing a “Not Safe for Work” campaign can help since everyone is going to have different beliefs and conflicting personalities, but they should be left at home and aren’t welcome in the workplace.

Boost The Efficiency Of Your Business

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If you’re just starting up a business, it’s vital that you know how to run it as efficiently as possible, you can’t afford to waste even a penny on a poor investment. Knowing what you can do to make sure you’re getting the most sales and income while spending the least amount of money without sacrificing customer and employee satisfaction is key to growing efficiently!

Outsourcing

If you’re looking to take on more work so you can grow, you might find yourself struggling with the idea of all the new workload. Not only would you likely have to hire more employees, but you may even need to invest in new or more equipment; which isn’t always the best course of action! You may find that outsourcing your work to another business is the more cost-efficient way to go about things, and it can be almost anything. If you need deliveries handled, there are services that offer that, if you need chemical testing, there are services for that too! You don’t need to handle the work that’s out of your comfort zone, and it can be passed on to someone who’s already equipped and trained to do it!

Customer relations

The better reputation that you manage to build with your customers, the faster you’re going to be able to gain new ones! Your business can grow from word-of-mouth, and giving your customers something to talk about is a great way to encourage that! Being known as a business with great customer service can take you a long way! There are a number of ways you can nurture and encourage this, but mainly you need to focus on customer service for it to be effective. Encourage your customers to leave feedback after they’ve shopped with you, open up a way for people to publicly view reviews of your business, accept and use feedback from customers to grow in the future!

When buying online, a lot of people will use the reviews to determine whether you’re a reliable business or not, so it’s best you do what you can to make sure those reviews aren’t negative or a deterrent for potential customers!

StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article | Boost The Efficiency Of Your BusinessMeetings

If you have a busy workday, the last thing you want is to be constantly interrupted with different problems, it can really slow down your work process. You can deal with this by holding meetings at the start and ends of the day so people can bring up problems there, meaning your work won’t be interrupted during the day. Not only this, but it allows you to make plans for the next day, and it can be handled effectively without getting in the way of anything.

Management

Proper management is essential if you have many people working in the same place, as it can be difficult to get your work done when you have to make sure everyone else is on track too. Always make sure you have enough management to make sure everyone gets their work done properly, without miscommunication.

Overcoming Challenges within your Business

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Business Challenges|Overcoming Challenges within your BusinessRunning your own business can be tough and challenging at the best of times. There are always obstacles and hurdles in your way. How you deal with problems and how you overcome challenges says a lot about your personality and about your leadership style. Tackling problems as soon as they happen and working out solutions is just what good business owners and leaders do. Here’s what to do to make sure you’re overcoming challenges effectively.

Facing problems head-on

Whether you run a bricks and mortar based business or an online-based business, you will have daily challenges and problems to overcome. These could be smaller problems like running out of office stationery, or they could be bigger problems such as sourcing last minute suppliers’ or making sure pallet rack protection is in place for your next delivery to ensure no goods get damaged when in transit. Whatever the problem, how you deal with it and overcome it will determine how successful you are within other areas of your business.

Seeing issues or problems through to completion is what needs to be done. Don’t be afraid to compromise to get the best solution for your business, but at the same time, don’t become a pushover – you will struggle to regain authority and respect.

Delegate and seek assistance

This may be easier said than done, especially if you have run the business from day zero, but remember that as an entrepreneur or small business owner, nobody is expecting you to do everything. To succeed in business, you need to know when to delegate jobs and responsibilities to others. Trying to do too much all the time will lead to burnout, which is no good for you or your business. Never shy away from seeking assistance or help from friends, family, and possibly even freelancers.

Evaluate and learn from your actions

To move forward within your business and to push it to the dizzying heights of success that you deserve, you need to regularly evaluate your business and yourself. Take some time out to focus on what you have achieved since you started out, and ultimately, where you want to finish up. It is important not to be too harsh on yourself but to simply see where and how you could have done things differently in certain situations or scenarios. It is beneficial to utilise business consultants when evaluating where you are wanting to take your business next and deciding which direction to go in.

Consultants have a wealth of experience and can provide you with an in-depth growth and development plan which you can implement within your business and start working on as soon as possible.

There will always be challenges to overcome within a business, this is part of the fun which you thrive on and live for. Make use of networking both online and offline to meet like-minded business owners and entrepreneurs. When you are facing difficulties or facing other small business challenges, the people you met through networking will be your business support network, which you can rely on to help you continue picking things up and moving forwards.