4 Strategies to Scale Your Business

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Scale your Business| 4 Strategies to Scale Your BusinessEvery business owner should look for opportunities to scale their company and increase profits. Fortunately, there are various ways to streamline business operations, boost productivity in the workplace, and increase sales and revenues. To help you achieve sustainable business growth, here are four strategies to scale your business:

1. Register with global selling platforms

One of the most effective ways to increase profits is by searching for new sales opportunities overseas. Expanding your business globally will allow you to access a far more diverse market and significantly increase your earning potential. This makes global expansion an extremely appealing business venture for many company owners. Despite this, you should be aware that businesses often face additional barriers when expanding overseas. This may include issues such as cultural differences and foreign regulations. Fortunately, these challenges can be overcome with market research and careful planning. Experts at businesstown.com provide the following advice for companies planning on expanding their business internationally – “learn the local language, research international business principles, and attend domestic trade shows to network and build connections.”

2. Relocate to a new office location

Relocating to a new office location can help you scale your business in several ways. Firstly, a more prestigious location may boost your credibility and help you secure new business. A new office premises may also offer additional space and facilities that will enable you to expand your services and grow your company. If you are planning on relocate your business, then be sure to do your research and choose a commercial property that will meet your business needs. Discuss your moving plans with your employees and maintain communication to avoid unnecessary periods of downtime. You should also consider hiring professional office movers to make your relocation as stress-free as possible and minimize any disruption to your business.

3. Automate business operations

Automating business operations and processes is another simple way to increase productivity and revenue within your company. Many different business tasks can now be automated using technology. This includes employee payroll, marketing campaigns, social media posts, and customer service support. Automating these tasks will provide you with valuable time to focus on developing vital areas of your company. All business owners should take advantage of automation software that can be implemented to streamline company operations and support business growth.

4. Hire sales experts

You must focus on increasing sales if you want to successfully scale your business and boost revenue. If you don’t have the funding to hire a team of salespeople, then you should consider hiring commission-based sales reps to help you expand your business and achieve your sales targets. The main benefit of hiring commission-based salespeople is that they have an incentive to work productively and maximize sales. Make sure you take the time to provide your sales team with quality training and support them until they get accustomed to your business and systems. Keep in mind that investing in your sales team will help you achieve far better results in the long run.

Use the above strategies to help you scale your business and increase profits today!

3 Ways to Improve Your Medical Office Management and Workflow

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |medical office management |3 Ways to Improve Your Medical Office Management and WorkflowThe sounds of phones ringing and multiple lights blinking to alert the front desk staff of calls on hold. Stacks of paper, and sticky notes littering desks, visible to patients. A stressed-out staff isn’t delivering the best service that they can. They can be overwhelmed with putting out fires constantly.

Would you come back to a medical office like that?

Earning a patient’s trust for medical care starts with the first experience with you. If a patient knows they have access to a medical care provider that values them, they are more likely to return.

A proper workflow and clear medical office management strategy can improve everyone’s experience.

Integrate Answering Services

One of the first things that medical office management can do is help with the incoming calls. Patients are still trained to call the office. They schedule appointments, inquire about prescriptions, and ask follow up questions to nurses and doctors.

If they can’t get through to speak with someone, patients can’t experience what you have to offer. Integrating a third-party app or website to help assist with calls during busy hours of the day can leave a burden on the staff.
When reception gets overwhelmed with incoming calls, an integrated answering service can help. Finding medical answering services that work for you can manage the influx of calls during busy hours.

An answering service lets patients know that their call is valuable. Medical office management will be able to communicate with patients better. Making sure that every call is answered, and messages relayed, helps everyone.

Scheduling Option Availability

Give patients a 24-hour, 7-day a week option. Allowing patients to schedule, cancel, and move their appointments is a way to ease the onslaught of calls to a front desk.

A scheduling app or website empowers patients. It gives them the peace of mind to have some control over their appointments.

A scheduling program can also record patient behavior and show a pattern behavior. Chronic canceling, last-minute reschedules that result in gaps–are missed opportunities to create income. Knowing which appointments to watch can help to get last-minute gaps filled faster.

Track And Observe Behavior, Hold Meetings

Create accountability in the staff’s practices and behaviors. This will help to streamline the processes of the office. Finding hiccups in the process, or where things start to back up, can help open ways to better work through an issue.

Holding both individual and staff meetings can address widespread and personal practices. This will help everyone assess what is working and what is creating more stress.

Get input from staff to find out what can be tweaked to get patient and staff concerns ironed out. This can help the medical office management address issues head-on.

Regular meetings can help get everyone on the same page, quickly.

Ready To Improve Your Medical Office Management?

Improving medical office management helps improve patients’ experiences in your office as well.
Have you implemented an answering service? What has worked for you in your office?

The Barriers Towards A More Efficient Construction Business

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Construction Business|The Barriers Towards A More Efficient Construction BusinessIn construction, efficiency is everything. The sooner you are able to see a project on the road to completion, but without rushing it to the point that mistakes are made, the better. As such, finding the most efficient ways to get work done effectively should be a major concern for site managers. Yet, there are significant barriers that could prevent you from having your teamwork at their most productive. Here are a few of them.

Poor planning

The logic behind your planning might be sound. However, it’s the easiest stage to make errors, leading to corrections in the following days. For instance, you could under-estimate how much concrete you might need, meaning you have to take time to buy more concrete and readjust. Good construction management software can help improve your planning processes, as well as taking care of invoices, contractor management, incident reporting, and more.

A lack of accountability

When mistakes are made, it’s important to follow them to the source. Simply put, certain colleagues may be in need of training or being moved to other parts of the project if they are not working well. If you’re not tracking key performance indicators to see which colleagues are affecting overall productivity or, indeed, how certain planning and management decisions affect their individual productivity, it can be hard to nail down the precise solutions you need to put in place.

Waste

Naturally, construction projects lead to a lot of waste. Aside from being unsightly when simply dumped on an empty spot of the site, it can also grow to get in the way of the team, forcing them to work around it and even leading to health risks. Click here to see how post-construction cleanup services can help you keep your project site clear. Have policies to make sure waste is effectively dealt with as soon as its created, not just when it becomes a problem.

Theft

Your team will find it hard to do their work when the tools that they are supposed to use in their work are not where they’re supposed to be. Theft is not just an economic concern in construction, it can threaten the timeline of the whole project. As such, click here to read some tips on how to better prevent thefts, as well as how to better handle them when they do occur.

Starting from scratch

Modular construction is a phase that’s on the rise. Even when construction projects are bespoke, there are still prefabricated elements that you could use to speed up the project some without sacrificing quality. The next time you’re planning out a project, take a look at some of the most highly-reviewed suppliers of modular construction equipment and resources. You could shave a significant period of time off the overall project with the right choice.

With the tips above, you can face the biggest problems plaguing the productivity of your team. Ensuring the right investments and organizational tips will help your site work more cleanly, more smoothly, and more quickly.

Preparing Your Small Business For A Disaster

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StrategyDriven Risk Management Article |Disaster Recovery Plan|Preparing Your Small Business For A DisasterSmall business owners wear many hats. They are marketers, IT specialists, inventors, accountants, security experts, website designers, human resources, and much more. There are so many different things to think about every single day, so it is little wonder that occasionally, something gets overlooked. For many businesses, that is a plan for what you would do to get your business back up and running after a disaster strikes. Almost three-quarters of small business owners do not have a written disaster recovery plan. While it is something that you hope you never have to use, having one in place is imperative.

Depending on where your business is based, hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, and fires are just some of the things that pose a risk to your company and your livelihood. Here, we look at some of the things that you can do to mitigate the risk, and if the worst should happen, what you can do to get back on your feet as soon as safely possible.

Before a disaster strikes

Identify responsibilities

Every person within your company has a role to play and responsibilities to handle, but often these can become blurred. It is important to note down in your disaster plan and make sure every person is aware of their responsibilities, and should there be a disaster, they know what they need to do.

Back up documents

The last thing that you want to do when your premises have been damaged or destroyed, or if conditions have made it unsafe to travel is to have to worry about finding out important documents. It is essential that you have at least one copy of all your relevant documents – insurance details, inventories, employee details, etc. Store these somewhere secure, and that is easily accessible.

Install security cameras

These might be damaged in the event of a disaster, but they are still worth having in to see what happened. They may be useful if you have to claim on your insurance as well.

Have secondary power sources available

Sometimes, the whole premises might not be damaged or destroyed, but the electrics blow or a storm knocks out your power. Give yourself a chance of trading, or at least make sure anything that relies on electricity such as fridges, freezers, tanks for animals etc. are kept running and protect your stock by having a secondary source of power available, such as industrial engines and generators.

Inventory

For both stick purposes and insurance purposes, an inventory is essential. Where possible, keep receipts and invoices as you may be asked to hand these to insurance companies as proof of costs, but having an up to date inventory of stock, machinery, and equipment is useful.

When a disaster strikes

Inform your employees

One of the first things that you need to do is inform any employees who might be due to work that day so that they know exactly what to expect. It is important to have a contact list accessible at all times. You also need to have a contingency plan fr paying your staff – it is vital that you try to keep paying staff as normally as possible, as you may find that you do not have a workforce when you are back up and running.

Work remotely

You may need to work remotely for a while, as may your staff. Ensure that you have access to the technology and tools you need – this is where cloud services are a good idea, as you and your team can access any documents required to continue working from anywhere in the world. Ensure that any confidential information is encrypted to prevent any hacks in the transfer of information – the last thing you want to be dealing with at this point is a huge data breach!

Let your customers know

Your customers keep your business going, so it is imperative to let them know what is going on as soon as possible. Pop a note on the door if it is safe or appropriate to do so, informing them of the situation and when you expect to be open again, as well as any contact details. Put a note on your website and a post out on your social media platforms.

Talk to lenders

If you have any loans or finance on anything, talk to your lenders and creditors. In a situation such as this, many will be willing to work with you to give you a payment holiday and catch up when things are back to normal, but if you don’t ask, you won’t get!

You can’t stop a disaster from happening, but the steps you take to prepare for one and how you deal with it afterwards can make the situation a little less stressful and get you back up and running as soon as possible.

Benefits of Help Desk for Your Business

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article | Benefits of Help Desk for Your BusinessMany companies do not realize the benefits of IT help desk software until they are in a reactive mode trying to fix issues with hardware and software that continue to compound.

Imagine that you are an employee who has just spent hours working on a report when suddenly, your computer crashes. All your work is gone, and you are unable to get your computer to operate. In this technological era, most daily work functions depend on an internet connection and electronic appliances. When troubles arise, employees are dependent on the IT experts of the company to get their system back up and running. Implementing IT help desk software and best practices allows end-users to request and receive assistance as quickly as possible. Help desk software automates and streamlines IT support so that your support staff can efficiently handle tickets.

Improve Employee Productivity and Satisfaction

Employees rely on IT support staff to troubleshoot and mitigate technical issues. Employees can quickly open up a ticket using help desk software instead of spending time tracking down IT staff. This reduces employee downtime, and work can resume. Employees tend to become disgruntled when there are problems that result in wasted effort. Knowing that there is a team dedicated to preventing such problems will reduce frustrations. When frustrations are low and satisfaction is high, the company is in a better position.

Automated Support Ticket Management

Some companies use email to report technical issues. However, as the quantity of tickets increases, it becomes harder to manage and prioritize critical issues. Help desks organize, prioritize, and distribute tickets efficiently for the IT help desk staff.

Automated ticket management can improve your IT team’s performance and help them stay on top of all incoming tickets. It will distribute tickets based on location or type of issue. If many issues are originating from users located in the same area, a team member can be assigned all of those tickets. This reduces traveling back and forth from one person to another.

Another way ticket management can maximize efficiency is to delegate all similar tickets to one person. That team member will be able to work faster since they are in charge of one specific task.

IT Documentation and Analytics

A very useful benefit of help desks is the retention of all the different tickets, as well as the implemented solutions. Recurring problems can be dealt with promptly even if it is a new team member who is working on it.

Another benefit is being able to analyze the data and history that the system is saving. Many help desk software can generate reports so you can easily detect trends or bugs in the system. This information offers crucial insight into any holes within your company’s IT infrastructure. For example, if many employees are repeatedly reporting the same problem, then you know that you need to spend resources to correct it.

One Resource for All Answers

Tracking via help desk allows IT staff to manage and maintain resources for the whole company. This will build the company’s knowledge base and free up IT staff to troubleshoot more serious issues.

Once common issues are identified, staff can compile solutions that employees can easily follow on their own. This provides a single tool for the entire company to utilize when they need help, but assistance is unavailable immediately.

Another way to use help desk is to quickly provide office-wide announcements as soon as an issue is known to be happening all across the system. For instance, if a specific application is having problems, the IT team can broadcast to everyone that a solution is in the works. This will reduce confusion, as well as the number of tickets in the help desk system.

Help desks can be valuable to your company and its employees. It provides a way for the support team and employees to communicate with each other and to work together to bring the company onto the path of success.