Owning a franchise is an easy and affordable way of starting a new business. As a franchise owner, a lot of the heavy lifting involved in starting a business is already done for you. Franchisees can take on an already established brand and don’t have to worry about marketing themselves, as this is done by the franchise centrally.
All the franchisee needs to worry about is dealing with the day to day running of the business, which includes the accounting. Many aspects of a franchise business will be managed centrally. In particular, the costs of marketing and developing new products don’t fall on the shoulders of individual franchisees.
Franchise accounting is similar to accounting for any other type of business, although there are a few extra steps. Let’s take a look at exactly what a franchise is and how they are run and managed.
How do Franchises Work?
A franchise location is owned by an individual, the franchisee. However, the franchise as a whole is owned by a larger corporation. For example, each individual McDonalds store is owned and operated by an individual franchisee. However, McDonald’s decides what’s on the menu, how the store functions, etc. They also handle all of the marketing and other costs of developing and growing the business.
franchising makes owning and operating a business accessible to people who would otherwise be unable to. Returning to the example of McDonald’s, a franchisee may be able to open a McDonald’s franchise as the first business that they run themselves. It’s hard to envisage most people launching a startup that has the kind of name recognition that McDonald’s does, or the existing infrastructure.
With the franchising model, new locations can be opened easily and quickly. From the perspective of the larger franchise business, this makes expanding a much simpler proposition. New franchisees will bear many of the responsibilities, and some of the costs, of opening a new franchise. If the new franchisee fails, the franchising corporation hasn’t lost as much in terms of time and money as it would if it had invested fully in a new physical location.
Franchisees, on the other hand, get to open a new business with an already established customer base, marketing strategy, etc. The franchisee will have to pay the franchising business according to their contract. This can either be in the form of a percentage of the profits, or it might be a flat rate.
Role of the Franchisor
The franchisor is the larger corporation that ultimately owns all the franchises. They manage the brand and business as a whole, deciding how to market the business and how to develop the available product ranges. The franchisor also provides assistance to their franchisees as and when it is needed.
Fees and Franchise Accounting
A franchisee owns the franchise location that they run, even though the business they operate is under license from the franchisor. They are required to follow all the guidelines set out by the franchisor. If they don’t, the license can be revoked and the franchisee can end up with a location but no business to occupy it. The franchisee will be required to pay fees to the franchisor; that’s how the franchising business makes their money.
The fees a franchisee pays are used to cover a number of costs. For example, these fees allow the franchisee to use the franchisor’s trademarks, brands, products, and services. Franchisors are legally required to set out all the fees involved in being a franchisee upfront and they cannot spring unexpected charges on the franchisee at a later date.
There will be an initial fee to pay the franchisor, which serves as a kind of entry charge. There will also be some form of ongoing fee, usually a royalty fee. Proper franchise accounting requires you to be familiar with all the expected fees and charges; you won’t be able to maintain accurate accounts unless you know what deductions and fees to factor in.
Initial Fees
The initial fee is the entry fee that grants the franchisee the right to use the franchisor’s trademarks, including brand, products, services, logos, etc. And, of course, the most important thing your initial fees will pay for is the right to use the franchisor’s name. Finally, your initial fee will cover some of the costs associated with opening a new business.
For example, the franchisor will cover the costs of training staff to use their point of sale systems, as well as any other in-house sales software. Initial costs are paid as a lump sum to the franchisor. Before you pay any initial fees, it is important that you establish exactly how much business capital you will need.
Amortizing Initial Fees
When filling out a business tax return, a franchisee can deduct their initial fee from their total profits; this is known as amortizing. Amortizing is similar in nature to depreciation, except that it deals with tangible rather than abstract assets. By amortizing a fee, its cost can be spread out over several years. This makes it possible for franchisees who can’t afford to pay a lump sum to instead pay the fee gradually over the useful lifetime of tangible assets, such as trademarks.
You can amortize the fee over a relatively long period of time, paying off fractions of it annually. For example, if you amortize your initial fee over a period of 20 years, you divide the total fee by 20 to work out how much of it you will pay per annum.
Royalty Fees
Royalty fees are the main way that the franchisor makes their money. Royalty fees are a little bit like a tax that the franchisee pays on every sale. This is the cut of the profits that the franchisor gets in exchange for essentially providing the core business. In some cases, royalty fees might be specified at a flat rate. However, the majority of the time they will be paid as a percentage of sales.
Marketing Fees
Some franchisors will further charge franchisees to cover the costs of marketing. Even though individual franchisees aren’t involved in the centralized marketing efforts, they still benefit from the effects of new marketing campaigns, so it does make sense that the franchisor would want to recover some of their investment.
Both franchisors and franchisees need to understand the intricacies of franchise accounting if the arrangement is to work. A mistake in a franchisee’s bookkeeping can end up in the franchisor being paid incorrectly and can lead to a distorted image of how healthy individual franchises are. For this reason, many franchisors are now centralizing their accounting and utilizing cloud-based accounting software. This allows individual franchisees to access and update their business accounts on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
Conclusion
Franchise accounting needs sophisticated accounting software like QuickBooks Enterprise hosting which can be accessed on Citrix Xendesktop VDI that enables accountants to work remotely for franchise-based models to work from anywhere anytime.
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Do you want to get started in the hospitality services or cafeteria food services? Whether you’re operating out of a catering van or you’re running a restaurant, it’s a dream a lot of people can afford to do nowadays; years of family recipes being passed down through the generations and you’ve got yourself a time honored tradition that people love to indulge in. If you think it’s time to make money off Grandma’s mashed potatoes, here’s a couple of tips on getting started in the food business.
Make Sure You Love to Cook
Running a restaurant means you need to know your craft and know it well. If you don’t like the ins and outs of cutting up a chicken or frying off your vegetables without getting them brown, and you know inside you’re not willing to learn, this maybe isn’t for you. Of course you can bring in talented chefs and let them go to town with their skills, but if it’s a family run business you need to be personally invested.
Similarly, if you’re not invested in what you do, it’s very unlikely you’re going to be able to grow in the potential you should. You’re less likely to be on the lookout for opportunities, and you can more easily get bogged down.
Find a Good Place to Start
Location is everything in the food business, especially when you’re running a themed restaurant. You need to be able to attract people to your business and have free advertising from your shop front. Thankfully people like to eat, so this usually works in your favor.
Individual growth is also important for an ever growing market sector. Shop around for somewhere affordable that you know you can do something with. You may need to expand a seating or kitchen area at the end of the day, when you’ve drawn in enough customers and got yourself a good following. Plan for this from the beginning and you won’t be able to disappoint yourself or your clientele.
Know Where to Find the Parts
If anything goes wrong in your kitchen, you’re going to want to know what you can do to quickly replace any faults. The cooking area is your livelihood, so if that goes down, so does business! Don’t let yourself panic by doing a little preparation before you get yourself up and running; planning ahead is always the best way forward.
Let’s run through a quick example: for your cooking vats, or any part of your system that takes away waste oil and water, your waste storage systems are a very important part of your working life. Look into something like Simplex Pipeline Strainers when these stop doing their jobs and you notice a difference in the cooking ability of your oil.
Whilst food is serious, restaurants are lovely businesses to start and run, as you’re making good food for a mostly appreciative customer base. It just makes it all the sweeter if you can specialise on your local culture and climate as well.
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When it comes to your business, you push it as hard as possible to do well and make a profit. You’re working early mornings and late nights and the days seem to run into each other without stopping. While this is wonderful, and you can see the dollar signs rolling as the profits come in, the better you are the more in demand you are – and this means more work to keep up with.
Outsourcing pieces of your business to others to lighten the load from you isn’t a bad idea to combat that extra workload. Taking the right approach to outsourcing your marketing team or your invoicing to an accounting service is important. You need to be able to trust the people you’re handing a piece of your business to, and so it’s important that you know the advantages of outsourcing and why you should do it.
Advantages of Outsourcing
Outsourcing is going to help you to combat the growth of your business. You want to be able to manage and control your business growth so that it goes in the way you hope it goes. You want to ensure that the time is right for your outsourcing, and if you know that it’s going to lower your costs and regain your focus properly, you’re going to do very well. On top of this, you could use outsourcing to develop your talent. A knowledgeable workforce is going to boost your bottom line and this will lead to even further growth. Now that you know the advantages of outsourcing with your business, let’s look at a few ways you could do it!
Know what to outsource. Before you do anything, you need to know what you should outsource. Look at your business functions and choose where you are weakest. If your social media marketing could use a boost, you know that choosing the right agency is the way to go. The same can be said for your IT, accounting and even your administrative tasks. You can check with your employees and your profit bottom line to know whether you need to outsource a function in your business.
Time it right. Sometimes, you can jump the gun and outsource too soon. You need to look at your long and short term needs and if you need help in the short term to help the long-term goals of yours, you’re going to do well. Once you have done this, communicate with your employees so that you can time this exactly right.
Cut ties gracefully. If you start outsourcing with an external company, you are more than within your right to cancel any agreements you have with them. No one enjoys firing a company, but you have to find the right provider to work with.
Communicate with your team. If you plan to outsource at all, you should consider talking to your team first. They will be able to tell you what they need and you can then decide whether to go ahead or to go another way. Communication is key and this will help you to get what you need for your business.
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Marketing is something of an art form, and its success often depends on the personnel involved and the toolkit that’s used. Your company might spend millions on a marketing campaign that doesn’t nearly reach your expected ROI. On the other hand a little honesty and savvy marketing know-how can accelerate your campaign beyond your wildest dreams. You will have to hire the best people for the job but you can narrow the chances of success by knowing the right tools to use as well. In this article we take a look at some of the marketing tools you need in 2021.
Buffer or Hootsuite
Both Buffer and Hootsuite give you more control and better data when managing your social media accounts. Your website host will probably allow you to schedule posts to social media but there are limitations and the data you receive back may not be sufficient. That’s why a third party software option like Buffer or Hootsuite is effective.
Buffer and Hootsuite allow you to schedule posts to multiple social media accounts at once and give you valuable response data, such as clicks, retweets, likes, favorites, mentions, and potential views. While the free version is limited to one social media account and 10 posts at any given time, a subscription can link you up with every major social media channel.
Social media was once a friendly platform for connecting with people around the world, it’s now a commercial enterprise integral to the success of brands and businesses. Around 3.8 billion people globally use social media everyday which means your business needs to engage with the medium effectively. Buffer and Hootsuite can help you make those important strategic decisions.
Wishpond
Is your website landing page looking dated or not achieving the results you expect? This might be the case with other aspects of your website as well, such as your mailing list or CRM system. Whatever the issue Wishpond can step in and help you out. It’s an affordable digital marketing suite with more than a dozen tools on offer that make your website sing like it should.
The aim of Wishpond is to help you grow your business online by making your website modern, functional, and attractive. Wishpond’s multiplicity of tools allows you to build and publish responsive web pages quickly and across all devices – you can also add various forms to the pages that popup when users visit a landing page. Wishpond will also integrate well with social media and allow you to set up promotions and contests.
If you want an all-in-one software solution that takes your online presence to the next level then consider Wishpond. It’s not only affordable but it provides you with essential software tools like departing employee computer forensics investigations, in a user-friendly format. These tools can be found in other places too but individually, and they are often more expensive.
Instagram
Are you a small business looking to gain a foothold in social media this year? If so then Instagram is your friend. Unlike the big hitters in social media, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit, Instagram has remained untouched by big business advertising. Major social media sites might be awash with established brands but Instagram manages to make space for smaller voices.
How is this possible? The answer lays in the way Instagram manages its advertising. It’s difficult for smaller businesses to gain traction on social media sites dominated by the loudest voices in the industry, and even if they do ‘get-in’ it’s next to impossible to maintain the progress. However, Instagram has an affiliate program that seems to cater more to these smaller voices.
There is nothing stopping corporate giants joining the affiliate network and proving products but for some reason they don’t gain the same traction or attention. Instead, small fashion lines, makeup brands, and esoteric products are more appealing to an Instagram audience. The Instagram audience is much more favorable to the personal connection with products rather than a slick corporate appeal.
Facebook Post Boost
Like Instagram, Facebook Post Boost is a way for smaller brands and companies to slip through the cracks of corporate advertising and gain effective traction at a lower cost. In the coming year the dominant trend for corporate social media advertising is to run high cost campaigns with long run times, this opens up possibilities.
Facebook Post Boost has been introduced to combat the decline in organic reach for businesses on the site. In recent years Facebook has moved more towards posts from friends and family. The result of this is more competition with bigger brands for reaching your target audience. With Facebook Post boost you have an alternative to big budget advertising that still reaches the people who matter.
Facebook Post Boost allows you to set up parameters for a promotion post to reach your audience. You can select a range of demographics along with your ad duration and budget. These ads are not as straightforward as scheduling a campaign with a long run time but they are just as effective at reaching your audience and helping smaller businesses compete with the big guns.
Twitter Explore
In recent times Twitter has become less favorable to marketers and many are moving away from it, opting for Facebook and Instagram instead. The platform is generally perceived as good for marketing if you have a few major influences, but is otherwise difficult to reach your target audience effectively. As more small and medium sized businesses seek conversions elsewhere it might be time to move against the tide.
The reason for this trend is fairly obvious. While it is not impossible to gain new followers on Twitter and benefits from retweets, the platform doesn’t lend itself well to conversions – getting people off Twitter and onto your website is not as slick as other platforms. Still, the site has much to offer, especially if more of your competition is making the shift.
In 2021 it’s more than worth the effort to investigate your potential reach on Twitter. With less competition in your industry and some concerted effort promoting your brand with retweets, lists, and relevant connections, you might see some Twitter ROIs you have for some time relinquished.
People Per Hour
People Per Hour is an excellent freelancer website that connects talented freelancers with businesses and brands. There is so much on offer through this website that it would be silly to ignore the possibilities in 2021. For instance, you could hire influencers to visit your YouTube channel to build subscribers or have product reviews written.
Building a brand online is not always easy or straightforward. There are a concert of things to consider, everything from how to post content, where to post content, and what content to include. You might want written material or something more sophisticated like graphic or photographs. Whatever it is you ‘need’ to take your business forward online PPH has the freelancers to help.
Using freelancers might not be your first solution. It’s tempting to learn the tricks yourself and save the investment for other areas of the business. But realistically, a freelancer who spends all their time doing what you need done will turn around an effective product for you far more quickly. This saves you time and most likely money as well.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console might not be the most sophisticated analytics software on the market, but it is free and extremely useful – especially for small and medium sized businesses that need to know the vital stats for website traffic. The software does have its flaws – it is not quite as accurate as similar products – but it’s extremely user-friendly.
With Google Search Console you can analyse, maintain and improve your website’s position in SERPs, all from the convenience of a free easy to use software system. The Google Search Console allows you to confirm that Google can locate and crawl your website, fix any indexing problems you may have, analyse Google search traffic for your website, and much more.
There are some drawbacks to the Google Search Console. It works on a verified setting which means that only some activity is recorded. If someone searches for your website with a VPN or third party app it may not register. Still, it’s a small price to pay for a range of free features to help your business succeed.
Sprout Social
If you’ve already done the groundwork with your social media presence and need something to take your brand to the next level, Sprout Social is the tool to use in 2021. Sprout Social collects information from all your social media channels and helps you manage and engage with it efficiently – integrate your social media enterprise and forget about the hassle of sporadic emails.
When you’re running a social media enterprise you need to have updated responses to new messages and schedule content across your channels. Without a social media manager like Sprout Social you will be all fingers and thumbs. Needless to say this software is for the more advanced social media users. In order to collect data Sprout Social will need access to several channels and many followers.
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The more productive your employees, the better for your business. But it can be hard to get employees to actually be productive. There are always a few gems who will go above and beyond, who complete their work early and wonderfully… but those are rare. Most employees won’t do more than what’s expected of them, because what’s the point? However, unproductive employees could do severe damage to your business’s reputation, since you may be behind on certain orders or have unsatisfied clients. While you are the boss and it’s your job to delegate, you need to know that your employees will do their work even if they aren’t being supervised 24/7. Keep reading to find out what you can do to improve employee productivity.
Training
Training will equip your employees with a lot of skills that can help them be more productive. You can even send them for training on how to maintain motivation, since productivity can’t exist without motivation. They may even feel grateful for the opportunity to have received the training and decide to show their appreciation by being extra productive. Either way, training will definitely improve productivity in the workplace. Training during Covid-19 is still possible in most places, as long as it complies with regulations and you take the necessary safety precautions.
Give them proper technology
While a lack of productivity often comes directly from the employees themselves, it can also be possible that working with old or outdated technology is slowing down their work. It can be incredibly frustrating to work with equipment and have it be a constant struggle, and if the technology they’re given is slow, their productivity will be negatively affected, no matter how motivated they are. You can’t expect modern results and productivity without giving them modern equipment. You might not be able to afford new technology right now, but see if there are any updates that you can run. If not, you need to accept the fact that your employees will never reach their full potential for productivity.
Incentives
If all else fails, bribe them. Okay, to be fair, incentives aren’t exactly bribery; more like rewards for good behavior. If you’re struggling to get your employees motivated and productive, your best bet is going to be to offer them incentives. Very few employees will go out of their way to be productive if there’s nothing in it for them. That being said, they’re more than likely to do it for money. Incentives are simple: the better their work, the more money they’ll get. There are various ways of designing employee incentive programs, so you should easily find a program that works for you as well as your employees.
Monitor
While you may not be able to watch your employees every second of their working day, there are ways of lighting a fire under them. If you pop into their office every now and then at random, they’ll never know when to expect you, and therefore always be on their best behavior. There are also ways of managing remote workers. There are apps that can tell you what time they logged on and off their computer, so that you can monitor how much time they’re putting in and ensure that they are working as many hours as they should.
Communicate
Miscommunications or misunderstandings can lead to work being done in the incorrect way. Of course, this means that that work will need to be redone and all the time spent on it was wasted. It’s your responsibility to communicate any instructions and deadlines very clearly to your employees, and it’s their responsibility to ask you for clarification if thy don’t understand you clearly. Being able to communicate effectively will help make your entire business run smoother. Employees are more likely to be productive if they know exactly what they need to do.
Remote work
If you have nay employees who you know are responsible enough to work from home, you should consider letting them. This will allow you to spend more time focusing on less-productive employees and you may even be able to pinpoint what is causing them to be unproductive, and work form there to fix it. Some employees may even be more productive while working from home, without the distractions of their coworkers. As mentioned, there are still ways to monitor remote workers, so that doesn’t need to be a worry. If there are less people in the office, the distractions will be less and your employees may be able to concentrate on their work. You may even like it so much that you decide to run your entire business with remote workers.
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The Basics of Franchise Accounting
/in Managing Your Finances/by StrategyDrivenAll the franchisee needs to worry about is dealing with the day to day running of the business, which includes the accounting. Many aspects of a franchise business will be managed centrally. In particular, the costs of marketing and developing new products don’t fall on the shoulders of individual franchisees.
Franchise accounting is similar to accounting for any other type of business, although there are a few extra steps. Let’s take a look at exactly what a franchise is and how they are run and managed.
How do Franchises Work?
A franchise location is owned by an individual, the franchisee. However, the franchise as a whole is owned by a larger corporation. For example, each individual McDonalds store is owned and operated by an individual franchisee. However, McDonald’s decides what’s on the menu, how the store functions, etc. They also handle all of the marketing and other costs of developing and growing the business.
franchising makes owning and operating a business accessible to people who would otherwise be unable to. Returning to the example of McDonald’s, a franchisee may be able to open a McDonald’s franchise as the first business that they run themselves. It’s hard to envisage most people launching a startup that has the kind of name recognition that McDonald’s does, or the existing infrastructure.
With the franchising model, new locations can be opened easily and quickly. From the perspective of the larger franchise business, this makes expanding a much simpler proposition. New franchisees will bear many of the responsibilities, and some of the costs, of opening a new franchise. If the new franchisee fails, the franchising corporation hasn’t lost as much in terms of time and money as it would if it had invested fully in a new physical location.
Franchisees, on the other hand, get to open a new business with an already established customer base, marketing strategy, etc. The franchisee will have to pay the franchising business according to their contract. This can either be in the form of a percentage of the profits, or it might be a flat rate.
Role of the Franchisor
The franchisor is the larger corporation that ultimately owns all the franchises. They manage the brand and business as a whole, deciding how to market the business and how to develop the available product ranges. The franchisor also provides assistance to their franchisees as and when it is needed.
Fees and Franchise Accounting
A franchisee owns the franchise location that they run, even though the business they operate is under license from the franchisor. They are required to follow all the guidelines set out by the franchisor. If they don’t, the license can be revoked and the franchisee can end up with a location but no business to occupy it. The franchisee will be required to pay fees to the franchisor; that’s how the franchising business makes their money.
The fees a franchisee pays are used to cover a number of costs. For example, these fees allow the franchisee to use the franchisor’s trademarks, brands, products, and services. Franchisors are legally required to set out all the fees involved in being a franchisee upfront and they cannot spring unexpected charges on the franchisee at a later date.
There will be an initial fee to pay the franchisor, which serves as a kind of entry charge. There will also be some form of ongoing fee, usually a royalty fee. Proper franchise accounting requires you to be familiar with all the expected fees and charges; you won’t be able to maintain accurate accounts unless you know what deductions and fees to factor in.
Initial Fees
The initial fee is the entry fee that grants the franchisee the right to use the franchisor’s trademarks, including brand, products, services, logos, etc. And, of course, the most important thing your initial fees will pay for is the right to use the franchisor’s name. Finally, your initial fee will cover some of the costs associated with opening a new business.
For example, the franchisor will cover the costs of training staff to use their point of sale systems, as well as any other in-house sales software. Initial costs are paid as a lump sum to the franchisor. Before you pay any initial fees, it is important that you establish exactly how much business capital you will need.
Amortizing Initial Fees
When filling out a business tax return, a franchisee can deduct their initial fee from their total profits; this is known as amortizing. Amortizing is similar in nature to depreciation, except that it deals with tangible rather than abstract assets. By amortizing a fee, its cost can be spread out over several years. This makes it possible for franchisees who can’t afford to pay a lump sum to instead pay the fee gradually over the useful lifetime of tangible assets, such as trademarks.
You can amortize the fee over a relatively long period of time, paying off fractions of it annually. For example, if you amortize your initial fee over a period of 20 years, you divide the total fee by 20 to work out how much of it you will pay per annum.
Royalty Fees
Royalty fees are the main way that the franchisor makes their money. Royalty fees are a little bit like a tax that the franchisee pays on every sale. This is the cut of the profits that the franchisor gets in exchange for essentially providing the core business. In some cases, royalty fees might be specified at a flat rate. However, the majority of the time they will be paid as a percentage of sales.
Marketing Fees
Some franchisors will further charge franchisees to cover the costs of marketing. Even though individual franchisees aren’t involved in the centralized marketing efforts, they still benefit from the effects of new marketing campaigns, so it does make sense that the franchisor would want to recover some of their investment.
Both franchisors and franchisees need to understand the intricacies of franchise accounting if the arrangement is to work. A mistake in a franchisee’s bookkeeping can end up in the franchisor being paid incorrectly and can lead to a distorted image of how healthy individual franchises are. For this reason, many franchisors are now centralizing their accounting and utilizing cloud-based accounting software. This allows individual franchisees to access and update their business accounts on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
Conclusion
Franchise accounting needs sophisticated accounting software like QuickBooks Enterprise hosting which can be accessed on Citrix Xendesktop VDI that enables accountants to work remotely for franchise-based models to work from anywhere anytime.
Starting And Running Your Own Restaurant
/in Starting Your Business/by StrategyDrivenDo you want to get started in the hospitality services or cafeteria food services? Whether you’re operating out of a catering van or you’re running a restaurant, it’s a dream a lot of people can afford to do nowadays; years of family recipes being passed down through the generations and you’ve got yourself a time honored tradition that people love to indulge in. If you think it’s time to make money off Grandma’s mashed potatoes, here’s a couple of tips on getting started in the food business.
Make Sure You Love to Cook
Running a restaurant means you need to know your craft and know it well. If you don’t like the ins and outs of cutting up a chicken or frying off your vegetables without getting them brown, and you know inside you’re not willing to learn, this maybe isn’t for you. Of course you can bring in talented chefs and let them go to town with their skills, but if it’s a family run business you need to be personally invested.
Similarly, if you’re not invested in what you do, it’s very unlikely you’re going to be able to grow in the potential you should. You’re less likely to be on the lookout for opportunities, and you can more easily get bogged down.
Find a Good Place to Start
Location is everything in the food business, especially when you’re running a themed restaurant. You need to be able to attract people to your business and have free advertising from your shop front. Thankfully people like to eat, so this usually works in your favor.
Individual growth is also important for an ever growing market sector. Shop around for somewhere affordable that you know you can do something with. You may need to expand a seating or kitchen area at the end of the day, when you’ve drawn in enough customers and got yourself a good following. Plan for this from the beginning and you won’t be able to disappoint yourself or your clientele.
Know Where to Find the Parts
If anything goes wrong in your kitchen, you’re going to want to know what you can do to quickly replace any faults. The cooking area is your livelihood, so if that goes down, so does business! Don’t let yourself panic by doing a little preparation before you get yourself up and running; planning ahead is always the best way forward.
Let’s run through a quick example: for your cooking vats, or any part of your system that takes away waste oil and water, your waste storage systems are a very important part of your working life. Look into something like Simplex Pipeline Strainers when these stop doing their jobs and you notice a difference in the cooking ability of your oil.
Whilst food is serious, restaurants are lovely businesses to start and run, as you’re making good food for a mostly appreciative customer base. It just makes it all the sweeter if you can specialise on your local culture and climate as well.
Want To Outsource? Here’s How You Could Do It!
/in Managing Your Business/by StrategyDrivenWhen it comes to your business, you push it as hard as possible to do well and make a profit. You’re working early mornings and late nights and the days seem to run into each other without stopping. While this is wonderful, and you can see the dollar signs rolling as the profits come in, the better you are the more in demand you are – and this means more work to keep up with.
Outsourcing pieces of your business to others to lighten the load from you isn’t a bad idea to combat that extra workload. Taking the right approach to outsourcing your marketing team or your invoicing to an accounting service is important. You need to be able to trust the people you’re handing a piece of your business to, and so it’s important that you know the advantages of outsourcing and why you should do it.
Advantages of Outsourcing
Outsourcing is going to help you to combat the growth of your business. You want to be able to manage and control your business growth so that it goes in the way you hope it goes. You want to ensure that the time is right for your outsourcing, and if you know that it’s going to lower your costs and regain your focus properly, you’re going to do very well. On top of this, you could use outsourcing to develop your talent. A knowledgeable workforce is going to boost your bottom line and this will lead to even further growth. Now that you know the advantages of outsourcing with your business, let’s look at a few ways you could do it!
The Marketing Tools You Need to Succeed in 2021
/in Online Marketing and Website Development/by StrategyDrivenMarketing is something of an art form, and its success often depends on the personnel involved and the toolkit that’s used. Your company might spend millions on a marketing campaign that doesn’t nearly reach your expected ROI. On the other hand a little honesty and savvy marketing know-how can accelerate your campaign beyond your wildest dreams. You will have to hire the best people for the job but you can narrow the chances of success by knowing the right tools to use as well. In this article we take a look at some of the marketing tools you need in 2021.
Buffer or Hootsuite
Both Buffer and Hootsuite give you more control and better data when managing your social media accounts. Your website host will probably allow you to schedule posts to social media but there are limitations and the data you receive back may not be sufficient. That’s why a third party software option like Buffer or Hootsuite is effective.
Buffer and Hootsuite allow you to schedule posts to multiple social media accounts at once and give you valuable response data, such as clicks, retweets, likes, favorites, mentions, and potential views. While the free version is limited to one social media account and 10 posts at any given time, a subscription can link you up with every major social media channel.
Social media was once a friendly platform for connecting with people around the world, it’s now a commercial enterprise integral to the success of brands and businesses. Around 3.8 billion people globally use social media everyday which means your business needs to engage with the medium effectively. Buffer and Hootsuite can help you make those important strategic decisions.
Wishpond
Is your website landing page looking dated or not achieving the results you expect? This might be the case with other aspects of your website as well, such as your mailing list or CRM system. Whatever the issue Wishpond can step in and help you out. It’s an affordable digital marketing suite with more than a dozen tools on offer that make your website sing like it should.
The aim of Wishpond is to help you grow your business online by making your website modern, functional, and attractive. Wishpond’s multiplicity of tools allows you to build and publish responsive web pages quickly and across all devices – you can also add various forms to the pages that popup when users visit a landing page. Wishpond will also integrate well with social media and allow you to set up promotions and contests.
If you want an all-in-one software solution that takes your online presence to the next level then consider Wishpond. It’s not only affordable but it provides you with essential software tools like departing employee computer forensics investigations, in a user-friendly format. These tools can be found in other places too but individually, and they are often more expensive.
Instagram
Are you a small business looking to gain a foothold in social media this year? If so then Instagram is your friend. Unlike the big hitters in social media, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit, Instagram has remained untouched by big business advertising. Major social media sites might be awash with established brands but Instagram manages to make space for smaller voices.
How is this possible? The answer lays in the way Instagram manages its advertising. It’s difficult for smaller businesses to gain traction on social media sites dominated by the loudest voices in the industry, and even if they do ‘get-in’ it’s next to impossible to maintain the progress. However, Instagram has an affiliate program that seems to cater more to these smaller voices.
There is nothing stopping corporate giants joining the affiliate network and proving products but for some reason they don’t gain the same traction or attention. Instead, small fashion lines, makeup brands, and esoteric products are more appealing to an Instagram audience. The Instagram audience is much more favorable to the personal connection with products rather than a slick corporate appeal.
Facebook Post Boost
Like Instagram, Facebook Post Boost is a way for smaller brands and companies to slip through the cracks of corporate advertising and gain effective traction at a lower cost. In the coming year the dominant trend for corporate social media advertising is to run high cost campaigns with long run times, this opens up possibilities.
Facebook Post Boost has been introduced to combat the decline in organic reach for businesses on the site. In recent years Facebook has moved more towards posts from friends and family. The result of this is more competition with bigger brands for reaching your target audience. With Facebook Post boost you have an alternative to big budget advertising that still reaches the people who matter.
Facebook Post Boost allows you to set up parameters for a promotion post to reach your audience. You can select a range of demographics along with your ad duration and budget. These ads are not as straightforward as scheduling a campaign with a long run time but they are just as effective at reaching your audience and helping smaller businesses compete with the big guns.
Twitter Explore
In recent times Twitter has become less favorable to marketers and many are moving away from it, opting for Facebook and Instagram instead. The platform is generally perceived as good for marketing if you have a few major influences, but is otherwise difficult to reach your target audience effectively. As more small and medium sized businesses seek conversions elsewhere it might be time to move against the tide.
The reason for this trend is fairly obvious. While it is not impossible to gain new followers on Twitter and benefits from retweets, the platform doesn’t lend itself well to conversions – getting people off Twitter and onto your website is not as slick as other platforms. Still, the site has much to offer, especially if more of your competition is making the shift.
In 2021 it’s more than worth the effort to investigate your potential reach on Twitter. With less competition in your industry and some concerted effort promoting your brand with retweets, lists, and relevant connections, you might see some Twitter ROIs you have for some time relinquished.
People Per Hour
People Per Hour is an excellent freelancer website that connects talented freelancers with businesses and brands. There is so much on offer through this website that it would be silly to ignore the possibilities in 2021. For instance, you could hire influencers to visit your YouTube channel to build subscribers or have product reviews written.
Building a brand online is not always easy or straightforward. There are a concert of things to consider, everything from how to post content, where to post content, and what content to include. You might want written material or something more sophisticated like graphic or photographs. Whatever it is you ‘need’ to take your business forward online PPH has the freelancers to help.
Using freelancers might not be your first solution. It’s tempting to learn the tricks yourself and save the investment for other areas of the business. But realistically, a freelancer who spends all their time doing what you need done will turn around an effective product for you far more quickly. This saves you time and most likely money as well.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console might not be the most sophisticated analytics software on the market, but it is free and extremely useful – especially for small and medium sized businesses that need to know the vital stats for website traffic. The software does have its flaws – it is not quite as accurate as similar products – but it’s extremely user-friendly.
With Google Search Console you can analyse, maintain and improve your website’s position in SERPs, all from the convenience of a free easy to use software system. The Google Search Console allows you to confirm that Google can locate and crawl your website, fix any indexing problems you may have, analyse Google search traffic for your website, and much more.
There are some drawbacks to the Google Search Console. It works on a verified setting which means that only some activity is recorded. If someone searches for your website with a VPN or third party app it may not register. Still, it’s a small price to pay for a range of free features to help your business succeed.
Sprout Social
If you’ve already done the groundwork with your social media presence and need something to take your brand to the next level, Sprout Social is the tool to use in 2021. Sprout Social collects information from all your social media channels and helps you manage and engage with it efficiently – integrate your social media enterprise and forget about the hassle of sporadic emails.
When you’re running a social media enterprise you need to have updated responses to new messages and schedule content across your channels. Without a social media manager like Sprout Social you will be all fingers and thumbs. Needless to say this software is for the more advanced social media users. In order to collect data Sprout Social will need access to several channels and many followers.
6 Strategies for Improving Employee Productivity
/in Managing Your People/by StrategyDrivenTraining
Training will equip your employees with a lot of skills that can help them be more productive. You can even send them for training on how to maintain motivation, since productivity can’t exist without motivation. They may even feel grateful for the opportunity to have received the training and decide to show their appreciation by being extra productive. Either way, training will definitely improve productivity in the workplace. Training during Covid-19 is still possible in most places, as long as it complies with regulations and you take the necessary safety precautions.
Give them proper technology
While a lack of productivity often comes directly from the employees themselves, it can also be possible that working with old or outdated technology is slowing down their work. It can be incredibly frustrating to work with equipment and have it be a constant struggle, and if the technology they’re given is slow, their productivity will be negatively affected, no matter how motivated they are. You can’t expect modern results and productivity without giving them modern equipment. You might not be able to afford new technology right now, but see if there are any updates that you can run. If not, you need to accept the fact that your employees will never reach their full potential for productivity.
Incentives
If all else fails, bribe them. Okay, to be fair, incentives aren’t exactly bribery; more like rewards for good behavior. If you’re struggling to get your employees motivated and productive, your best bet is going to be to offer them incentives. Very few employees will go out of their way to be productive if there’s nothing in it for them. That being said, they’re more than likely to do it for money. Incentives are simple: the better their work, the more money they’ll get. There are various ways of designing employee incentive programs, so you should easily find a program that works for you as well as your employees.
Monitor
While you may not be able to watch your employees every second of their working day, there are ways of lighting a fire under them. If you pop into their office every now and then at random, they’ll never know when to expect you, and therefore always be on their best behavior. There are also ways of managing remote workers. There are apps that can tell you what time they logged on and off their computer, so that you can monitor how much time they’re putting in and ensure that they are working as many hours as they should.
Communicate
Miscommunications or misunderstandings can lead to work being done in the incorrect way. Of course, this means that that work will need to be redone and all the time spent on it was wasted. It’s your responsibility to communicate any instructions and deadlines very clearly to your employees, and it’s their responsibility to ask you for clarification if thy don’t understand you clearly. Being able to communicate effectively will help make your entire business run smoother. Employees are more likely to be productive if they know exactly what they need to do.
Remote work
If you have nay employees who you know are responsible enough to work from home, you should consider letting them. This will allow you to spend more time focusing on less-productive employees and you may even be able to pinpoint what is causing them to be unproductive, and work form there to fix it. Some employees may even be more productive while working from home, without the distractions of their coworkers. As mentioned, there are still ways to monitor remote workers, so that doesn’t need to be a worry. If there are less people in the office, the distractions will be less and your employees may be able to concentrate on their work. You may even like it so much that you decide to run your entire business with remote workers.