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Ways to get your business off the ground this year

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Get your business off the ground|Ways to get your business off the ground this yearGetting your business to a point where you feel completely comfortable with its level of success can be quite difficult. Establishing a consistent turnover is a relief for any business owner, and it can be particularly hard to achieve at the start of your business’ life. Getting your company off the ground takes a business plan that is carefully thought through and is flexible enough to change as you hit bumps in the road along the way.

Loans

The reality for many businesses is that some big investments will require a business loan. New machinery or facilities that would aid your company’s growth can be incredibly pricey, and sometimes it is just more effective to pay off the full cost in gradual instalments. Loan brokers such as ONYX Finance, which specialize in financing commercial businesses are always the best institutions as they come armed with plenty of expertise.

Support

You may be surprised by how many local business services there are for companies who are just starting out. Contacting an agency that supports local businesses, particularly start-ups, could give you some much-needed advice. It’s not always easy to contact other like-minded businesses, and local resources and fairs are a great way to network and find information.

Promotion

If your marketing and promotional strategies are lacking, then now is the time to have a bit of a reformation. Unfortunately, when you’re starting out, there’s no room for retiring and shy wallflowers. As well as social media, a website and a recognizable brand, you must promote your company effectively. You can even try quirky ways of promoting yourself, such as having a company car that has your business logo wrapped on it. These somewhat guerrilla methods of promoting your company are sometimes surprisingly effective.

Upselling

If you have ever been out for dinner, and the waiting staff have asked you if you are interested in purchasing a deal that gets you slightly more for your buck, then this is upselling. It’s possible to do this in any business: you’re just making customers aware of what other products you have to offer. This encourages customers to purchase more, which is ultimately what you need to get your business up and running. Be careful not to cross the line into pushy territory, as this could put customers off.

Reward

Incentives for customers to come back and use you again is key for encouraging loyalty. It’s this loyalty that will inspire word of mouth and help to aid the promotion of your company. It’s a competitive world in business, and you will need something appealing to hook in clients. Give them a reason to return to you again: a discount or freebee is the most common route.

If you want to get your business off the ground, then the safest route is to get advice. The best way to know how to succeed is to know what not to do. You can find this out by chatting to other companies and working with local business support services.

Why Companies Hire an External Consultant to Help Them

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |external consultant|Why Companies Hire an External Consultant to Help ThemMany companies hire consultants but how widespread is the practice?  The consulting market across the world is valued at 262 billion dollars.

Are you trying to figure out why companies hire an external consultant? Read on to learn how consulting professionals can help your business.

Expert Advice

Do you ever have problems that seem beyond your experience? Perhaps they’re not unique to your business. They’re outside of your area of expertise.

There will be a consultant that’s solved that problem before and can offer you the benefit of their expert advice. It needn’t be a major project or a long term relationship.

For example, you might have a small technical problem with Office 365. You need someone who can advise on products from Microsoft pay now and get it fixed quickly.

Specialized skills are expensive to develop in-house and you might only need them occasionally. Better to buy the expertise in when you need it and reserve your investment for core activities.

Change of Perspective

An external perspective can be very helpful sometimes. When you and your team are too close to a situation it’s difficult to see the wood from the trees. A fresh external perspective can often help to see things that you don’t see.

One reason why this phenomenon occurs is that being involved in the day to day running of the organization encourages feelings of attachment. The emotional connection tends to limit how you see the possibilities available to you. An external consultant has no such limitations and is open to different perspectives.

Wider Experience

An external consultant that works with several companies in an industry can bring their wider experience to your business. Your problems may have been faced and solved by other companies in your industry. A consultant can share industry best practices with you.

A consultant may also be able to identify ways in which you can gain a competitive advantage. Their industry experience may help them see opportunities for your business that you could never know about unless you had worked for other industry players.

New Life

Have you ever felt like your team needs some inspiration? The same people, facing the same problems in the same old ways. It can be depressingly predictable that they will get the same poor results.

A new team member, even if it’s for a short period of time, can re-energize the team. An external consultant can bring a breath of fresh air and excite everybody. Newly motivated, the team can go on to achieve much more than you expect.

Support the Team

Sometimes your team has an increase in workload and pressure that it can’t cope with. It’s time to draft in some help but recruiting more people is expensive and slow.

New, directly employed team members might be able to fill the gap but what do you do when the crisis is over? You might have to let them go. That can be difficult to do, de-motivating for your existing people and bad for your reputation as an employer.

You don’t always need a long-term increase in the team’s resources. It may be that you just need an extra pair of hands to help support the team through a temporary crisis. Time to draft in an external consultant.

External Consultant’s Connections

External consultants typically work for a series of clients or even a number of clients simultaneously. This means they develop a network of connections. These relationships may be very valuable to you.

The consultant’s connections may give you access to potential new customers. It may provide you with new suppliers that may be better than the ones you have. These connections could be your connections too as part of the consultant’s services.


Change Management

Change is a constant reality but it’s no less of a headache for that. External consultants are very helpful agents of change. They can identify the need for change, manage the change program or support the change.

Because an external consultant has not worked in the organization for some time, they are limited by the natural resistance to change that many people have. The status quo has no merit for them. They are psychologically free to make the change happen and get help others to do so too.

Independent Party

Any organization has politics going on all the time. Vested interests and personal power plays may at best limit thinking. At worst it can sabotage the corporate strategy.

The objectivity a consultant can bring to the company can help business decisions break out of petty politics. An independent consultant can elicit more truthful feedback from stakeholders such as employees or customers if they feel that their views are being handled independently.

Take the Pain

Some situations in business life can be painful. “Downsizing” or “letting people go” are sanitized terms for what can be unpleasant for the people involved.

An external person can sometimes handle these situations with both compassion and professional detachment. This may make the process easier for both the people being let go and the people doing the letting go.

Back You Up

When you are making a proposal for a change or project it can sometimes be difficult to get a hearing from the decisionmakers in the company. Sometimes, internal voices don’t have the credibility of external ones.

Have an external consultant run their eyes over the data or the details of a plan. It can provide legitimacy for the proposal that the decision-makers need. It can also be helpful if other parties, such as a bank, want validation for a financial business plan.

Knowledge Transfer

When consultants are hired they aren’t always brought in to do a task. They may be brought in to enable others to do it. This training makes any change sustainable by transferring knowledge from the consultant to the company.

Problem to Solve?

Do you see an opportunity for an external consultant to make a difference to your business? Perhaps there is an opportunity to add value or a problem to solve. An external consultant might make all the difference.
Browse our website for more business tips.

Four Qualities You Want in a Potential Employee

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article | Talent Management | Hiring | Entrepreneurship | Four Qualities You Want in a Potential EmployeeIf you are involved in the hiring process for your company, you are very likely wise to the fact that searching for and hiring a new employee is no easy task. Along with the pressure of making sure you fill a vacancy in a timely manner, comes the task of sifting through hundreds, maybe thousands of applications to find the ideal candidates.

There are also times when the number of candidates you consider inhibits your ability to pinpoint exactly what qualities would best be suited towards the position that you are looking to fill.

Here are four specific qualities that you should look for when conducting your search for your ideal employee.

1. Excellent Communication Skills

The ability to communicate well, both in speech and the written word, sounds as though it should be a given quality in every candidate. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. It is important that you confirm that the individuals you employ can hold their own when it comes to communication.

The last thing you want to do is to set yourself up to have an employee who is unable to appropriately handle internal communications. If your company is like most others, the day-to-day success of your operation involves many moving parts. From office memos to updates on various projects, it is critical that all those involved have the ability to communicate clearly and concisely.

Additionally, if the position you are hoping to fill is one that involves any aspect of client contact, it would be less than ideal to have someone in that position who is unable to adequately communicate with your customers.

For a more specific idea of the communication skills that you should be keeping an eye out for, check out this comprehensive list that the experts at Habits for Wellbeing put together.

2. Advanced Degrees

Not only does the fact that your potential employee has an advanced degree demonstrate a certain level of commitment to the industry in which you both work, but it also shows that this individual has the ability to learn and improve. Furthermore, it also indicates that they have a desire to continue to do both of those things.

Depending on the type of business that you are in, there are particular degrees that seem particularly appealing to employers. Generally speaking, if someone has an MBA, for example, that means that the person you are considering has spent time developing critical skills that will come in handy in the business world.

Don’t be deterred by a candidate who has earned their degree in a less traditional manner, either. More and more students are earning their advanced degrees online, for instance. Prominent and accredited schools like Suffolk University Online MBA can be trusted to have properly educated those who go through their programs.

3. The Right Attitude

The right employee should also come with the right attitude. Remember, this person is going to become a part of your company. You might be in a situation where you will be working side by side with this individual, and in that case, you don’t want to hire someone whose attitude doesn’t fit the bill or your company.

On the other hand, you might be filling a position in another department from yours. In that instance, you want to avoid any potential for future friction amongst other employees.

There are also certain characteristics that tend to make for a good employee no matter what line of work you are in. Does this person seem like they have ambition? Are they positive-minded and pleasant to be around? All of these things are important to consider particularly when you are in the interviewing part of the hiring process.

4. Staying Potential

The last thing you want is to fast-forward to six months from now only to find yourself having to fill the exact same position once again. It is important to find someone who is in it for the long haul. This simply comes down to asking for an honest estimation of the candidate’s dedication to the job you are offering.

Does this person have any long-term plans that might inhibit their ability to stick around? Do they have all the skills that it takes to be a success in this position? If not, you might risk that person falling short of fulfilling all the duties that the job requires of them. In that case, they might be the ones ultimately deciding that it isn’t a good fit.

Things you have to know before you start your coworking marketplace

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StrategyDriven Starting Your Business Article | Coworking Marketplace | Entrepreneurship | Things you have to know before you start your coworking marketplaceCoworking is a new concept of an open working environment that allows several unrelated companies to share office space and work together. According to Statista, there were around 22,4000 coworking spaces worldwide by the end of 2019. With the rising popularity of shared workspaces, more and more businesses are launching coworking marketplaces. In other words, they are just like Airbnb.

When Airbnb offers vacation rentals with homely amenities, a coworking space marketplace offers office spaces with unique amenities for individuals and businesses. The coworking marketplace efficiently connects coworking space owners looking to rent out their unused office space with individuals and businesses looking for vacant shared work spaces.

In the coming years, we will be seeing tremendous innovation in the field of building and running coworking rental marketplaces. There is no better time to launch your coworking space business. Before we start, let me establish this- There are no easy ways to launch a coworking marketplace and make it successful. Following a sound business strategy and understanding, best practices are important.

Things to consider before starting an Airbnb for coworking

The whole world has been taken aback by the potential of coworking space marketplaces and you are on the right track with launching a coworking rental platform. But running a successful Airbnb for coworking requires a lot of planning and effort. Here are some of the core things to consider before starting your own coworking marketplace that helps you to take your business to new heights.

Research your target market

Whether you are creating a coworking space platform from scratch or using a white label solution, there is no way around doing thorough market research. According to studies, lack of market research is one of the major reasons why startups fail.

To build a viable coworking space rental marketplace, you need to have a clear understanding of the market, how the industry looks like, your target users, their requirement, and the solution they are looking for. Pay attention to market trends as well to spot any big changes like technology breakthroughs so that you can use it for your business advantage.

Choose the right business model

It is a great idea to design a viable business model even before starting your coworking marketplace. Now, the exact way your coworking space rental platform makes money will depend on a lot of factors. However, there are some common business models to consider.

Service fee

It’s a great monetization strategy of any peer-peer marketplaces to charge service providers a service fee each time they receive and process a new booking on your platform. The more transactions your marketplace makes-the more revenue you get. The host service fee can be 3% or more and can vary with different countries. You can also incur service free from guests which can range up to 20% of the booking subtotal. For example, Airbnb takes a 20% service fee from guests and a 3$ from the hosts.

Listing fee

Your coworking marketplace can collect listing fees from coworking space owners when they list their space on your platform. It can be a flat fee or vary based on the total reservation made or any other parameters. To reduce friction, you can consider collecting the fee once the transaction is completed instead of doing it at the time of listing. Airbnb charges a 14% host-fee from property owners according to its new policies.

While these are the common business models- You can add more than that including the following.

  • Adding premium subscriptions
  • Collect payment processing fee
  • Promote sponsored listings
  • Setting your own ad system

Carefully plan your operations

Creating a coworking space management tool is one thing and successfully running is something completely different. As you have to manage two user types, bookings and scheduling, payment processing, and a lot of other functions together, the operations can get a bit complex. Hence, it is important for your rental marketplace to have all essential features that support the operations carried out on your platform.

You will need specialized marketplace payment gateways that allow users to book coworking spaces and pay effortlessly. Implementing an in-app communication system is also essential to set a channel for all your users to communicate regarding scheduling, booking, and cancellation.

Optimize your platform’s search to deliver high performance

Search is one of the most critical interfaces of your coworking office space rental marketplace users leverage these features to interact with your platform. Significant engineering goes behind a smart and intuitive search that performs well. If you take the example of Airbnb, the smart search is one of the most powerful features of this peer-peer vacation rental marketplace.

A typical search for any coworking marketplace should support the following search features.

  • Location
  • Coworking space type
  • Price range
  • Availability
  • Amenities
  • Capacity
  • Meeting rooms
  • And more

Improve the booking flow and experience

To deliver a great user experience to all user groups, your coworking space platform must have a seamless booking feature. When a coworking space owner registers in your platform and activates his listings, the people who are looking for rental office spaces must be able to view and book the space.

Consider instant booking as opposed to normal booking feature as it is the preferred way for hosts to rent out their properties. With proper identification verification services, you can allow service providers to reliably list their coworking space for instant booking option so that users can make instant bookings.

Dealing with Last minute cancellations

Building and running a successful peer-peer coworking management software requires you to think from a user perspective. For example, Airbnb allows hosts to cancel the booking at the 11th hour. When thinking from a host’s perspective, this is an absolutely great feature, but if you think from a guest perspective, this might not be a pleasing feature. Hence, your marketplace must have smart ways to deal with last-minute cancellations considering the interests of both user groups. To reduce last-minute cancellations, you can add a cancelation fee and block booking dates. Another great alternative would be to reallocate another similar coworking space to the user in case a service provider cancels the last minute.

Conclusion

Building an Airbnb for coworking is a different thing and scaling it to millions of users like the real Airbnb does is another thing. Implementing the above-discussed things will help you to run your peer-peer coworking marketplace successfully and gain a competitive advantage in the industry. Happy Coworking!

About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor | Shirley C. StewartShirley C. Stewart is Business Consultant and Marketing Head at RentCubo. She helps brands to build their web products that people love using. Shirley has a passion for growth hacking and startups.

5 Employee Training Tips for Smoother Operations

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |employee training tips|5 Employee Training Tips for Smoother OperationsIt’s the start of the year, which means you might be onboarding new employees soon.

In order to make your new employees comfortable and get operations running smoothly, you need to train them well.
This article will give you five employee training tips so that your new employees will feel at home in no time.

1. Communicate Well

Good communication is at the heart of any relationship, and that includes employee-boss relations.
It’s important you communicate to your new employees what is expected of them.

Give them clear instructions on daily, weekly, and monthly tasks. If they’re not performing well, communicate early so they’re aware of the problem.

To enhance business communication, use a website like Slack where you and your employees can communicate professionally.

2. Start Small

Beginning a new job can be very overwhelming.

Your new employee is dealing with both the social and mental strains of starting at a new company.

Don’t feel like you have to teach them everything in one sitting. Microlearning and microtraining are great ways to give your employees the information they need in small doses.

This short training time ensures they can stay focused on the information all the way through the training and that nothing falls through the cracks.

3. Try Team Bonding

It’s important that your new employees feel like they can acclimate to your workplace.

They will feel happier at work if they can form bonds with others.

Take your staff out for a team bonding exercise. Try an escape room or another activity that causes everyone to put their heads together.

Bring in lunch for your new staff once a week so everyone can bond over sandwiches. It’s a nice gesture that will show your new employees that you care.

4. Make Welcome Folders

It’s true, we live in the digital age where almost everything is online.

Still, it can be nice for new employees to have learning materials to hold in their hands.

Make them a welcome packet with all the information they need to survive at your company. This packet can be something they take home and study at night so they’re up to speed on their role at the company.

5. Check-In

Be a good boss and check-in on your new employees regularly.

Your senior employees know what they’re doing and don’t need to be asked, but your new employees most likely have questions.

Sometimes they might be too afraid to ask a question out of fear of sounding stupid. Be sure to assure your new employees there are no stupid questions and ask them how they’re doing regularly.

Now You Have the Best Employee Training Tips

These employee training tips will take your new hires from novices to experts quickly.

Remember to include your new employees in team bonding activities, communicate well, and check-in on how they’re doing.

Want more information on how to succeed in the workplace? Check out our other articles for more tips on how to run an effective business.