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What Can You Do to Benefit Your Business in the Long Run?

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Benefit Your Business |What Can You Do to Benefit Your Business in the Long Run?After the last couple of years, running a business might have all seemed like survival, but as some things at least return to normal, your thoughts might turn to more long-term plans. With so many things to do at once, it might seem an impossible task to even get started, but to make things easier, here are some of the main things you should consider looking at.

#1 You Are Going to Need to Invest in PPSR

PPSR, otherwise known as the Personal Property Securities Register, is an essential part of running a business. The Personal Property Securities Register is a powerful tool that can help you get the compensation that you deserve if people who haven’t paid you to go out of business.

It means that you can repossess what you lost, or at least the value of what you lost. This is important to get right, and you might need some templates to make sure that it is perfect for use. This might mean that you are going to want to look at templates for Personal Property Securities Register used in Australia to make sure you don’t lose out

#2 You Are Going to Need to Invest in Cybersecurity

Investing in Cybersecurity is important to ensure the longevity of your business. It can help you work in a more secure environment and help your employees trust you. You would be wise to start by investing in anti-virus software and a decent firewall. It should also be beneficial to invest in end-user education to help yourself and your employees work safely on the internet and are wary of threats.

#3 You Should Be Investing in Training Your Employees

Not only does this help employee morale, but it also allows your business to get better results. This is because mistakes are less likely to be made, and communication becomes more fluent with the overall result that the pace of work not only becomes faster but also more accurate. You will be pleasantly surprised with the transformation that the correct training will cause within your business, as it starts to overcome issues more consistently and intelligently, as well as use fewer resources and perform better, even under pressure.


#4 You Should Be Looking into Getting High-Quality Website Management

This can help you tremendously when it comes to keeping the customers that you have attracted to your site. It can help you make sure that your website is up to spec and isn’t taking forever to load, being slowed down further by bugs, and just not looking good, causing your potential customers to click away.

You should also be looking into tools like Chatbots and using SEO to help your site become more findable online and enjoyable for your customers when they get there.

#5 You Should Be Investing in Your Social Media Output

This can help you when it comes to reaching specific audiences and helping your ‘brand’ increase in popularity. It can be a great tool as people all over the world could be potentially exposed to your business so that you have a chance of bringing in a customer anytime, meaning that you are always actively marketing. Although this might not bring the same long-term results as SEO, it will give you a more immediate audience.

#6 You Should Be Ensuring That Your Finances Are in Order

This isn’t just getting your business a PPSR. This is also building up your business’s credit score and making sure that you are as debt-free as possible. This is important as it can prevent you from getting the help that you need when you need it, as lenders might turn you down, which in turn might be the end of the line for your business.

#7 Digitalization Can Help You with Efficiency

Digitalization can be great for building efficiency throughout your business and it can be an effective way to modernize. It can also help you cut down on the single-use products which are detrimental to your business’s finances, and instead invest in other areas. For instance, moving storage to the cloud would be significant as you are going to need the digital space to expand your business and help it grow.

#8 You Are Going to Need to Think About Packaging

This can help your business appeal to more customers and then make them want to come back for more. It has been said that the packaging is more important than the product, and you also need to remember to make switches to more eco-friendly materials and also keep your packaging practical and reflective of your business. You will find that it is easier to keep your customers if they have a great ‘unboxing’ experience.

To Wrap Things Up

It’s never too soon to plan, especially if some of those measures will mean your business does have a future. By getting the back-up you need, both financially and digitally, as well as cutting down on overheads and boosting the knowledge in your workforce, you’ll find that moving forward doesn’t have to be as hard as you first thought.

A Guide to Engineering Business Success

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Engineering Business|A Guide to Engineering Business SuccessGuiding an engineering business to strategic success is not easy. The engineering industry is both highly fractured and immensely busy. Here is a very brief guide to some of the strategic elements that need to be kept in mind when planning out the long-term growth of an engineering business.

Have a Coherent Strategic Vision

It is extremely rare for an engineering company (or any company for that matter) to succeed strategically if it does not have a coherent and achievable long-term vision and well-defined ethos. From the very genesis of an engineering business’ life, it should be guided by the vision defined by its founders. These strategic visions should be directly related to the space within the market that the business wishes to occupy and should guide the long-term onboarding of staff and the development of processes. The vision should be displayed in a strategic vision statement.

Pay Attention to Service Standards and Efficiency

Engineering businesses are not only concerned with the creation of a product or delivery of a 2D service. Their relationships with consumers, customers, and other businesses need to be ongoing if they are to see any kind of success. Service standards and efficiency need to be an absolute priority. Companies like Servicegeeni.com help engineering businesses to offer efficient and effective ongoing relationships. Looking after the people connected through purchase, rental or stake holding in products, in the long run, can provide the opportunity for repeat custom and a good corporate reputation.


Know Your Metrics of Success

Engineering business owners need to be able to develop criteria and metrics that enable them to measure success. These are typically known as KPIs

– Key Performance Indicators. Without the development and quantization of Key Performance Indicators, it can be hard for a business to tell what areas of strategy are proving successful.

Good Key Performance Indicators can provide generally objective evidence for the success or failure of a strategic element. Typical KPIs in the engineering industry include profit to cost measurements, profit to personnel measurements, service outcomes, and a whole host of other indicators. Getting your strategic KPIs in order is essential if you want your business to grow.

Process Driven Onboarding is a Must

Running an engineering business successfully is eventually going to involve hiring some extra help. Don’t just hire randomly – use a process-driven onboarding strategy to find the best solutions. Although process-driven onboarding has received some flak in recent years, it still dominates the hiring strategies of most successful engineering businesses. This is because engineering firms are environments in which specific skill quotas need to be met to facilitate growth. Process-driven onboarding involves the following of a specific process when looking for and interviewing new hires.

Carefully identifying the skill gaps that need filling and looking for personnel that fill those gaps will help a business to grow as efficiently as possible without taking people on that do not have specific things to bring to the table. Don’t just you’re your business aimlessly, grow it intelligently.

Not About Us and Them: Dealing With Employee-Manager Conflict in 4 Ways

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |employee manager conflict|Not About Us and Them: Dealing With Employee-Manager Conflict in 4 WaysOne of the toughest things about being a leader is making employees feel more at ease with who they are so they can do their job better. When we encounter conflict between us and them, as inevitable as it is, we cannot avoid conflict as this will result in chaos, but we’ve got to ensure that we have the right strategies to resolve conflicts between ourselves and employees. If somebody disagrees with how you are leading, think of the following:

Actively Listen

One of the most difficult things in emotionally charged situations is actually focusing on the other person. One of the most fundamental tenets of any human resources training, whether it is coaching salespeople who don’t want to be coached or learning soft skills, is to block out any urges to form a response and just listen. If you find yourself preparing your response while the other person is talking, it can be difficult to get rid of this, but you need to actively listen, but you will need to do this from a place of empathy.

Showing empathy towards your employees is vital to establishing a trusting relationship. When there is a conflict between the employee and the manager, it’s vital to acknowledge how employees are feeling and understand where they are coming from. Rather than responding with something like “I’m sorry you feel that way,” if the problem has stemmed from you, accountability is important, and reframing the “I’m sorry you feel that way” response into “I’m sorry that I’m making you feel this way” is acknowledging responsibility rather than having a non-committal response.


Focus on Behavior

When we’re trying to resolve a conflict, we should never focus our words on the person. We need to focus on the behavior rather than the person responsible. If we target the person, it’s very much like pointing fingers at them and establishing blame. Somebody can behave in any way they want, but we should never enter into a discussion where we are calling into question the employee, whether it’s their beliefs or values.

Remove Yourself From Your Biases

Self-awareness is such an important trait in leaders. We need to acknowledge our biases, preconceptions, and trigger points, which form the basis of many aspects of unconscious bias training. Having the self-awareness to describe how you see the world means you can adequately enact strategies to see other points of view. This means you have got to be aware of how you respond to conflict. Do you avoid, accommodate, compromise, or collaborate? These four components provide the starting point to help you realize where you can improve.

Exhaust Your Toolkit Before Bringing In HR

It’s easy to rely on HR to deal with this, but any good leader will be able to understand if the conflict is an ongoing or a one-time situation. Documenting these conversations is so important, and if a simple conversation doesn’t solve the issue, this is when HR can get involved.

It’s one of the hardest things to get right, but conflict is commonplace, and to be a successful leader, you should know how to work towards a proper solution.

3 Stress-Free Ways To Keep Your Startup Costs Low

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StrategyDriven Starting Your Business Article |Keep startup costs low|3 Stress-Free Ways To Keep Your Startup Costs LowStarting a business can be a stressful experience. You’ll not only have a wealth of tasks to take care of, but money will be tight. You’ll need to figure out how to keep your startup costs low to make sure you can afford everything you need.

As complicated as that can seem, there are multiple ways to do so. Focusing on a few particular strategies will be helpful with this, as they’ll help you keep costs low without affecting your product’s quality.

How To Keep Your Startup Costs Low: 3 Stress-Free Options

1. Check Your Suppliers

Purchasing supplies is one of your larger startup costs and can be a significant ongoing expense, making it vital you get the best possible deal on this. As a rule of thumb, it’s worth getting three or four quotes from potential suppliers before committing to a specific option.

Price shouldn’t be the sole aspect you consider with this, as the value you’re getting is also vital. Striking a fine balance between cost and quality could be needed for this. As your revenue grows, it’s worth looking into higher-quality options and determining whether they’d be more appropriate options.


2. Lease Instead Of Buying

As well as standard supplies, you’ll need equipment to get your business started, with this including anything essential to your operations. This can be more expensive than you’d think, with it often being the largest upfront startup cost you’ll have.

You can minimize it in quite a few ways, with equipment financing and leasing being recommended. While this could mean spending more on the equipment over time it’ll minimize your initial investment.

As your profits grow, you can always consider buying the equipment, but leasing may be the most appropriate option as you launch and grow your company. Readjusting over time and determining when you should buy instead of leasing can be difficult, but waiting until your revenue is consistently high is recommended.

3. Track Expenses

You won’t be able to figure out how to keep your startup costs low if you don’t know what they are. You’ll need to track them from day one, with this including all of your expenses regardless of how minor they might seem.

Having an ongoing list of your expenses will help with this, and it’s worth auditing this regularly. By doing so, you can more easily identify areas where you can reduce costs or improve return on investment.

Tracking your expenses also lets you take a more organized approach to your company’s finances, an essential component of running any successful business. You can use various pieces of software to help with this, with many even automating much of the process.

How To Keep Your Startup Costs Low: Wrapping Up

Once you know how to keep your startup costs low, the entire process becomes much more affordable. You’ll not only find cost-effective ways to start your company, but you’ll help maximize your profits.
With a lean business, you shouldn’t have a problem starting your company with relatively little funding.

How Scent Marketing Can Benefit Your Business

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Scent marketing|How Scent Marketing Can Benefit Your BusinessScent marketing is a technique that has been used for many years to increase sales and improve customer satisfaction. It involves using scents to create an environment that is favorable to the customer and conducive to making a purchase. The following blog will discuss how scent marketing can benefit your business.

1) Scent Marketing Can Increase Sales

One of the most obvious benefits of using scent marketing in your business is that it can increase sales. This is because scents can have a powerful effect on people’s moods and emotions. Studies have shown that certain scents can stimulate the brain’s part responsible for memory and emotion. This means that if you use a pleasant scent in your store, customers will associate positive emotions with your brand. As a result, they are more likely to purchase from you.

There are many ways to use scent marketing to increase sales. For example, you could use diffusers to release a pleasant smell into your store or office. You could also add scented candles or potpourri to common areas. You could even use scented soaps in your bathrooms. Whatever scent you choose, make sure it is pleasant and not overwhelming.

Another way to use scent marketing to increase sales is to offer scented products for sale. This could be anything from candles to air fresheners. Customers will be more likely to purchase these items with a pleasant scent. You could also offer scented samples of your products. This is a great way to get customers to try your products and potentially make a purchase.


2) Scent Marketing Can Improve Customer Satisfaction

When customers enter a store, they first notice the smell. In fact, studies have shown that up to 80% of what we perceive as taste is actually smelled. This means that the scent of your business can have a significant impact on how customers perceive your products and services.

If you want to improve customer satisfaction, then using scent marketing is a great way to do it. A pleasant-smelling environment will make customers feel more comfortable and relaxed, leading to them making better purchase decisions.

3) Scent Marketing Can Build Brand Loyalty

When customers enter your store, they should be enveloped in a pleasing scent that subconsciously promotes your brand. This will help to create an emotional connection with your customers and build brand loyalty. A study conducted found that 70% of consumers would be likely to return to a store more often if it had a pleasant scent. Similarly, 60% of respondents said they would spend more time shopping in a store with a pleasant smell. Therefore, you can increase customer loyalty and retention rates by investing in scent marketing.

In conclusion, scent marketing can have several benefits for your business. It can increase sales, improve customer satisfaction, and build brand loyalty. If you are not using scent marketing in your business, then now is the time to start. Your customers will thank you for it!