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Stop Working For Your Business

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We don’t have an exact answer figure, but we reckon 98.1% of entrepreneurs are okay with putting in the hard work if it means they can sit back and enjoy a bit more freedom down the line. Yeah, we’re talking about creating a business that works without you needing to be there. The problem is, most founders end up working for their businesses instead of their businesses working for them.

If you’re not sure which camp you fall into, try pondering this scenario: you are kidnapped, put in the trunk of a Ford Mondeo and kept hostage (albeit well-looked after) for a fortnight, maybe even a month – what would happen to your business? Would it thrive, would it survive or would it fall apart faster than a filo pastry?

If it is the latter option, don’t despair. We’ve pulled together a few tips and tricks to help make your business start running smoothly without you. Enjoy the early retirement you’ve always dreamed about.

1. Automate All You Can

The more of your processes you can automate, the fewer things will need you – or someone – to focus their efforts on. Automate your customer service response, look at your method to manage your policies and procedure, streamline your onboarding processes, your systems for filing documents, your workflows, invoicing, anything. The more you can automate, the less chance there will be of human error getting involved and that means less for you to oversee.

2. Let Your Employees Work

Any leader that has trouble relinquishing control will no doubt have a stringent interview process to make sure they only bring on the very best talent. You don’t want anything but the right candidate to take your business forward. That means you have hired each of your employees for a reason, so let them do their jobs. Let them do the very role you hired them to do. Instead of hovering over them, inspire and empower them and let them figure out which way of doing things suits them. It will make your hopes of standing back come true, that’s a promise.

3. Step Away For A Bit

It doesn’t have to be long, a week let’s say. What you will find from stepping back for this length of time is you get a better understanding of how your company runs without you. We’re talking about turning your phone off for that entire week and then evaluating the result when you come back. This will let you see where your big weaknesses are, where the biggest issues arose and which unanswered questions need some attention. It’s about having more understanding of where your team needs further assistance, training and empowerment.

4. Be A Better Delegator

The role of CEO is a bit of an ambiguous one. That’s why you should cross this out and then make a list of all the tasks and roles you took on the past six months to a year. Once you have this in front of you, start categorizing and delegating them. This won’t be creating more work for anyone else, it will give them the chance to take total responsibility for a role and all the responsibilities that come with it and that can be immensely motivating.

What To Do When Your Business Is Struggling

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Don’t be surprised if at some point you find your business struggling, with you figuring out how and why such issues have arisen. Such ups and downs are normal in the world of business, and whether you’re an entrepreneur or seasonal business owner with years of experience, both need to know what to do when their business needs a boost in the right direction.

Try not to panic or make any rash decisions when you first realize you’re going through some tough times. What your business needs right now is you to step up and be a leader and stay determined to figure out how to get yourselves back on track. Be prepared to do your homework as to why this is occurring and then get ready to make a few changes.

Revisit your Business Plan

You can’t take action until you pinpoint exactly where you’re falling short and the gaps exist. What you need is a new and improved strategy if you’re business is struggling. It may be time to revisit your goals and adjust them for the future so you can start finding success with your company again. Pull out your business plan and go over it closely to verify areas you’re not currently executing on and figure out how you can modify your approach for the future.

Review Roles & Responsibilities

This is a good time to go over roles and responsibilities with your staff and confirm everyone’s on the same page. Make sure each person has a job they’re busy doing every day that’s helping you reach your business goals. If there are people or roles that are no longer a good fit then it’s up to you to make adjustments where necessary. You need to confirm all that’s going on within company walls is helping your cause and not holding you back.

Find ways to Boost Morale

One reason your business could be struggling is because your employees aren’t feeling very motivated. Boost morale at the office by rewarding your team when they do a good job and taking them out for a meal or participating in an Escape Rooms adventure. These are both fun activities where they’ll get to come together as a team and celebrate or problem solve their way to creating a closer bond as a group. It’ll be well worth your small investment when you start to see your employees feeling more satisfied at work and performing their job duties better.

Stay Positive & Keep Trying

What you can’t do is give up and stop trying to figure out why your business is experiencing growing pains. Stay positive and continue working your way through the hardships. Focus on what you’re doing right and always remember to play to your strengths. While it’s okay to be realistic and honest with your staff, never let them see you get down on yourself or the company as you try to minimize any long-term damage.

Conclusion

Every business goes through ups and downs and this just happens to be a period when you’re struggling. Spend time understanding the problem areas and finding solutions instead of complaining. Use these suggestions for helping you to recover and bounce back better than before.

How To Make Your Business Safer

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As a business owner, you have an important responsibility to ensure the safety of everyone who works for you. Of course, there are always going to be times when accidents happen, but you need to take steps to reduce the odds of this happening. Anything negative or dangerous events which happen at your business and are your responsibility could end up being very destructive and damaging to it. So, let’s take a closer look at a couple of the ways that you can make your business safer for the benefit of both you and your employees.

Develop a Risk Management Policy

The risk management policy which you create for your business very much depends on the type of company that you are running. Obviously, there are some environments which are more dangerous than others, but you still need to take the proper safety precautions even if you just run an office environment. Your risk management program needs to be ongoing and adaptable. After all, there may be new risks which present themselves during the lifespan of your company.

To start off with, look at your current risk management program to see if there are any improvements which you could make to it. Have you set safety goals and are they measurable? Look to your managers and ask how committed they are to workplace safety. If they are not giving this aspect of your company the attention that it deserves, you need to ask why not and reiterate just how important it is to everyone. While everyone should have the same priorities when it comes to protecting staff members, you will probably want to have a few trusted staff members who can lead the initiative.

There are a number of factors involved in creating a risk management policy. First of all, you should conduct some inspections of your property to identify potential risks. You may decide that you need to invest in additional equipment and protective measures such as safety rails. It is worth having an inspection completed by a professional who knows what they are doing and can make recommendations. Be aware of any potential hazards around your work environment including faulty machinery, unsafe practices or things which could result in trips and spills. You also need to ensure that your employees are protected ergonomically and you have dedicated first aiders who can help to handle any emergency situations which may occur. If you have any vehicles which you use for business, these should all be fully insured and taxed.

Put Your Program into Effect

Once you have established your policy, you then need to take steps to put it into effect. To start off with, you should consult your key members of staff to tell them all about your safety practices. These in-person consultations will ensure that you are all on the same page. You should also offer safety training sessions to all your staff members. Provide them with any additional resources as required. It is also important that you have an open-door policy when it comes to offering suggestions from your staff members. After all, they are seeing a totally different side to your business and are well-placed to offer improvements and suggestions that could help you out in the long-run.

Choose the Right Insurance

As we mentioned at the start, you can have all the best measures in place, but sometimes, accidents may happen. For example, your business could suffer from a fire or another act of God which was impossible to predict. Therefore, it is important that you have the right insurance policies to protect you from a wide range of circumstances. If you are not sure what you need and what you don’t, it is always going to be worth consulting with a professional advisor who can steer you onto the right path. Insurance is the one thing that you want your business to have in times of need.

Making your business safer should be one of your main priorities as a responsible company owner. The points listed in this article give you a few of the main things to consider. Of course, every company is different, and you will need to come up with a health and safety policy which is bespoke to your business and covers a wide range of different circumstances and eventualities. When all else fails, it is important that you have the insurance measures in place to keep your business protected.

Are You Getting The Best Online Exposure?

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Business is all about sales, and sales are best made through the internet. Anyone who says different doesn’t understand the power that the internet has, and the things that can be done to make sure the best online exposure is achieved. So, we would hope that your business is online, and we would hope that that’s where you’re driving your sales. But you need to ask yourself the question, are you getting enough exposure each month? This can be found through things like conversion rates, sales, clicks etc. If you don’t monitor these, let this article show you why you should.

You’ve Got To Market & Advertise

Some companies just have their marketing strategy so wrong, that’s one of the reasons why online exposure might be so bad. If you hardly put any effort into your marketing campaigns, then you’re definitely never going to get to where you need to be in the business world. One of the best forms of advertising is adwords and pay per click. Adwords is where a company will pay a certain amount to have their website at the top of a search engine, meaning it’s going to get the most exposure. To do this you have to pay a fee, and you have to be constantly outbidding your competitors to stay in one of the top three spots. Adwords management can be hard, so sometimes it might be better to get a company to do it for you. As long as you’ve got the money to spend, this is a really effective technique to use. Pay per click works by showing advertisements for your business, and every time someone clicks the link, then you pay, hence why it is called pay per click. This is effective because using this technique sort of plasters your business all over the web. It’s wherever everyone looks, providing that website allows ads, and it is really effective for gaining that exposure that you need. Depending on how many clicks you get, it’s probably cheaper to do than adwords.

Design Is key

The design of your website is going to be key to making sure you have the best exposure, marketing is only one side of it. Think of it this way, if a person sees your advertisement and thinks, I like the sound of that, but sees your website is under developed and hard to use, they’re obviously going to click right back off. Make sure you have a professional maintain your website to keep it at the highest level of quality possible.

Beating Competitors

Beating competitors isn’t hard, you just have to put in the hard work and dedication to get there. Make sure you’re always running marketing campaigns, and monitor what they’re doing in terms of their own marketing. They’re most likely going to be doing all they can to stay ahead of you, beat them at their own game and your business will just shoot to success. Don’t be afraid to splash the cash because it’ll always work out for you in the end providing you do it right.

6 Easy Office Security Tips

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Whether you are at home or in the office, you’ll agree that security is important. At home, you worry about the doors being broken into and you install a top alarm system, double lock the doors at night and even invest in a dog. Life is busy, though, and security can be easily forgotten about. You get complacent, you shut the door but don’t lock it. You leave the building without setting the alarm and all is fine. Then all of a sudden, that complacency will bite you when you end up being broken into. Your home and your office have got to be places that you look after, but your office is going to be the place that your livelihood gets messed with. Almost every business out there is at risk from theft by employees or outsiders, criminal break-ins and data theft. It’s a tough world, full of competition and you should be doing everything that you possibly can to look after your office and home, keeping them both secure.

People tend to get more concerned about their homes when they go out to work in the day, but they have a lot less concern for the security of their office. Unfortunately, it’s not potted plants that are at risk of theft or damage when people decide to take it upon themselves to break into your office. It’s going to be your data and your personal information, along with the personal information of your clients and your financial data. As a business owner, document storage and retrieval is going to be a big deal for your company, and paying attention to every way that you can secure your office is going to tighten up your business. Working in an office is going to mean you are exposed to certain threats, and we’ve got a list of tips for both you and your employees to keep as safe as possible while you are there:

Social Media

Your job doesn’t have to be completely online, but social media is important for any business. Your whole business is going to be critiqued and reviewed online, and so it makes sense for your staff to be very careful about what they say online; whether it’s business related or not. Social media profiles should also be private as much as possible, so that nothing about work that is shared is visible online. Sensitive information about your workplace that goes up about your office can leave you in a position of vulnerability. This could end up in lawsuits and leaving your business open to those who want to pick your business apart.

Integrated Security Systems

When you have a physical office building, you need to have an integrated security system to stop people who are unexpected from coming into your space. You should ideally have doors that are opened with key cards and a video camera system that can see the doors from every angle. Some offices that keep highly sensitive information on site also choose to use facial recognition software or video cameras for access. Making sure that your internal and external doors are locked at night, and auto-locked throughout the day with glass that isn’t easily breakable is so important. People may not be able to bypass the electronic systems, but it only takes a power failure to short circuit the whole thing. This is why manual locks are so important, and double-locking the place isn’t going to be over the top.

Employee Screening

A big reason for theft in a company is via the very people that work there. While you want to be able to trust your employees, it doesn’t mean that you can be complacent about the people that you hire. You could have the most stringent checks around and still find yourself at the mercy of the people working for you. Criminal record and referencing checks should be done upon hiring, and the control that you give your employees will need to be monitored. Do not allow employees or anyone outside a very tight and trusted group to have full access to the documents and data in your company. Financial documents should only be accessed by the proper finance teams at all times.

Lock & Key

Server rooms in your business are going to be the very place that sensitive information is stored. Anywhere that can be infiltrated by outside influences has to be kept under a physical lock and key as well as a data lock and key. Using the Cloud is a good way to keep sensitive information safe and away from servers, but it’s still precarious. Those servers have everything that makes your business what it is, and only those with an in-depth security clearance should have access to the server room. Ensure that you install your server room in the middle of an office and make sure that there are no walls that lean into your office neighbours. We’re not suggesting that there’s going to be a great heist with drills through the walls, but you never truly know!

Secure Workstations

Most of the time, people will bring their own tablets and laptops to the workplace so that they can work off something portable. If you have desktop computers, instead of portable laptops or tablets, you need to get these locked down so that in the event of a break-in, they cannot be stolen. Paperwork and documentation, if not in a secure storage centre, should also be under lock and key. Any desktop computers you’re not using should be locked away, as well and wiped of any data. Anything you don’t intend to keep should always be shredded and not just placed into recycling bins, as criminals tend to keep sensitive information including names and addresses. You’re not being overly cautious by taking a moment to look at your office security and not wanting to lose thousands of dollars in equipment.

Disable The Drives

Ideally, you don’t have someone among your staff that will steal information from you, but just in case you should disable the drives. USB ports and floppy drives are the perfect way for people to steal information from inside the office and bring it outside; all they need is an external drive to plug in and go. You can have your IT team disable these drives or remove them altogether, which will prevent any of your company documentation or data that is held on the main server from being removed and brought anywhere outside of your office.

While you are making sure that your office and your data is completely secure against outside unwanted access, you should also be keeping your knowledge updated about the recent cyberattacks and office break-ins that are in your area and could affect you. It’s so essential to ensure that your IT team have brought the best malware and latest antivirus to you to install on your machines. If you are truly concerned about whether your office will get broken into, you could ensure that you bring in a security company and hire some guards for the front and back of your office. Protecting the company assets, data, software and equipment is an absolute must and as a business owner, you must do everything that you possibly can to ensure the safety of your staff and your information. Physical security is rather overlooked by most businesses but ensuring that you have the right security in place could change whether your office is a target or not for would-be thieves.