Ideas are funny things; they can strike in an instant, grow in your mind over many years, or disappear for a while, only to re-emerge at some point in the future. If you have an idea for an online enterprise, that’s a good start; if not, there are ways to develop them into workable ones that have a chance at success. That is the key point. Every idea has been done, so don’t worry that it isn’t original; what you’re looking for is what makes the idea special or unique to you. How can you develop an idea that’s been done a thousand times before into something that is fresh?
Know Your Market
If you don’t know your market well enough, you won’t know what you’re getting into, and chances are you won’t be competitive once there. Avoid this eventuality by conducting thorough research into your competitors and what they bring to the table. Go on social media, follow them, sign up to their mailing list, and even buy their products. By experiencing their product as a customer, you will soon get to know what they do well and what could be improved upon. In terms of improvements, that’s your job. Wherever you notice an inefficiency, you can cease upon it as an opportunity to create a USP of your own.
Discover Efficiency
As an online entrepreneur, you must always be on the lookout for ways to be more efficient. This might be in the form of outsourcing distribution using companies like DME Supplies or using third party warehouse solutions. Depending on your business and industry, it could also mean implementing appropriate software to help improve your business’s efficiency and bring down the costs. Luckily, the internet and many modern online brands are set up for efficiency. Because of this, many options exist to serve companies operating in diverse industries, so it should be easy to find what you’re looking for.
Keep Your Day Job
Regardless of whether you are immediately successful or not – chances are you won’t be, but best of luck – it’s a good idea to keep your day job for the foreseeable. Being successful online is a sort of balancing act. You need to grow the business in the same way you might grow a tomato plant. Give it soil and water, light, and nutrients, and it will grow steadily into what you want. Until then, you need to keep an income coming in. It doesn’t have to make you rich, but if it pays the bills while your business gets off the ground – that’s good enough.
Get Organization
Basic organization can take you a long way, and in some cases, it can be the difference between success and failure. A solid business plan can help here. If you know your financial responsibilities, and you’re committed to your short and long term goals, your strategy should be easy to see and implement. Don’t be afraid to review your SMART goals and business plan regularly – there’s no such thing as too much planning.
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Manufacturing processes are complex and they often consist of multiple steps. So, in order to maximize profits, businesses have to find innovative ways to streamline these processes and reduce the time they take to complete.
If your manufacturing processes are inefficient, then there are a few things you can do to improve them, including getting rid of obsolete steps and improving the communication between your employees. There are also some amazing tools available that will help you to streamline these processes. Some of these tools include:
1.Salesforce
In order for manufacturing companies to be successful, they need to take good care of their customers. This is where the Salesforce tool comes in. Salesforce is a customer relationship management solution that brings customers and companies together. It makes sure that all departments including sales, marketing, commerce and service have a shared view of every customer. Salesforce for different industries is available, meaning that no matter what industry you work in, this is a tool you should consider. Salesforce solutions by Alt-Solut are a brilliant option for businesses wanting to streamline their manufacturing processes.
Here are some of the products they use to help you achieve this:
The service cloud – this allows your customers to connect with a specialist or find answers to any questions they may have in a fast and traceable way. Keeping track of your customers’ needs and concerns allows you to support them and run your business more effectively and efficiently.
The sales cloud – this helps companies to increase their customer base. It gives them the ability to notice potential deals as well as the ability to close more deals, all while increasing overall productivity.
The sales force CPQ – this allows you to provide accurate pricing and it can increase your ability to send quotes more quickly
Manufacturing cloud – this can help you to create transparency through each process.
2. Kanban
Kanban is another great tool that manufacturing companies can use to streamline their business processes. It is a Japanese scheduling system for lean manufacturing. This tool allows you to highlight problem areas by measuring the cycle time and lead time of each step. One of the main benefits of this tool is that it can help you to avoid overcapacity.
Unlike many other continuous improvement tools, Kanban is less about revolutionizing and more about evolving. This method looks at each part of the process as a fluid and changeable piece.
3. PDCA Cycle
The Plan-Do-Check-Act Cycle allows you to test out hypotheses and ideas. The four stages of this cycle include:
Plan – set out your goals and work out how you will achieve them
Do – try out the first few steps of your plan to see how well they work
Check – keep an eye out for areas that can be improved. You can do this by evaluating each step you’ve implemented as you go along. This allows you to spot problems at each stage of the process.
Act/adjust – depending on what you find in your evaluation, make any necessary changes in order to meet your goals.
Most manufacturing businesses are eager to streamline the complex processes within their business. Streamlining these processes can not only increase overall productivity, but it can also increase profitability. However, streamlining these processes can often be time-consuming and daunting. This is where streamlining tools come in handy. Why not try using some of the above tools in your business to see what a difference they can make?
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Although international recruitment is on the rise, many companies and businesses are still reluctant to try it. If you are undecided about taking this bold new step, these key benefits could help!
Access to a Wider Talent Pool
International recruitment means you are no longer confined to finding the right candidate in your local talent pool. Now, you can select a diverse group of the most qualified and productive employees from anywhere in the world. Additionally, the new international hires might have unique skills that are not available in your country of origin, thereby affording you yet another benefit.
Insights into New Markets
Every business that has a unique insight into an emerging market will always have an advantage over other similar businesses. International hires allow businesses to get a better insight into different and new markets as well as customer types. For example, if you want insight into a market like China and the types of customers your business is likely to encounter in that market, you could use a China PEO to find candidates who will give you this unique insight.
International teams also offer your business more productivity and creativity. This is because international hires bring unique experiences and perspectives with them. This boosts the whole team’s productivity and creativity by helping the team think outside the box.
To ensure this creativity, innovation and increased productivity, companies should partner with a global recruitment company to find the right types of candidates. Incidentally, New Horizons Global Partners comes to mind. They help companies such as yours to find the right candidates in Asia, manage your payroll, and a lot more. If you are expanding into markets like Indonesia or any other country in Asia, you can learn about how they can help your business do just that at nhglobalpartners.com.
A Better Workplace Culture
Many companies struggle to hire people who diversify their workforce and enrich their workplace cultures in a meaningful way. Hiring internationally can solve this problem. Hiring internationally brings in different types of people who think differently and who can enrich the company through their unique cultures.
Building this better culture has its benefits including making for a happier and better-connected workforce, developing a global community of employees, and helping employees build professional and personal connections across the globe.
Helps You Cover Multiple Time Zones
Hiring internationally gives you access to candidates who will be working different hours should they choose to work remotely. This will allow your business to provide services round the clock if you can assemble a team that covers every time zone provided your business is large enough.
These increased hours also give customers and clients confidence in knowing that no matter the time of day or night, they can get served by your business.
Hiring remotely might seem like a scary and expensive prospect, but it doesn’t have to be. If you have an experienced international recruiting company behind you, it is possible to hire great candidates who can help your business grow into new markets and beyond.
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The majority of businesses have their own dedicated app these days and if you don’t, you’re missing a big opportunity. Developing your own app is a brilliant way to increase brand awareness and it can be an incredibly effective sales tool as well. However, if you want to boost your business with an app, engagement is essential.
There are thousands of competing apps out there and it’s easy for your app to get lost in the crowd. If you are relying on a flashy design and a gimmick, you won’t find many long term users for the app and your business won’t benefit from it. If you want to be successful, it’s important that you have a clear customer engagement strategy in place to encourage people to download your app and, most importantly, to continue using it for a long time. Whether you are planning to develop your own business app in the future or you already have one on the app store, it’s important that you employ these techniques to boost customer engagement as much as possible.
Create The Right User Experience
If you want people to engage with your app, you need to make sure that they have a positive experience while using it. User experience is vital and a few small mistakes can make an app difficult and frustrating to use, which will seriously hurt engagement. A good user experience starts with the initial design process and extends throughout the build stages, and it’s important that you conduct regular usability testing throughout. Using the Infragistics Indigo.Design design-to-code system allows you to create basic designs and run usability tests, gaining a lot of insight into how positive the user experience is. When you base your entire design and build process around the user experience and use the feedback from testers to drive your decisions, you can ensure that the design is perfect and your app offers a great user experience.
It’s also important that you stay on top of maintenance issues and iron out any bugs right away. If certain features on your app don’t work or pages are slow to load, this will discourage people from using it again, so maintenance is very important.
Consider Your App Store Listing
Now that you have an amazing app that is easy and intuitive to use, you need to put it up on the app store and get people to download it. When you are writing your app store listing, you should consider it in the same way that you would a product listing. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses don’t put enough thought into their app store listing and they struggle to get any downloads.
You need to think about why people would want to download the app in the first place. What problems are you solving? What are the best features on the app? Instead of simply telling the customer what the app does, you need to create a story and explain to them why they can’t live without it. If you are stuck for ideas, check out the listing on some similar apps and look at the listings on the most downloaded apps so you can get an idea of how they entice people and encourage downloads.
Get Your App Onboarding Right
Convincing somebody to download your app is the first step, now you have to convince them to use it on a regular basis. The onboarding process will help the user get to grips with what the app does and how it works. Unfortunately, there are a lot of common mistakes that people make with their app onboarding.
If you launch straight into a tutorial that teaches the user about all of the advanced features of the app, a lot of people will switch off. They are still not quite sure about the benefits of your app yet so you should start by giving more detail about what the app does. Using screenshots of different features is a great way to give people a sense of the utility of the app without bombarding them with a tutorial. Once they are familiar with the overall features of the app, you can then start with the tutorials. It’s best to have separate tutorials that run when somebody clicks on a certain section of the app. This prevents people wasting time learning how to use features that they are not interested in.
Login and authentication is another thing that people get wrong during the onboarding process. If you require a user to be logged into your app for any reason, don’t ask for this right away because you are instantly putting a barrier up and people are less willing to create an account before they even know if they like the app. It’s best to let them explore for a while and get to grips with the basic features and then ask them to create an account only when absolutely necessary. Forcing people to commit to your app too early is likely to put them off and cause overall issues with engagement.
Manage Permission Requests Properly
Permission requests are so important when developing an app because people are very cautious about online security. If somebody downloads a new app and it immediately starts asking for permission to access their camera and their contacts, they may be suspicious, especially if it isn’t obvious why the app requires those permissions.
Ideally, you should keep permission requests to a minimum and you need to be careful about how you word them. When asking for permissions, you should always explain why so you can put the user’s mind at ease. You also need to display a message if permissions are denied, explaining that this will affect the functionality of the app and some features will not work.
Deciding when to ask for permission is important as well and a lot of app developers make the mistake of doing it all as soon as the app opens. But bombarding the user with a lot of permission requests right away will make them more suspicious and it also stops them from getting to experience the app right away. It’s much better to split the permission requests and only ask when the user tries to access a certain feature.
Use Push Notifications
Continued engagement with your app requires some prompting because people may simply forget about your app. Using push notifications reminds them that you are there and demonstrates the value that your app provides, so people are more likely to keep coming back. However, you do need to be careful about how you use push notifications because if you get it wrong, you may encourage people to delete your app.
Constantly spamming people with useless notifications is the easiest way to get them to delete your app. If you are going to send somebody a notification, there needs to be a reason for it. For example, if you sell products through your app, you can send them suggestions or information about any new deals and offers. Whenever you update your app and add something new, send out a notification inviting people to give the new features a go. These kinds of push notifications provide value to the customer and offer them something, so people will respond to them. But if you send lots of notifications that don’t offer anything, people will get annoyed and delete the app.
Your notifications will be far more effective if you personalize them and tailor them to each specific user. It’s also a good idea to use deep linking on your notifications. This means that users will be taken directly to a specific page so, for example, if you send a notification with a product suggestion, they can go directly to that product by clicking the notification. This makes the process a lot smoother for the user and adds more value to your notifications.
Incorporate Live Chat
Being able to communicate directly with your customers through the app is very important. If you don’t have a clear line of communication and a customer has an issue, they will usually leave a negative review on the app store. Naturally, bad reviews make people far less likely to download your app, so engagement suffers in a big way. Introducing a live chat feature will help to avoid that issue because users can message you directly if they have a problem with the app and having that direct line of communication there is a brilliant way to improve overall engagement. You can also use live chat as a way to improve your customer service, so it’s definitely a great feature to add to any business app. So, if you do not own an app yet and just consider creating one, put the live chat into the list of essential features. Your in-house team or outsourced specialists (if you decide to hire a React Native developer, for instance) will help you elevate the customer experience to a new level. If you use chatbots to answer the basic questions, your users can get an instant answer to their queries.
Developing an app with great features isn’t enough to be successful these days because there is so much competition on the app store. If you want your app to help you boost your business, it’s important that you focus on engagement and you have a clear strategy in place to encourage people to download your app and use it on a regular basis.
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Many, if not most, businesses need money to develop, survive, and grow. Organizations need the right amount of cash to meet both short-term and long-term needs without high risks of ruining their businesses. Thus, a stable and sufficient net working capital should exist within these companies’ financial accounts.
Net Working Capital: A Brief Overview
Perhaps the simplest definition of net working capital is money that a business has in its bank account. It’s also the measurement of the liquidity, efficiency of operations, and overall financial health of a business entity. Therefore, if a business possesses a working capital of good standing, it can grow through various investments.
Note that it’s possible to grow the net working capital through various means. Organizations can produce additional sales, build long-term relationships with clients, and develop products and services. It’s also possible to acquire additional working capital by borrowing the cash from reliable lending corporations.
Having a lender loan the cash you need to start and maintain projects might help your company grow. You can use the acquired money to purchase equipment to streamline processes or hire additional workers to finish tasks quickly.
Calculating Net Working Capital
Always keep in mind that money is a finite resource. Hence, it would be best to learn how to calculate working capital to let you know the amount of money needed to develop, sustain, or grow business operations.
Don’t worry, as it’s not severely challenging to calculate your company’s working capital. It’s as straightforward as subtracting your business’ current liabilities from its current assets.
Your firm’s current assets may include (but not limited to) the following:
Current inventory
Cash and cash equivalent
Accounts receivables
Prepaid expenses
Marketable investments and securities
Other liquid assets
As for your current liabilities, these may include the following:
Accounts payables
Taxes
Accumulated expenses
Interest payables
Short-term loans
For example, a small business wants to calculate its net working capital and compiles all the data required to acquire this figure. After gathering all the necessary receipts, documents, and files, the company might find its current assets at USD$100,000. They then need to collect and calculate payables, such as taxes, loans, and other expenses. Now, it finds that the business has USD$45,000 in current liabilities. Using the formula of subtracting current liabilities from current assets, the net working capital is USD$55,000. Hence, the company could use this amount to cover operational costs and meet other short-term obligations.
It’s highly recommended for entrepreneurs to know how to calculate their company’s net working capital. The ability to be aware of your business’ income sources helps you check whether you have a steady income source to thrive and survive.
Importance Of Net Working Capital
Without a sufficient amount in one’s net working capital could lead to mild or serious issues. Avoid these concerns by looking at the various reasons why a working capital is essential in developing and maintaining a business.
Maintain Smooth Operations
Maintaining smooth business operations is crucial to the profitability of relatively any company. A successful business thrives on providing products or services that people want to purchase.
Providing your business with a stable and sufficient working capital helps the organization maintain smooth operations. Otherwise, you might encounter certain problems, such as the lack of funds to provide workers’ salaries.
If this scenario happens, it could lead to more serious risks. Your employees might go on strike and may not return to their working stations until you provide them with their just financial compensations.
Another problem you might run into is the lack of stable finances to continue producing goods for customers. If your sales representative tells your customers that you don’t have enough stocks for a particular item, you’re going to lose valuable sales. Furthermore, customers might opt to purchase from your competitors instead, and this scenario accounts for lost short-term and long-term sales opportunities.
Improve Company Earnings And Profitability
Many small businesses don’t have the financial resources available to sustain their operations and make them grow, unlike large corporations. Therefore, it might be tough to create a profit without knowing and possessing financial stability in the business’s net working capital.
If so, begin by asking yourself how you plan to handle your working capital. Using the formula mentioned above would calculate your company’s net working capital to know the budget for your short-term and long-term projects. In turn, you can figure out the company’s earning potentials and maintain profitability to access eventual growth opportunities.
Minimize Costs While Maximizing Returns
Knowing your company’s net working capital also helps you minimize costs while maximizing revenue potentials. It’s because knowing the figure in that aspect enables you to balance various benefits versus the costs.
For example, you might find that your organization is holding high inventory levels. Note that several benefits may come from having plenty of stock to offer to clients. That idea might not always be the most efficient solution, especially for startups and small businesses.
Excess inventory will take up valuable storage space. Hence, your company may not have enough room for other products, unless you’re willing to spend extra cash for additional storage. Furthermore, you need to add the costs of financing and insuring the inventory in case of losses. In turn, the excess stocks may lead to more costs for your organization if you can’t dispose of them soon.
It’s possible to figure out the right number of products needed for your business’ storage while satiating the needs of your loyal customers without spending too much of the company’s financial assets. You could achieve the answer to this particular concern by calculating your business’s net working capital.
Helps Identify And Solve Efficiency Issues
When your company has problems with the flow of funds, it might be because you may have too little money for your accounts receivables. But you might not know about this issue if you don’t know how to calculate for your firm’s net working capital.
In turn, you can identify and solve efficiency issues in your business. Identifying your organization’s working capital allows you to look at where your money is coming from and where it’s going. Thus, you can formulate plans to solve productivity issues to increase the business’ cash flow.
Conclusion
A company’s net working capital helps meet its short-term goals, which might lead to long-term solutions. Calculating the working capital and understanding its importance allows entrepreneurs to develop actionable strategies and implement projects based on their spending power.
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