Posts

8 Super Tips to Grow Your Small Business Today

/in /by

StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Grow your Business|8 Super Tips to Grow Your Small Business TodayIf you’re a small business owner, you probably understand that it takes proper planning, flexibility, and excellent organizational skills to succeed. Today’s business environment is competitive, and your company needs to stand out from the crowd. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports 20% of startups collapse in the first year of their operations. Fortunately, if you’re looking to grow your business, this guide got you covered. Here are great tips you can use to achieve your desired goals.

Take Advantage of Modern Technology

If you’re not using the available technological tools in your business, you could be missing a lot. Technology can enhance your business operations while reducing the effort you may need to manage it. You can do this by utilizing various tools ranging from spreadsheet to logo maker.

The good news is you may not require a lot of money to invest in many of these advancements, but you’ll gain considerably by incorporating them into your business. Before you utilize such tools in your organization, it’s essential to ensure you familiarize yourself first.

You don’t want to work with something you’re unsure of because sometimes it can be a recipe for trouble. That’s why you should test any technology tool with an experienced IT company before integrating it into your business to know if it can match your day-to-day activities.

Set Attainable Goals

Setting achievable goals should be part of your business. If you don’t set goals for your enterprise, you need to start it today. Creating business goals shouldn’t be daunting. One of the best ideas you may want to consider is making them attainable but challenging to achieve. This enables you to push yourself more.

If you set goals that you can quickly achieve, your business may appear to do well, but this may not translate to long-term success. That’s why you should make your objectives broad and measurable. What things can you do to improve your business’s success? If you’re unsure of how you can set attainable and measurable goals for your business, here are a few ideas you may consider:

  • Enhancing employee retention
  • Improving your enterprise’s online ratings
  • Reducing operation cost
  • Boosting sales
  • Attracting more clients to your business

Consider Work-Life Balance

While the dream for many entrepreneurs is to grow their businesses and make more profits, it’s advisable to focus on other areas of life. Proper relaxation is a critical part of business success, and you should set time for it even if you’re a workaholic.

Unfortunately, some people may work too much and forget to take a break. This can lead to stress and burnout, and soon you won’t accomplish the required tasks. If stress continues to build up, you may succumb to the pressure and fail to achieve your objectives.

You need to focus on either direction and don’t swing too far. For example, if you’re doing well with your company, maintain the pace instead of slowing down and relaxing. This will ensure a steady growth curve for your enterprise and avoid unpleasant experiences if things don’t work as per your wishes.


Think of Innovative Ideas for Your Enterprise

If you’re looking to enhance your business, you need to be creative and develop innovative ideas, as this may help you implement the necessary measures and lead to improved results. While not all ideas can be successful, some changes could work best for your company. The bottom line is to keep thinking of things you need to implement to achieve your objectives.

Every successful entrepreneur may tell you it’s vital to take measured risks and accept the results. If you’re looking to change your niche’s status quo, don’t be afraid to experiment and see the possible outcomes. Here are some ideas you can fiddle with:

  • Strategic pricing
  • Partnering with other enterprises
  • Adding or removing some products or services
  • Marketing efforts

Enhance Your Hiring Process

Whether your firm is small or big, improving your hiring process is something you don’t want to underestimate. You can look for ways to get the most talented employees into your company. If you’re not currently hiring, prepare for the issues you may need to handle when the time comes. Find ways you can improve how you hire your employees.

This means you should always focus on the next step, allowing the process to be systematic for easy following. Sometimes you may face challenges that need your particular intervention. However, when hiring employees, you may not require new methodologies. You can take advantage of the available tools to hire the best talent in your industry.

Nurture Your Customers and Look for More Prospects

Every business needs to retain customers and attract more to boost sales. That’s why you should design strategies to nurture existing clients. For example, you can connect with them in various ways, including offering information about upcoming promotions and sending e-newsletters with valuable information.

You also want to generate leads and convert them to reliable clients. Look for ways you can find such opportunities and continue building your customer base. Ensure you balance between maintaining existing clients and attracting new ones.


Use Social Media

Many enterprises are utilizing these platforms to advertise their offers. The powerful tool can help you interact with your potential customers and comprehend what they need. Through social media, you can spot current market trends and what clients are talking about your brand. This helps you to make better decisions.

Provide Excellent Customer Service

Some businesses may focus on making more profits and forget to tackle clients’ needs. However, modern customers are looking to work with companies that can solve their most pressing problems. Offering exceptional services gives clients the best experience, and they can refer to other individuals leading to the growth of your network.

The Bottom Line

If you’re looking to grow your small business, you need to understand what it may take to do this. You can use these valuable tips as a checklist to help you attain your enterprise’s objectives. What other tips do you think can lead to small businesses’ growth?

Top 7 Tips to Ensure Employee Satisfaction in Your Real Estate Brokerage

/in /by

StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Employee Satisfaction|Top 7 Tips to Ensure Employee Satisfaction in Your Real Estate BrokerageIf you want to attract the best of the best real estate agents to your brokerage, it’s crucial to ensure employee satisfaction. Indeed, even the best recruitment strategies will fail if you people keep leaving your brokerage every few months. With a high turnover rate, a prospective candidate might think that you aren’t taking good care of your people. Ultimately, this affects your reputation and can make people hesitant to apply.

In short, a good recruitment strategy must include good employee satisfaction and retention plans as well. For those in need of ideas to bolster real estate recruitment, getbrokerkit.com can help. Meanwhile, if you need tips to ensure employee satisfaction, here are just a few:

Listen to Their Concerns

Before you can solve a problem, you need to know what it is. The best way to find out is to go straight to those who are experiencing them: your employees. Ask them to identify their concerns and be as detailed as possible. This way, you can address the issues completely and prevent them from recurring. If you need help formulating questions, there are different kinds of survey software that can help in this regard.

It’s also ideal to have everyone rate their overall satisfaction with their jobs, even those in management and senior positions. In addition, ask them to provide suggestions that can help improve their rating. Then, make a reasonable effort to make these things happen.

Keep Everyone Updated

Communication is a two-way street. In the same way that you listen to your employees, you should also take the time to keep everyone updated about what’s happening in the brokerage. For example, if there’s an economic crisis, your people would appreciate knowing about your response plan. Even if the status quo won’t be affected, hearing from the higher-ups in the brokerage can provide a measure of peace of mind.

The bottomline here is to provide regular company updates. It doesn’t even have to be an all-hands meeting every single time. An email containing the latest news about the company—whether it’s good or bad—can do a lot in terms of transparency.

Develop a Recognition System

People want to be appreciated for their hard work. If your real estate agents exceed their targets or meet them before the deadline, find a way to recognize and reward the hard work. The same goes for every other employee in your brokerage who goes above and beyond their tasks. This will help boost morale and confidence, which in turn has a direct effect on productivity and job satisfaction.

Remember that recognition can come in many forms. You can award cash bonuses, vacation tickets, and other gifts to your high-performing employees if you have the budget for it. Still, even a genuine message of appreciation can mean a lot to someone.

Encourage Socialization

One of the most important components of happiness is human interaction. Indeed, even introverts need to socialize to help dispel bouts of loneliness and feelings of isolation.

In the workplace, you can encourage socialization through small celebrations. It could be for birthdays, a company milestone, or even a “just because” reason. It’s also a good idea to provide areas where your people can gather to take breaks and engage in conversation.

Outside the office, consider activities such as a mini sports fest or a volunteer program in the community. These can help promote camaraderie and a sense of belonging. Volunteering, in particular, can foster a sense of fulfillment and even boost your brokerage’s positive reputation.

Give Them Opportunities to Use Their Skills

For greater engagement, provide opportunities in which your employees can use their skills and interests. For example, if you have someone in your team who is passionate about tabletop games, why not hold a game night with them as the game master?

Remember that your employees have hobbies and activities outside work. Show your support for these endeavors and see how much happier they can be in your brokerage!

Help Them Improve

When your employees are equipped with all the right skills, they can do their jobs more efficiently. This is a win-win situation for the brokerage (which will experience a boost in earnings) and your employees (who will be happier and more satisfied). Continuous learning can also help prevent feelings of being stuck. Last but not the least, employees will also be more inclined to stay loyal to a company that’s concerned not just with profits but also with people development.

Promote Health and Wellness

Here’s a fact: healthy employees are happy employees. Real estate agents may often be on the go and are thus not as prone to a sedentary office lifestyle, but what about their mental and emotional health? In addition, you still have other employees in the office that you need to think about.

Fortunately, there are simple solutions that can help you promote health and wellness in the office. You can allocate 30 minutes a day for “deskcercise,” or perhaps you can sponsor the gym memberships of your employees. If you can, provide access to healthy meals and snacks. Paid sick days and vacation days can also go a long way in preventing stress.

Remember that if your current employees aren’t happy with your brokerage, it will be difficult to convince others to join your team. Meanwhile, if your employees are satisfied and feel valued, it will be easier to attract the cream of the crop.
Keep these tips in mind to ensure employee satisfaction and boost your brokerage’s recruitment efforts!

5 Ways You Can Support Your Employee’s Mental Health

/in /by

StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Mental Health|5 Ways You Can Support Your Employee's Mental HealthIt’s so important for any business owner that they have employees who are coming to work every day feeling good about the work they are doing. The people working for you aren’t just your employees; they’re people, and they have lives outside of your business to run. Supporting the mental health of your employees should be one of the most important considerations when you are thinking about the best ways to manage your staff. The better you can support people, the more they will be willing to stay with you and be loyal to your brand.

Mental health isn’t a joke, and whether you are considering asking your human resources team to put a plan together to ensure your employees are happy, or you want to bring on Peter Sandhill for life coaching purposes for each member of the team, you need to know how to do this. Supporting your employee’s mental health is going to make a big difference to their performance, and your profitability and reputation as a result. So, with this in mind, here are some of the most important ways that you can support employee mental health at work.

  1. Ask. The best way to support your staff is to ask what they need. What one member of staff will need wll differ from another, and the more you understand about the people working for you, the better. If you can be candid with your staff and help them to better understand what you can offer, the happier they will be. People who work for you should be able to feel as if they can come to you for help and advice, and if you ask them what they will need the most, they’ll give you all the answers and pathways to help them that you need.
  2. Resources. Identifying the local resources that you can utilize to ensure that you support the mental health of others is important. If you offer your employees health insurance, make sure that it covers counseling or mental health support in their local area. You can even offer duvet days in the workplace. These are three or four days in the year – paid – that your staff can take at any time, no questions asked. These days are on offer as they need them, and it’s often the lifeline people need to know that they have your support.
  3. Self Care. Policies in the workplace that include self-care should be open to your employees to learn about. Encourage your staff to get away from their desks to eat and make sure that no one touches work on the weekends. If you do things like this, people are going to be more inclined to feel happier at work as they know that they have you supporting them.
  4. Workloads. It’s important that – as an employer – you stay on top of how much work your employees are actually doing. This means ensuring that you are monitoring when they are doing too much, rather than too little. When your employees are overloaded, they don’t work well. It’s not a good idea to give your team too much work, as all that will do is bury them in a load of stress that they can’t get back out of.Create Culture. You want everyone in your business to feel safe, able to ask questions, able to discuss issues and feel safe. Every single business is different, so work out what will work for your business and go from there!

3 Design Tips for a More Productive Office Space

/in /by

StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Office Space|3 Design Tips for a More Productive Office SpaceWhen you are the owner of a small business, one of your top priorities is to help your employees be as productive as possible. There are many ways in which this can be accomplished. You might need to adjust your management style to help your workers be more productive throughout the day, or you might need to invest in new equipment and software geared towards increasing productivity.

You can help your employees be more productive that might not have occurred to you is to re-design your office space a bit. The layout, look, and overall feel of an office all play heavily into how productive a person can be when they are at work. An outdated and dingy office space will not be encouraging or functional enough to allow your employees to be as productive as possible.

If you are looking to improve your workers’ productivity and would like to start with the design of your offices, here are a few tips that can go a long way to helping you reach your goals.

1. Make Things Brighter

The first thing you will want to evaluate when you are re-designing your offices for maximum productivity is the amount of light in the space. If you are still working with outdated and depressing fluorescent lighting, then it is probably time for an upgrade.

The best thing that you can do is bring in as much natural light as possible. You will be surprised at the uptick in your employees’ mood when they can experience more natural light throughout the day. More energy, improved attitudes, and more can all be brought about with natural light.

Where traditional windows on walls are not an option, skylights are worth considering. By installing flat roof lights, you can reap all the benefits of natural light.

2. Incorporate Color

If your offices have maintained the same dull shade of white that they always have, it is time to incorporate some color. There are some colors that are proven to improve productivity levels when incorporated in the right way.

Colors that are more on the natural side of things like blues and greens can help you and your workers to feel more focused while on the job. Warmer hues are linked to increased creativity and intensity in the workplace.

3. Bring in a Bit of Nature

One rather simple thing that you can do to create an office design that is geared towards productivity is bringing in some plants. Not only can plants brighten up a space instantly, but there are several that can contribute to an overall improvement in the air quality of your offices, which is known to boost both mood and productivity in general.

Furthermore, when you use the right plants correctly, they can even help reduce noise throughout the office by acting as a natural sound barrier. Any clients or customers that enter your offices will also feel more comfortable in such a space.

Achieving Happiness in the Workplace with these 3 Steps

/in /by

StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Happiness in the Workplace|Achieving Happiness in the Workplace with these 3 StepsHappiness in the workplace might sound like a pipe dream to many, if we are honest, but it does not have to be all doom and gloom, especially if you are just in a rut.

When it comes to work, there are some things that are just not within our control. This includes dealing with difficult clients, staff shortages or disagreements, or sometimes you are just having a bad day.

If you are working in a toxic workplace, then use these steps as best as you can before you can move on, but for those who are just finding things a little boring or lacking at the moment, these steps should help you get into a happier headspace so you can face the day head-on.

What is Happiness in the Workplace?

Happiness in the workplace can be characterized in a few ways, though some factors will, of course, be subjective to each employee.

Ideally, for an employee to be happy, they will need to enjoy the tasks that are assigned to them, especially if they are the main part of their job role. They will need to feel comfortable around the people they are working with, including being respected and valued as the bare minimum. Have the chance to improve skills and gain new skills at work so the job does not become stagnant and they can progress. Have a decent salary or wage that can cover their basic needs and allow them to live comfortably and more stress-free. Finally, they have their hard work and contributions to the role, and the company acknowledged.

Be Mindful and Meditate

You do not have to sit cross-legged on the staff breakroom floor to get a piece of zen – in fact; we actively advise against that unless it has been mopped. Being mindful and meditating is much about finding a quiet or happy space in your head and vacating there for a few minutes to take a few deep breaths. You do not even need to leave your seat if you need a moment’s peace where you are – Just find something small to focus on, such as typing, listening to the sounds, and paying attention to the feel of the keys. This can give your mind a rest.

Rewards Go a Long Way

If you are a business manager reading this piece on a quest to find out how you can help your employees become happier, then not only focus on making the workplace a relaxing and comfortable space but also incorporate some treats and rewards into the mix too, to let your employees know they are valued. This can range from a personal touch to something such as fun office merch. But make sure to choose your products from a quality company such as anthembranding.com.

Value Yourself

It can be particularly easy to forget to value ourselves if we always wait for praise from others. If you work somewhere that is particularly underwhelming when it comes to acknowledgment and praise, do not forget to remind yourself of everything you have done, who you are, and how much you bring to the table.