Category: Tips and Tools

Running a business and a busy family can be a bit hectic. Trying to get everyone up, dressed and off to school in time for you to dash to work is no mean feat, but there are a few things you can do to make life a little bit easier for yourself.

Navigating your way through all the potential pitfalls of the business world takes time, agility and the ability to learn fast. Luckily you are already practised in all of these skills raising your family! Just as you know that an afternoon nap will prevent overtiredness, you can learn simple tricks for organising your business for smooth sailing.

Here’s how.

Buy the Best Software

You could try to keep track of your business yourself, but as you know, juggling lots of information inputs and trying to analyse them all at once is near impossible. Instead try using Enterprise Asset Management Software.

EAM Software will help you to collect and analyse data, produce quarterly reports to track your progress and streamline your business operations to be more efficient and save money! Finding the right software will require a bit of research but once it is up and running, the time you took looking into it will be well spent.

Delegate

When your business is young, handing over the reins to someone else feels risky. You have put everything into getting this far, and even just an hour away makes you feel nervous. Actually, it’s just like handing your baby over to a babysitter for the first time!

Finding the right person to delegate tasks to can be nerve racking to being with, but equally having someone else who understands the running of your business will be a real weight off in the long run. Start small with simple tasks that you are around to monitor before you take the plunge and have a day off. As you give up more responsibilities, it will get easier to do the things you really need to be doing as the business owner and you certainly won’t regret it!

Prioritise

When you have a list as long as your arm, you need to prioritise which tasks to do first, what can wait and what should be delegated. Just as delegating can be difficult, knowing where to focus your attention is a skill worth learning.

Try colour-coding your list using red for the most urgent tasks, orange for the ones with deadlines looming and green for things that can wait. Delegate as much as possible. Once you have a finalised list, work through the reds first, then the oranges and finally the greens. Bear in mind that the colours may change as deadlines loom, so don’t be tempted to ignore those greens and oranges until they turn red! Tackle them with plenty of time to spare.

Being a parent and a business owner is a lot of hard work but the rewards for both pursuits are amazing and make it all worthwhile. Hopefully with these three tips, you will be able to manage your work/life balance a bit more effectively and reduce your stress. You might even find time for a holiday!

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Being a mum and a working woman is one of the most challenging jobs in life. As a woman, being in the workplace is full of discrimination barriers which need hurdling. And, opting to start a family does mean putting your career on the backburner. Sure, maternity leave allows women to come back, but when they do they are light years behind the men. So, are there any advantages for mums in the workplace? Yes, there are because being a parent is a full-time job. As with all roles, the skills are transferable.

Here are the parenting traits which relate to any and every career.

Visualising Ahead

As soon as a mum leaves the house, anything can go wrong. Kids who are potty training may need to find an emergency bathroom, or a screaming fit may occur out of nowhere. Parents have to be able to negate these issues as and when they happen, or else it could turn into a scene. To make sure a child doesn’t scream the supermarket down, mums often think about the problems beforehand. For a business, visualisation is essential as projects never go smoothly. If you can think ahead, you can negate the potential pitfalls in advance and save time and money.

Party Planning

Kids seem to have birthdays more than once a year! For some reason, there is always a party on the horizon that needs arranging. From cake to drink and party games, parents are adept in the art of pulling off an event. It may seem like an abstract skill, yet plenty of businesses use corporate functions to generate leads. At an event company, you will be able to take your skills and scale them up for the bigger stage. Organisation, of course, is the main attribute, but so is creating a guest list, inviting the right people, and playing politics.

Problem Solving

Without a doubt the most significant skill a parent has in the corporate world is problem-solving. Kids can’t act for themselves because they are children. As a result, they need their parents to come up with quick fixes. Better yet, they need their mums to find solutions which are suitable. Yes, kids aren’t just demanding but quality-driven too! Whether it’s finding a tasty snack or a way to pass the time, mums know all the tricks. Businesses need people who can think on their feet because they haven’t got time to hold a worker’s hand.

Listening

Young people don’t open up often, so, when they do, mums have to simmer down. Not only that, but a savvy mum asks open-ended questions which encourages their child to open up further. You clever son of a gun! To a business, listening is essential for a variety of reasons. Firstly, every role revolves around a boss’s instructions. Anyone who can’t listen, then, can’t do their job. Secondly, customers will have queries and complaints. Being able to pinpoint their frustration is vital to be able to find a solution.

Being a mother and having a career is difficult, but there are advantages.

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The best way to think about a business is as a gigantic mechanism, something like an old clock with various interlocking gears all turning perfectly in tandem in order to keep the whole thing ticking. As long as each and every gear is working, things are going to get along just fine. But as soon as one gear stops working, the whole thing can inevitably grind to a halt. Of course, some gears are going to be more important than others, and few are more important than IT. While it’s been somewhat important in business for more than twenty years, it’s now an indispensable part of just about any business in the modern age. If something is wrong with your IT, it can sink your business entirely. In order to keep that from happening, here are a few ways that you can make sure that your IT is always an asset that keeps your business ticking away like clockwork.

Outsourcing

One of the best ways to make sure that your IT is always working is to take it out of your hands entirely. By putting it in the hands of an IT consultancy such as Prosyn then you’re able to rest easy knowing that it’s well taken care of. An outside company can not only take the responsibility of your IT away, allowing you to focus on other things, but it can also ensure that the people working on it have exactly the kind of up to date expertise that it really needs.   

Specific training

Of course, there are always going to ways in which your employees and yourself need to interact with your IT on a daily basis. As much as you might like you, you can’t have someone else deal with every part of your business. Because of that, you need to make sure that you’re providing adequate and specific training to each and every member of your staff. If you don’t then mistakes are going to end up being made and trying to go back and fix those kinds of things often takes up a lot more time, resources, and money than if you had taken the time to train your employees properly in the first place.

Streamlining

One bad habit that far too many business owners end up getting into is that they try to use as many new pieces of technology as possible in a misguided attempt to stay ahead of the competition. The reality is that you should only have the IT in place that your business really needs. Anything else is going to be a waste of time at best, and the cause of some serious problems at worse. Carefully assess the needs of your business and make sure that you’re only using IT that will actually help improve your business on a day to day level. Streamlining really is the key to any successful business.

Of course, this isn’t to say that IT is the only part of your business that you should pay attention to. As with the metaphor of the clock, if each and every gear isn’t working properly, then there’s a chance that the whole thing could end up falling down entirely.

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Promotional marketing is an excellent technique for positioning your brand, and gaining greater brand recognition. It’s a series of products, or actions, that have a common characteristic, for example, the name of the company, visual aspects, specific colours, etc. that help establish a relationship between your brand and customers.

That something extra

The purpose is to achieve greater visibility for a product or brand, through additional incentives. The ultimate objective is to drive a greater volume of sales in the specific targeted niche. What the public perceives is the product and the added “promotional plus” resulting in a product with added valued, which, in many cases, can become a true motivator in the purchase decision-making process.

The recipe

In all cases, the key is to establish a short-term concept based on the promotion. It should be time-limited otherwise the public will perceive it as just one more (permanent) characteristic of the product, therefore detracting from the intended stimulus of the promotion. It’s a simple concept: a product + promotional plus + time-limited offer.

You need to consider the kind of ‘plus’ incentive that you want to use to support your branding campaign. The additional stimulus should be chosen according to your product, or offer, and the target audience. You should carefully research the attitudes of your intended audience, and consider the positioning of your brand, the incentive chosen, the means to communicate the promotion, and the mechanism by which consumers will access it.

Developing a strategy

The various promotional activities should follow a planned strategy, and be part of your company’s marketing and communication plan. Simply using promotional merchandise without the correct planning could produce little effect, or even adverse results. A comprehensive strategy is essential.

The starting point should be the analysis of your business intelligence data regarding the market, customers, etc. This will allow you to identify the most appropriate strategy, and thus a successful approach. Secondly, you must know the target audience, and consolidate the specific actions that will attract attention to your brand, either to make it known, or to contribute to greater customer loyalty.

This kind of marketing offers a wide range of possibilities and ways for you to make your brand unforgettable. You can organise a promotion with a gift, which can be obtained in different ways, instant POS delivery, accumulation of points, labels, participation in contests, games, etc. It will basically depend on the product that you want to give, the audience, and the strategy which will be implemented. However, overall, the primary aim should be to try and reach the greatest number of customers, and potential new customers possible within the target audience.

Are you ready to make your brand more visible?

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image: geralt

As a business person, you’re probably used to being independent; you probably think that if you want something to be done right, you need to do it yourself, as the old saying goes. However, if you actually want to see your family from time to time, you simply can’t do it all, and anyway, collaboration is a fantastic tool for helping businesses grow.

Check out these very important reasons why, as a business owner, you need to start collaborating more:

Access to Expertise

I’m sure you’re a capable, intelligent individual, but that doesn’t mean that you’re great at everything. Sure, you might be able to do a passable job of setting up your server, for example, but can you do it as well as Mustard IT? Probably not. Although collaborating with another company or service provider might cost you a  little extra upfront, it will give you access to a greater level of expertise, which means your business will be better set up than many others, and you’ll probably save money by not having to do various fixes over the long-term, too.

Inspiration

When you spend time with other entrepreneurs, experts and business people, you learn more about their processes; how they do their work and what drives them forward. This can inspire you to try out new ideas and improved techniques in your own business, which will stop you from stagnating and may just help you hit upon that one big idea that propels your business further than you ever imagined possible.

Build a Stronger Network

When you collaborate with others on various projects, you meet new people (obviously), and these people become part of your network. You can then leverage those contacts to forge new relationships with people you may previously never have had access to, and as I’m sure you know, the more people you’re acquainted with in the world of business, the more opportunities are available to you.

You Learn New Skills

Collaborating with others is also a great way to boost your own education. Everyone has at least one skill to teach or one vital piece of wisdom to impart, so if you isolate yourself and try to be a lone wolf, imagine all of the things you’ll miss out on!

You Can Make Savings

It might seem counterintuitive to say that hiring a freelancer to help you with your graphic design or a content writer to help you whip your website into shape could save you money, but it really can because, not only will it free up some of your time (which you can use to grow your business in other ways) but you’ll get a more professional job that will bring the money in.

It’ll Solve Your Problem

If you’ve been struggling to come up with a piece of software that will automate your print process, or you’re having a hard time working out the one design flaw in your otherwise perfect product, then obviously, collaborating with a third party could be just the thing you need to iron out the wrinkles and go on to make more money.

The bottom line: collaboration rocks.