Business Plus Baby

August 1, 2015

Unexpected essentials for your cleaning business

Anyone who thinks that cleaning is just a matter of soap and water and possibly a sponge or mop is mistaken. If you’re running a cleaning business, you will have to include a full inventory of all of the latest cleaning products, as well as a few unexpected items.

Be prepared for anything

Lord Baden Powell instructed the nation’s boy scouts to ‘be prepared’ and anyone who runs a cleaning business will be well aware of this motto. You should always include a pair of gloves from Brosch Direct in order to protect your hands. Every cleaning job is different and until you actually arrive at your client’s house or business, you don’t know what type of nasties you’ll be expected to eradicate. Keep yourself protected and stay healthy.

Cleaning clocks – take a rope

Last year the iconic timepiece Big Ben was treated to a deep clean. The job demanded care and precision and the expertise of an abseiling team in order to carry out the work efficiently. Of course this was a specialist contract but an article in The Daily Mail highlighted the importance for any cleaning company to think in a lateral way. Buckets and sponges were also very much in evidence for this particular contract.

Take the meat tenderiser

There are, of course, some stains that modern cleaning products just can’t remove.
If you run a cleaning business you can’t ever tell a client that a stain has defeated you. This is the time to employ some imagination. Meat tenderiser is fantastic at removing some difficult stains. It’s also cheap which is another bonus.

Protein based stains are often tricky to remove and this is where meat tenderiser comes into its own. Simply go into your local supermarket and invest in this wonderful product. Meat tenderiser breaks down the protein in meat, hence its name. The product needs to be made into a paste and then placed on the offending stain. After about five minute, rinse off the paste and you’ll find that the stain will have disappeared.

Cleaning plants

You will always anticipate that you’ll have to clean carpets, furniture and other basic items, but don’t forget that house plants also require maintenance. There’s nothing that makes a room or house look shabby than a dusty plant. According to The Huffington Post you only need to give the leaves a gentle wash with some water in order to remove bacteria and dust. You may find it helpful to place larger plants in the shower!

Alternative uses for your daily bread

A post on the blog Larger Family Life suggests that bread is a wonderful resource for removing dust and minor stains. You may get some strange looks from your employer, but once the stains are removed they won’t really care how you removed them.

If you already run a cleaning business you’ll know all about ingenuity and imagination. These attributes are essential in all aspects of life, especially when confronted by a large and seemingly insurmountable stain.

July 29, 2015

Freelancing – the best way to get started as a work at home mum?

Were the first ideas you had about being a mum with a business all about inventing a product or maybe a party plan?

If so it’s not that surprising because newspapers and websites love the ‘mum invents new product’ story and party planners are actively out there recruiting. For these reasons, these business types tend to pop up on our radar faster than other possibilities.

But there are plenty of mums quietly freelancing away too. Some pick up a few odd jobs in nap-times, others turn it into full-time self-employment. I was a freelance trainer for about 6 years in my LBK (life before kids) and I picked up a few freelance jobs when my kids were tiny, too. But my main focus has been on creating information products and promoting other people’s products as an affiliate.

Just lately a few things have happened, though. My kids have got a little older so I’m no longer working in a half-hour I can grab here and there (except for now when it’s the summer holidays), I’ve made a lot more video training and enjoyed it and I miss working together with a client to produce a satisfying piece of work. Yes, information products can get a bit lonely and isolating.

So I’ve decided to dip my toe in the freelancing world once more and I’ve posted my first ‘hourlie’ on People Per Hour. The idea of an hourlie is that it’s a short, well-defined job that doesn’t cost too much. It gives a clients a low-risk taster your services, which is great of you’re just starting out.

Tons of the services people search for on People Per hour can be done from home, such as writing, design and admin. I’m offering my voice-over services!

I’ve found the signing-up process is very straightforward, so it’s definitely worth a go (click here for more info).

(Photo – me with my tablet – we’re an Android family!)

July 28, 2015

How To Achieve Business Success Through Project Management

Whether it’s one-off campaigns, the launch of new products or services or changing the way you do an existing function, any business will have to deliver projects.

Success is important in any of those scenarios and to achieve that you need effective project management. Here’s our guide to how this can help your business to thrive…

Clarity

Whatever your project is, it needs to be clearly defined. You need to understand precisely what it is you hope to achieve, when you need to have done it by and set out the way you can measure the success of the project.

Personnel

A good project manager is worth their weight in gold. This role has probably been given a bad press by the television show The Apprentice, with the project managers being the people who more often than not carry the can for their team’s failings.

Yet, in real life, these people are the lynchpins or your strategy – sitting at the heart of the project and, ultimately, ensuring the goal is achieved. You need to find someone who understands what you want, has the right skillset to achieve that, has a good track record, is well-organised and analytical.

You are trusting this person with a key role, but that doesn’t absolve you of any further responsibility – it’s your job to liaise properly with this person and ensure they get the support to deliver what they need to do.

Specialist

A project manager will need to identify what skills a business possesses and which it lacks when it comes to delivering on a particular task. So, whatever you need – be it abrasive recovery systems, legal advice or even translation of foreign transactions – the project management process should identify these at the earliest possible opportunity and go about securing the most cost effective options for these.

Budget

Speaking of being cost effective, one of the key functions of the project management process should be to keep a close eye on the money involved and ensure the budget is being stuck to. Your business will suffer if you allow costs to spiral; the project itself might end up being incomplete if the coffers run dry. Your project manager should keep a regular check on every piece of expenditure and monitor this like a hawk.

Analysis

Monitoring the money is crucial, but the project management process is about analysing every element of the scheme. That means regularly reflecting on what is going well and what isn’t and measuring progress against that set out in the plan. By never letting matters drift so they get behind, you’ll be on track for an efficient delivery of your project.

Flexibility

This analysis is not about forcing your project to be micro-managed within an inch of its life – far from it. While it’s important to have a plan, it’s also important that, if things don’t work, you’re able to be flexible and adapt to circumstances that arrive during the delivery phase.

July 27, 2015

Business Innovation: Who’s On Top In 2015?

“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”

Those wise words from the late Steve Jobs sum up why businesses are always striving to innovate. By doing so they are able to lead and stay ahead of their competitors and, in turn, by being at the head of the pack they are seen as a brand worth investing in and doing business with.

So who is proving their strength when it comes to innovation in 2015, and how is this impacting on the business world?

Microsoft

It’s a big year for Microsoft, not least because Windows 10 is upon us. The new operating system will undoubtedly be important for businesses and consumers alike – with neat new tools to utilise – but the bigger game changer might well come with the accompanying release of the Hololens.

This device might seem like a bit of fun for the end user – the chance to play with holograms as if you’re in your own personal Star Wars film, with hand gestures, voice control and gaze helping to control the virtual world your visor projects onto the world in front of you. Yet actually this could be the business innovation of 2015.

The device will actually allow the user to pop it on, ring an expert and show the person at the other end what is in front of them. The expert could then annotate that view and point the user in the right direction – a powerful use that could be transformative in a host of industries. It could certainly help to assist the design, manufacture and installation of high tech specialist equipment so that a customer purchasing paint spray booths from Airblast Eurospray could call on one of the firm’s experts to ensure the machinery and materials were being correctly handled.

Apple Continue reading “Business Innovation: Who’s On Top In 2015?”

July 24, 2015

How to get (and keep) your first ‘real’ job

No matter what stage you are in life, whether you are a recent college graduate, have just finished high school or have been searching for a suitable job for a while now, bagging your first ‘real’ job is quite an achievement. If you find that you are struggling to find employment, there are ways in which you can better prepare yourself to ensure that you not only get a job, but that you are able to keep it. Follow these tips and you can soon schedule a night of celebration. Continue reading “How to get (and keep) your first ‘real’ job”