Business Plus Baby

Building your own small business is no mean feat. When it comes to making a success of yourself and being able to forge your own unique career, there are so many different elements to bring together and different methods you can use to build your empire.

One of the parts of a new business which you might not think about right away is known as compliance. This is the legal stuff and the regulations which are needed to ensure you are conducting your business in a safe and legal way. Today we are going to take a look at a few of the things you need to bring to your company this year for compliance.

Code of conduct

From the moment you hire your first employee, you will need to have a code of conduct in place for them to follow in the workplace. A code of conduct is a way of making sure that your employees behave in a professional manner around the office and that they are reliable and trusted. It is important when making a code of conduct that you outline what employees can and cannot do, so that if someone ever breaks the rules you can point them to this and show them what they have done wrong.

Emergency procedure

Although it is a rare event and it is unlikely to ever happen in the workplace, fires are dangerous. It is important that from day one you have marked our a fire exit to escape the building, and that you have the ability to exit safely and count the heads of people in your office safely. Be sure to also place the procedure and a fire extinguisher in an easily accessible place.

KYC

When it comes to compliance for a business, it is not only others that you aim to protect. If you deal with clients every day and if you are in the financial sector, a KYC Check can be essential. Know Your Customer is a Check which will be done on any new client who is either from a high risk country or form an unknown source. It will ensure that their financial history, criminal history and everything else is safe and sound. It will allow you as a business to deal with a client safe in the knowledge that they won’t do something stupid or not be able to pay you back.

Privacy policy

Every man and his dog has a website these days, and when we have a website it is important for us to have a privacy policy. A privacy policy will outline how your company will use client data, what you can and can’t do, and how long you will keep their data on record. It is something which is essential to have on board because it will allow you to refer back to this if someone ever makes a complaint against you. It will act as a handy protective shield for you and your business.  allow you to refer back to this if someone ever makes a complaint against you. It will act as a handy protective shield for you and your business.

Image: TeroVesalainen

It’s a positive choice to make, to strike out on your own, but did you know that self-employment doesn’t always mean just you are working by yourself? Unless you know all the is to know about the process of self-employment, it’s best to wait before you make the leap into the relative unknown.

Going it alone in your career doesn’t always mean “alone.” For example, contractors may work under the banner of self-employment, but in fact, have a company that employs them as a freelancer. This company, though they won’t pay sickness or holiday pay, would instead run a Construction Industry Scheme to protect their contractors and their taxes. It sounds more complicated than it is, but it’s a perfect example of why you should weigh up the pros and cons of self-employment before you get started.

The Pros

• Choosing when you work is a massive bonus of self-employment. You may be contracted to work certain hours, but if you decide to take time off it isn’t seen as a huge deal because you are only paid for the time that you work anyway. Freelancing allows you better flexibility than working for someone else.
• Not only can you choose when you work, but you can also choose where. If you’re not enjoying working on a specific site, or you don’t want to be cooped up into an office, you don’t have to. As long as you can complete your tasks, you can work where you want.
• There’s the chance that with self-employment you can make more money than you would in a full-time job. You’re only paid for your work completed, and as you don’t get holiday or sickness benefits, your wages can often be more.

The Cons

• One of the most significant downsides to working for yourself is the lack of guarantee of work – or money. You’re not promised a job, which means that you don’t always know where your next income is coming from. Working as and when people need you can make it harder to manage your finances, too.
• Freelancing requires you to be self-motivated, which means that it’s very easy to make less money if you’re feeling particularly lazy one day. It’s much harder to feel secure about your income and your job if you’re worried about the money you’re making.
• There are far fewer employment rights, and you have to organise your own pension plan when you’re self-employed. Some businesses that hire contractors will point you in the right direction of a pension plan that you can use, while others won’t concern themselves with helping you.
• Self-employment, if you’re working at home and alone, can be an isolating experience for those who need the social aspect of the workplace. The fundamental lack of human contact is often hard for people to manage.

Improving your career is essential, and deciding to leap into self-employment isn’t one that everyone makes. Do your research before you do it and you will find it much easier to decide what to do.

Image: Pixabay

You’ve got a home business, and you’re incredibly proud of being able to convert that spare room into a proper office, which you then turned into a bustling center of supply and demand. You’ve got a home office to cheer about, and you’ve got a business running out of it that you never thought you’d manage to juggle alongside your family. You’re a working mum, after all, and now you’ve got to keep an eye on both pots to stop them bubbling over.

But your family are always going to take precedence, of course. And that sometimes leaves your business unchecked for a while – and really, anything could happen during these busy moments. Your website server could go down without your knowledge, losing you all kinds of profit, or an impatient customer could log off of the support chat and just leave you a scathing review!

Which is why it’s important to know about the things out there that can help keep an eye on your company for you. It’s homegrown and homemade, and now you’re looking to invest in its security. So here’s some options for you.

Photo by Djurdjica Boskovic on Unsplash

An Advertising Program

And not just any advertising program, but one you’ve specifically signed up for to give you a good ranking on search engines, and to give you a good presence on blogging websites or Youtube channels. After all, affiliate marketing is often a good way to open yourself up to the masses, and you do so via content that’s going to be on the internet forever. Home businesses often have to rely on passive income, so you should learn how to make good use of this!

If you get your links out there on a site that has a few thousand followers, and plenty of unique visitors per month, then your business is going to get at least 20% of these people heading on over to your website. And that’s where they turn into potential customers. If a website even gets 10,000 viewers per month, that’s still 2000 people who click through to you! Imagine if even 10 to 20 of those people buy something from your site, and with little to no extra effort on your part.

A Bit of Insurance Never Hurt

Insurance is a very good way to make sure you’ve got your eye on the prize, and that you’re never going to lose out on any of your business assets either tanking in value, or being otherwise misappropriated. Say you use your car for business means, and you get rear ended whilst out meeting a client by someone in the traffic behind you – do you have the right insurance to cover that? If you’re looking up Farmers auto insurance, you might just be on your way to redefining your standard policy into commercial insurance terms.

Your home business deserves to have another set of eyes on it, even if only to consistently pad out your income. Make sure you’re keeping these ideas in mind.

When it comes to work, we all need to feel fulfilled. Even if you think that you can start something just for the money. Or you can follow a career path because it’s what you think you should be doing, that’s never the best way to go about things. Because you are going to find that you will always feel restless, unmotivated, or unfulfilled if you’re not doing work that you love. And so, it’s important for you to be able to change that. But, for most people, it’s the knowing how that’s the problem. Whether you work from home, are hoping to soon, or you’re looking for a complete change, you may need to shake things up. Let’s take a look at how.

Offer A New Service

To start with, you’re going to find that offering a new service could help you. If you’re working from home and offering freelance services, why not expand? Perhaps you’ve recently gotten yourself in a rut and you’re doing the same thing over and over again? Then shaking up what you offer could be what you need.

Get New Clients

As a step on from that, it may be the case that you need to think about getting yourself some new clients. Perhaps you’d like to earn more? Or you’d like to work with different kinds of clients? Then this is really what your focus needs to be on. Think about pitching new ideas, contacting new companies, and putting yourself out there more to see what business can drum up. Remember, if you’re not asking for the work, you have no chance of getting it in the first place.

Get A New Job

The next thing that you might want to think about here, is getting a new job. Because it might be the case that you are in need of a new challenge or something interesting to do. So think about looking for new opportunities online, or with a specialist such as Pure Staff Ltd, to see what’s around. Sometimes, you just need to try something different or get a change of scenery and you’ll find that things are looking up for you.

Rebrand Yourself

From here, it may just be that you need to think about shaking up your personal brand. If you’re not looking professional, or you don’t think that you’re really showcasing what you can do, then you need to change that. Work with a designer to come up with a brand that you think looks incredible and represents what you do well.

Learn Something New

Finally, you may find that you actually just want to be able to learn something new. Do you feel as if you cannot progress in your career because you do not know how you can take things to the next level? Or because you feel like you’re not qualified? Then studying at an online university could be exactly what you need to do to shake up your work. By adding a new string to your bow, you could be supercharging your work going forward.

Photo by Mel on Unsplash