Business Plus Baby

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The need to say yes to going green is greater than ever, and it shouldn’t only influence your personal life. Turning your business into a more eco-friendly operation doesn’t only bring personal satisfaction. It can additionally inspire your team of employees and give clients an incentive to choose your company over its competitors.   

 Gaining the desire to enhance the efficiency of the operation is one thing, but actively doing it is another altogether. Here are five simple tricks that should work wonders for the operation and brand.

• Reduce the need for business travel by improving communication. Modern businesses can be split over several locations while you may also do deals with clients from over the world. Video conferencing facilities can provide a great alternative to meeting in person. Not only will you save time and money, but you’ll also save the planet. As for internal communications, cloud computing and team messaging smartphone Apps are the answer.

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• Stop printing so many marketing materials, and take your advertising ventures online. Digital campaigns can reach far wider audiences, meaning that you’ll gain far more revenue on a smaller budget. Meanwhile, wasted digital impressions cause less damage to your pocket than wasted printed flyers. Better still, they won’t cause any harm to the planet. When combined with the fact it’s easier to edit a digital ad, there is no reason to ignore this realm any longer. 
• Utilise old materials, especially in the workplace. Second hand office desks are just as useful as new ones, and stop perfectly fine products being trashed. Liquidation items can also help your business become greener while saving a lot of money in the process. Aside from making the company greener, you’ll be helping the old owners reduce their carbon footprint. Better still, you can keep the cycle going when it comes to replacing them in future years too. 
• Choose greener packaging and distribution services. Eco-friendly packaging sends a clear message to customers, which can be another selling point for the company. However, the method in which those items reach their destination is equally important and should not be forgotten for a second. If nothing else, going the extra mile in this step will actively encourage a healthier mindset. In turn, that will promote positive moves in the other aspects of the operation. 
• Reduce your carbon footprint with an improved approach to energy consumption. Solar panels are the obvious one, but there are plenty of ways to save water, electricity, and gas. The right office windows, for example, can work wonders for the temperature. On a similar note, going paperless can have a telling impact on energy as well as paper consumption. LED lighting and smarter usage will also make a noticeable difference. Best of all, your energy bills should fall dramatically.

Going green brings a whole host of benefits for a modern business. As such, entering 2018 without at least starting those transformations simply isn’t an option. Make those changes today, and you’ll be destined for a far brighter tomorrow.

Business events are great promotional tools, for established businesses and for start-ups. Companies large and small use them for a multitude of reasons, including team building, product launches, networking, social functions or conferences.

If you’re contemplating holding your first event, you might be wondering where to start or what to include to make it a success. Here are three vital aspects which, once considered, will give you a good foundation to build on.

1/ Go it Alone or Hire a Professional Organiser?

A business event needs a lot of the same organisation as a private function, with a few extra, specialised features on top depending on the type of event. Most people underestimate the amount of planning and organisation that happens behind the scenes.

First things to consider include:

• Reasons why you’re holding it – these will help you determine the type of people to invite.
• What type and how big your venue should be.
• The what, who, where and when of catering.
• Activities during the event.
• Daytime or evening? One day or running over several days?
• Do you need power – should you hire a generator?
• Health and safety, and insurance.

These points are a starting place, not an exhaustive list. Anyone organising a wedding soon realises the value of wedding planners when it comes to nailing all those small, important details, and it’s the same with events for business. If you’re organising everything yourself rather than hiring a professional organiser, gather a team of helpers and delegate tasks. Arrange regular meetings for updates.

2/ Choosing the Right Venue

The right venue can make or break your business event. Major considerations when deciding on the right venue include:

• Size – can your chosen venue hold all the people you plan on inviting?
• Venue layout and general suitability.
• Parking and transport availability.
• Location convenience if attendees will need overnight accommodation.
• Technical support and venue management.
• Performance areas if these are needed.

When choosing a venue, all the stakeholders’ needs are important, including emergency services, participants, clients, entertainers and performers, or speakers. When you know the facilities you need, visit and inspect several possible venues before making a final choice.

3/ Creating the Right Surroundings

Bearing the previous points in mind, the next step is setting your stage. This is a highly specialised area with many considerations. Not least of those considerations is health and safety, especially when large numbers of people are moving through the venue at the same time.

The type of staging needed will depend on the type of business event:

Seating

• Banquet seating if you’re hosting a formal dinner.
• Theatre seating if your event includes spoken or performed presentations. Tiered seating like this ensures everyone can see the stage.
• Classroom seating if your event is educational or instructional.

A Physical Stage – Considerations include how large a stage you need, what type of lighting and sound, and how will you ensure all cabling is safe. If it’s an outdoor event, would a canopied dome help make the stage the centre of attention and focus?

Catwalks or Poles and Podiums – Are you having a fashion show? If so, you’ll need a catwalk and suitable seating for guests, plus possibly screening or quick-change facilities for models. Modular catwalk systems from professional staging companies provide a variety of sizes and shapes to suit all fashion show needs.

Barriers – Directing people and organising movement flow through a venue is often best achieved through erecting barriers along with appropriate signs. Custom made, purpose built barriers and fences are also useful for cordoning off areas, or indicating queueing directions.

And finally, when organising any event, time is a prime consideration. Think in terms of months rather than weeks for relatively small events. Large corporate events may be a year or more in the planning.

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If you’re an entrepreneur, there’s one thing that you fear more than anything else, and it’s the competition. More often than not, observing what your competitors are introducing to the market and how they choose to interact with their audience is an educational strategy: it teaches you a lot about how to best tackle their weaknesses and transform them into business opportunities for your benefit. However, observation and competition analysis are not always enough. It doesn’t matter how well you think you understand your competitors: when they sell more than you, then there’s still something that you’re doing wrong. How do businesses boost their sale revenues? Here are four strategies that you can try to maximise your business income.

They’re better at selling

The simplest reason why people can manage to make more sales at the end is that their sale team might be better trained or qualified. It’s not only about presenting an award-winning product, but there’s a lot to be said about the soft salesman’s touch. It’s an art to earn a buyer’s trust, and maybe if you’re struggling with it, you should be considering high quality sales training from Impel Dynamic. Sometimes all it takes to improve your sales is to understand the secrets of the trade and the way to turn a stranger into an interested lead in no time.   

They maximise their digital potential

You might have a website, but if you’re not making the most of it, then it’s a waste of money for your business. A lot of entrepreneurs’ approaches are embedded in a traditional marketing strategy, from TV to flyers. Of course, these do work and increase your brand awareness. But at a time where most people turn to the digital sphere to find the solution to their problems, you can’t ignore online presence anymore. Online shopping is a natural and effective behaviour for most users: they prefer the click and buy approach to getting in touch with a company per phone or driving to a shop.

They surf the competitive edge

You may be full of motivation and hard-working. Your services or products may be of high quality, but that doesn’t mean that you’ve got a competitive edge over other businesses. Building a competitive advantage is a matter of creating an experience that your customers won’t find anywhere else. You can decide to maximise the knowledge within your company, especially if you work with a team, or you can target low cost as a competitive advantage. Small companies and freelancers prefer a combination of niche knowledge and excellent customer services.

They’ve got offers you can’t resist

Everyone likes a good offer, and your clients more than anyone else. You can take inspiration from the Amazon Prime Day market boom, or the Black Friday sales. If the offer is appealing, then your clients will be hooked. Grab their attention with an exclusive discount offer; it’s not just cheap it’s also not going to last. You know the kind: Buy now before it’s too late sort of feeling.  

Give your sales a boost with appropriate training, high-quality digital marketing, a competitive edge that will make other businesses turn green with envy, and finally promotions that get your clients buying now! And remember to maintain high standards of customer services; you don’t want to sell more to spread dissatisfaction!

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When you work nine-to-five and pursue a standard career path, the process of entering into a pension plan and saving for your future is largely automated. This is because employers tend to take the lead in the modern age, as they are required to opt you in to workplace schemes and make mandatory contributions.

From my perspective as a business owner, however, creating a viable pension plan and saving towards retirement is an altogether more complicated affair. Not only is it difficult to identify the right type of fund, for example, but it is also exceptionally hard to manage your finances and build wealth effectively.

Starting with the basics: Choosing the right fund

Aside from the daily running of my business, I find that my biggest challenge as an entrepreneur is making concrete financial plans for the future. After all, much of my wealth is tied up in my business venture, represented by assets and holdings rather than cold, hard cash. This makes it exceptionally difficult to separate income from profit, unless you afford yourself a fixed and viable wage as a CEO and categorise yourself as an employee of the business.

While this can free up the necessary funds to make regular pension contributions, the next step is to identify the best possible savings vehicle. In my experience as an entrepreneur, your two main options are a self-invested pension plan (SIPP) and a small self-administered scheme (SSAS), both of which share many of the same features. The latter is distinguished by the fact that only company directors are eligible to open a SSAS, while there is also a clause that enables account holders to withdraw funds and invest them directly into their business.

While this appeals to many, it does not help you to effectively save for your future. Similarly, it also affords you little flexibility, in contrast with SIPPs (which are accessible to everyone and can be sustained regardless of the career paths that you follow in the future). Choosing to invest in a SIPP does not restrict the range of assets that you have access to, either, so you can continue to seek out domestic and international options that form part of a diverse portfolio.

Managing your funds and building wealth

As you build your fund, the next challenge is to effectively manage your finances. Sure, you can take responsibility to some degree by minimising spending and creating an expenditure budget, but higher level financial planning requires expert assistance. You could use Tilney to help conceive and implement long-term financial plans, for example, making allowances for your own objectives and desire to save for your children’s future. By using financial experts in recent years, I have also been able to create a legally binding will and make detailed plans for the distribution of my estate in the event of my passing.

This strategy has afforded me considerable peace of mind, meaning that I can concentrate on running my business and optimising my future pension fund while delegating the management of this capital to professionals. More specifically, I can focus on what I am good at and employ those with knowledge of financial planning to help me achieve my goals.

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