2021 marks the 30th anniversary of the empowering song “Sisters are Doin’ It for Themselves.” It was an instant classic and is just as motivating today as it was then. A whole generation of female entrepreneurs is consistently redefining gender stereotypes.
The result? The number of female-owned businesses grew by close to 3,000% between 1972 and 2018. The working world today bears little resemblance to what it did 30 years ago. (more…)
In case you missed it, here was my interview with Jerry Norris of The Fledge on his podcast, EveryDamnDay. It was a great conversation and very comfortable. His podcast is exactly that, talking with entrepreneurs and business owners every single day. Check out more of his interviews here. And subscribe to The Fledge on YouTube and like them on Facebook, they are doing great things over there.
When it comes to being a successful entrepreneur, “knowledge is power.” So, if you’re on a quest to build your knowledge hub, where do you go?
In today’s digital age, the natural inclination might be to listen to a podcast, watch a YouTube video or attend a Ted Talk. Make no mistake, these can be valuable resources for gaining business insights, but they don’t give you the detail that 300+ pages might offer. Yes, If you want exposure to new ideas, modes of thinking, and a library of diverse knowledge, then cracking open a book on the regular is an essential part of being a successful founder. (more…)
The coronavirus is all over the news and basically the only thing on everyone’s minds. Consumers and businesses are in a state of limbo. There are still so many unknowns at this time, everyone is still trying to figure out what to expect.
Today, we’ll focus on a few potential positive and negative outcomes. Overall, negative outcomes will likely fall into two major categories: loss of business and sickness. The travel, tourism, and event industries are the most likely to feel the impact of the virus. Companies in these fields should evaluate their current financial situation and find ways they can quickly save money or cut costs. These companies should also consider thinking about new ways they can serve their customers during this time.
Although it may seem bleak, there is help on the way. Actions are already being taken by lawmakers to protect small businesses, and there are some ways businesses will be positively affected. On March 6th, President Trump signed an $8 billion emergency funding package to support small businesses impacted by the coronavirus. This will make it easier for businesses that need extra capital to get it.
Empathy is the ability to understand the feelings and vulnerabilities of those around you. Having a strong standing team that is able to notice when someone may need help, or have a good sense of direction when navigating a tough conversation is key. As your small business starts to expand and more team members start joining your team, exercising this skill is crucial.
Whether you are putting your time and energy towards building a more positive working environment this year, or you’re wanting to grow your client list, empathy is a great place to start. Research shows that over 60% of employees would take a pay decrease to work on an empathetic team—proving that investing in your employee’s well-being should be a top priority for industry leaders.
On the flip side of this, showing empathy for your employees doesn’t just happen overnight. There are a few small changes to be made for a long term impact on your team.
Empathy has various different pros and cons when it comes to a work environment. There is such a thing as being too empathic, or not showing enough empathy. Educating your team about the different types of empathy and which to portray is a great starting point.
1.Cognitive Empathy
Also known as “perspective-taking,” this type of empathy focuses heavily on understanding one’s emotional state. This empathy type provides a comfortable and flexible company environment to help build your team’s ability, goals, and aspirations for growth.
2. Emotional Empathy
This type of empathy is also known as “effective” or “primitive” empathy as it triggers an emotional feeling on a deeper level, affecting one personally. For instance, if someone got in trouble for a project gone wrong, you might develop fear over losing your job or making the same mistake.
3. Compassionate Empathy
Compassionate empathy is the most actionable of all three. This involves seeing someone go through pain, experiencing it emotionally yourself, resulting in an instant desire to help. For instance, say an account executive isn’t meeting their goals that month and have been put on a performance plan. Compassionate workers will do everything in their power to help direct prospects to that team member, schedule additional educational meetings, or give sales directly to them.
Increasing empathy on your team can have a positive impact on your team’s productivity, in turn, optimize your initial salary investment on your employees. Show your team you care this year with Fundera’s roadmap to practicing proper empathy in your workplace.
Meredith Wood Vice President and Founding Editor at Fundera, Meredith Wood is the founding editor of the Fundera Ledger and a vice president at Fundera. She launched the Fundera Ledger in 2014 and has specialized in financial advice for small business owners for almost a decade. Meredith is frequently sought out for her expertise in small business lending. She is a monthly columnist for AllBusiness, and her advice has appeared in the SBA, SCORE, Yahoo, Amex OPEN Forum, Fox Business, American Banker, Small Business Trends, MyCorporation, Small Biz Daily, StartupNation, and more. Email: meredith@fundera.com.
If your business is experiencing a decrease in foot traffic, there are some different tactics that you can try to increase your customer flow. One of the best ways to go about doing this is by enhancing your storefront so that it catches more people’s attention and entices them to stop inside to shop. These five simple methods for enhancing your storefront can help you increase customer foot traffic.
Add a Window Display
Window displays can spark the curiosity of onlookers and highlight businesses in a more positive light. Your window display can include mannequins, colorful decorations, and visually stunning signage to get people through your doors. It’s also a good idea to include a QR code in your window display that people can scan with their mobile phones to get instant access to your store’s website.
Set Out a Sandwich Board
Even a simple sandwich board can garner more attention for your business from passersby. This sandwich board can be placed directly outside your front door on the sidewalk for easy advertising. Your board can feature written details about any promotions or other aspects of your business that will make people want to become customers. For a custom-made sandwich board, consider ordering one from a reputable plasting moulding manufacturer.
Include Some Flowers
Beautiful flowers around your storefront will give your business a more welcoming feel. Flowers can be especially helpful for brightening people’s moods on cold and dreary days, which will shed even more positive light on your business. Roses, chrysanthemums, and tulips are always good choices. You can also include some ivy or other plants to give your floral display more greenery.
Feature Some Balloons
The sight of balloons can make a person feel like a kid again and make your store look like a more fun place to shop. Business 2 Community suggests using colors like red, blue, green, and yellow, which have been shown to increase sales. You’ll also want to make sure that these balloons stay fully inflated so that they look livelier and remove and replace any balloons that have lost air.
Try a String of Flags
This creative display simply involves a string of individual flags that attaches from a light post to your front door. You can choose to include flags that are of the same color or multiple colors that coincide well with one another. These flags can also feature the name of your business or any special sales or other offers that you’re trying to promote.
Getting more business through your door can be a reality if you take the time to improve your storefront’s appearance. The little bit of extra effort that’s needed to enhance the look of your business might pay off handsomely in the end.
Lizzie Weakley is a freelance writer from Columbus, Ohio. She went to college at The Ohio State University, where she studied communications. In her free time, she enjoys the outdoors and long walks in the park with her three-year-old husky, Snowball.
Today’s companies need to embrace the latest disruptive technologies in order to grow and develop, and at the same time, they’re faced with an increase in customers’ needs and demands. All this means introducing a lot of new business processes, which, in turn, leads to complicating the workflow and increasing the workload. Needless to say, overhead costs grow too, while employees tend to become frustrated and disengaged. If we bear in mind that 85% of the global workforce are either not engaged or are actively disengaged at work, it’s clear that streamlining business processes and simplifying your business organization will increase productivity and boost your profit.
Reduce the number of meetings
While they are important for the flow of information, meetings can be huge time wasters and productivity killers. For example, senior executives spend more than 2 days a week while an organization spends 15% of its time in meetings. When translated into financial resources, it turns out that in the US, companies throw away $25 million a day, or a whopping $37 billion a year, on unnecessary meetings. Instead of running lengthy meetings, use email blasts, or even better, team communication tools to keep everyone informed and on the same page. Another idea is to have some quick, stand-up meetings during which only the employees directly involved in the process or task will be present. This way your employees will be aware that meetings won’t be dragged-out and tedious, which means that they’ll show up and be focused.
Leverage automation
Instead of relying on a mountain of paperwork, automate your document management and go paperless. With the help of professionals, you can implement document management solution that will improve the information flow within your company and have everything in one place where it’s easily accessible. Apart from enabling team and customer collaboration by sharing documents, you’ll also be able to speed up approval processes, prevent jams, and get things done faster by implementing electronic signature tools. Finally, given that your clients are concerned about the privacy of their sensitive information, a reliable cloud-based software will make sure that their data is absolutely protected.
Standardize processes
One of the best ways of simplifying your business is by standardizing recurrent processes. In other words, why wasting time repeating the same or similar task over and over again if you can create templates and save a lot of time? Standardization rests on finding the best way of doing things, that is, implementing the best practices. This results in better productivity and easier process improvement. In addition to that, adopting standard methods for doing things in your company will make it much easier to break in new employees and show them the ropes. Standardization is one of the key pillars of the Toyota Production System also known as Kanban, a management approach which focuses on quality and consistency.
Outsource
The advancement of new technologies has enabled a new way of outsourcing and finding the right people for the job from the global talent pool. This means that you’ve got a chance to hire various professionals who work from home as freelancers even if they don’t live in the same city, country or even on the same continent. Another way to boost the productivity of your business is by introducing a telecommuting option. If you’re having second thoughts, take your cue from Dell, as the IT giant managed to save $12 million on real estate costs only, while some estimates say that the company saved almost $40 million in total by allowing and even encouraging their employees to work from home. Besides reducing the overhead costs, Dell announced that their telecommuting employees were even more productive as they could work from the comfort of their homes and avoid numerous open-office distractions.
Add “no” to your vocabulary
Sometimes entrepreneurs and managers tend to bite off more than they can chew and pile up tasks and responsibilities. It’s only logical to always be looking for business opportunities, but if non-selectively applied, this idea can only lead to wasting your time, energy, and resources on things that aren’t your top priority. Instead of that, it’s essential to assess every situation separately and ask yourself “What’s in it for me and my business?” Learning to say no to things that aren’t exactly profitable can significantly increase your productivity. When it comes to making promises, make sure that you do that only when you know that you can deliver. Now that the multitasking myth has been busted and that research studies have shown that the practice of doing several things at the same time only reduces our productivity, it’s time to come to terms with our own limitations. A day has only 24 hours and the best way to be productive and get things done is to be 100% focused on every individual task.
These straightforward tips can help you simplify your business and boost your and your employees’ productivity.
Emma Worden is a startup funding consultant from Sydney. She enjoys reading and writing on different aspects of entrepreneurship, usually finance and marketing. If you want to read more of her work, you can find it at https://bizzmarkblog.com/
We live in an entrepreneurial world, a world where technology has made it possible for everyone with an interesting idea and a sound growth plan to become a successful leader in the industry, and pave the road to long-term success and solvency. However, even though this opportune environment opens many doors for professional prosperity, that doesn’t mean that the road to entrepreneurial superstardom is not laden with obstacles and possibly crippling challenges.
Assuming that you have already developed an idea for your brand that will catch the eye of the consumer market, now is the time to tend to some crucial steps that will define the future of your company. Here are the key moves every aspiring entrepreneur should make.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that the most successful CEOs and entrepreneurs in the world started out with nothing more but a dream and a broken-down garage, because the fact of the matter is that they would never achieve the success they enjoy today if they didn’t have comprehensive business plan on their side. Because without it, your idea has no foundation and no reason to become anything more than a dream that never saw the light of day.
This exhaustive document should hold within its pages everything you and your team members need to know about your own brand, the market, the competition, and most importantly, the financial management methods needed to keep the ship afloat and even reach solvency. It might not sound like a lot of fun, spending weeks and months crafting such a document, but it will nonetheless be a crucial step that will define your future.
Building your network and client pool
A business that doesn’t have a pool of potential clients in its pocket is bound to have a difficult time getting off the ground, or reaching solvency within the first three years. In fact, you should not only have a pool of potential clients at the ready before you launch, but you should also secure clients for your company well-before you step into the competitive market. Networking and client acquisition is a difficult and time-consuming task, though, even for an established business.
The first thing you need to do is to find adequate help in terms of staff and software that will allow you to automate and outsource menial tasks so that you can focus on acquiring clients for your business. Next, you’ll need to get the word out that an amazing new brand is about to hit the market. You can visit networking events and get potential clients on the line to discuss your business and get them on your side before you launch. When you finally open the doors, you will already have established a stable income stream.
In all the chaos and stress of entrepreneurial life, many aspiring business leaders forget about the most important element of a successful career – their health and longevity. This point cannot be stressed enough: you need to get your personal life in order and ensure long-term health if you are to stay in the game for the long haul, and build the success you deserve.
The most important steps for an entrepreneur are eating healthy, banishing stress, and obtaining adequate coverage. Acquiring a comprehensive better life insurance is an important element of success, for instance, as it allows you to prepare for all contingencies, and ensure your loved ones, team members, and business are taken care of. There is no telling what could happen on the road to business success, and a real entrepreneur will plan for every scenario in order to prevent it or manage the situation as best as they can.
There is no greater education than one that is self-driven. Neil deGrasse Tyson, the leading astrophysicists of the modern era said that, and no other aphorism could better portray the importance of constant education for a modern entrepreneur. As a future business leader, you should have the thirst for never-ending growth and knowledge that will fuel your passion, drive innovation, and allow you to always stay one step ahead of the competition.
Not only should you learn how to manage your cash flow better, and how to market your business for maximum engagement, but you should also learn how to be a leader in order to inspire your employees and elevate their productivity as well. Under the wings of a devoted and passionate workforce, your business will have nowhere to go but up.
The time is better than ever to put your business idea out there and transform it into a lucrative business the customers will love, and the rest of the business world will envy. However, there are several crucial steps you should take beforehand in order to ensure your success and pave the road to a long, thriving future as a 21st-century entrepreneur.
Emma Worden is a startup funding consultant from Sydney. She enjoys reading and writing on different aspects of entrepreneurship, usually finance and marketing. If you want to read more of her work, you can find it at https://bizzmarkblog.com/
Did you know that out of 27,2 small businesses in the U.S. almost 9,9 are women-owned? What this stat doesn’t explicitly say is that among these female entrepreneurs, there are a lot of women who also have another equally (or even more important) job – they’re full-time moms. Running a small business is extremely demanding and challenging, and it’s only logical that you want to be fully involved in order to make sure that everything is taken care of properly and that your vision is followed down to the tiniest detail. Still, the number of commitments will grow, and this will eventually take its toll on your family life, not to mention that it will most definitely rob you of your “me” time, which is why outsourcing and asking for help is an absolutely valid and welcome option.
Every mompreneur knows that good organizational skills are the key to running everything from a household to a company. Luckily, these days when we’re blessed with all kinds of tech gadgets and widgets, it’s much easier to automate certain tasks. There are lots of helpful tools which you can use to boost your productivity, meaning that you’ll be able to work less and achieve more. Even if you’re a home-based SMB owner, it can be hard to manage your time effectively as you always have to juggle between business responsibilities and family chores. A good thing is that these tools, such as Slack, allow you to manage your team remotely and organize online meetings, while Trello lets you create a to-do list, prioritize your tasks, and see how each member of your team performs. When it comes to being a mom, although you can’t always be there for your kids and check whether they got to school on time, you can use an app like Pumpic, to monitor how they spend their online time and keep track of their whereabouts with the help of GPS.
Social media platforms are frequently blamed for being counterproductive as many people use them for the wrong reasons. The truth is that you can leverage the power of Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn to help your small business thrive and to find a number of helpful communities in which you can read the latest news from your industry, connect with other business professionals, and get some good advice and support. One of the most important starting points when it comes to using social media platforms for your business is picking the right channels. Naturally, Facebook, with its 2.13 billion monthly active users from all around the world is a logical choice regardless of your industry. Instagram and Pinterest, as visually oriented social networks, offer a wide range of promotional possibilities for fashion companies, or those selling handcrafted jewelry or artisan goods. LinkedIn is inevitable if you’re in a B2B industry, as you’ll be able to get in touch with other professionals and potential clients very easily. Apart from being used for promotional activities, social media platforms are extremely effective when it comes to:
Use social media management tools, such as Buffer or Hootsuite, to post your content on a regular basis, schedule your posts in advance, and put things on autopilot.
Many small companies start as one-person businesses, but as they develop, more people are needed to keep things running. It can be hard to find someone who is your perfect match and who will be passionate and motivated as you are, but it’s not impossible. Sharing the reins of control with someone new, whom you don’t know yet, can be tricky, but it’s a necessary risk if you want to grow your business and have time to watch your kids grow too. The first thing on your priority list should be hiring a team of experts, that is, people who are skilled and experienced enough to be able to contribute to your thriving business. References and recommendations are the best methods for finding people you can trust your company with. Make sure to check out employment laws in order to understand your responsibilities and prevent some legal issues. Another useful tip about hiring a new employee is that you shouldn’t always listen to your gut instincts because 85% of people lie on their resumes. Do your research well before you welcome anyone aboard. Finally, set your expectations clearly and ask the same from your new employees, because communication is crucial for any successful business relationship.
Stats say that 82% of small businesses fail because of poor cash flow management. This is why you need to acquire some basic money management skills. However, since there are lots of things to deal with, such as delayed invoicing, taxes, paying bills, and various expenses, it’s best to hire a professional accountant. This way you’ll protect yourself from making bad financial decisions, and free up more time to spend with your family. However, even if you have your financial matters under control, running a small business often requires additional investments, which is why obtaining caveat loans can save the day and help you overcome a rough patch easily and with no fuss.
Growing your small business and raising your kids at the same time is very demanding, but it doesn’t have to be exhausting and messy if you’re well organized and surrounded by a team of hand-picked employees who will help you carry physical and psychological burdens of entrepreneurship.
Emma Worden is a startup funding consultant from Sydney. She enjoys reading and writing on different aspects of entrepreneurship, usually finance and marketing. If you want to read more of her work, you can find it at https://bizzmarkblog.com/
After graduating with a degree in statistics from the University of Michigan, Jerry Norris started his career with the Unisys Corporation and Cascade Engineering. He became an expert in management systems across a wide variety of industries. Jerry’s next projects involved building and selling multiple companies and creating management systems that operate in 172 countries. He is currently the CEO of GAIA, which connects global professionals.
But Jerry’s current passion is helping startups form in the Lansing area. He is co-founder of the Grand Ledge Fledge, a startup incubator and accelerator, and he serves as the Business Acceleration Consultant for the Lansing Economic Area Partnership.
On this episode of 2nd Brain Collective, Jerry chats with the hosts about how he helps entrepreneurs in Mid-Michigan!