Coping Mechanisms to Grow a Business During a Pandemic
Seemingly overnight, the normal course of our lives changed dramatically. Businesses, schools, and public facilities shut down, while companies fortunate to remain open had to transition their employees to a work-from-home setup. Covid-19 brought a complete shift in our lives, where adjustments are necessary.
Indeed, the pandemic has significantly changed the way we live and work. It is tough to do business in an uncertain environment while in the midst of a global crisis. Many companies have already closed down, while many are still facing financial struggles and an uncertain future.
While it has been a tough time for the business world, there are ways to ensure your business’s growth and establish the resilience of operations and cash flow. This can be done by knowing how to handle your connections, such as employees, customers, and suppliers. Below are some ideas that can get you creative and step up your efforts without risking too much for your business.
Suppliers
Supply chain operations met the biggest impact from the pandemic, leading to supply shocks and acute shortages in many businesses. If you have suppliers overseas and disruptions in deliveries, it’s time to reach out to suppliers.
Get in touch with suppliers to ensure the timely delivery of supplies. This way, you can easily manage customer expectations and cash flow plans. Also, negotiate with the supplier about deferred payment terms for payables. Extend courtesy to suppliers by sending them advanced notice if you cannot pay them immediately.
To ensure health practices, spend money to protect your supplies and resources. If you have delivery vehicles, make sure to protect any consumable from contamination. The best way to maximize delivery trucks is to install truck curtains to ensure the safety of your products. You can search online for suppliers that offer customized curtain siders for delivery vehicles.
Employees
It is important to note that Covid-19 is a worldwide health problem that requires a human response. You have to start with your people by ensuring their health and security.
Ever since establishments begin to shut down, companies are under scrutiny because of how they treat their staff in terms of delayed salaries and unpaid leaves. Meanwhile, companies like Airbnb have been implementing a cost-cutting restructure to support their staff.
Keep in mind that the way your business responds to the crisis makes a great impact on the consumer. Any reputational damage can be long-lasting and significant. In tough financial situations, offer support as much as you can by ensuring jobs and cutting additional slack. Not only it serves as a reputational boost, but it can also repay you by increasing customers and staff loyalty.
In terms of health, take time to implement the best health practices to keep employees in a sound state. If your business requires a continuous operation, follow health and safety practices to prevent transmission among employees. You can also allow employees to work remotely so they can stay with their families and minimize contact. You might want to learn how to delegate tasks effectively while using online communication channels.
For quarantined employees, create a contingency plan if some of them can no longer come to work. You can also form different work teams to reduce the risk of having the entire crew put into isolation. As much as possible, reduce any emotional or financial distress to your employees. Be sensitive if any of them go through personal circumstances and offer support the best way you can. These efforts can go a long way by building employee loyalty.
Customers
Moving your business online helps keep the customer flow and sales coming in without risking any people by physically reopening a business. While this move is only possible for some businesses than others, having the right plan in place will ensure the success of your business while operating in the virtual space.
Retailers may consider expanding or setting up an e-commerce platform. If you offer coaching services, you can move your business online by offering virtual classes. You can also offer products in digital forms, such as e-books. Simultaneously, step up your digital marketing efforts by updating your website and promoting your business on social media. But you have to be creative as possible to pique the interests of your customers.
As you change the way you do business, you will notice a corresponding effect on the cash flow. You can start by reaching out to customers by informing them you will continue doing business with them. You can make phone calls by providing updates about orders and new payment terms. Also, make follow-ups and encourage them to be open if they are experiencing difficulty.
Next, propose additional services by asking if they need other products or services they cannot find in other businesses. Treat this as an opportunity to explore more options that will bring in additional cash for your company.
With the rapid shifts in the business industry, companies need to learn how to be creative and flexible in growing their business. But before thinking about your sales, it is important to prioritize and foster your connections first, starting from your employees, customers, and suppliers. After all, your business is nothing without these people.
6 Types of Expenses Involved when Starting a Business
Everyone dreams of becoming their own boss and finally call the shots. The best and sometimes the only way to do so is by starting your own business. According to the Small Business Administration, approximately 627,000 new companies open their doors each year, ushered in by aspiring entrepreneurs.
However, starting a new business is very difficult, as any entrepreneur will tell you. One of the largest hurdles is amassing enough capital to do so. Prospective businessowners often turn to bank loans and other organizations for financial assistance in this matter. But what exactly are the costs involved when opening a new business? Here are 6 types of expenses associated with opening new startups.
Costs Involved with Starting a New Business
Everything costs money, even establishing your own company. But just like investments and life insurance, the money you spend on opening a new business can flourish and secure your financial stability in the future. When planning to start a company of your own, you should be aware of the six most common types of expenses involved.
Here’s a comprehensive rundown of these costs.
Insurance
Your business will need to have its own insurance policy, completely separate from your personal insurance in most cases. This is to protect it in case your company is broken into by criminals, catches fire or some other negative incident. Aside from insuring the business itself, you may be required to provide your employees with their own insurance policies. These protect workers and gives a modicum of financial assistance should anything untoward happen to them on the job. Premiums on these policies vary with each company and your provider.
2. Permits and Licenses
Whether you’re opening a new bar or selling natural preservatives for cosmetics, you will need to secure business licenses from local or even national authorities. For example, if you’re opening a bar you will need to a liquor license as well as a business permit. These are often affordable, although this depends on local legislation. The more areas of industry your business covers, the more licenses you’ll need. This does not include voluntary certifications thatboost your company’s reputation.
3. Real Estate Costs
There are many differences between starting your business and setting up an online store. One stark difference is that almost all startups will require an office space, especially if you have more than a handful of employees. This means you’ll either have to rent an office or purchase a building for your new enterprise to occupy. This tends to be the most expensive part of opening a new business and can comprise the largest portion of your business’s overhead afterward.
4. Technological Costs
This covers costs such as computers, internet services, mobile devices and other electronics. Nowadays, every business needs at least one computer, even if its solely to track your expenses and client information. Depending on the industry of your startup, your technological costs can skyrocket. For example, a boutique bakery will have drastically lower technological expenses than a software development firm.
5. Equipment Expenses
Not every device or piece of hardware you’ll buy for your new business falls into the technological category. Your desks, ergonomic chairs and carpeting are all part of what’s known as your equipment expense. This also covers specialized forms of equipment. Continuing the example above, a bakery will need plenty of ovens, stand mixers and possibly even a walk-in refrigerator. Don’t be tempted to scrimp on this part of your startup costs. A comfortable workplace with the right chairs and desks can mean the difference between a profitable first year of business.
6. Debts and Obligations
Finally, there are the costs your business will incur before it ever opens. The primary examples of these types of costs include any bank loans you may have had to take out just to finance any of the other aforementioned costs. Another type of financial obligation you’ll have to pay off sooner or later includes returning investment costs to all backers who helped fund your business. This does not count any personal cost you may have accrued financing the enterprise. For example, if you took out a mortgage on your house to buy equipment, that’s a personal cost and shouldn’t be part of your company’s obligations.
Starting a new business is a challenging and complex process. Understanding every aspect of this process is important in ensuring you know what you’re getting into when you want to become your own boss. Knowing the costs involved is essential in preparing yourself and your affairs properly for becoming an entrepreneur.
Factors to Consider When Sanitizing Your Workplace
COVID-19 vaccines from multiple pharmaceutical companies are being distributed across the globe. However, recent mutations of the virus and the limited supply of vaccines continue to slow down progress towards everyday life being back to normal. As such, social distancing and proper cleaning and disinfection are still essential when working in the office.
The virus is dangerous, especially for children and older adults who have compromised immune systems. Its symptoms range from mild instances like coughs, fever, and colds to full-blown respiratory infections and kidney failure. It spreads easily, too, when an infected individual speaks, coughs, or sneezes. These actions spread their infected respiratory droplets in the air. If another person breathes these droplets in, they could get infected, too. And when the virus settles on surfaces, it can stay alive for a few hours to days.
Cleaning Your Office
With so many surfaces for the virus to settle on and the different common areas your office has, it can be daunting to clean and disinfect your workplace. If you want to make your office safer, here are important factors you should consider.
The Different Definitions
First, you and your cleaning staff need to be familiar with cleaning and disinfecting because they can be used interchangeably by others. There’s a huge difference between them.
Cleaning involves removing dirt, grime and other impurities from a surface. This gets rid of germs and viruses not by killing them, but by removing them from the object they’re clinging onto.
Disinfecting, on the other hand, involves using chemicals like diluted bleach or isopropyl alcohol to kill or deactivate germs and viruses. This doesn’t necessarily clean the object of any dirt. This why it’s often the second step after cleaning.
The Plan
You and your team should have a routine to make sure that every surface and corner of your office are consistently clean and disinfected. Start by identifying the high-traffic areas in your workplace. These include the lobby, public bathrooms, and the main workspace.
Prioritize your cleaning and disinfecting efforts in these regions of the office, as employees constantly breathe in the air and touch the appliances in them. Make low-traffic areas, like storage spaces or maintenance closets, lower on your list. When a few people enter these areas, they only stay there for a short time.
The Protective Gear
The virus can easily spread from person to person or when an individual interacts with respiratory droplets on a surface. Plus, your workers also have to deal with chemicals like bleach or alcohol, both of which can be dangerous when too much of their fumes are inhaled.
This is why it’s vital for you and your workers to wear personal protective equipment (PPE) during the clean sweep of your office. Appropriate PPEs include an isolation gown, gloves, face mask, and face shield. These minimize the chances of your workers inhaling the virus or getting it on their skin or eyes. This gear also protects them against exposure to potentially toxic chemicals. You may want to hire a skip when disposing of your PPEs, so you can get them off the premises immediately.
The Tools and Materials
As with any task, you’ll need the right tools and materials to ensure your regular cleaning and disinfecting tasks go smoothly.
Here’s what you’ll need.
Cleaning
Sponge or rag – You can use a sponge or rags sold in wholesale quantities. These are efficient at cleaning off dirt, but they do wear out with use. As such, it’s important to have a constant supply of them.
Buckets – You’ll use these to store water for soaping and rinsing.
Soap and water – This combination is always effective in cleaning off grime and dirt on almost any surface, be it concrete walls, wooden tables, or tile floors.
Disinfecting
Spray bottle – A spray bottle lets you cover a large area by dispersing droplets of disinfectant quickly in multiple directions. Make sure to get one with a large chamber, so you don’t have to refill after just a few spritzes.
Disinfectant – There are a variety of EPA-approved disinfectants. The most available ones are bleach diluted in water or 70 percentisopropyl alcohol. These will get rid of viruses and germs on a surface easily.;
Even with vaccines being rolled out, the COVID-19 pandemic still shouldn’t be underestimated. The threat of infection is still high, especially if your workers still commute to and from your office. Make sure they’re safe and protected by knowing the best practices in cleaning and disinfecting their workplace.
Making money for your business and getting a big sale is pretty exciting. It is something that you will have set up the business for, and is what will help you to get it to where you want it to be. However, getting paid as a small business can be tricky. There can be late payments, meaning you need to chase missing invoices, as well as having to spend time and money and effort getting in contact with people who still owe you. You could even not get paid at all, and cash flow problems are one of the reasons why a number of businesses actually fail.
If you use a B2B model in your business, then the chances are that your customers are going to have particular payment terms. So before you start out doing any selling, it is a must to have some clear policies so that you can ensure payment, promptly and on-time. It can be hard to walk away from a sale, but you need to look after the potential of your business. So here are some things to think about, to ensure swift payments and better cash flow for your business.
It is a must to have some defined policies right from the start. What kind of credit collections will be in place if payments aren’t made? You need to know all of this before you offer credit or allow people to pay you after the service has been completed. You should also think about how much credit you can give without it impacting your cash flow, as well as putting into place the payment terms that you want to set for anything that is overdue.
Automation
When it comes to getting paid, and getting paid by a certain date, you need to make sure that you are getting your invoices out on time. This can be difficult when you’re doing it yourselves, as there are a number of other things that can take up your time as you run a business. Automation in any business, but particularly for something like invoicing, can be a great idea. When the invoices will just get sent out on a certain date, using something like OnPay Solutions, you don’t have to worry about them not being done on time. Then you are more likely to be paid on time, and it will carry on like that.
Communicate your policies
When you get a new customer or a new business looking to use your services, then you need to lay out a clear statement with all of your business payment terms and conditions. This is something that should be clear on all invoices, as well as any contracts that you have with customers or clients. The things to state are penalties for late payments, as well as making sure that follow through with the charges if it comes to it. They can’t complain about it if they have had the policies and fees communicated clearly to them.
The most important features of every day operations as a successful brand are marketing and advertising campaigns, as you must do all you can to spread the word about your business to develop a buzz of interest and attention. Figuring out the best ways to do this can often seem difficult, however there are a few simple ideas and concepts that your brand can utilise to increase your reach in no time at all. So, if you would like to find out more, then read on to uncover some of the best top tips and tricks that you can make the most of today!
Utilise Social Media
One of the best things that you can do to improve your reach and influence as a brand is to utilise social media platforms. There are so many different ways to advertise your products, services and business on these websites, from the simple sharing of pictures and other content to targeted marketing campaigns that land on the homepage of relevant, interested users. It doesn’t take long to set up your own social media pages on the most popular of platforms, as you need nothing more than an email address to get started. You can develop a mass of followers by sharing interesting and inspiring posts that entice users in, whether this is through style, quality or even comedic value. It’s more than possible for you to become a real hit on social media, as several brands and businesses have found themselves ‘going viral’. Making the most of dedicated social media advertising is almost guaranteed to boost your sales, as the use of cookies and other tracking data allows these platforms to send your campaign specifically to users who may show a keen interest in the topic, saving money and time by cutting through the millions of other profiles to find the most likely potential customers.
Logos, Taglines & More
Your brand logo, tagline, webpages and any other representations of your business are much more important than you may initially think. So many things can be done with these features, from personalised hats like those over at Cap America to help market your brand whilst out and about, to radio or television shows too. Whether your message is meant to be clear or subliminal, people will begin to remember and recognise your logo and catchphrase the more that they see it, and this will lead to a much greater reputation. Potential customers will feel as though they can trust and rely on your brand as they are now so familiar with the name, creating a win-win situation for all.
Spreading the word about your brand has never been so simple when you are able to make the most of the amazing tried and tested top tricks and tips detailed above! Begin by developing a social media presence, creating several profiles on the popular platforms to get your message out there. Utilise your logo and tagline in lots of creative ways to get more attention for your brand name.
If you are looking to sell your home, you are obviously going to want to make sure that you get it right the first time. There is a lot that you might need to consider there, but one of the main things that most people want to do is to save a lot of money in the process. There are many places in the process that you find yourself having to pay out. Of course, you will always make it back with a good sale. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t want to try and reduce your costs in the meantime, so that you can make even more from the sale. Let’s look at how you might be able to do that.
Most people will automatically go to a standard real estate agent when they are selling their home. While that might seem like the obvious move to make, you should bear in mind that there are other options for listing your home, and going for the first local real estate agent you see is not necessarily always going to be the most economica, way of going about things. If you want to try and save money on commission, look for a listing agent who will carry out a flat fee listing for you. That way, you know that the fee is not going to rise over time.
Think Like A Buyer
Part of the problem that many people go through in this process is that it is hard to detach emotionally from the home and see it as what it truly is, which is a product that you are trying to sell. If you are not detaching emotionally from the house, then it can mean that you struggle to put yourself in the buyer’s shoes, which precludes you from presenting the property in the way that will produce the most interest. This apparently simple change is likely to make a huge difference to how much you can sell the home for, so it’s an important thing to consider.
An important part of the process of selling a home is when you have to clean up the property to get it ready for others to move in. This is clearly something you can’t avoid, but it is generally the kind of thing that most people like to outsource to a professional team. While there are benefits of doing that, it is obviously pricier than simply doing the cleaning yourself. If you don’t mind a bit of cleaning, you might want to think about taking it on board yourself. You could save some considerable cash that way.
As long as you consider these essentials, you should find that you can save some considerable amount of money on selling your home. That will make the whole venture much more profitable, and will mean that you are going to get a lot more out of it in general. Be sure to consider these options.
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