For any new driver, driving a car can be quite a task. It’s all brand new, you’re in the car by yourself for the first time, and they say this is where you do all your real learning once you’ve passed your test. Like the old expression “you can fit a bus in there” you never really understand how much space you actually have to navigate through until you drive something larger. Driving a lorry is a big difference in comparison to driving a car, and you may wonder what exactly the differences are.
The first big difference is the size. With a lorry, the sheer magnitude of the vehicle when you compare it to your dinky Nissan Micra means that people tend to get out of your way when you’re on the road. You know that feeling when you haven’t driven for a while and driving next to a lorry feels a little too close for comfort? Well, you’d have the power! The other thing in relation to the size is that driving a lorry just feels different. You’re higher up, and the controls feel more worn and require a bit more brute strength when you compare it to a normal car. As driving a vehicle of this size means it handles differently, you also have to think about the routes you are taking, low bridges are a big problem for many heavy goods vehicles, and with a lot more vehicle to drive, you can have a lot more issues! Have you ever seen a lorry or a bus having to navigate between some cars with only a few inches each side? It’s a nightmare. That’s how much room you have to play with if you drive in city centers and residential areas!
The other big difference is how you actually drive the thing. Your car has three mirrors, two side mirrors and one rear-view. With a lorry there is seldom a rear-view mirror, you have to use your side ones which makes parallel parking a difficult task. Some lorries have reversing cameras attached to them, which certainly helps. And instead of the one blind spot in a car, there are several in a lorry due to the load that is being transported. If you drove a lorry for a living, you would get used to understanding the perils of blind spots, where so many cars or cyclists drive by the side of you. And there are many choices for driving lorries as a career, you could have a career in vehicle transport, but you would need to obtain a different license, which is an HGV (heavy goods vehicle) license, but when you train for your license, you get detailed information on how to navigate around blind spots.
The other difference is the distance you have to maintain between other cars. If you pull in front of a lorry, have you seen them drop back? No? Well next time, make sure you never pull directly in front of a lorry, as it can cause an accident. You don’t want to mess with someone in a lorry. Now doesn’t it sound like your car will be a doddle to drive?!
What’s the aim of the business? Financial success? Fulfilling a passion? Personal empowerment? If that’s the case, it might be tempting to take shortcuts and see the fastest way to that success. To cover up the tracks of mistakes like an animal hiding its mark or to even take full advantage when the opportunity arises. But it’s not how you end up successful in the end. Businesses can prosper and fall, but the integrity of the owner lasts forever.
How you treat other people comes first and foremost. Fulfilling promises to customers makes you all the more likely to see repeat business. Honest negotiations and collaboration with others in the industry offer a lot of opportunity for future gain. But everyone is going to be paying attention to how you treat your team, as well. The more flexibility you offer, the more respect you have for the needs of the staff, the longer you retain them. You might save some money in the short-term by refusing to spend on further training. In the long term, you lose the valuable asset that is someone who knows the business inside and out and can provide perspectives you might otherwise miss.
As important as doing right by other people is doing right by the law. Without the right kind of due diligence and eye on fraud and other illegal practices in the business, it becomes a den of snakes. Without paying attention to the kind of steps taken by Ten Intelligence to keep the interior of a business safe from corrupting presences, your business isn’t just in legal danger. It’s a place where only the most ruthless can excel, meaning that everyone trying to do honest work can only get penalised by that ruthlessness.
Not all the threats come from inside the business, of course. Cybersecurity teams like Xyone stop data from falling into the hands of hackers. The security of the business isn’t just important to you but to customers too. This data might very well contain sensitive customer information. Fail to protect that, especially financial details, and you risk losing your customers a lot of money. Moreover, it’s a lot of money you may be held accountable for.
It’s important, more than anything else, to own up to your mistakes in business. It’s a hassle when you admit something went wrong, when you let a customer down, or were the target of a crime. It’s a nightmare level of a scandal when that information is uncovered later without your business owning up to it. For the lighter mistakes, showing that you learn from your mistakes and even using case studies to improve the business can actually have a positive effect in nurturing trust in the business. Don’t just pay lip service to honesty and repentance when you do wrong. Make your mistakes clear and make it clear what you’re going to do about them. Apologize in vagaries and no-one will believe them.
As it lasts forever, integrity is all that really matters. With integrity, it’s not the end of the world is you stumble. People will trust you to get back up on your feet. Without integrity, you will become a pariah, sooner or later.
What most people don’t know about starting a business is that they will probably experience an audit. Are you one of these people? You knew about building an online presence and marketing to a target audience, but had no clue about the chances of an audit, right? Well, the chances are pretty high as most individuals and businesses that earn anywhere between $25,000 and $100,000 are the likeliest candidates. The reality is you will have to deal with one at some point soon, and you will need to know how to survive.
Delay
The first thing to do is to delay. Although the authorities say you should be ready for an audit at any time, most companies aren’t ready. After all, no one is going to spend time worrying about something that might not happen (fingers crossed!). As a result, you will need more time to get all of your records in order. In truth, you will never have enough time, which is why delaying tactics are useful. Most of the time, the authorities will be happy to give a business more time to get the books in order as long as they have a good excuse.
What’s important is that you have records of all of the transactions for the period they want to investigate. However, it isn’t easy to do it if there are lots of cash transactions. A card transaction, on the other hand, is a different argument. Industry experts like NFC Direct believe card transactions are brilliant organisational tools, and it’s easy to see why. Once the transaction is over and the receipt printed, the cashier just has to put the receipt in the till for safe keeping. When the taxman turns up, it is much easier to detail all of the firm’s transactions with the receipts. Cash is notoriously hard to follow and gives the taxman cause for concern.
It ‘s hard to obtain a deep understanding of the law because the law is complicated. However, there is no need for an in-depth knowledge of the law because you’re not a lawyer. Instead, just read up on the essential points that will help you during the audit. For example, you are allowed to cut the meeting short if you require help or if you need to get your records in order. A little bit of knowledge can go a long way in these circumstances, so obtain as much as possible.
Not too many businesses come out of an audit without a compromise. Although it isn’t fair, the authorities like to impose their power because they don’t want to seem incompetent. And, an audit which showed there were no means for their services would be incompetent. As a result, it’s a good idea to manage your expectations. The odds are high they will find some irregularities, but it isn’t the end of the world. All you have to do is take it on the chin and negotiate.
Audits aren’t nice, but you can survive them with these simple tips.
If your business runs on delivering goods to the customer, then you may have, at some point, relied on others to do it for you. As demand grows beyond capability, outsourcing your fulfilment services is a common step for businesses to take. But as that business grows, the cost-effectiveness of outsourcing might come into question. The question you have to ask is: is your business ready to deliver the goods?
A lot of different things factor into customer satisfaction as far as delivery goes. Missed or late deliveries due to poor driver and poor shipping room staff productivity will be the cause of many a complaint. Damaged items will cost you money. You need to make sure that you create an efficient, safe delivery room with the right packaging items for each kind of goods. More important still is using GPS and long-range communication technology to ensure your drivers are using the best routes and batching parcels in trucks to make as much from a single trip as you can.
Can you handle the costs?
The fleet is going to cost you money. It’s not just about buying the vehicles, but also about keeping them fuelled and maintained in great detail to ensure that a journey is never interrupted. You need to get cost-effective. This means getting directly in touch with wholesale providers, not retailers, for your stock of replacement parts and red diesel drums. It also means tracking your inventory and recognizing your needs to stock efficiently. It’s important to never run out of the resources you need. However, another issue is over-stocking, which means you could be spending money on well-maintained storage space holding items you just aren’t using.
With the delivery system comes a need for added skills. Recruiting logistics experts, drivers and delivery room staff isn’t just an investment in money. It means taking on new human resources responsibility, from ergonomics in the delivery process to developing safety on the road policies. If the business is going to grow to accommodate your own delivery services, it needs to accommodate the people that will carry out those services, too.
Can you work it flexibly?
One of the greatest mistakes in taking care of deliveries is failing to anticipate the seasonality of your business. In production and sales, you might be prepared for seasonal ups-and-downs. But those demands get even more strenuous in fulfillment. You are going to need to ensure that you can find the temporary workers, as well as the leased vehicles, to deal with deliveries when demand gets too high. At the same time, you need to be aware that buying and hiring new people permanently during these times will only mean that for the rest of the year, you’re paying for resources you’re not using.
There comes a time when businesses rely on an outsourced service so much that they could just as easily bring it in-house and spend less money. Your delivery system is no different. You just have to ask yourself if you handle the burden.
Perhaps you have security cameras, guards, sophisticated locks and perhaps even an alarm system that’s so loud it could wake the dead. However, what about those unseen threats that are lurking around in the shadows? They crawl around your business, sinking their fangs into your business and slowly sucking the life out of your company until there’s nothing left but a broken husk.
What threats could these be, you ask? Let’s find out what they are and how you can banish them for good.
If you’ve gone through the process of trade mark registration then you probably think you’re relatively safe. You might assume that as long as you have this trade mark, no one can infringe on your intellectual property—but that’s completely wrong. If you see people who are copying your trade mark, then you need to immediately alert authorities because you have to show that you are actively protecting your mark. If you don’t take legal action, then it’s possible that your mark could be transferred to another company if they are making more use of it than you. If you’ve been holding a trade mark for a long time but you have been failing to even use it, then it could be stolen under your nose before you even know it.
Your lawyer can assist you in forming cease and desist letters to send to the offending party, but if they don’t respond or aren’t willing to comply to your demands, you need to take this matter to court by filing a lawsuit. Your brand is incredibly important to your business’s success, so if you don’t defend your territory, you could be in for some serious trouble when the imitators and copycats start to overtake your market share. Unless you want to hand your business over to these people, you need to defend it with all of your resources, and nothing will help you as much as a knowledgeable lawyer.
Computer Viruses
Lurking within each and every one of your computers could be a deadly virus that is just waiting to attack. Although that’s an exaggerated scare, it is possible that a member of staff could bring in an infected device that harbors computer viruses that have the capability to spread across your office network. These are hard to detect and stop if they are already within your network. A self-replicating virus could disguise itself as an important file within your computer hardware and be immune to all forms of detection. It could then strike, spreading itself across your network and infecting more files, essentially deleting or stealing things such as customer information, passwords and even payment information.
It’s a scary but very real thought. You need to make sure that your business is protected from these threats by contacting a network security specialist who can not only diagnose and clear up problems but also recommend future improvements you could add to your home system in order to make it safe and free of viruses.
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