The Entrepreneurial Spirit: The Unexpected Costs all Business Owners Have in Their Company

09 Jul, 2015 | Tags: , , , , ,

Before a business can thrive and start to make money for its respective owner and investors, it has to weather out the costs of doing business. The process of making the product to landing it to the customer’s doorstep involves a variety of expenses. However, even with the most diligent planning and preparation, a business owner can still miss a few unexpected costs on their list. Failing to identify and address the costs can drastically cripple your business in the long run.

Overdue Returns and Penalties

Regardless of the size of a business, there are bills to pay. Not paying them on time can lead to late payment fees that you might not have considered while making your business’ budget plan. If you do not yet have the cash to pay your bills, contact a representative to discuss alternative payment options.

Workplace Injuries and Accidents

When something goes wrong in the workplace, you are responsible for any financial damages it caused. For instance, you will have to hire a workers’ compensation lawyer to handle paperwork and of course the actual settlement amount for the injured employee. Work-related accidents are never a pretty sight, but is not an uncommon situation, especially in businesses related to construction or manufacturing.

Web-Based Expenses

Your online footprint leaves a trail of additional expenses incurred every month. Majority of businesses nowadays use the online space for their client acquisition and marketing strategies. But a lot of business owners do not recognize costs beyond the obvious monthly internet plan. They fail to account for expenses like annual domain name registration, hosting services, and even search engine optimization.

Strategic Changes

A business may face unexpected costs while trying to adjust their operational or marketing strategies. Costs may be incurred from hiring third-party advisers or from having to retrain the entire workforce to adapt to the strategy.

Hidden Liabilities

This is a tricky part, especially for new business owners. Hidden expenses and liabilities come in various forms depending on the market in which you operate at. Look for charges cryptically embedded in the fine print. This includes introductory teasers, poor quality materials, insurance coverage gaps, professional charges, or underutilization penalties.

No matter how much preparation you put into it, unexpected costs will keep popping up year after year. A smart and financially savvy business owner will be able to weather the increase in costs when competitors are already filing for bankruptcy.

5 Things You Should Be Doing On Twitter

27 Jun, 2015 | Tags: , , , ,

Nowadays, everyone can be found on a social media channel, and keeping up with the times means you have to be on several channels. But Twitter still reigns in many social circles as the best and fastest way to get the news you want to hear without having to scroll through your old college roommates posts. Here are 5 things you should be doing on Twitter to make your experience there worthwhile.

Use Hashtags

Hashtags are a way of Twitter life. Words (or phrases) that start with a pound are automatically turned into a link. You can now search through all the tweets that also used the same hashtag. Use tags in your profile bio to help you be seen in searches. Example: My name’s #Bob and I’m a lover of all things #Pizza.

Create Follow Lists

Again, one of the best features of Twitter is that you decide whose tweets you want to see in your feed. You can also very easily divide your users into “Follow Lists” to help sort through the tweeting madness. Name your lists and then place the accounts you follow into the appropriate lists. For instance, you might have a list for your News, Friends, and Technology. Creating your lists will help keep your overall tweeting experience enjoyable.

Subscribe To Public Lists

Just as you have created Follow Lists, other users create lists as well. You can make these lists public and follow other account’s lists. If you follow Mashable for example, you can look at their 30 public lists. You can easily follow their entire staff members, or just their interns, or the Mashable staff members that are at SXSW. Can you understand what a gold mine public lists can be?!

Upload Videos and Photos

It’s a well-known fact; tweets with videos and pictures garner more attention than words only. The Twitter app allows 30 second video creations, but you can also use Vine or other apps to help you get more from your tweets. This is also important because it helps you say more than your 140-character limit!

Search Hacks

The search bar in Twitter seems pretty harmless and humble, but with a little know how, you can open doors you didn’t know possible! Here are a few hacks for the Twitter search engine.

Operator: “happy hour” | Finds tweets: containing the exact phrase “happy hour.”

Operator: love OR hate | Finds tweets: containing either “love” or “hate” (or both).

Operator: beer -wine | Finds tweets: containing “beer” but not “wine.”

Operator: #Puppies | Finds tweets: containing the hashtag “Puppies.”

Operator: “happy hour” near:”san francisco” | Finds tweets: containing the exact phrase “happy hour” and sent near “san francisco.”

Twitter has a lot to offer as a social media channel. So use it to benefit you and your company! Feel free to share any tricks you might have as well. Also, check out our free 30 day trial on What Time Do I Work Software!

How to Survive Bad Press Like a Pro

19 Jun, 2015 | Tags: , , , , , ,

We are living in the age of the Internet: where all types of communication and attitudes are welcome, bad news actually does travel faster than the speed of light, and everyone waits in the shadows for an opportunity to hop on a good (or bad) story. You know you’ve seen it before; the little business down some street you’ve never heard of is suddenly the talk of the entire Internet. Everyone starts ganging up on the business sharing the story via Facebook and Twitter with posts encouraging everyone to stop being a patron. Then after you’ve seen the story show up in your feed for the third time in an hour, you decide to read the story, and you realize the way the business handled a situation was cringe worthy.

Let’s be honest, in the age of Internet, sometimes you won’t be able to stop some bad press from happening. There’s always going to be the outraged man who’s water wasn’t cold enough who fumed in your Yelp reviews. And don’t be too upset with the woman who keeps tagging your business on Facebook with hate posts, because truth be told, you probably won’t be able to make her happy. If you recall when Facebook would change their layouts, you would think a violent revolution was brewing based on the angry posts on your timeline. The internet makes it easy for people to indulge in anger, but eventually it all blows over. So here are some rules for dealing with bad press, and how to do it like a pro so that you can survive it and come out stronger in the process.

Don’t Bring Fuel To The Fire Fight

One thing you should always remember about the internet: there is always a user somewhere that will “out-insult” you, and wherever you are, once you bring your best fight, that user will come out of the shadows and find you. Bad press happens. As a business owner, NEVER turn to your caps lock or profanity. The only way all caps are acceptable are when driving the point home to never reply to a customer IN ALL CAPS. Keep your cool, which leads us to our second rule.

Pick Your Battles Carefully

While you’re remaining cool, calm, and collected, still choose your battles wisely. The barrage of commenters will likely not back down, even if you are using legitimate arguments for reasons your business is being portrayed in an ugly light. Do spend time if necessary commenting on the situation, but don’t feel like you need to get into a comment battle with every individual with an opinion. Another option in these situations is to hire an outside PR agency to handle communication.

Sometimes It’s Best Not To Say Anything

No one is forcing you to say anything at all, and sometimes you may find the odds are in your favor if you’re silent anyway. Again, the users of the Internet will comment until they’re blue in the face whether or not you’re an active participant. Standing in the shadows quietly until the waters have calmed is never a bad idea.

Your Silence Is A Good Time To Listen

If you do choose silence as a strategy, this is a good time for you to listen to your customers. Don’t try to read every comment on the Internet, but do try to seek out your customers and listen to ways their experience with your business could be made better. At this step, your job is not to try and fix your bad press, or to make the press go away. Your job is to just listen.

Find Opportunities To Grow

After the bad press starts to calm down, you’ve carefully chosen which battles to engage, and you’ve spent time listening to your customers, take this as an opportunity to come on the other side of this bad press as a better business owner. Take everything you learned during your time in front of the bad press spotlight to come back as a stronger business and business owner. Be honest about what took place, how you handled the event, and lastly what you’re doing to be a better business. Your customers will appreciate your honesty, and the Internet commenters will slither back into their shadows and await their next victim.

If you have any stories, experiences you can share, feel free to leave them in the comments!

The 5 Best Ways to Optimize Your Company’s Finances

08 Jun, 2015 | Tags: , , , ,

Optimizing your company’s finances is an important part of staying in business for the long term. This process is something business owners learn to do more efficiently over time. As they become better at handling large sums of money, a business owner will recognize the value of staying on top of their company’s finances and carefully scrutinizing the general flow of cash in and out of their business. Here are the five best methods for optimizing a company’s finances.

Knowing the Essential Operating Costs

To ensure that your company’s finances are operating at peak efficiency, it first requires that you have a solid grasp on your company’s essential operating costs. This means that, if push comes to shove, you want to determine the minimal amount of money required each quarter, month, week and day to keep your company up and running. After calculating items like rent, lights, payroll, and other factors your company will not be able to avoid paying out, this establishes a target amount that you will use to make sure your company is going to be able to handle its essential budgeting requirements. If your company is failing to bring in enough money to handle its weekly requirements, despite meeting its quarterly requirements, then adjustments to your operating costs may need to be introduced to ensure a more consistent financial outcome.

The Future Projections

It is not enough to ensure that your company will be alive and kicking at the end of the first quarter of operations. Your funding sources should be scrutinized in order to develop a financial plan to ensure that your company will be prepared to hold out for the next five years. Having a financial projection that meets this duration requirement, where you know how you are paying off all your operating costs well into the future, is important to getting your company over a critical financial hump. The reason this is critical is because most start-up companies never develop a proven financial strategy to meet such long term financial projections.

Cutting Wasteful Spending

If you notice that your company is spending money in areas that do not prove to generate considerable profit, then such spending will typically turn into nothing more than long term waste. It is your job, as controller of your company’s finances to spot and eliminate these wasteful spending habits. Every dollar wasted in unprofitable spending efforts literally translates to a financial loss.

Stop Mixing Personal and Business Finances Together

One of the temptations that business owners tend to have is that they use their company finances to carry out personal transactions. This generally tends to make for a growing financial mess and should be avoided at all costs. For example, if you are ordering checks, do not put your custom designer personal checks in as an item you pay for with company money. Once you figure out where to buy checks online, be sure to purchase them with your own money instead.

Use a Financial Consultant

Sometimes the trick to ensuring the best path to optimizing your company’s finances involves utilizing the services of a competent financial adviser. It may be the case that your particular niche industry produces special or even abnormal financial challenges. Using a consultant that has experience navigating through such niche specific challenges will be key to ensuring the best possible outcome for your company’s continued financial success.

Conclusion

The key to optimizing your company’s finances is more about getting down to basics than attempting to over-complicate matters. The more complicated your company’s financial situation gets, the more room there is for inefficiency to creep into the works. The straighter forward your company finances happen to be, the easier it is to spot any perceived financial problems and wasteful spending. This will make managing your company’s financial course far easier and profitable over the long term.

5 Things To Know Before You Install A Business Sign

29 May, 2015 | Tags: , , , ,

Business signs are the easiest way for your customers to spot you from the street; those bright beauties that help guide them from their car straight to your door. Many signs are recognizable from miles away to millions of individuals around the world. Consider the golden arches of McDonalds, or the bright orange square of Home Depot. Signs are iconic, and a well-planned sign is a strategy not only to bring customers to your door, but also to keep bringing them back when they see your beautiful logo against the sky. But those signs don’t magically appear; there are a lot of steps that go into designing, manufacturing, and installing a business sign. So before you try to design and install a sign on your own, here are a few tips from professionals that you might not consider otherwise:

Difficult to understand

This isn’t to be taken the wrong way, but unless you’ve created business signs before, you probably don’t know where to start in learning about your city codes and permit requirements. Signage professionals know all there is to know about codes and permits. You’ve got a business to run; don’t spend your precious time trying to figure out which permit paper means what. Let a signage pro help your business guide you quickly to the end of an otherwise long journey through paper.

Time consuming:

As a business owner, your most valuable quality is your precious time. Time means money, and every minute you spend learning codes and looking at permits, you unfortunately have to take time away from your business floor…and business profits. The process of business sign installation is extremely time-consuming, especially if you’re doing it for the first time. Choosing to find a professional to help you install your sign will protect your valuable time from being wasted, and make sure your time is being used wisely.

City approval and permits:

You’ve probably heard of building permits; a building can’t be built until the city has approved of the structure, the architecture, and the placement of the building. It’s important that you think of your business sign the same as you would a new building—because your city thinks of it very much alike. As is most everything in city approvals, completing your permit is typically not done in a hurried fashion. One of the benefits of working with signage professionals is they know all the right people to talk to. Another thing to know is most cities require a licensed sign contractor to even pull a sign permit. So even as a business owner who is willing to put in the time to install a sign, you may not be able to obtain a city permit as an unlicensed sign contractor.

Landlord approval:

Unless you own your business building, you’ll need to gain the approval of your landlord before you install a business sign. An important aspect of being a business owner is continuing to build respect and understanding with other business owners, and your landlord is definitely a business owner you do not want on your bad side. The overall long-term relationship with your landlord is fundamental to your business. One way you can build lasting rapport with your landlord is by communicating with your them about the sign, gaining their approval, and also letting them see as you bring on professionals to have the installation done “the right way”. A happy landlord makes for a happy tenant!

Finding the right business sign professionals:

If you’ve come to the conclusion that spending weeks learning codes and permits aren’t for you, then the next step is finding the right business sign professionals that will give you a full-service package and install a business sign you can be proud of. Try to find a sign business that will create and install a sign that will make you proud. Some things you will want from the business you choose are: attentiveness, sign design, permit and city code knowledge, manufacturing skills, and installation abilities. Your sign will be a very important aspect of your business, make sure to find and use the company that you feel most comfortable working with. You’ll want a business that does more than just take your order, you’ll want a business that serves as an advisor, guides you through the process, and has open communication about any snags along the way.

Think you’re ready to get that new business sign you’ve been dreaming of? Hopefully you’ve gained some helpful insight with the professional tips above. Good luck with the installation of your new business sign!

Brett Duncan helps companies clarify and simplify their messages, including in the area of building signage and channel letter signs.