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Run Your Business Better
618 posts
Unnecessary Expenses That Startups Should Avoid
Starting a business can be an exciting time, and the idea of being your own boss and doing what you love is alluring to many. However, with startups being so young, they’ll have additional deficits from their initial costs. While there are essential costs every business needs to pay for its day-to-day functions, it’s easy...
Employee Experience: Culture, Involvement and Career Development
Businesses focusing on customer experience is a given. After all, no business will thrive, or even succeed, without the support of the market it seeks to capture. But ensuring customers remain happy with your products and services is not the be-all and end-all of effective business management. Or at least it should not be. An...
It’s Not Too Late to Make 2021 the Year of the Customer
This is a story about the importance of amazing customer service. Sometimes, entrepreneurs can get too caught up in the day-to-day problems and trying to make money that they forget there are actual humans purchasing their products and services. Recently, I bought a small gift for my daughter that ended up deteriorating within a few...
A Personal Phone Number Shouldn’t Be Used for Business
When starting a new business, it can be enticing to give clients and other business contacts your personal phone number because it’s convenient. You already have one, it’s easy for you to remember, and there are no extra expenses or setup involved. However, there are a growing number of risks associated with using your personal...
How Process Optimization Cures Employee Burnout
Now more than ever, retaining your top talent matters most. Your employees are the foundation of your business and its future success. For them to stick around and help your business grow, they need processes and systems that don’t overwork them. But if your business is full of inefficient workflows, chances are you’re at risk...
Summon Your Inner Alpha: 7 Ways Business Leaders Can Outwit the Competition
Alpha traits are key to leadership success. Business leaders can learn from these top predators how to outsmart the competition and never cede ground. In recent years, coyotes have made themselves at home across the United States, Canada and Central America. In the community and neighborhoods near Boston where I live, people see them almost...
Goldfish Swim School CEO Shares 5 Must-Haves in Post-Pandemic Playbook
Over the course of the last year, it’s been remarkable to watch successful adjustments to remote work, new innovation projects and everything in between, as small businesses across the nation quickly adapted to changes brought on by the pandemic. As we’ve surpassed the one-year mark of COVID-19 and inch closer to a return to normalcy,...
How to Get Out of Day-to-Day Operations and Into Leadership
When you start a business, you have a vision of what you want running your company to be like. While every founder is different, most entrepreneurs envision customers who love their product or service so much that they see it as the best (or only!) option in the market. Years after they start their business,...
How to Use CRM and Marketing Automation to Improve Your Scalability
Automation has become a business essential. For entrepreneurs looking to grow their business, the question always is, “How can I work smarter, not harder?” That’s where the power of marketing automation and your customer relationship management (CRM) comes into play. With such high demand to cut down on costs while increasing profitability, businesses are turning...
Scaling Your Bootstrapped Business: 3 Tips for Lean Entrepreneurs
Like most entrepreneurs, you have likely spent hundreds of hours developing skills to build your business. By the time you start turning a profit, you’re likely to spend thousands of hours and dollars trying out different business models and seeing what works for you. Many entrepreneurs who start turning a profit think that the hardest...
Automation Technologies Companies Should Focus on in Q4
Q4 is shaping up to be incredibly busy for virtually all industries. Even though it's crunch time for exceeding quarterly and annual goals, it's critical to spend adequate time positioning your company for greatness in Q1. Successful leaders find ways to spend their valuable time on the things that matter most. In order to spend...
4 Questions Every Entrepreneur Must Ask Themselves
Time is the most important asset you have. Unlike money, once you’ve spent it, you can’t get it back, and how you spend it is important. They say time is money, but time is your dream. When you’re running a startup, you’re in the dream business. And every minute you can spend on your dream...
To Grow Your Company, Prioritize Productivity Over Being ‘Busy’
Recent events have caused major shifts in how we work. Now, more than ever, businesses are rethinking what it means to be productive. Gone are the days where working more hours was the key to success. Instead, if you want your business to grow, you need to prioritize productivity over hours worked. Here are five...
Doing the Data Dance: Why Data Protection is Paramount to Your Business
You are setting up your business and have a million problems to worry about. Languishing toward the bottom of your painfully long to-do list are the words "privacy policy for website." You plan to find a precedent online at some point and use that for now. After all, nobody actually reads privacy policies, right? Data...
10 Actionable Steps to Automate Your Content Marketing Workflow
Being a marketer in today’s digitally dependent world without using automation tools is just like starting a business without intending to scale it. Statistics show that half of the companies in the marketing field alone are now using marketing automation and 58% of the B2B companies are thinking of using it in today’s digital world....
Trade Secrets or Patents: Which Should You Choose?
Most businesses need to continuously innovate to stay relevant in the marketplace. With such intense focus on innovation, businesses naturally seek to patent their inventions to avoid infringement by other parties. But there’s an alternative: trade secrets. Getting a patent is a very time-consuming and costly process. In niches such as tech, where first mover...
8 Tips for the Work From Home Solopreneur
You’ve plunged into starting a solo business venture from home. Being a solopreneur is a fantastic experience for motivated individuals, but it can easily become stagnant if you aren’t careful. When everything starts piling up, you can lose sight of what drew you to your passion project in the first place, and your tools of...
How to Build a Business with Purpose
For decades, business leaders treated purpose as an afterthought, if they thought about it at all —a donation or volunteer program to be supported after it had achieved its business goals. But times are changing. According to a survey conducted by Green Print, 64% of consumers are willing to pay more for sustainable products. What’s...
How Quality Reporting Helps Smart Entrepreneurs Build Investor Trust and Long-Term Returns
Think of investor reporting as the foundation of trust between a company’s founders and its investors. That trust is earned over time and is strengthened by timely reporting of company results. Strategic entrepreneurs will see good investor reporting is both the foundation for a company's success and an entrance to later investing. Done correctly, early...
5 Reasons Why Startups Need to Create a Crisis Communications Plan Now
A crisis can happen to any business at any time. While planning for a crisis may seem quite ironic, given that the very definition of the word is something that happens unexpectedly, it is incredibly important that business owners invest in creating a crisis communications plan. A thoughtful and well-crafted plan has the potential to...