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Freelancing Tips: Building Long-Term Relationships with Your Clients

So, you’ve decided to be a freelancer, and you’ve successfully acquired your first set of clients. You were able to negotiate the payment rate that you want, and you’ve worked on a contract and terms of conditions that detail the responsibilities of both parties. Give yourself a pat on the back, you’re well on the way to independence.

Freelancer working on a cafe

Of course, things don’t stop at this point. Successfully closing a deal doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be plain sailing for you from here on in. You’re just about to get on with some real work, so it would be good to learn a few pointers on how you can forge long-term relationships with the people you’ll be working with.…

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Using a Meeting Room Manager for Increased Efficiency

Do you think of meetings as a waste of your company’s time and energy? Meetings can be the backbone of any well run organization. They can also be a time waster that leads a good business down the pathway to disorganization and lost opportunities.

Meeting room

How you as the captain of your small ship use the time spent in meetings can have a huge impact on the entire organization in the long run. Having the right tools to keep meetings on topic, on time and a way to solve problems instead of creating them goes a long way towards turning meetings into a key part of your business instead of a time waster.…

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The “Drilling Down” Principal – Do One Thing Well

Steve Jobs quote on doing one thing well

Do not try to do everything. Do one thing well. – Steve Jobs.

It’s Hard to Do Less

As business owners sometimes the hardest thing is doing less. All sorts of opportunities can present themselves to us and with that can come the temptation to take on work that’s beyond the original business plan.

If we aren’t careful we can spread our resources so thin that we end up doing nothing really well.

There is incredible power in drilling down and focusing on one thing and doing it with excellence. Drilling down and offering a superior product or service can lead to the following benefits:

  • Consistent Demand: The law of demand means your product or service will always be in demand if it is superior
  • Higher Revenue: A superior product or service will attract a higher price because of higher demand
  • Lower Costs: By focusing on one product or task, you can better optimise your resources towards it

Sounds like the ideal business model.…

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How Great Online Accounting Can Save Your Business

Every business survives or fails because of whether it is staying in the red or black. It is hard to keep any kind of business afloat if you are spending more then you are taking in, that is an easy statement to make.

Cloud accounting

But what if you aren’t really sure how your business is doing? Sure, you have cash in the bank and happy customers, but are you really making a profit? This is the all important question that can only be answered with a good accounting system.

These days, more and more, that accounting system will be online accounting or cloud accounting.…

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How to Attract Talented Bilingual Employees in Your Business

The workforce market is changing. With the accelerated globalization and less restriction at the borders, there is an increasing need of bilingual people in large and small companies. For example, according to statistics, there are over 55 million Hispanic people in the US (data valid for 2014) and the numbers are growing. So if you own a small business in the US, you may have to deal with Hispanic customers at some point.

But they are not the only ones and the US is not the only country that deals with this issue. People are traveling for work or for pleasure creating a mixture of languages and cultural traditions.…

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What Can Small Businesses Learn From Start-ups?

Let’s get one thing out of the way: you’re an entrepreneur. Your mind is constantly spinning with ideas to share your passion. You probably already have or at least moving toward stepping away from a traditional day job in pursuit opening your business. You’re about to take that first giant leap toward turning your dreams into a reality.

Startup

Dig further into the motivations behind pursuing a business and you’ll find a myriad of reasons. Here lies the rub. Motive is a key difference between small businesses and start-ups. While they share many characteristics, such as a scrappy, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps work ethic, start-ups and small businesses do have some key distinctions.…

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Business and Commercial Solicitors: Take some strain off running your business

Making sure that your business has access to a good solicitor is essential in ensuring its long term success. Having a solicitor from the outset can give you a number of benefits, given the wide range of expertise most solicitors have at their disposal.

Business and commercial solicitor working with a client

A business and commercial solicitor can offer you advice and insight on issues of finance and banking, real estate, employment and much more. It can also be valuable to you should you ever encounter any legal issues related to your business.

Why would you ever need a business and commercial solicitor?

For a new business, or small business, it may not seem essential to look into the services of a solicitor.…

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Generative Design: A Transformation in How Products Are Made

In modern manufacturing, an innovative new process sees the designer create a system and that system actually generate the product. The process is known as generative design and it represents over a paradigm shift in product design.

Here is a look at how generative design works and the revolution underway in modern product design.

What Is Generative Design?

The end result of generative design, whether it’s a chair, an image, an animation or an architectural model, is the byproduct of an algorithm. A set of rules entered in to a computer program and uses highly complex protocols of parametric modeling to generate and test different variations of a product design.…

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What is Deal Registration – and Why Does it Matter to You?

Anyone who has ever worked in a sales environment knows the frustration and disappointment that comes when a big sale falls through — especially when a competitor swoops in and seemingly snatches the customer right out from under your nose. Despite your anger, though, there’s usually not a whole lot that you can do about it.

Deal registration

Unless, of course, you registered the deal that you were working on. In industries that rely on channel partners and resellers, such as IT, some vendors engage in a process of deal registration that protects their partners from losing sales to other resellers and even the vendor’s own sales team.…

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Pinterest: The Underestimated Social Media Channel you Should be Using

Pinterest is one of the five biggies in social media, but despite this, quite often it’s not used by businesses. Think about the social toolbars that are present on almost every website; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and even YouTube are regular features here but quite often Pinterest is nowhere to be seen.

Not relevant

The belief that Pinterest isn’t relevant is quite a common one. With it being image heavy, a lot of B2B companies and info-heavy sites, which may be lacking in a strong stock of images, quite often ignore it with the opinion that it’s not relevant to their company.…

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