POST CATEGORY : Management

The Fine Art of Farming Out Functions

In their earliest days of operation, most entrepreneurs take great pride in performing all their company’s tasks in-house, sometimes even personally doing everything. It’s a phase that provides important lessons for the owners and employees, but in time a successful business owner will reach a point where it’s no longer practical to do everything alone.

Car loaded with watermelons

This doesn’t necessarily apply to the physical process of producing a good; you can maintain a high level of efficiency and still take on the entire assembly process yourself.

In-house vs. outsourcing

Shipping is a different story. Owner delivery can work up to a certain volume, but when you can no longer put the day’s output in your SUV and drop off deliveries on the way home, you have a decision to make.…

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Producing Great Membership Cards: DIY or Outsource?

If you run a business, club, gym or organisation the chances are you may need to produce membership cards. Hobby clubs and gyms use them a lot as a way to make sure that only members get access to certain areas. Effectively these double as simple ID badges.

Hyatt Gold Passport membership card

Many firms also use them as a way to reward customers for their loyalty perhaps taking a percentage off the bill for people who carry the card or only allowing people with a card to benefit from certain offers. Some firms use plastic ID cards with a magnetic strip or simple smart chip embedded in them.…

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More Than a Vendor: How to Turn your Vendors into Partners

For many small businesses, vendors serve a defined purpose: They provide a product or service. Once that is done, the business pays the bill and moves on, until the next time they need the product or service.

Business partnerships with vendors

In some situations, this model works. However, many businesses have found their vendors are an important part of their success, and are instrumental in their company reaching its goals. Those companies that have developed strategic partnerships with their vendors are often in a better position to achieve their objectives and to maximize their results than those who take a more transactional approach to working with vendors.…

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5 Times You Should Relocate Your Business (and When You Should Stay Put)

Deciding to move to a different city when you work for someone else is a major decision. Balancing the emotional with the practical can lead to tough choices, even when it appears that moving is the best thing for your family, your career, and your life.

Relocating business location

When you own a business, making that decision is even more difficult. Even if your business is mostly online, or you work with clients everywhere, pulling up the stakes and heading to a new city requires thought, planning, and a healthy tolerance for risk. That being said, there are a few signs that it’s time to move your business somewhere else, especially if you want to grow.…

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Securing Your Shop: Standards and Simple Steps for Using Safety Tape

Safety in a factory or workshop is a serious matter. There needs to be proper training for everybody in the work-place in how to keep themselves and others safe and how to use equipment properly. Communication is key to compliance with safety standards, and one of the aids to communication that can be very useful is a surprising one: safety tape!

Safety tape

Marking Boundaries

Obviously, machines with moving parts can be dangerous. The machine operator has a safe area where he or she can position himself to work. The machines should be fitted with all appropriate protections, but sometimes a complete physical barrier isn’t possible.…

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5 Ways your Small Business Could be Wasting Time

If you are running your own small business, chances are you are going to run into the problem of time management. Wasting time in a small business can be a chronically unnoticed problem by the over-scheduled, busy shop owner. It is critical that when you operate your small business you are running the most time efficient schedule for both yourself and your employees. Included here are a few ways you could be wasting time in your business and how to stop the leaks.

Busy small business owner

Doing Inventory

Do you find yourself completely unaware of how much stock is left? Are you having to do inventory on a weekly or monthly basis?…

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5 Ways your Small Business Could Be Losing Revenue

It is an undeniable fact that the current state of affairs is difficult for small businesses. Trying to compete with Goliath-sized companies is a bit like swimming upstream in molasses for your small business. You may be unsurprised that you are counting every penny and monitoring revenue on a daily basis. But are there options for income that you could be missing out on? Included here are a few ways your small business could be losing revenue, as well as means to correct it.

Losing profits

No Credit Card Processing

Credit cards are like candy in today’s world. Everyone has at least one and they will use them whenever they get the chance.…

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The Dangers of Stereotyping in the Workplace

It’s often thought that diversity in the workplace only involves race and gender, but in actual fact, diversity in the workplace is much broader than that. Your colleagues or employees differ in a number of ways, such as age, relationship status, education, and even their role in the business. It’s illegal to discriminate on a number of number of factors, such as race, gender, and age and although much has been done to tackle discrimination, stereotypes are still prevalent.

Diversity in the workplace

Stereotyping or labelling people is the result of making general assumptions about someone without finding out anything about them. It’s something we have no doubt all done, with several very common ones – such as baby boomers can’t adapt to new technology and changes, and that people who drive a van for a living are rude and unhelpful.…

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Workplace Fire Safety: 5 Things to Improve

Did you know that 40 percent of businesses never reopen following a natural disaster, like a fire? Indeed, workplace fires can be devastating – not only to your employees and everyone else who are in your business premise but also to your company.

It is clearly your responsibility to prevent workplace fires – neglecting it can cost you a lot, even can land you to prison!

Blocked emergency exit

Fortunately, workplace fires are not something that business owners can’t prevent. The key is in the planning and plan execution.

To help you out, here are five things to consider when planning for or improving your company’s fire safety procedures:

1.

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7 Great Tips for Maintaining Good Client Relationships

In most industries, you need to have a touch of selfishness in your nature to be good at sales. After all, you have to beat out the competition to get those accounts signed. At the end of your pitch, you’ll either win or lose. Even when working closely with a team of other marketing and sales agents, your goal should always be the brightest shining light in the room, the super-seller that everyone else wants to be like.

Business client relationship

Having the winning, super-competitive, relentless drive needed to meet and exceed quotas every month will get you the sales. It won’t, however, help you hang on to that crucial big fat twenty-percent of clients who’ll keep company bank accounts filled with cash.…

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