6 Interesting Indoor Activities to Keep Your Kids Busy this Winter

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If there’s any phrase a parent dreads hearing from the kids, it’s, “I’m so bored!”

With winter coming up, you’re probably planning for the next couple of months when the kids are going to be indoors a lot, and not have much to do besides watch TV and play video games. As a parent well aware of the downsides of too much digital time as explained by this feature on CNN, it is understandable that you’re looking for other indoor activities that can keep them busy, but also challenge and develop their intelligence.

This winter, go ahead and choose things to do with your kids that will inspire their creativity and encourage them to think. Try and spend as much time with them as you can because nothing develops a child’s brain faster than love and nurturing that can only come from indulging in quality time with your little angels.

1. Take the Kids for Escape Room Games

If you’re looking to combine an afternoon of fun with indoor activities that will keep your kids out of the cold, take them for adventure escape games. Such games combine family time with challenges that encourage your kids to think in a familiar environment. For instance, choose an escape game room based on the Harry Potter theme or perhaps, Doctor Strange – anything that they are into. The room will have hidden clues that the kids must unravel to escape and help Harry save Hogwarts from the complete annihilation engineered by Voldemort.

Each group comprises of 8 to 10 players and they must break out of the room within 60 to 90 minutes. Depending on the ages of your kids, you can choose rooms with the right difficulty levels. The games are immersive and exciting and give children the chance to step into the shoes of their favorite fantasy character.

2. Sign Up the Kids for Music Lessons

Check out this article on the Daily Beast that talks about how kids who play a stringed instrument, piano, or any other musical gadget are likely to have up to 15% higher verbal skills scores. This winter, sign your kids up for indoor activities like music where they can develop their verbal and listening skills and with them, their IQ. Not only will you be giving your child the opportunity to learn something new, but you might just discover a musical genius hiding behind the remote of the TV.

3. Encourage Your Kids to Read

Books are easily the biggest treasure you can give your kids. Open up their imagination to a world created by the written word and watch their intelligence levels soar. Use the excuse of winters and forced indoor activities to build a love for books and reading. If you can take out the time, join them in reading the books together. Discuss the story as the book progresses so the young readers are encouraged to think beyond what they read and explore new possibilities. Statistics show that kids growing up in a home full of books have a 36% higher probability of graduating from high school and a 10% higher chance of earning a college degree.

4. Learn a New Language with Them

Being able to learn and converse in multiple languages can help your kids attain SAT scores 14% higher than their peers. Like studies conducted at the National Center for Biotechnology Information show, speaking and understanding more than one language teaches kids to be more disciplined, and develops their cognitive and processing abilities. Further, the brain learns to pay attention and concentrate; and becomes more adept at switching between tasks and excelling at each of them.

Use the internet to learn this new skill which could prove to be one of the most interesting indoor activities. The entire family can participate in the lessons and have fun while using the new language to converse at home.

5. Give Your Children Building Materials

Bringing home sets of actual building blocks is something that all parents do. It’s not unusual to find moms and dads scouting the aisles of pre-fabricated blocks for their kids to use for building say, a house or plane, or even, themed creations like spaceships. This winter, allow your kids to experiment with regular items lying around the house.

Craft paper, scissors, glue, paper cups and plates, paints, sticks, and even toilet paper can act as the perfect tools to be creative. You might just get to step into a rocket created by draping an old sheet on a ladder or tall lamp. Or, enter a garden with painted flowers, butterflies, and ferns cut out and stuck to the furniture in the kids’ rooms. You could also take your story-reading session further. Having finished a fairy-tale, get the kids to recreate it with their own illustrations.

6. Give Your Kids the Time and Space to Think

The Greater Good magazine directs parents to take a step back from directing all indoor activities and allow the kids to come up with ideas of their own. While you do hate having to hear about your kids having nothing to do, sometimes, the best thing to do is to just let your kids be. Give them the time and space to think in a quiet corner of the house or their rooms. Don’t cram every single moment of the day with some indoor activity you have planned.

Set aside an hour or two each day where your child can choose what he or she wants to do without supervision. Start with the question, “Okay, tell me! What would YOU like to do?” And, just go with the choices no matter how silly they may seem.

Keeping your kids busy this winter and coming up with indoor activities does not have to be expensive projects. You’ll be surprised to see how little it takes to challenge their imagination and creativity. As a parent, that’s possibly the best things you can do for the kids to develop their intellect.

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Ready to Start a Business? Step 1: Hire an Expert Leadership Coach

Business

Until 20 years ago, leadership coaching or executive coaching was viewed as a necessity for faltering business owners. But, in recent times, more and more entrepreneurs getting ready to start a business prefer to hire the services of a leadership coach. They are open to enlisting the help of an expert to help them create a sounder platform on which to build their new enterprise.

But, will this move do them any good? According to the Forbes magazine, corporate giants like Google, GE, and Goldman Sachs have allocated a budget of $1 billion each year towards leadership coaching. Further, statistics gathered by the PriceWaterhouseCoopers and the Association Resource Center clearly indicate that this simple move can help businesses earn profits worth 10 to 49 times their original investment. So, if you’re ready to build a successful business, one of the first moves you may want to make is to hire a leadership coach.

What Exactly is a Leadership Coach?

Executive coaches are very different from mentors. They follow a carefully-designed schedule, stepping in from time to time helping their clients to make the right decisions. Like expert business coach, Arman Sadeghi at Titanium Success reveals, a coach will not tell you, the entrepreneur, how to start a business. He is not there to give you advice. On the contrary, he asks you a series of questions intended to realize your full potential so YOU can make the right choices. With the help of the coach, you can develop the essential soft skills you need to start a business and make a long-term success of it.

But, Why Choose a Coach?

Magdalena N Mook is the CEO & Executive Director at the International Coach Federation (ICF) that has 26,000 members operating across the world. She tells the Entrepreneur magazine, “What coaching can offer, it’s not telling people what to do, which entrepreneur will listen anyway, it’s really being a partner in the process. I think this is exactly what makes coaching even more prompt to be adopted by the entrepreneur. Because it is partnership and not mentorship or consulting, it’s helping the entrepreneurs to find responses in their own ways to whatever they want to accomplish.”

Accordingly, here are some of the areas where you’ll receive assistance:

  • Planning your business strategies and sounding out ideas
  • Developing the essential confidence in your project and conviction to make it materialize
  • Training yourself to maintain focus on your goals
  • Getting the necessary support and being accountable for your projected milestones
  • Putting together a skilled team and managing it to help you achieve the company’s objectives

1. To Start a Business, You Need More than a Great Idea

Starting a business with a great product or service idea is just the beginning. To make it a reality, you need to raise the necessary finances by pitching your ideas to financiers and potential business partners. You’ll also need expert portfolio teams that can help you with the other aspects of your business. These facets typically include production processes, advertising and marketing, sales, delivering goods, customer care, sorting through legal nuances, and much more. To get the right personnel together, you’ll need the assistance of an expert leadership coach.

2. Executive Coaches Help You Institute a Favorable Work Culture

When you’re ready to start a business, it is highly essential that you set the tone of the work culture and ethics of the company early on. And, the one person to create that persona and impression for the company is you. The team working with you will emulate and follow your leadership when it comes to dealing with vendors, customers, and other stakeholders of the company. Given that a positive attitude can make a difference between success and failure, work with your executive coach to learn how to institute the right culture in your company.

3. Leadership Coaches Make You an Efficient Team Manager

Simply having a great team and right mix of skills and talents to start a business is not enough. You must know how to coordinate their efforts to keep the company functioning smoothly. While working hard to grow your company is essential, you must keep in touch with your people. Involve your workforce in the vision you have for the future of the company, and how you hope to achieve the objectives you have planned. Welcome feedback and ideas for future growth since your team works in close contact with vendors and customers on the ground level and has a better understanding of what the market wants. Need to understand better how that can work? Check out this article released by NBC News.

4. You Need Guidance to Build a Lasting Company

As long as your company is in its fledgling stage with just a few employees and you running operations as a manager, dealing with the challenges is easy. But, as the enterprise grows and you’re ready to go public, you’ll need the advanced guidance needed to act as CEO. You may not have the skills and expertise needed to deal with growth equity, venture capital, and the other intricacies of the corporate world. That’s where the executive coach steps in – to guide you in the right direction, so you can make a success of the company and watch it grow over the years. Most importantly, you need the business coach to help you assess if your business is stable enough to begin expansion.

5. Understand that an Evolving Business is a Successful Business

To ensure the lasting success of your business, you need to keep your finger on the pulse of the market and evolve according to changing market trends and consumer expectations. Rely on the expertise of your business coach to help you steer the company in the right direction to keep pace with change. Like the folks at BizJournals explain, lack of flexibility can spell disaster for your enterprise.

In a fiercely competitive world, understanding how to start a business and make a success of it is a significant challenge as it is. But, with the assistance of a qualified and trained business coach, you can overcome the snags and understand how to avoid potential pitfalls. Design success for your business from the onset and watch it reach the 10-year and then, 15-year success mark.

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Data and Analytics Play an Important Role in Digital Transformation. Here’s Why.

Business Entrepreneurship Home Business Wiz Tech Tips

 

The world is forever evolving and changing. New technologies are being developed, behavioural patterns are changing, and businesses with the desire to avoid extinction have to evolve along with everything around them. As a result of modern technology, access to information is easier than it has ever been. Through digital innovations like artificial intelligence, cloud computing and many others, customers now have access to a wealth of information about whatever business or service they’re searching for. This raises the bar for existing businesses (adapt or lose everything).

Digital transformation involves restructuring existing business models, strategies, processes and so on, to suit consumer needs using current technology. The important thing to note about digital transformation is that it is consumer-focused, aimed at giving the consumer the best experience possible, while also making managing operations easier for business owners (CIO from IDG).

Consumer behaviour is constantly changing, and, as a result, organisations have recognised the need to shift from data generation to being data powered. Today, data and analytics are used to identify behavioural patterns through extracted data, analyse said data and use the results to improve business processes (Techopedia). Qualitative and quantitative data are gathered simply through using web analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Open Web Analytics, Clicktale and many others.

Data and analytics are important to digital transformation, as they are key aspects of strategy development. Different aspects of every business produce data, and some aspects provide a larger amount of data than others. As your business produces data, your competitor’s business also does the same. The difference in both cases lies in the goals of each organisation, how data is interpreted, and how the results acquired are developed into strategies that can help improve business processes and operations (Centric Digital).

One of the beneficial aspects of data and analytics, relating to digital transformation, is machine learning. Machine learning involves getting computers to learn and act like humans, by feeding them data and information in the form of real-life observations and interactions. This helps in making more intelligent and informed decisions. For example, selecting alternate routes to avoid traffic, in turn preventing the late delivery of goods or products.

Analytics help companies understand the data at their disposal and help them make better business decisions, resulting in decisions with benefits such as cutting down maintenance costs and improving business operations (Search Business Analytics).

Cloud platforms are also agents of digital transformation, which do not make access to information easier for just the customer, but also for the organisation and its employees. Cloud computing is built around hardware and software that can be accessed through any web browser. They store information and programs for businesses, which can be accessed through a secure connection (iomart).

Analytics in cloud computing involve activities such as tracking social media engagement and statistics.  Analytics deal with a large amount of data which requires plenty of processing power and storage space. Cloud computing thus possesses the space to hold large amounts of data, while also making data accessible from remote locations. This is what makes cloud computing and data analytics a great fit (Forbes).

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Are Competitors Beating You to the Punch with Marketing and Advertising?

Business

How well would you say your marketing and advertising efforts are going these days?

For some business owners, their efforts could be playing out much better.

If your competition is beating you to the punch on marketing and advertising, how do you plan to turn it around? And as importantly, when do you plan to do this?

Remember, each day that goes by where your competitors have the upper-hand, you can lose ground.

So, is it time to act starting now?

Take Action to Stay Competitive

In your efforts to stay competitive, start by assessing current conditions.

Among the questions you want to be able to answer:

· Am I doing enough to market and advertise my brand?

· What are my immediate competitors doing that seems to work for them?

· What are the demographics with my business? Knowing this is key so you have the right products and services for select ages and genders.

· Have I been too absent when it comes to social media?

While there are other questions you should be able to answer, start with those and go from there.

Once you’ve decided that action is needed on one or more fronts, do you do it on your own or reach outside for help?

If doing the latter, have you thought about LED signage?

As more businesses have discovered over time, LED signs can make an impact on how successful one’s brand can be.

So, if some of your closest competitors are using such signage, don’t you think you should consider this too?

If you said yes, you can search online. Also go through word-of-mouth referrals to see which signage best suits your needs.

Whether you end up with www.megasigninc.com or another provider, know the benefits you will get in return.

Among them:

· Greatest exposure for your brand

· Being seen during the day and at night

· Prime locations around town where consumers can’t help but notice your brand

With the right LED signage, you can add some punch to your marketing and advertising efforts.

Don’t Forget How Important Referrals Are

As important as signs and other promotional methods are, never lose sight of one thing. Yes, that would be your customers.

Your customers can do wonders for your business image. As a result, put them to work where and when it is appropriate.

An example of this would be via customer testimonials.

If you have a customer stating how happy they are with what you provided them, will they give you a little plug? In the event they will, take advantage of it.

A customer testimonial can go a long way in bringing you more business and added revenue.

Use testimonials on your website, in promotional brochures, on TV, and newspaper ads.

When customers go to bat for your brand, you win.

So, if competitors have been beating you to the punch in promotions, is it not time to turn this around?

If you fail to address any issues you are having with where your marketing dollars go, you may look back with regrets one day on not having done enough.

With that in mind, do not be that business owner.

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How the stock markets can help a business grow

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In the public mindset, investing in or making use of the stock market is something that only small-scale, individual investors do. However, it’s also possible for companies and organizations to make the most of it: whether it’s by offering your own firm to other investors through an IPO or using company cash to buy shares in other firms, there are a lot of options.

Initial public offerings

Perhaps the main way that the stock market can be used to a company’s benefit is through a market float, or an initial public offering (IPO). Most American companies are owned by private investors, which means that the general public or wider investor market can’t simply buy shares in the way that they usually can for one on the stock market. An IPO changes that: it means that a company offers some or all of its value for the public to buy, which in turn means a big cash injection.

The key to a successful IPO is research, as it’s only by doing this that a firm can find out the right time to strike. In almost every case, a company will choose to employ a specialist who can manage the IPO process for them – but company staff should still be as aware as possible of market movements. A stock events calendar should be used to locate occasions and dates to be avoided, while keeping a keen eye on news stories about previous IPOs in publications such as the Financial Times will help you build up some perspective on how it works.

Cash investment destination

For businesses that aren’t quite ready to float their value on the stock market just yet, one alternative is to invest any spare cash they have in the stock market. It’s not just retail or individual investors who invest in stocks and shares – companies can also do it. Beware of any tax implications of doing this, though: speak to your retained accountant first before making any moves.

Perhaps one of the most obvious ways that a company can invest in the stock market is through its pension funds. When employees pay into a pension pot, it needs to be invested somewhere in order to grow – and the stock market is one option. Whatever your reason for investing company cash in the stock market, though, you should always seek professional advice to mitigate the risk of losses – and when it comes to using employee pension cash, you should only do it through a pensions professional who can manage it all for you.

While it may seem at first glance like investing in the stock market is simply something that only retail investors do, firms can also use this asset class to their advantage. Whether your firm puts its cash to work by buying shares in other companies for speculative purposes or it goes as far as adding its own value to the stock market for general sale, there are plenty of ways you can go.

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The Evolving Role of Human Resources Within the E-Commerce Industry

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The human resource department has always been an essential component of any company, whether it runs online or from a brick-and-mortar location. Employee well-being is the responsibility of the HR department, which controls everything from hiring employees, setting pay rates and keeping track of payroll, deciding employee benefits, deciding how to fire employees, keeping up with tax laws and more. The HR department is basically the backbone of any successful business venture.

Basic human resource functions have been working behind the scenes for ages, but within the ever-expanding e-commerce industry, the role of HR has had to evolve and become more dynamic, and it’s still doing so today. Successful e-commerce fashion retailers, JJ’s House and VeryVoga, have shared some insight on the major points of HR evolution within their organizations. Read on to find out how e-commerce is modernizing its old conventions to sync up with a contemporary workforce.

Contemporary Hiring Trends

Today’s e-commerce businesses have to deal with a massive influx of advanced systems and technologies. It can get so complicated that many entrepreneurs who start online marketplaces actually consider them to be tech enterprises. HR managers have to employ some innovative hiring trends to fill in positions with worthy candidates.

HR managers in the e-commerce industry are expected to work around-the-clock. One of their most formidable tasks is to find the right candidates for open positions. In e-commerce, employees must not only possess a pleasant attitude and relevant work experience, they must also have the technical knowledge to perform their tasks properly.

Keeping Employees Happy

Since the need to retain top talent is arguably more significant in e-commerce than in any other industry, it’s imperative for HR to come up with ways to rethink employee retention. They must keep employees happy in order to avoid rapid reorganization, consolidation and a host of other hurdles that comes with losing an essential employee.

It’s the responsibility of the HR department to create a positive employee experience and provide an unparalleled, exclusive work-life experience by incorporating dynamics like an open work culture, relaxed hierarchy and other employee-friendly policies.

Introducing the SME

Where training and development are concerned, human resource departments use something called subject matter experts, or SMEs, to get the job done right in today’s e-commerce industry. SMEs are trained to help enable aptitude development and intensive skills within the workforce. These experts can also help improve communication between employees, initiate open thought channels, open new avenues of knowledge for employees and help them become seasoned professionals. Ultimately, they help employees feel nurtured and important within the organization so that they appreciate being part of the company and are naturally inclined to be more productive.

Successful e-commerce operations like JJ’s House and VeryVoga wouldn’t exist without a strong and modernized HR department to back them up. Anyone working in the e-commerce industry must employ a strong HR department by considering the points above. When a business has a solid HR department in place, all other aspects of the business should function well too.

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Why You Need to Know the Difference Between FEIN and Tax ID

Business

Essentially, a FEIN and a tax ID number are the same. It is important to learn the small differences between the two so that you know what to do for your business or an entity such as a trust. When filing for a Trust tax ID Number or FEIN, knowing what each is for helps you to make the right decision when filing. The experienced associates at IRS-EIN-Tax-ID can help. 

A FEIN is a Federal Employee Identification Number and an EIN is an Employee Identification Number. Both numbers can be used to identify a business. The federal government does not recognize a FEIN and this number would not be used for federal tax filing. 

Small businesses will need to apply for a FEIN-EIN whether they have employees, or they do not. Having this number helps to avoid identify theft and protect the privacy of the business. 

To be able to report taxes to the IRS, a business must have a tax ID number. When you are the business owner, it is important to file for a tax ID or EIN to have this nine-digit identification number as it is required. A business also needs this number to be able to get a bank account or apply for credit for the business. 

The filing is easy when you take advantage of online service options. An application for an EIN can be completed online via IRS-EIN-Tax-ID.com. At the site, easily find the application for your business needs and fill out the appropriate paperwork. Once completed, you will need to hit the submit button. 

After your EIN has been assigned, the number will be emailed to you. Once you have the number, you will be ready for tax filing purposes as well as accessing lines of credit for your business, opening a checking account and more. 

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Building a successful marketing strategy for your ecommerce website

Business

Starting your own ecommerce site used to be something you would do once you had already come up with the products that you are selling. However, nowadays, it is an essential early step to take if you want to maximize your sales and reach as many people as possible. Customers are used to services such as Amazon and they expect you to have your own site. However, once you have your ecommerce site up and running, how can you get people to come to it? What you need is a successful marketing strategy.

Have plentiful content

Your site needs content as well as products. Your homepage, your product category and product pages all need plentiful text content on them. This is because search engines consider sites with lots of useful, well-written and relevant content to be better than other sites – similar to how people view sites. Your homepage needs to tell people exactly what it is that you sell and why customers should buy from you instead of somewhere else. Your product pages need to explain the features of the product and how they will benefit the customer. You should aim for at least 300 words of content per page, where possible. If you sell hundreds of different products then this might be a tall order, so you should probably just concentrate on the main pages.

Produce interesting blog posts

As well as plentiful content for your pages, you also need to make sure that you have a regularly updated blog that is full of interesting posts. Search engines look favorably upon sites that add new pages relatively often. However, blog posts are also a great way to get people interested in your site and your company. Blog posts can be about anything you want. You could do a post about a new product that you have available on your site. You could write one about something industry related that you are an expert on. You could even interview an industry expert. Blog posts are also a chance for you to express yourself and get your company culture across.

Social media presence

Having a social media presence is an absolute must in 2018. When you start an ecommerce site from home, you are unlikely to have a particularly large following. This is where your existing social media profiles will come in. You will (hopefully) have some friends on Facebook, who might be interested in what you are selling. Set up a new profile for your brand and then share the page on your personal page to get interest started. After doing that, you can do posts on the brand profile about any new products or deals, or even link to your interesting blog posts.

The objective of your social media presence will be, ultimately, to get people to click onto your site and browse your products. It’s essential to get great pictures of your products whether you do it yourself or get professional still life photography of your products for better results. However, you can also do other things to build your following on social media. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are excellent for having conversations with your followers. Engage with your followers by replying to their questions, complaints and comments. You can ask their opinions about new products and deals and even run competitions for them.

Email marketing

Email may seem like ancient technology compared with social media but it is still an immensely important weapon in the digital marketing arsenal. It is hugely effective at reaching your audience in a more targeted way. Email marketing is not about spamming generic sales emails to anyone and everyone. Since spam is not the aim of the game, you need to be able to harvest people’s email addresses. Existing customers will have already given you their address when they signed up to buy from your site. You can get potential customers’ email addresses by encouraging them to subscribe to your blog.

Email marketing platforms will let you split your customer base into various demographics, based on stuff like whether they have signed up to your blog, what they have bought before and much more. This means that you can send them more personalized emails that will engage with them better. Valentino Vaschetto is an email marketing expert who works for advertising and marketing agency Iconic Industries. Valentino Vaschetto has a popular Vimeo that uses videos to explain all aspects of digital marketing to you.

Conclusion

Starting up a business from home has never been easier. Ecommerce and digital marketing allow you to direct customers to your shop where they can buy your products, all by using the internet.

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More than money: How to tempt the best employees on a shoestring budget

Business

It would be fair to say that we are well and truly in the era of the start-up culture. Wherever you turn, start-ups are popping up everywhere, and there seems to be a story every day about the latest new business securing lucrative new funding.

However, not all of these start-ups can afford high salaries. At the same time, not all start-ups are going to receive lots of funding and as a result, can’t compete with salaries.

This is where creative minds need to enter the picture. Unfortunately for them, employees just aren’t going to choose them if they can’t offer them something else in return. It’s understood that a large proportion of start-ups fail in the first year, so jumping ship and joining one of these companies on a less-than attractive package just isn’t going to happen.

Following on from the above, let’s now take a look at some of the ways in which young businesses can reward employees, without paying huge salaries.

It’s the small things that matter

Let’s kick things off by highlighting that you don’t need to be giving twice the average annual leave, plus other ridiculous perks to join your company. Sometimes, it’s just the small things that count.

Building a good culture is something that can take time, but you can accelerate the process with small gestures. For example, employee holiday gifts might feel like a small token, but it’s something that still makes your employees head home for the festivities knowing that they are valued by their place of work. Small tricks like this can make the world of difference.

Gym memberships and wellness programs

This is something that has come into its own over the last few years and is regarded as very important by a lot of employees.

Companies have realized that the likes of gym memberships and wellness programs don’t just put a smile on their worker’s faces, but they can also make them healthier. Ultimately, the number of sick days should theoretically reduce.

As a company, you can tend to get discounted gym rates if you can promise that a set number of your workers will subscribe. For the employees themselves, they at least know that they are saving the best part of $50 a month – and this is something that they can link back to their salary.

Performance bonuses

This is largely going to depend on the type of industry you are involved in, but it goes without saying that lower salaries can be offset by performance bonuses. In the UK for example, Sports Direct is known for its low salaries, but at the same time it offers huge bonus pay-outs to all of its staff. Ultimately, this is something else that workers can factor into their decisions.

Flexible schedules

Finally, don’t underestimate the importance of flexibility. Recent studies have shown that more and more companies are encouraging their staff to work from home, and the effect it can have on morale is incredible.

Sure, this isn’t something that is applicable across all industries, but if you can manage it in yours you will prove to be a much more attractive proposition to potential employees.

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4 Tasks Every Small Business Owner Should Outsource

Business

As a small business owner, you are used to wearing many hats and acting as a Jack of all trades. You likely know a little about a lot, and it’s no wonder why. Running a business requires initiative, skill and savviness. You certainly benefit from the support of your staff, but at the end of the day, you are the one running the show. It can be difficult to delegate tasks to others when you trust yourself the most, and it might be even more difficult to outsource portions of your operation and let go of control completely.

Part of being an effective manager, though, is knowing when to do exactly this. There are several tasks that every small business owner should outsource. Outsourcing can help you free up resources, focus on the essential aspects of your business and avoid errors by getting help from experts trained in the task at hand. The following are some of the processes that might benefit from outsourcing.

Marketing

You might think that your marketing skills are sufficient for promoting your business and attracting customers, but sufficient is not good enough. You work hard to sustain your small business and provide customers with the best service possible. It would be a shame for these efforts to reach only a portion of the market containing potential customers. Rather than do your business a disservice by managing the task of marketing all on your own, consider the benefits of outsourcing it to a company that specializes in small business marketing. This can be a great way to reach new customers.

Bookkeeping

Too many businesses are crippled by the consequences of poor bookkeeping. It is absolutely imperative that you keep track of all revenue, outgoing funds, taxes and payroll. Outsourcing bookkeeping and/or payroll can help you avoid many of the problems that small businesses often encounter with money. Even if you use software and other resources, small mistakes can have major repercussions, and this is a task best left to professionals who are experts in managing small business finances. Outsourcing can also eliminate the stress of spending hours each week managing the minutia of your company’s money.

Web Design

Just as many small business owners are capable of basic bookkeeping, many small business owners are capable of basic web design. When you settle for basic, though, you are doing your company a major disservice. Utilizing a professional website builder is the better option, and it can boost your business’ revenue substantially. Many customers find businesses online, and when your website does not represent your company effectively, you are losing potential sales. A website builder can ensure that potential customers are motivated to follow through. Web design and marketing for small businesses is best left to dedicated professionals.

Conversion

At the end of the day, your ultimate objective is to convert potential customers into loyal clients. Maximizing your conversion statistics demands the use of proven strategies and an effective approach. This means you must utilize marketing, web presence and customer service effectively. Conversion experts who specialize in small businesses can help you use all of these tools to boost profits and reach your target market effectively. A good sales pitch alone won’t do the trick, so it is important to enlist help from specialists when you want to get conversion rates that are worthwhile.

Outsourcing is an important part of running a small business. No matter what industry you are in, you should consider outsourcing these aspects of your company to experts and focusing on what you do best—running the day-to-day operations of your business. This can alleviate stress and free up your time, so do not hesitate to outsource when it becomes necessary.

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