Top 5 Tips posts from the SME Blog are always full of hints and tips for small, home & micro business owners.
1. Make sure that your email Inbox is totally clear of anything urgent and that you have replied to everything important. You can set your email to provide an ‘out of office’ message and let people know when you will be back.
2. Turn off alerts on your phone if you want to really disconnect. Nowadays with smartphones you may feel like you are never really away from your business even when you get some precious time off, so make sure you won’t get email notifications or incoming business calls.
3. Let people you work with know where you are going to be and tell them how you can be contacted in an emergency, but make it clear that you shouldn’t be bothered for trivial matters.
4. Keep your social media presence active even if you aren’t there. Schedule a few good updates to go out whilst you are away.
5. Work hard before you go away to ensure that you won’t have a lot of things outstanding when you return. Plus, it will feel more like you are deserving of the break!
Top 5 Tips posts from the SME Blog are always full of hints and tips for small, home & micro business owners.
1. Using a credit card is actually a sensible thing for a business to do, provided they are going to be paying it off in full each month. Doing this helps to build a solid credit history.
2. The card should be used for small purchases at first to allow you to improve your credit rating. As your credit rating improves you will be allowed to borrow more money.
3. Don’t pay for too much all at once on credit. Plan your purchases carefully and stagger them across multiple months if possible.
4. If you must buy things on long-term credit, shop around for a good interest rate and don’t be afraid to chop and change lenders to get the best deal.
5. Make sure that any employees who will be able to buy things on the company credit card understand what should be paid for on credit or upfront.
Top 5 Tips posts from the SME Blog are always full of hints and tips for small, home & micro business owners.
1. The London Olympics are expected to cause travel chaos for small businesses and the general public this Summer. Make sure that all your vital journeys are well planned in advance and that you identify potential alternative routes if you get stuck.
2. Aside from vital journeys, it isn’t advisable to actually travel anywhere in London right before and after Olympic events. You can also expect to see increased traffic in Hertfordshire as well because all the shuttle buses going to the venues will be departing from there.
3. Keep your customers informed. Let them know that you will still be open during the Olympic period. Now would be a good time to start up a website for your business if you don’t already have one.
4. Make sure your deliveries and other services are not going to be affected by the events. Keep in close contact with suppliers so you know what is going on with them.
5. Planning is important to make sure you are adequately prepared for the festivities. Overall, the Olympics are likely to be an excellent opportunity for many small businesses to increase revenue as long as they are prepared.
Top 5 Tips posts from the SME Blog are always full of hints and tips for small, home & micro business owners.
1. If you found the tax deadline to be very stressful, it is likely that you are doing something wrong throughout the year. Use this opportunity to get more organised and get your books in order – try to post transactions daily to your accounts.
2. Halfway through the year you should conduct a review of your books to see if everything is in order. Ask your accountant if you want an expert opinion too.
3. Remember to adjust the value of your business assets to account for annual depreciation.
4. Consider introducing some employee benefits like health insurance or childcare subsidies. Not only will they be made very happy and less likely to leave, you should be entitled to tax breaks.
5. Update your estimated totals for the previous year and replace them with the actual figures now they are known.
Top 5 Tips posts from the SME Blog are always full of hints and tips for small, home & micro business owners.
1. Make sure that you set achievable goals for your team to give them something to work together for.
2. Identify the skills of your team and organise workloads so that these strengths are highlighted.
3. Set a tight schedule for collaborative projects and do everything you can to keep the team focused on completion dates.
4. Team-building exercises and social events are good ways to improve the bonding of the team and help them collaborate better.
5. Use software and devices that make it simple for your team to communicate. Most of the problems that occur with collaboration only happen because of poor communication.
Top 5 Tips posts from the SME Blog are always full of hints and tips for small, home & micro business owners.
1. Don’t blindly assume that exporting is the right option for your small business. Sometimes it is best to establish yourself more firmly in your local area or home country rather than branching out.
2. Understand the risks you are taking when exporting. Rapid expansion could make you forget all the core elements of your business that made it great in the first place. Remember there is no guarantee of success.
3. You will need to do a lot of research before even considering exporting as a course of action. Different countries may have laws that prohibit the sale of your product or there may just not be a valid market for you.
4. Don’t underestimate the importance of the culture within the country you want to export to. You must be sensitive to local customs and their way of doing things, or you stand no chance of acceptance.
5. Use a virtual office solution to keep your costs manageable. By doing this you won’t have to risk much money at all to get your product available on a worldwide basis and still provide localised support.
Top 5 Tips posts from the SME Blog are always full of hints and tips for small, home & micro business owners.
1. One of your main aims as a business owner should be converting prospective leads into actual sales. A proven sales script that works is vital for increasing your conversion rate.
2. Another essential element is generating enough leads in the first place. You need to be able to identify quality prospective customers and develop a strategy for consistently turning these into sales.
3. As well as concentrating on increasing your leads, you should focus on customers who have bought from you in the past. These people are already predisposed to want to buy from you again.
4. Try to get the people who already regularly purchase from you to buy even more by bundling packages of products and services together at a discount.
5. Take a long look at the products and services you provide. Which are the most profitable and which of them barely break even? Are you wasting too much time on things that aren’t making you any money? Be ruthless. Cut the waste or don’t be afraid to increase your prices.
The top 5 tips weekly post is always full of hints and tips for small, home & micro business owners.
1. Allow customers to purchase from you in the way they want to, rather than just limiting them to one method. For example, if you only accept payment in person at your shop then you are excluding anybody who might want to purchase from you over the phone or across the Web.
2. It is important for your business to be able to accept credit cards. The credit card gives additional security and peace of mind to the purchaser, plus in the case of B2B sales it will also give them extra time to make the payment, which is something that will be appreciated.
3. To make things run as smoothly as possible, you should always try to integrate your payment data with your payment system. This will remove any data inaccuracies that could be caused by human error. It may also help you to receive payments quicker and improve your auditing and compliance.
4. Make sure that you select a payment provider that is secure, technically savvy and financially stable.
5. It is essential that your payment system is encrypted and that the computers and other electronic devices you use are secure and protected from viruses and other dangers.
Top 5 Tips posts from the SME Blog are always full of hints and tips for small, home & micro business owners.
1. If you don’t have the space to put an office in your own home, consider sharing one. Other local potential business owners are likely to be in the same situation as you and will want to go in on a joint let, or if not you could ask a local business if you could lease a desk in their office.
2. Get rid of your business landline to cut down on costs unless you really cannot live without it. Small business phone bills can often be very expensive so if you can switch to a VOIP solution like Skype it is likely to make a difference. You can even make calls to landlines at a much lower rate and put a plugin on your website to allow people to call you directly through Skype for support.
3. Use free Wi-Fi from hotspots whenever you are out and about rather than paying for mobile broadband. The cost of downloading data on the move is still far too high to be worth the benefits.
4. Don’t travel to meetings anymore. Travel expenses are something that a small business can rarely afford. With current online meeting technology it just makes financial sense for small businesses to remove face-to-face contact with suppliers and partners from the agenda. Perhaps meet for the first time in person, but then try to switch to talking online after that.
5. Try to combine all your software expenditure into one small monthly payment. The complete Business Cloud Framework from WinWeb will allow you to collaborate with other professionals, automate your sales and marketing process plus give you access to a whole range of powerful software apps.
Top 5 Tips posts from the SME Blog are always full of hints and tips for small, home & micro business owners.
1. Try to make as many useful professional business contacts as possible in your local area, even if it means attending lot’s of tradeshows / exhibitions or networking events. You want your business to be in the forefront of everyones’ mind if your industry is the topic of discussion.
2. If you receive complaints about a particular aspect of your business then you should look at spending some money to address those issues. Problems that continue over a long period of time will only drive customers away.
3. Use some of your profits to advertise in ways you haven’t yet tried. Perhaps you could take out a full page advert in the local paper or offer free samples at a community event.
4. Giving something back to local people is a great way to build the reputation of your business. Perhaps you could hold a seminar on entrepreneurship or launch a loyalty scheme.
5. Find out how businesses of similar size in your local area are spending their money. Perhaps they reinvest or maybe they are more interested in building up capital. Use their choices to help you make a decision.
