Gone are the days when you can afford to have all the necessary expertise to run your business in-house. Particularly if you are a small or medium enterprise. Outsourcing is a way of getting the exact expertise you need, when you need it. It may be a regular task such as a virtual assistant for [...]
Is the Christmas tree out of the box? Are all the decorations sorted? Are your Christmas cards ready to go out to all your loyal and valuable customers? Hopefully these are the easy tasks for any business. Then there is the staff Christmas function, this should be well and truly organised by now, along with [...]
Well it is actually time management. Managing time is abstract, as time just happens and keeps on happening whatever we might try to do to slow it down or get more time. Time management is all about good planning. Knowing the number of hours you have to work, and to play; knowing the tasks and [...]
Marketing is simply communication. Communicating information about a product or service to potential and existing customers. The most basic form of marketing is “word-of-mouth” but first you need to have customers talking about your offering. You need to communicate the value, the benefit and why your company, product or service is different to the rest. [...]
Small business is actually big business. As at June 2014 in Western Australia, there were 218,798 businesses with 211,658 of these considered small (0-19 employees) and small business making up 96.73% of all WA businesses. According to the Small Business Development Corporation (SBDC) the top five small business industries are - – Construction (40,080) – [...]
We all like to get paid but if your invoicing is not up to scratch, it could take a lot longer to be paid than you hope. All too often you receive an invoice which leaves you scratching your head, maybe too much information making it hard to work out the widget from the gadget [...]
People start their own business for a variety of reasons, they have a brilliant idea they are sure will be the next must-have or must-do; a new mum who decides she just can’t go back to a 9 to 5 job and leave her child at home; redundancy and deciding you will be your own [...]
It is highly likely that at some point in your business lifecycle you will approach your bank for additional funds, most likely an overdraft. An overdraft can be more straight-forward than a loan, due to less paperwork once the facility is established. An overdraft can also occur if your spending has inadvertently exceeded your available [...]
One of the worst parts of running any business is dealing with late payment or worse still non-payment of invoices. Making that phone call to ask for payment could be fraught with difficulty and even the best working relationships can be damaged by making that call. When considering a new customer, one which has long [...]
Using energy wisely is not only good for the environment but for the business bottom line. Now winter has definitely signalled it is on its way, it is a good time to consider how we are using energy. A new book “The 20 Step Guide to Cutting Energy Bills in Your Business” by Jon Dee [...]
