Small Business Efficiency Hacks

It’s important for every business to operate as efficiently as possible. For small businesses, however, increasing efficiency is a critical way of maximizing your resources and competing with larger companies. When you’re up against industry giants, for example, it’s vital to streamline your workflows and reduce waste if you want to grow your enterprise. To start enhancing your operations now, take a look at these top hacks to optimize small business efficiency:

1. Mobile Point of Sale Systems

If you regularly take face-to-face payments from customers, a mobile point of sale system could increase the efficiency of each transaction and even boost your sales figures. When you have the right system, you can take payments from any location. Whether it’s the shop floor, trade shows, or out and about when you’re doing promotions, the ability to secure a transaction instantly minimizes the risk of customers changing their minds at the last minute.

In addition to this, using mobile point of sales systems minimizes the amount of space required for checkouts or payment portals. As a result, you can make the best use of your retail space and increase payment efficiency.

2. Inventory Control

When you have an effective inventory control system, you can operate with minimal storage space and still never run out of stock. This keeps your costs low and allows you to respond to changing customer demand swiftly and efficiently.

Traditionally, inventory control used to be managed manually but this takes a significant amount of time and manpower. By switching to back office software, you can manage your inventory with greater levels of accuracy. With automated inventory control, you can ensure that stock is automatically re-ordered when it’s running low, which means you’ll always have the resources you need to meet customer demand.

3. Set Measurable Goals

Every business should have goals they want to achieve, such as expanding into more locations or increase sales every quarter. However, unless these targets are measurable, you won’t be able to monitor your performance. Many companies ascribe to SMART goals for just this reason. By making your targets Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-framed base, you can ensure that reaching your targets is a viable way to drive your business forward.

Furthermore, you won’t waste time trying to achieve goals that are unverifiable or that don’t offer financial benefits for your firm. While hitting your targets is great, it’s vital that you’re striving to achieve the right goals in the first place if you want to run your business with maximum efficiency levels.

Prioritizing Efficiency in Business

Many business owners focus on increasing productivity or boosting sales when they first starting setting goals. However, optimizing efficiency is typically at the heart of these targets. By prioritizing efficiency, you can achieve a wide array of other goals too. An inefficient business will never benefit from maximum productivity, for example.

Fortunately, there are numerous tools and processes you can use to make your business more efficient. By doing so, you can consistently increase in-house efficiency and use this as a basis to enhance your overall commercial performance.

How to Start a Consulting Business

The easy part of being a consultant is acting as an advisor to businesses in a specific area. The hard part is drawing a line between being a good and a bad consultant. You can only bridge this gap by knowing what your strength is in the business. You also must have a passion and a drive for excellence to succeed.

 In these modern times, anyone can be a consultant. All you need is to identify what you’re good at and specialize in monetizing it by providing valuable advice to businesses. However, it’s not as simple as it sounds.

 Before you put up a consulting business, consider a few factors to avoid setting yourself up for failure. 

Assess Your Strengths and Skill Set

As a consultant, businesses will require you to solve problems they can’t solve themselves. This is the only reason they’ll be willing to pay for your service. You need to know what value you’ll offer to your clients.

 You can consider several types of consulting businesses to start. For example, if you’re good at IT, you can offer managed IT services like those offered at Levit8 IT Solutions. Other opportunities are available in digital marketing, accounting, public relations, and business strategy.

Figure Out the Needs of the Market

Once you establish the service you want to offer, think of the pain points of your market. It’s not enough to choose an area of specialization and have a strong skill set. If your target market doesn’t have the problems you want to solve, you will soon be out of business.

 The best way to identify what your market wants is to ask. Utilize social media and online research tools to see what leaders are saying about your niche. Try to establish where the confusion is and whether there is an ongoing argument over a particular topic.

Invest in Networking

It’s essential that you connect with other consultants in your industry and stay in touch with potential clients. Seek introductions to connections that can help advance your business. It’s advisable to exchange contact information and use professional networking websites like LinkedIn. Look for similar online tools that make it easy to find people and clients.

Create a Pricing Structure

Creating a clear pricing structure will require some deep analysis. You may also have to make trial and error attempts to see how certain projects will respond to timing and pricing. When setting prices, take into account:

·         The standard price in the industry

·         How much time you expect to invest in specific tasks

·         How much you need to support your business

·         Any external expenses you’ll incur

·         Your level of experience and expertise

 You might be worried about overpricing or underpricing. In this case, try using a pricing template to estimate the time the project will take. Upon setting a rate, record your pricing structure, and stick to it. Keep in mind that people pay for the value they get from a service. If you charge too low, you might struggle to get clients to take you seriously.

Take Away

Business consulting is just a business like any other. If you don’t have a solid plan for your long and short-term goals, your business might not succeed. Once you establish your business, have a plan for how you’ll embark on your first client’s project.

 Be prepared with a timeline and expectations for the process from start to finish. The success of your first project will be the starting point of your consulting business. 

Why Advertising On Social Media Is Essential For Your…

You probably hear a lot about using social media for business, and that’s because it’s so important. If you aren’t making use of social media as much as you can, you’re going to be missing out on a massive opportunity to advertise your company, which is something that we know you don’t want. A lot of businesses find it difficult to get to a stage where their marketing is doing really well, but when you use social media, this isn’t so much of a problem. So, if you don’t know why advertising this way is so essential, then it’s a good thing that you’ve come across this article because that’s exactly what we’re going to be looking at. Keep reading if you would like to find out more.

Gives You A Bigger Platform

Using social media gives you a bigger platform to reach a whole range of different people. We know that you’ve got your target audience, and we can almost guarantee that they are on social media, but that doesn’t mean other people aren’t going to be interested in your product or service. You need to make sure that as many people as possible know about your company because this is how you reach new customers. It doesn’t have to be the case that every single person who buys from your business is a member of your target audience, and perhaps it’s even better that they aren’t. 

Most people have at least one social media page, but many have two or three. The main social media platforms are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, which means that you need to have a page on all of these sites. If you don’t have one right now, you need to set one up sooner rather than later to address as many people as you can at one time.

Allows Different Kind Of Posts

Another benefit of using social media is that you can use a variety of different methods to get your message across. For example, you’re not going to just be limited to text posts no matter what platform you are using, and this gives you an opportunity to create exciting and engaging content. The people who are visiting your pages are not going to want to sit there and read massive blocks of text each time, so you want to change it up. Make good use of videos and photos at the very least so that they have something a bit different to look at.

It might even be a good idea to create polls and have people engage with the page a little more. This makes your business look more interesting as you’re not just sticking with the standard posts.

Make Use Of Ads

Some social media platforms such as Facebook allow for ads on their site, and you should make use of these as much as you can. You have to pay for these, of course, but they are well worth it with the amount of added traffic to your site that you’re going to see. This doesn’t have anything to do with your page specifically, but it is important that you understand how the ads work and how they direct traffic to your site. The great thing about the ads is that they are generating more high-quality leads for you, leading to, hopefully, a higher conversion rate and a lower bounce rate. For example, if you sell industrial water tanks and you want everyone on Facebook for example to see it if they have looked at something related, the ads work wonders.

Interacting With People

You should also be using social media to interact with the people who are visiting your page. We spoke briefly about polls above and you can use this to interact with the page visitors, but you also need to actively engage as well. It’s really simple to do this, you just need to talk to them. If they leave a post on your page, make sure that you are replying and giving them the information that they are looking for. Converse with users about promotions, freebies, and any competitions that you are running to ensure that everyone is on the same page. Give as much information as you can while also just talking.

Even simple things like asking people if you can fix an issue they’ve had if they have used you before will go a long way. Social media provides you a way to do this without all the formalities surrounding customer service phone calls and other things like this. It is also a quicker way for users to get a response from someone if the other lines of communication are busy.

A More Personal Touch

Finally, you can give your business a more personal touch by using social media. You are showing them that there is a person behind the business, which helps to make you a more relatable company. People don’t want to buy from some faceless corporation anymore, they want to buy from someone who has their needs at heart when they created the product or service. They also want to buy from someone who has some values that they are willing to share, so make sure that you are open and upfront about what you believe in.

Talking to customers and potential customers through social media might not seem like something you want to spend your time doing, but it is great for building relationships. In a way, this is advertising your business because you are showing yourself to be a company who cares for and has time for its customers. This is super important to the people who are looking to buy from you, so make sure you are putting the effort in here.

We hope that you have found this article helpful and now see why advertising on social media is essential for your business. Understanding why you are doing something is half the battle, then putting it into practice is the other half. So, now that you have the understanding, you can move on to making it a reality, and seeing your business really benefit from this. Good luck, and we hope that you see some great results soon.