small business Archives - Rafi Chowdhury

How to Manage a New Business and a Family

Rafi Chowdhury — Tue, 05 Feb 2019 16:08:24 +0000

Manage a New Business and a Family : It’s not just the young free and single who get the entrepreneurial bug; plenty of older people find themselves in a position where they’d like to set up their own small business. In fact, going self-employed or starting up independently is becoming an ever more popular choice for people even into their later working years.

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As you mature, you’re more likely to find a partner and start a family, and if you then wish to set up a business, you have the extra responsibility of taking care of your children as well as yourself. You will feel the added weight of ensuring you’re making a decent income, and you’ll need to consider the welfare of your family not just now, but in the future too

Finances

As a new business owner, you know it will take a while, maybe years before you start to turn a decent profit, so you have to be able to manage the business finances to ensure you can pay yourself a reasonable salary in the meantime. You’ll be hoping and planning that as the business takes off, you’ll have a greatly increased income, but in the meantime, you’ll need to manage your budget at home just as tightly as you do your business budget.

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You should also be planning for the future and safeguarding your family’s wellbeing in the event you aren’t able to work anymore or that you’re no longer around. This is a good time to buy life insurance that will cover your debts should anything happen to you, and not leave your family out of pocket. You should also find out about other insurances that would help protect your family from financial hardship, such as disability and enhanced health cover.

Time

It’s very easy as a business owner to get so wrapped up in the work that you have little time or energy left for your family, which isn’t good for them or you. Try to avoid falling into this trap by making sure you balance your work and family life appropriately. There’s little point in devoting so much time to your work that you never get to spend quality time with your kids or your partner. Business owners often say they’re working so hard because of their families and the drive to provide for them, but most kids would say they’d prefer to have time with their mom and dad.

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Think about ways you could involve your kids in your business, helping out, learning, and feeling invested in what you’re doing. If they feel you’re making an effort to include them in your work, they’ll appreciate the time they have, regardless of what they’re doing. You also need to spend time with them away from work, reading them bedtime stories, helping out with homework, going for walks or kicking a ball about in the backyard.

Running a successful business doesn’t require you to spend every waking moment working. Your family are the most precious part of life, so give them the respect and attention they deserve, and you’ll have a happy home and a thriving business.

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3 Mistakes To Avoid When Growing Your Business

Rafi Chowdhury — Thu, 17 Jan 2019 15:27:40 +0000

Knowing the next steps to take with your business can be a minefield, but also a very exciting time in business ownership.

To help you make informed choices, in this article I want to cover some of the common pitfalls that business owners fall into when looking to grow their business. Of course, this is not an exhaustive list, but it is definitely a good place to start when thinking about the next steps in your business’s journey. For more growth tips, check out this article on ways to grow a startup.

Spending Too Much, Or Too Little…

This is a tough one, but when taking your next step as a business getting the spending right is very important. It can be tricky to know how to play it – under-invest and you risk losing out to competition with deeper pockets, but overextend yourself financially and you could be in real trouble. So, how do you know your hitting the right balance?

The key here is knowing your sector, and knowing your own brand inside out. What is it that makes you stand out, and how can investment help that? Similarly, what are your competitors upto, and how can investing in your own business help you compete?

Getting the level of investment right requires having a plan. If you know where you want your business to be in the coming years, it’s easier to budget correctly. This doesn’t need to be a rigid and inflexible set of deadlines, you need some room to react to changes in the marketplace. But if you have a good idea of when key events in your businesses development are going to happen, you’ll be in a great place to plan the dollars and cents needed to deliver those goals.

Also Read : 7 Traits of A Successful Business Leader

Keeping Data Secure

As a small business, data security may not have been a top priority. After all, there are a million other things to deal with at the outset. However, as your business grows, so does the amount of data you keep. This could be customer information, contact details for clients, or sensitive data about company goals and finances. As you grow and take on more staff, this also means more people with access to parts of these data sets. All this means that you have to think carefully about IT security, where data is stored and who has access to it.

You may think that your business is too small to be of interest to hackers. However, this is no longer the case. As Fidus, a UK-based penetration testing company, explain, there are all manner of malign actors who look to target smaller businesses, precisely because they know that security might not be as tight.

This shouldn’t make you worry, you just need to be careful and make sure that you have the correct protocols in place to make sure sensitive data is secure. If you are wondering what software is best for protecting you from viruses and malware, take a look at the site here for an overview of various antivirus tools and their associated reviews.

Trying To Do Everything On Your Own

Finally, you probably started out your business doing everything yourself. Being a jack of all trades is all part of running a start-up. However, if you’re looking to grow you have to let this mentality go. The simple fact is that real growth will mean you can no longer do everything yourself.

At first, this can be really daunting, and it might feel difficult to delegate. The trick is to keep telling yourself that it is a good thing because it means you can focus on the important strategic decisions. In fact, if you’re finding that you no longer can oversee everything, this is a good sign! It means your business has grown!

Ultimately, letting go of complete control will require that you trust the people around you to make the right decisions. This is something that grows with time, so although it will feel strange at first, in time it will feel completely normal to pass on responsibilities for certain areas of the business to colleagues. As a start, consider participating in planning for a particular area of your business and then delegating its execution. For example, if it’s social media, make sure to help come up with a social media plan and let your employees to actually work on it. Sooner or later, you’ll see that delegating is a necessary step when it’s time for your business to grow.

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How Social Media Can Give Your Small Business a Push

Rafi Chowdhury — Tue, 18 Jul 2017 23:45:53 +0000

Initiated as an entertainment tool, Social media has now emerged as the most powerful measure in promoting business and creating a brand image. The popular social networking sites including Facebook and Twitter have developed as the marketing giants offering businesses valuable information about the target audience and free way to reach them. The perks of social media for the growth of a business are unquestionable and that’s why many small and large scale businesses have launched their social media marketing programs.

In this post, we are talking about how social media can give small businesses a push to success.

Increased Brand Awareness

Social media allows you to communicate your message to a staggering number of users with the aim to enhance your brand awareness. Your social media presence will make it convenient to interact with your customers, properly responding to their feedback, and increasing customer retention and enhancing brand loyalty.

Knowing your target audience

Social media generates a huge amount of information about millions of people including who they are, where are they from, what they like, and how they feel about a product. This information can help you gather relevant customer information to design your business strategies. For example, you can know what your customers’ sentiments are, what products or brands people like most, what are their views about your product. Keeping these points in mind, you can design your advertising and social media marketing strategy.

Top 10 resources to take your social media marketing strategy to an entirely new level

Inexpensive and targeted advertising

Social media ads are an inexpensive way to communicate your message to your target audience. For example, if you run an ad campaign on Facebook, you can set your target audience based on demographics, interests, and connections. Moreover, you can monitor and measure the performance of your ad in real-time.

Social Customer Service

More than 67 percent of the customers go to social media for customer service; probably that’s why the businesses have initiated customer care on their pages. So, your customers might be looking for you on social media even if you are not there. The companies engaging in social customer service continue to earn bigger revenues.

Increased Search Engine Ranking

Another benefit of social media marketing is enhanced website ranking with increased traffic on the site. Social media does not only help you to direct more people to your site, but the more shares you receive the more people will visit your site resultantly increasing your website ranking in search engines.

Competitive Analysis

Social media allows you to get information about your competitors that can be helpful in taking business decisions and designing own marketing strategies. Based on the information, you can improve your business offering the products or services that they may be missing. Also, you can reach the customers of a rival product and influence them to give your brand a try.

Respond Negative Feedback

While a negative comment on social media can damage your brand reputation, responding to that remark efficiently and appropriately can help turning a complaining customer into a follower. This is the social media that has enabled the businesses to respond and resolve the complaints in a faster way.

Increased Sales and Leads

Social media does not only give you access to millions of active users a day but also increase your sales. Posting content that is equally favorable for both your product and customers will attract more people. Those who will be interested in your brand will communicate you most probably dropping a message in your inbox. A good experience would certainly attract more people and increase sales.

Develop Brand Image

Brand is what people perceive about your product or service. Your social media presence helps you to influence people perception about your business by interacting with them, informing them about the positive aspects of your brand and resolving their complaints as soon as possible.

Social media is no longer an option; it is now a MUST for businesses. Almost 30 percent of internet users turn to social networking sites to research a product and get public opinion about that product or service. Whatever you or your customers post online about your product represent your brand and can have a stronger impact on people’s perception about it. So make sure you know how to take a ride on social media to give your business a push to success.

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