August, 2012 | BizSieve.com

Top Ways To Manage Your Business More Efficiently

So many factors go into the successes and failures of a business. Success might come from a stellar product, a dedicated team at the helm and enough freedom and accountability to make daily time management as smooth as possible. On the flip-side of things, a company may hit a few missteps along the way because of how understaffed they may be against the number of projects coming in, or they may be overflowing in one department and not enough in another.

The latter problem isn’t a cinch to fix by any means, but it’s also not a daunting task, either. A majority of businesses may need help in only a few areas, while others may need a helping hand for a much longer period. Either way, getting down to the root issue of management issues and structure as a whole is the first order of business.

Here are some others to follow from there.

It Starts At The Top

Any good business knows they didn’t reach the apex of success by dogging it within the management ranks. Any business needs a solid leader in place to not only hire qualified and passionate managers and supervisors below them, but instill a positive direction to the staff as a whole.

Being on top of your game as a CEO requires intelligence to know which structure works best for your staff and how they complete projects and roll right along at a comfortable, but productive pace.

Because Time Management Is A Telling Factor

Dollars and cents tell the big picture at the end of the day. Regardless of whether your staff is bright, motivated and give their due diligence to each and every project laid before them, if the time and labor costs start rising more and more above any net gains, it’ll chip away over time at the core success of your business. This is the one area where you’ll have to survey if a department feels understaffed, and if that’s the case you go out and hire more capable employees to join the already capable staff. While you might be thinking that would deduce the profit margins from the onset, then you might have to look out how your customer pricing model looks and make changes where needed.

Have An Effective Tracking System

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of project tracking software available. Some are geared towards very intricate tracking where multiple projects are being worked on from dozens of departments in your office. And then there are others like Trello, which has a much more simplified approach to the interface. Basecamp is another popular method that comes to mind.

You can find other choices here.

How Liberating Is The Office Environment?

One of the most looked-over time savers for a business is the company atmosphere itself. How are your employees responding on a daily basis, or more importantly, is the cubicle feeling too constrained for its own good? While you went out and hired the best team around, if your office doesn’t reflect a welcoming, more open vibe, there could be little dips here and there with how invigorated your employees are. Projects and deadlines could soon carry over towards similar sentiments if you at least don’t poll the office as to what their likes/dislikes are with their work environment.

Always Be Thinking It Can Run Even Smoother

No matter how many changes and tweaks you do to both the company structure and how projects are drawn up and executed, the mentality should be there’s always an extra minute or two to shave off next. Part of that speaks to keeping an eye on motivation highs and lows, but mainly it’s reviewing and comparing past project management sheets with the current one. Basically, think of it as one, long marathon and your entire office is practicing each and every day hoping to best their run time from yesterday until they’ve hit that barrier to where they feel confident enough to stick with that stride.

And that last part about knowing when the best formula’s arrived is crucial because you don’t want to risk burn-out with your team, nor do you want to affect the quality of the projects. It’s just that any good business is never satisfied with the present, because they expect the future to be even brighter.

Author Bio: Kyle O’Brien is a freelance writer and has covered many topics on the business side of things, including corporate structure tips, leadership intangibles and much more. He’s consulted for ej4, a performance improvement company that helps develop cohesive e-learning video platforms for businesses.

Don’t have a business degree? Good!

Why you are probably better off without a business degree.

It seems crazy, but it’s true: an undergraduate degree in business isn’t a door to wealth. Parents think they can’t go wrong by sending their kids off to business classes at the university, but business school, unlike most other vocational fields, doesn’t offer experience or a big pay-off.

Business majors learn fewer applicable skills.

Let me break it down for you. A recent high school graduate who goes to school to learn to be a mechanic actually gets his hands dirty and works with physical parts, gaining knowledge that can be directly applied to his vocation. Business majors learn how to respond to theoretical scenarios in the sheltered vacuum of a classroom. It’s a little like learning to drive a submarine by playing a video game and then being expected to survive once you’re unleashed on the open waters.

Becoming a business leader takes a variety of skills – psychology, mathematics, communication – but it also takes creativity. Many students who aspire to make money in business fail to make the correlation between imagination and ingenuity. It was, in fact, Andy Warhol who called business “the best art.”

business graduates
Image by Rob Chan

Some undergraduate liberal arts degrees are even father down on the pay-scale than business (which ranks 35 out of 75), but for some graduate programs, a liberal arts degree is more promising than an undergraduate degree in business. Students who study philosophy and English literature are well-versed in analytical thinking and are constant practitioners of sharp communication. On the other end of the spectrum, mathematics majors understand the language of economics and statistics.

Your life can become overrun by work.

Degrees in business are extremely common, so once you graduate; you’re going to be forced into an oversaturated market with high levels of competition. In this case, becoming a small business owner is a great option, but most college students don’t have the resources to fund a startup right after college. With no career history or savings, most people are starting from scratch.

In a study completed by labor economists, business majors working in the finance and consulting sectors were shown to have extremely difficult times juggling their work and lives. The fields are so competitive that they demand constant participation, and those who go on leave or drop out of the race for even short periods of time, face great challenges and penalties in terms of resuming their careers and moving forward.

If not business…then what?

By all means, if you find the right business degree program and you are confident that you will have a job after college, go for it! Some people thrive in competitive environments and can juggle project and personnel management with a happy home life. Creating your own small, independent business is a great way to exercise business skills, but there has to be a passion beyond making money, and that is what a business degree fails to nurture.

A business degree isn’t necessary to becoming a business leader. Higher education is a way to improve the skills you already have while exploring new territory, and you can pair any degree with business classes if you are interested in becoming an entrepreneur.

About the Author: Melissa Miller is blogger and freelance writer for associatedegreeonline.com. She is interested in all things education and writes to help recent college graduates navigate the challenging world of first-time employment, adult responsibility, and finances. Throw your questions to melissamiller831@gmail.com.

3 Easy Ways to Organise your Workspace

If you work from home, whether self-employed or owning your own business, or simply in need of a space to perform office work like bills etc., separating your workspace from where you relax is essential to being able to carry out what you need to, when you need to. Ideally you don’t want to turn your home into the same place you associate with tedious work, or you’ll feel like you can never properly relax. On the other hand, you may not be able to get anything done, if psychologically you know you’re at home. If you own a business, this can be a major problem if financially, you have something at stake and need to work.

Below are three simple tips you may want to consider when organising your workspace to be more efficient:

1. Think ‘Work’

If you’re aware that you’re home, then you’ll be tempted to relax and not work as hard as you would do if in a public office environment. The process of commuting to an office and then being in public essentially, means one is psychologically more prepared to get on with what you need to do. If you’re self-employed and work alone then you also don’t have anyone to answer to other than yourself, so you don’t really have the same authority to push you. Put any distractions like a television or games console in another room, or at least out of sight. Ideally, you would have a different room to work in which you wouldn’t enter much outside of working, like an actual study. This is not always possible when spacing is an issue. You also don’t want these things to infiltrate your workspace, so ensure your desk isn’t cluttered or a place where things that not work-related are just left, like magazines or books.

2. Personalisation

If you had an a cubicle at work, you would be allowed to personalise your workspace somewhat even if there were some restrictions, so don’t think that you need to recreate a sterile office in your home to get into that mindset to work; after all, you’ll probably have to sit in that space for many hours, everyday, so it needs to fit you and be a place you can be happy in, even if you have to work. Add personal photos of family to your desk, though don’t go too overboard as this can clutter and distract. Additionally, something which can inspire or motivate you but doesn’t look too boring or dull can help, such as a fish tank or a painting/print of a majestic landscape, can help (preferably something which doesn’t take up too much space). Some find that said motivational posters remind them too much of being in a stiff office environment so perhaps stay away from those; plus they’re quite generic and you should make the most of being able to work from home. Everyone gets those moments of stress or when they just need to breathe a bit and think, so invest in something quality for those moments. Again, the most important thing is that you can work, so don’t clutter your desk with too many things that can distract you.

3. Health and Safety

To give you some perspective, you may want to think back to some of the health & safety considerations from a previous office (or other workplace) you have worked in. Keeping drinks without lids on an alternative side table would avoid spillages on paper, or worse electric equipment, which would need replacing and can result in lost work. Speaking of, make sure the fan for any computers is not obstructed so it doesn’t overheat and create similar computer problems. Consider yourself but also anyone who may come into contact with your workspace. Make sure things can’t be pulled off the desk by children or pets in the vicinity, like loose papers or books. Additional bookcases, shelves or cabinets will mean you don’t have stacks of books, documents or folders taking up space on your desk, which could fall over and cause more chaos. In fact, the positive of having a separate room to work in, means that not only do you separate it from your leisure psychologically, but anything valuable in there, like computers or records are secure from intruders and can be locked away; if you have kids or pets who like to wander in, they will be prevented from doing so.

Paul has worked in a variety of office environments. He currently works in digital marketing, and is in the process of putting together his own home-office, which has required consulting various sources on how to put together the best workspace at home.

Database Management for Small Businesses

Database management is defined as the maintenance of various types of records like employee details, vendors’ list, customer database etc. Anne Kerven, had mentioned in Colorado Business Magazine, that it simply entails the transference of the contents of file cabinets into an electronic format. That simplistic statement spawned a multimillion dollar industry dealing with database management and relevant solutions. This is a service that is required by virtually every company that has the need to maintain its records in a professional manner and leverage that database to maximize productivity and profit.

Databases can be of various sizes. They can range from a few hundred entries or lists stored on an individual hard-drive, to thousands of terabytes worth of data that is stored on large mainframe computers maintained by corporate giants. The primary benefit of using database management software is the ability that is afforded to each employee of an organization to locate and access stored data, however old and remote, in a matter of moments. Previously, the data based reports that took days, even weeks to be compiled by specialized technicians. Today, they are compiled by ordinary employees in minutes.

Choosing the Right Database Management System for a Small Business

As a small business owner, if you are thinking about buying database management software, you need to ask yourself two things before you actually make a decision. They are, the kind of reports that you would require from such a system and what you hope to get out of it. These questions being answered would help you in determining the type of database that you would need to maintain. Furthermore, you would also get an idea about the kind of information or data you would gather and what fields you need to create to do that. It is also a prudent decision to start small, for example a mailing list, to acclimatize yourself to the task of database management. Once you master it, it will be easy for you to move on to more complex tasks.

The moment when you have identified what you need out of a database management system, you can move on to selecting the right kind of software to get the job done. If, by any chance, you are proficient with computers and the database that you need to maintain is a simple one, you could easily choose from the software packages available to the market and identify the one that suits your needs the best. Otherwise, it is a good idea to involve professionals to help you to decide.

Types Of Database Management Software

Most databases serve two basic functions- warehousing and transactional. Databases that deal with transactional data are built with relative ease, and perform simple tasks such as keeping tabs on the availability of parts or product. Warehouse database, on the other hand, collect any data related to company matters, like sales history and hiring statistics.

Experts say that the simpler software you end up buying, the better, because by buying a ready-made and non customized software, you will be spending a lot less money. But that approach has its tradeoffs. Your business might have a unique model and hence unique requirements which can’t be met by ordinary generic database management software. This is where the expertise of a specialized data base service provider, in designing customized database software to meet your needs, can help you.

About the Author: Penny is an expert associated with Emergingpower2, which offers reliable and secure database management services for businesses. Visit the website to know more about how you can use the company’s services.

How the Cloud Can Help Small Businesses Get Ahead

Some small businesses make the mistake of ignoring technology. The people who own these companies often believe that it’s only the corporate giants that can benefit from leveraging new tech, or that cloud services would be too expensive for their operation. Nothing could be further from the truth; in fact, small businesses that leverage the Web can develop the kind of loyal customer base that would never form under a monolithic corporation. People love to support those within their local community, and in order to reach them, businesses have to go where they are: on the Internet – in the cloud.

Free Promotion

Something as simple as a fan page on a social networking site can serve as an advertising platform. If 100 people see it, every person they have on their friend’s list will see it too, and the effect multiplies when someone spreads positive feedback about a local business. Promotion can go viral even at the local level, and businesses that take advantage of that can save a lot on advertising costs.

Cheaper Software

It costs thousands upon thousands of dollars to purchase every piece of software that’s necessary to run a business. Nearly all of these applications have a cloud-based counterpart, and cloud applications run the gamut between free and cheap. At most, someone will have to pay a low monthly fee to gain access to certain applications through a cloud storage service.

No Hardware Required

Purchasing cloud storage makes sense regardless of what someone needs for his business. Hundreds of gigabytes can be had for less than $20 per month. That eliminates the need to buy hundreds of dollars worth of storage devices and backup software. While it’s still a good idea to keep some physical backups on hand, some cloud services have that covered as well. A few business oriented services will allow customers to request certain files on disks or hard drives for a small fee.

There are other benefits that result from this. When less hardware is required to run a business, less office space needs to be purchased. When files can be accessed from the cloud, business owners can stay away from the office for extended periods of time and still have access to pertinent information. With certain businesses, a physical location is completely unnecessary once cloud services are brought into the picture. It makes it far easier to bargain for time, and business owners can do what they need to do far more easily when they’re not bound by the limitations of a low-tech enterprise.

Working With Other People

Business owners used to be restricted to selecting workers from local applicants. Now certain businesses can hire anyone from across the globe, or entrepreneurs can choose to hire independent contractors on a per-project basis. Day-to-day business operations can flex according to a business’ needs, and any enterprise with that kind of flexibility is far more robust than one that lacks it.

Everything is in the Cloud

Computers that use the cloud for everything have already hit the market. The cloud is not a gimmick, and it’s not a convenient but frivolous function of modern computing. It is what the entire world is now shaping itself around; the Internet is weaving itself into everything, and what’s beneficial for a business today will be necessary tomorrow. Small businesses need to adapt now in order to survive the future.

About the Author: Alan Martin is a tech blogger.