10 Ways to Improve Your Business Operations

Every new day gives you a chance to move forward from your present situation. You can improve your business on a number of fronts: by increasing profits, reducing losses, getting more customers, expanding the markets, becoming more visible in the community, going public or a number of other items deemed desirable.




1. Start the year in high gear. Take a notebook (or a laptop or PDA) and jot down your thoughts and plans for the year. It's the time to get excited to the prospects of this New Year! List down ideas on new product lines, or new projects that you want to take on. Write down your ideas on how to expand and energize your business. Only through innovation and continuing adoption of relevant new products and ideas can your business improve its competitiveness and profitability. Start the ball rolling with financers, lenders and bankers if you need to take on additional capital.

2. Dust off your business plans. Review, review and review your business plan. See how far (or little) your business has taken shape from your original idea. Many entrepreneurs write a business plan at the start, only to forget about it. Some stray away from their plans - and fail. Go find your business plans and update it. Since your business' inception, a number of factors must have changed - from the overall business climate to your product line. Take all those changes into consideration, factor in your and your family's goals, and get a clear assessment of the direction of your business. Get in touch with your business advisers, if any.

3. Rekindle your relationship with your customers. The start of the year is the perfect time to tap your customer database and get in touch with your existing customers. Whether by phone, email or letter, contact your customers to greet them "Happy New Year!" and remind them that your business is ready to serve them this year. You need to constantly look for ways to encourage repeat business. Although marketing and advertising are important to get more customers, quality, service and customer satisfaction are what keep a business successful in the long run.

4. Evaluate your pricing. Think about raising your rates. Now is the appropriate time to inform clients that your rates are going up. Just be sure to check out what the competition's doing and make sure your prices or rates aren't too low. You don't want to overprice yourself out of the market, yet you should not bear the burden of a cash flow shortage. Give your customers a month or two advance notice should you decide to increase your rates.

5. Find ways to cut your costs. Even if you have secured funding from investors, you need to constantly look for ways to reduce your costs. From making double-sided paper copies to ordering shipping supplies in bulk, you can reduce wasted material, effort, and time in making, selling, and delivering your product. The result is an improvement in your company's bottom line and an increased competitive advantage.

6. Resolve to improve your weak spots. Take stock of all aspects of your business operation and list down the areas that you want to improve. If your list of delinquent receivables is longer than Santa's list, find out how you can improve your billing and collection process. Perhaps you need to improve your record keeping to help flag you on delinquent accounts.

7. Institute measures to assess the performance of your business. Setting clear standards for your business allows you to determine the effectiveness and efficiency of your strategies. If you haven't done so in the past year, start determining how much you are making per hour of work, how effective your advertising is, and some other measurements of where your business has been. Set some benchmarks and periodically assess how your business is doing. You need to know what you consider an improvement before you can start to improve on it.

8. Keep employees involved. Good employees are hard to find; yet they are an important element in your business. Check to see if they are getting what they need and make them part of the team. Help them understand the importance of their role in your business and how their job impacts the business as a whole. Review your relationship with your employees and find ways to keep your relationship happy and avoid costly attrition.

9. Explore new markets or improve marketing. Start the year by exploring new markets for your business. Whether you are looking at targeting a new demographic or getting your business up on the web, take time to plan how you can expand your existing market. Look for ways to improve your marketing, whether by winning easy publicity, arranging an open house or preparing direct mails.

10. Find out how you can live a more balanced life. Work and business are not the be-all and end-all of your life. Learn to have fun! Spend more time with your family. Take a vacation once in a while. Engage in activities that will rejuvenate your spirit and your life. Take care of yourself, and your health. Your productivity and focus will improve if you are stress-free and healthy.
Spcial Thx for and more read to click here

How Your Business Can Capitalize on Location-Based Marketing

As society evolves into an increasingly mobile interface, businesses must follow suit or get left behind. It seems there’s a new location-based app being incorporated into mobile devices each and every day, and with good reasons. How else are we to keep abreast of the whereabouts of friends and family in the new portable world? But with these geo-social networking sites comes an opportunity for business owners, particularly retail stores and restaurants, to capitalize on real-time data being provided by subscribers.

Location-based sites in a nutshell

Users connect with friends and family by “checking-in” at a particular location. Points are awarded for checking in at particular venues and users can post their check-ins on their Facebook and Twitter accounts. Users earn badges and mayorships based upon the number of times they check-in at a business or location. These sites are intelligent in that they take the user’s location and notify users of events and other activities taking place nearby at that moment or by the hour.

How businesses can capitalize

The geosocial-networking phenomenon offers businesses the opportunity to drive business to their location by first listening to, and then engaging users of these location-based social sites. Create content on these sites. Establish your digital-self on Foursquare, Loopt, Brightlite, and Gowalla. Tweet, Yelp, create a Facebook profile…, whatever you can do to link your physical business location to the mobile, virtual world. Mostly, be heard.

These geo-sites offer real-time customer demographics to businesses—yes, real-time. The value of real-time customer information cannot be overstated. By monitoring a site like Foursquare, businesses can get a potential customer’s exact location at that moment in relation to their own business, whether that customer is male or female, and what hours an establishments seem to be the most popular.

What’s even better is that you can target customers of a competitor in your area with specials for customers that check-in to your competitor’s location, in hopes of drawing them over to your business. “Two-for-one dinner offer at Joe’s Pesto Palace just for presenting this screen. Offer good for next twenty minutes.” With that offer they get your address and you can extend the offer to their friends who might be nearby. A 2008 report by technology research firm ABI Research estimated geosocial-networking sites will generate as much as $3.3 billion in revenue by 2013.

Of course, with the advent of location-based networking sites comes the formation of marketing firms dedicated to capitalizing on them. If you’re a business owner and want to hire a firm to handle this aspect of your marketing campaign, you might check out Moment Feed, Three Ships Media, or any other firm specializing in location-based marketing.

So step aboard this virtual ship before it leaves your business behind. Location-based sites offer great opportunities for increased revenue in 2011 and the years to come.
Special Thx for

Why Businesses Fail

By Ken Sundheim
To be able to start a business from thin air is quite a hard thing to do. Some can, some cannot. There are a lot variables when it comes to a business succeeding or failing. Below, you will find a list containing the reasons as to why some small businesses fail and what you, the business owner can do to prevent the situations from becoming a problem in the first place.

No Leadership, Employees Get Lazy and Sometimes Insubordinate
As a manager, you should never "manage," unless it comes to a dire situation. Power trips for unintelligent, insecure managers and business owners. Instead, you should be friendly, listen to the ideas the employees have as well as consider them the front line soldiers who know what is going on in the market.

However, some newer, younger employees may see this type lax of attitude and attempt to leverage it in an attempt to firmly establish a "do what I want whenever I want" mentality and atmosphere throughout your company. This can spread like wildfire and it can get out of control very quickly. Upon the first sign that the employees are slacking and not taking their jobs seriously, the manager or business owner must remind them as to why they are paying them the amount that they are being compensated and reiterate as to what kind of productivity and execution is expected.

Good managers and /or business owners lead by example and create a business atmosphere that screams "hard work" and "company dedication." You must create a "produce or don't work here atmosphere" within the organization or your business is being left often to failure.

Not Paying the Employees Enough
To obtain the best employees, one must pay. Your employees are going to be representing your company every time a potential client calls or very time somebody visits the office. These individuals are going to be the face of your creation. Regardless of how impressive you may be, if your employees are not sharp and don't give off an energetic vibe, clients are going to begin shying away and will not take you nor your company seriously.

Additionally, if you are not ready to pay an employee or employees a salary that is very industry competitive, you must do the extra work and continue to put in the 16hour days until you can provide a salary that is conducive to acquiring top notch talent.

Don't misunderstand. This does not mean that you have to save $200,000 for the person, but look at various job boards. What are your competitors paying to bring in new employees? Do you think that they are getting impressive or lackluster talent offering the compensation packages that they are? Always aim higher.

If they are paying them $70,000 a year, budget $85,000. You always want to get employees who are better than the workers whom your opposing firm currently has.

Business owners with big egos don't bring in high returns. Don't just have an employee simply to say you have one. There is no sense in doing this. I know people who have done this and it gets them absolutely nowhere.

Lastly, free employees can quickly bring down a corporate empire. They can bring down the corporate empire that you a very long time to create and bring to life. I've always felt that simply having the thought of obtaining free employees is a little off. Why should somebody work for you for free? Would you work for somebody else for free?

I can see justification that they would do so if you were sharing half of the company revenues with them a.k.a. making them a partner. Otherwise, those employees are going to leave and, upon them going to competitors, they may badmouth you. Therefore a result of you even attempting to obtain free labor, will give your competition free and very useful competitive intelligence on your company. Their obtainment of this information could come from a job posting or your former "gratis" employees potentially bad-mouthing you.
Spacial Thx

5 problems in IT business

Lindsay is an IBM distinguished engineer, having held positions at the software giant for over 20 years. He's worked variously as product manager for VisualAge Generator, co-leader of the Eclipse platform development team and director of WebSphere studio and Rational modelling tools departments. He is also a developer and researcher, contributing 14 patents to IBM's portfolio. He told Builder AU that when it comes to managing responsiveness in IT, there are five key factors you need to examine.

1. Asset Management

The problem is in knowing everything that a business owns, in terms of software resources. Code sitting on a mainframe is not like products sitting in a warehouse. According to Lindsay, many businesses claim to have trouble keeping track of all of their software once it's deployed.

"Most businesses suffer from a lack of inventory of existing code. You've got millions of lines of COBOL code and you don't know anything about it. The same problem is occurring now with Java code, everyone's got legacy Java code that they don't know what to do with," Lindsay said.

2. Architecture

If you don't design your software with the goal of being maintainable and reusable then it cannot be any surprise when it becomes difficult to maintain and reuse it, he said. The solution is in designing your systems and interfaces with an eye to the future. "You don't have the flexibility of repurposing code if it's very brittle, or it's poorly architected, with ill defined or even not defined interfaces and the like," he said.

3. Skills Modernization

Lindsay says that IBM has worked with thousands of COBOL developers to help them develop for more modern platforms, such as J2EE with Java. The dream for Rational and IBM is to remove the barriers of platform and middleware as to where developers can work.

"We want to move to a position where if you have 500 developers, instead of having 200 COBOL, 100 PL/1 and 200 Java, you end up with 500 general purpose business developers that can be applied to projects independent of deployment platform," he said. "You need to focus on better design and architecture of your systems, but at the end of the day people are the ones who are doing that, you need to focus on your staff."

The solution, according to Lindsay, is in retraining developers to higher level languages, which are agnostic to the issues of architecture. IBM Rational's answer to this is the Enterprise Generation Language, which can be compiled to run on CICS in COBOL, J2EE in Java, or as a native Linux, Windows or Solaris application. It also targets IBM platforms such as Websphere and Weblogic.

This is not a new phenomenon. IBM themselves have been working at the problem for two decades, and other languages also support multiple platform targets. Other languages also support this pattern: high level language Python can deploy on .NET with IronPython, or Java with Jython. In fact, this one language, many platforms approach is the other side of the coin to the many languages, one platform approach favoured by .NET.

The approach best for the business depends on what is easier to retrain: language syntax and semantics or the specifics of your middleware platform. IBM Rational is well and truly a proponent of the first. "There are a lot of people who have tried to retrain COBOL developers to Java. The failure rate is huge, it's in general not a winning proposition to try to do it. EGL is a higher level language and so you have less to know about. Learning the Java syntax would be rather straight forward for a COBOL developer, that's not the issue. The issue is learning about the concepts of OO, learning about the various J2EE extensions. I'm not telling you it's impossible, I'm just telling you what customers have told me: that they've tried it and in general it's not a path that most of them choose to go down again."

4. Team Infrastructure

Too long has a divide existed between mainframe and distributed infrastructure, Lindsay says. "I'm sure if you talk to many enterprise customers a lot of them have duplicate infrastructures. They have something for the mainframe or the enterprise system, and something totally different and disconnected for the distributed side. This came about because of the digital pilot projects they did in the early client/server days, it grew up and grew even more with Web investments."

The problem this causes is that it creates barriers that prevent a business from efficiently using their personnel and tools, he said. "You have this duplicate infrastructure and this limits your ability to move people around, because they're using totally different sets of tools, totally different processes. Of course it's more costly, our assertion here is that you need to move back to a consolidated team environment. You need to take advantage of all the tools that have come about in the distributed areas and apply them to mainframe development as well."

5. Budgetary Inflexibility

Lastly, it all comes down to money. Lindsay explains that "This is really simply the phenomenon that 70 to 80 percent of most companies IT budget is spent on maintenance, and you need to figure out ways to freeing up some of that money, so you have more than 20 to 25 percent to spend on the backlog. This is something to help mitigate the fact that there isn't this vast number of people you can bring into IT, at least get a better use out of the ones that you have."

Spacial Thx

Make way for E-Business

Online spending is growing rapidly in the UK. E-commerce in 2009 will be worth over £20bn and, experts say, by 2013, online spending will make up for 10% of total retail sales. If you have a product to sell, you’re in a good position, but how to attract customers to buy? Emma Jones offers five recommendations.
1. Make offers

Offer to write content and guest posts for blogs and sites where you know your customers are hanging out. Offer discounts to member groups and communities and offer links to other important sites, in exchange for them linking back to you. The more inbound and outbound links, the higher you’ll appear in the search results.
2. Make some noise

Why not carry out a poll on your site using www.surveymonkey.com and use the results as the basis for a press release. Another tactic that will have you mentioned in the media is celebrity endorsement. This is what Lyndsey Young has done with her product, Count On It, www.count-on-it.co.uk which has received glowing testimonials from the likes of Amanda Holden and Janey Lee Grace, to profitable effect.
3. Make the most of social media

Have as many sites driving traffic to yours as possible. And this is possible by making the most of social media and creating communities on Facebook and Twitter. These applications can now be integrated so you only need to update once and your news/product offers can be communicated to your entire network, with links back to your site. A number of online businesses we profile have their own site as well as a presence on a trading platform such as eBay, BT Tradespace or, for the arts and crafts sector sites such at Etsy, Folksy and MyEhive. Review sites such as www.thegoodwebguide.co.uk are also useful for bringing attention to your online store.
4. Make friends with your customers so they keep coming back

Have your existing customers return by keeping in touch with them and connecting customers to each other. Again, this is where cost-effective technology tools play their part; why not introduce an e-newsletter to your site using a service such as www.mailchimp.com or add a community feature such as that available from www.webjam.com - you can go as far as inviting customers to meet each other ‘virtually’ face-to-face by adopting www.tinychat.com
5. Make yourself known to this site

Contact the site you are reading this on and ask if they’ll profile your story! It’s great to have your company featured in the printed press but if your site is promoted online (with a link) then potential customers are only one click away.
Thx for www.buyassociation.co.uk/money/text/home-business/enterprise-nation/make-way-for-e-business.html

Increase Your Business

The forum link building is one of the effective ways to get more traffic to your websites. There are many forum link building services that a person may opt for top get the maximum business and increase number of hits on his or her websites. There are also many forum services that you can use for your benefits. Some service providers specialize in providing cheap forum posting service. With the services of forum postings, your content is posted on websites and forums that get a high number of hits. Many a times, your URL is also posted along with the content in these forums so that you are directly linked to the people who are looking for more information about you and your company.

There are some forum service providers who ensure Guaranteed Forum Link Building services that in turn increase the chances of giving a boost to your business. The forum link building services also allow you to create threads in these forums so that more and more people can participate in your forums. With the help of forum services, you can also get some permanent links with the people you wish to. The money that you send to get the services of forums from any of the cheap forum posting service providers is sure to be recovered within a very short time.


The cheap forum posting service providers post content rich in information to various forums. This helps in locating your information through various search engines in a very easily. In fact, even the search engines look for links that are rich in information and therefore the services of forum link service providers come in handy. There are professional service providers in this field also who charge as per the quality of their service and number of clients that they handle.
Source: www.articlealley.com/article_1673989_15.html