Networking 101| Your Small Business’s Guide To Human Capital

Getting Your Small Business Ready For The New Year

2022 had the world trying to restore any sense balance that was disrupted by the onslaught of Covid-19. Businesses were faced with very few options: adapt or perish. As a small or medium business—with very limited survival arsenal compared to business giants—you have had to run countless marathons throughout the year to give your business a fighting chance.

With every hoop jumped, it is no wonder why the end of the year comes as a breath of fresh air for businesses. Such a time signifies a massive victory for managing to make it through the year and surviving all of its punches.

While it is essential to celebrate all wins, it is equally crucial that end of year celebrations for businesses be met with thorough preparations for the new year to ensure that they make it through yet another year.

With a celebratory yet ‘ready-to-conquer attitude in mind, this article will explore some tips and tricks to aid small and medium businesses in getting ahead of the new year. While there exists a myriad of activities your business can take on to prepare for a successful year, this article will focus on the following 5 tips:

• Reflecting
• Creating new goals
• New financial plan for the new year
• Reviewing customer relationships
• Planning ahead

Reflect

In gearing up for the new year, a good place to begin with preparations is by studying the preceding year. It is time to travel back to the beginning of 2022 to place all that your business has been through under a microscope. The point of reflecting on the year is to gage all the successes and losses the business encountered to determine all the areas that need to be whipped into shape.

How to go about reflecting

David Bell describes this task as ‘crucial to moving forward towards the future. Reflecting, to some, may seem like a tedious task. Perhaps you have no idea how to go about reflecting in a purposeful manner.

One way to go about it is to use the ‘What? So what? What now?’ approach. The point of this approach is to identify events you would want to or could learn from, followed by dissecting the reasoning behind the need to learn from such events and then constructing a plan of action —based on this reflecting—for the future.

Reflection stands in perfect relationship with the adage: “work smarter, not harder.” As per the Harvard Business Review, it aids in improving job performance by ensuring that businesses take a break from blindly following objectives without real thought on where they are coming from. It helps them in understanding how they could polish their already traveled paths to ensure less turbulence en route to reaching their goals.

Create New Goals

No small or medium-sized business should aim to remain that way. That means that with every passing year, new goals should be set that will contribute to the financial and structural growth of the business.

To establish new goals, go back to your business’ reflections and see what your business was able to achieve and the timeline it was able to achieve it all in. From there, determine any short-term and long-term goals that your will will actively work on in the coming year. Set yourself a timeline as to when you would like to see these goals come to life.

When setting your goals ensure that they will not disadvantage your business more than they will contribute positively into it. Ensure that they pour into the growth of your business.

Draw Up A Financial Plan for the New Year

A well planned and documented financial plan is an essential element of any business. This is one of the most effective ways of tracking the business’ income and expenses and ensuring that the business does not bite off more than it can chew in terms of financial commitments.

A savvy financial plan allows your business to assess risks in the market and build a risk tolerance strategy that will help keep your business afloat in tough financial situations. Where inflation threatens the stability of many small or medium-sized businesses, your business could survive such uncertainties because of the implementation of a well thought out financial plan.

Financial planning includes maintaining an emergency fund, managing any debt the business may incur, planning in advance for any taxes that the business is obligated to pay and drawing up a flexible monthly budget.

Review and Revitalize Your Relationship With Your Customers

This might not be the first time you hear this and it will most definitely not be the last: customers carry the immense power of making or breaking your business. Without them, there is no way of building a lasting business.

This is the time to assess whether you treated your customers like royalty. You need to review whether any improvements can be made to keep customers excited and coming back to do business with you in the new year.

Your business can, for instance, institute a rewards programme — if it hasn’t already — to reward loyal customers and in turn keep them coming back to you. Your business can also ensure that customers’ voices are heard by allowing them to voice any concerns and feedback they might have to offer.

This is also the time to appreciate those customers who chose your business over others in the same industry. Sending them an appreciation email or letter can only do your business good. However your business chooses to show customer appreciation, ensure that it is done before the end of the year to send the message that they are not an afterthought.

Plan Ahead

It is detrimental to ignore the fact that the modern world is filled with uncertainties and unforeseen risks that may have the power to alter any sense of normality in a matter of seconds. If any lesson is to be taken away from Covid-19 is that tomorrow or three months from now might not look like today. Planning ahead saves your business from succumbing to the uncertainties of the future.

Tips for Planning Ahead

There are many ways to successfully plan ahead for the new year. As a business owner, you get to decide which methods you’re going to implement to help you in this endeavour. These are some tips that you can use to ensure that 2023 does not find your business unprepared:

• Prepare and schedule any social media posts, reports that may be due at the start of the year and ensure that all the business’ equipments work accordingly.
• Determine which tasks you might need to outsource and start assessing who they will be outsourced to.
• Purchase any stationery and resources that your business will need to get survive the start of the new year.

This is not an exhaustive list. It is also important to note that your planning should not be rigid and should make space for any uncertainties that may arise that may need you to alter your plans. Plan accordingly to your business’ goals and needs to get the most out of this activity.

Get Set, Ready, GO!

There are many reasons why your business should invest some time in getting ready for the new year and planning ahead for it. Each and every new year births endless possibilities that your small business can seize. A well prepared business puts itself in the position to fully take control of such opportunities. No matter how seemingly big or small your goals are, it is not too late to start planning for the new year to ensure continued success.

It is true that no business can ever be fully prepared for unforeseen risks and circumstances that may arise on any given day. However, it is such preparations that help to soften the blow of all these uncertainties

Revisit your new year strategy regularly and tweak it where necessary to adapt to the ever-changing world. Most importantly, commit your business to maintaining a strong and purpose-filled momentum for the new year.

Augmented Reality AR: Revolutionizing the Content Creation Arena

The way people consume information has drastically changed over the years. People have gone from absorbing information through newspapers, to old-fashioned TV to the heavy use of the internet as well as social media. This sentiment can be held for the way that content is being created. People have gone to from using still imaging, to videos to now incorporating Augmented Reality (AR) into their content.

When most people think of Augmented Reality, they think about the gaming world. The truth is that AR is moving rapidly beyond the gaming experience. With the rise of content creation, specialists have found ways to include AR as an additional means of creating modern, unique content.

The increasing focus on AR technology in the content creation world has consequently prompted businesses to adapt to this modern technology and to the ways they create their content.

While just about anyone can create content, it is important for businesses to create inspiring, attention-grabbing content that will ultimately covert mere audiences to customers. This article seeks to highlight the importance of content creation for businesses with a specific focus on content creation through the use of AR (Augmented Reality).

Content Creation is Crucial to Business Success

The success of any business is multifaceted in that there are many factors that need to be taken into account to ensure business success. From delivering top-notch customer service, heavy financial planning to avoid sinking the business, all the way implementing feasible marketing strategies. Content creation is no exception as it forms part of the contributory factors to business success.

There is no one right way to define content creation as the concept may differ from business to business. Be that as it may, content creation involves the process of formulating entertaining, informative material to distribute through different platforms. Businesses all over the world create content for various reasons, with one of the main reasons being to increase customer engagement to ultimately drive sales.

As alluded to earlier, content and the way it is created and consumed has seen a massive shift. For instance, businesses have opted to using content creation and distribution tools such as podcasts to release their messaging to their audience. This is a swift response to catering to the increasing number of podcast listeners world-wide. This is a wise strategy as a little over 383 million podcast listeners were recorded in 2021.

Content acts as a key link between any business and its audience. Moreover, it is the beating heart of every online communication strategy. It is therefore important for businesses, more so small businesses, to think strategically about plausible and efficient content creation strategies to implement in order to successfully grow their business.

Content Creation Strategies

Content creation strategies entail mapping out ways to curate, use and deliver your businesses’ content in ways that will place a positive spotlight on your business and ultimately drive sales to it. Investing in feasible content creation strategies will help you create brand consistency for your business and aid you in selecting the right distribution channels in order to ensure your content reaches the right audience. It will aid your business in garnering maximum engagement on every piece of content it releases.

How To Create Optimum Content Creation Strategies

Creating content is not the easiest task to undertake. Adopting content creation strategies is even harder to execute. However, there are tips to follow to ensure that your business fully partakes in the ongoing era of content creation to achieve growth. It should be noted that this is not a closed list:

• One of the best places to begin is to ask your audience what type of content they wish to see. Customer surveys can give your business an idea on the type of content to release that will not only boost your businesses’ presence but also appeal to the interests of your audience.
• Have clear goals that you wish your business to achieve through the content you put out. This will help center the type of content you create as opposed to having your content be all over the show. A good way to do this is by using the SMART method to set out these goals.
• Many online platforms offer backend insights into the demographics of those engaging with, or showing interest in your business. Google Analytics, for example, gives insight as to which country your audience is from and how long they engaged your website. Information like this is crucial as it provides insider intel on how your business can personalize its content to suit your audience. Furthermore, such analytics can help your business gage the content that gained the most traction, therefore aiding in the direction in which to create your content.
• Last, but certainly not least, scouting your competitors can help your business curate content that not only stands out but is also memorable to your business’ audience. A great example is the content that Nando’s Nando’s scout their competition and comes up with content that is hilarious, satirical, and thought-provoking which is rare for a restaurant business. Upon examination of Nando’s’ competitors, it becomes easy to conclude that Nando’s’ standard of content creation surpasses that of their competitors. This gives Nando’s their competitive edge.

The secret to creating high-quality content that will most likely convert observers into customers easily lies in harnessing high quality content creation strategies. To fully take control of this means keeping up with the latest content creation trends. Augmented Reality is one such trend.

Augmented Reality: A Rising Content Creation Trend

There are dozens of content creation trends that are surfacing yearly. From year-to-year, hundreds of articles on ‘content creation trends to look out for’ are released. Augmented Reality most certainly makes the list. It has been recorded that 2 in 3 online customers prefer to engage with businesses that incorporate AR into their brand messaging.

Augmented Reality can be described as the enhancement of the actual physical world around you. Through AR technology, virtual objects can — in real time — be placed in any actual environment to enhance it to fit your liking. One of the main aims of AR is to alter and enhance the perception of any real-world environment by adding extra details such as infographics, sound, video and images to it.

Benefits of AR for Your Business’ Content Creation

Utilizing AR when creating content for your business comes with a number of advantages:

AR brings your business offering closer to your audience

There is not a single consumer in the world who does not wish to gain real value for their time and their money. It is thus no surprise when many consumers take their time before concluding any transaction, more so with businesses that they engage with online. AR possesses the ability to help guide your customers — both existing and potential customers — through their decision making all the way through to the transaction process.

For example, if your business offers hair dye, AR can be used to give your audience an idea of what each dye color your business houses would look like on them. This adds the element of certainty to your audience’s shopping experience whilst also enhancing their experience with your business. This has the potential to increase your businesses’ sales.

AR enhances customer experience

One of the ways for businesses to draw in new customers and retain existing ones is to offer them noteworthy experiences that never cease to fail them. AR assists with this by enabling your business to create high quality FAQs and product/service descriptions that are easily and readily accessible. In this way, your business offers them transparency and ease which in turn contributes their enhanced customer experience.

Converse and Their Use of AR

A comprehensive and relevant example of a business that managed to add AR to their brand is the world-famous Converse. As mentioned earlier, customers continuously seek to engage with businesses who utilize AR to enhance their shopping experience.

Converse took note of this and subsequently introduced the AR experience that enables their global audience to virtually “try-on” the brand’s shoes from the comfort of their homes. Through this, users can select the shoes they want to try on and simply point the cameras of their phones to their feet, thus giving them a look at what the shoes they are interested in would look like on them. This helps eliminate the indecisiveness and uncertainty of their customers and leads to Converse raking in massive amounts of sales.

Augmented Reality Is Critical to the Future of Content Creation

Content creation is — and will continue to be — an important element of maintaining any business relevance. Content creation trends such as Augmented Reality continue to shape the future on how content is both released by businesses and enjoyed by consumers.

AR has the ability to enhance the quality and layout of your business’ content. Furthermore, AR technology possess knowledge and insight that can help your business set a standard of superiority amongst other businesses who put out similar content. While AR is not a foreign or new concept, it is most certainly a welcome addition to the content creation arena that is here to stay.

Small Business Optimization | A Guide to Surviving the Economic Crisis

The economic instabilities striking the South African economy seem to rise on a daily basis. In July, motorists have been warned to brace themselves for a hike in the already increased petrol prices. Electricity tariffs have also been approved to increase by 7.47%. 

Hard-working individuals are putting in hours of labour to keep up with the sweat-breaking demands of the strenuous economy. Many well-established businesses have risen and fallen due to the never-ending economic pitfalls. Small businesses do not fall short of the looming potential downfalls catapulted by these instabilities, more so in their first year of business. The rising fuel and electricity prices are but a massive tip of the iceberg.

The big question is: how can your small business stay afloat amidst the looming economic crisis? This article will explore this question by providing easy, practical guides to optimizing your business practices to stand a chance in the rough economic seas. You can find a few answers to  surviving the economic crisis as a small business.

Budget Like a Pro

Budgeting is critical to the financial wellness of any business, and not only to during times when you must be surviving the economic crisis as a small business. Pouring money into empty wells is a sure way down the slope to business closure. Budgeting is not easy but there are many ways to ensure that your business does not burn through money faster than it can generate it.

Simple tips that your business can implement:

Tip one: create a list of your income and expenses. From this, identify those expenses that are unnecessary and eliminate them.

Tip two: Gage any amount of spending capital you may have and from it, set a monthly spending limit. At this point, you should ensure that you prioritize your expenditures.

Tip three: Budgeting is not an easy task that can be perfected overnight. Unexpected circumstances may cause a deviation from your budget. This is not the end of the world. Adjust your budget accordingly, keeping in mind that the goal is to limit unnecessary expenditure.

Using Freelancers

Freelancers are independent workers who companies hire on a short-term basis to perform specific tasks. Freelancers are part of the growing gig economy. Some companies opt for these independent contractors as opposed to full-time employees.

For instance, if your business is in need of accounting services, a freelancer with the relevant skills and qualifications can offer them to you. You would then only pay for services rendered for the period that you used the freelancer’s services. You could use freelancers for any work you might need help on; professional data backup services, website building services and even photography services to add to the attractiveness of your businesses’ online presence. It is all up to you and your businesses’ needs.

This calls for the elaboration on the benefits that the use of freelancers poses. For small businesses, freelancers come with a number of benefits with the most obvious being, saving on costs. Most small businesses do not have the financial capacity to house fulltime employees. Using freelancers cuts training and development costs. It means paying for work done for the contracted period instead of paying for all the costs that are involved in maintaining full time employees.

Local companies such as Safrea, Upwork and Mintor all provide South African freelancers and businesses the opportunity to find each other to establish affordable working relationships. Freelancers — for small business owners — are a smart, cost-effective move.

Low-Cost Advertising

Targeted markets cannot be penetrated or reached if no one knows about the existence of your business. Marketing, if done well, saves your business from invisibility. As a small business, chances are that your operations, marketing included, need to be executed on a shoestring budget. Social media, word-of-mouth tactics and email marketing are but a few pocket-friendly marketing strategies worth considering

Social Media is going nowhere

There are over 4.2 billion active social media users all across the globe. Growing platforms such as Instagram and TikTok offer real-time analytics on each post and each visitor who views users’ pages. Utilizing such platforms not only means reaching the multitude of social media users who are your potential consumers, it also means having demographic information handed through the provided analytics. This means that you can determine who is showing interest in your small business and thus prompt them to opening their wallets to your offerings.

Seeing that social media platforms are mostly free to use, your business has the opportunity to reach millions of potential customers at essentially no cost.

Refer-a-friend Scheme

Happy customers are a great way to advertise your business. Offer your customers some form of incentive for bringing in new customers. You could offer them discounts, loyalty points or coupons to encourage them to spread the word. Word-of-mouth is free advertising that your small business needs to trigger to maintain visibility.

Email Marketing

Businesses have the potential to both gain and lose customers at an alarming rate. Studies have previously indicated that it takes the average customer 8.25 seconds before they lose interest.

Email marketing serves as a sound reminder to your existing customers that you exist. Prompt them to subscribe to receiving sale notifications and any relevant updates from your business. Programs like MailChimp and Stripo offer free options for businesses and individuals to send customized group emails to customers. Essentially, your tight-budgeted small business has nothing to lose but customers to gain.

Email marketing is an effective way to retain customer interest. It also saves you ample time as it eliminates the need to send many emails individually. However, take caution not to spam your subscribers with endless emails as this will inevitably annoy them.

Optimize Your Delivery Strategy

With the seemingly uncontrollable predicted petrol hikes, businesses will do well to revisit their current delivery strategies to ensure that they do not drown in all the increases.

The last mile small business faces both economic challenges and the challenges that come with attempting to exceed customer satisfaction to continue competing in the market. South Africa may not have a variety of well packaged solutions for such challenges, however, all hope is not lost.

Taking great advantage of available services offered by last mile companies who possess researched methods to combat the many challenges your business may face in terms of logistics, can save you from a lot of excess stress. For instance, Easy Collect & Drop — a local solution — eases the pressure for businesses by providing affordable smart locker use as points of delivery. These are just as quick and efficient as the more traditional delivery options, with the upside being that they are cheaper in the long run. Thus, if the costly door-to-door delivery does not accommodate your business financially, ECD is sure to take care of your business need either way.

Conclusion: Survive the economic crisis as a small business

Small businesses can never learn enough about optimizing their business practices to give themselves a fighting chance in the rising economic waters.

SMEs are key role players in the building of the economy. The National Treasury views it best: They contribute to the efficiency of the local markets. They also contribute to the alleviation of poor economic activity in rural areas.

Economic instability has the ability to wipe out the existence of any brittle business. Surviving the economic crisis as a small business is a big question, but it should be your priority to ensure that you continuously revisit your current business practices to withstand such forces.

Outsourced Shipping – A Way To Streamline Your Growing Business

Shipping is one of the most important aspects of running any product-based business. In the early stages of operation, many startups and small businesses can possibly handle their own shipping needs. However, along with the growth of customer orders comes the inevitable need to outsource the business’s shipping to ensure customer satisfaction. With expansion, self-shipping may soon become much too unsustainable and financially strenuous on your business’ wallet.

Outsourced shipping can be associated with a number of overlooked benefits. Many business owners do not know that this delegation can mean optimizing your customers’ experience, lowering shipping costs, flexibility and saved time in terms of not having to learn the back-end of the shipping industry.

To get more comfortable with outsourcing your startup or growing business’ shipping needs, it is important to know and understand what this operation entails. This article aims to simplify this aspect of conducting business to help you optimize and streamline your small business.

Understanding Outsourced Shipping And How It Works

Outsourced shipping, simply put, entails delegating the distribution of your business’s products to another company — usually a shipping company. The need for outsourced shipping usually arises when the demand for your business’s product offering grows, thus posing a challenge to timeously fulfill your customers’ demands.

Outsourced shipping begins with you taking the decision to allow an external shipping or logistics company to basically lead your supply chain. Depending on the services that your chosen company offers, it will handle your warehousing, packaging, and shipping needs. In addition, your chosen company can ensure that you receive detailed reports on all your inventory and thus keeping you in the loop on this part of your business.

Benefits of Outsourced Shipping

No startup or small business aspires to stay in such a state forever. Outsourcing your business’ shipping duties is one strategy to consider when trying to scale. As a growing small business, outsourcing your shipping poses a number of benefits that you might not want to pass on.

Outsourced shipping optimizes customer service

We are living in a world where on-demand culture and that of instant gratification is rife. This is part of the reason why customers demand and expect speedy delivery. If it is logistically challenging for your business to meet and supersede customer expectations in this area, outsourced shipping can help ease this. Working with a third-party shipping company that ensures speedy delivery is a great way to optimize your customer service in that you could potentially avoid having to unnecessarily keep them waiting. You then give your business the opportunity to secure repeat purchases from your existing customer base and to lock in new customers.

Lowered Overall Fulfillment Costs

From the outside looking in, outsourced shipping may appear as an extra expense that your small business would rather shy away from. This is not necessarily accurate as it may actually reduce your fulfillment costs. Yes, outsourced shipping comes at a cost but so does self-shipping.

Through the magic of outsourced shipping, your business need not be concerned with securing a fleet of delivery vehicles when it is not in the financial position to do so. You will be saved from having to fork out funds on designing, automating and maintaining the shipping process because all of these areas will already be taken care of by your shipping partner.

Flexibility

Taking on a flexible approach when fulfilling your customer orders offers your business the golden opportunity to extend your market reach when working with a suitable shipment company. Why limit your business to having only a local presence when you can have a national and even a global presence through simply allowing a reliable shipping company to make this possible for you.

The formalities of the shipping industry are taken care of

The logistics industry is a rather complicated field. Outsourced entails your chosen outsourcing partner taking all the stress of having to navigate through all the field’s intricacies by yourself away. They will know how to handle delicate shipment, hazardous products all the way to beverages and food. Your partner will bring to the table their experience and expertise in the logistics industry. There is thus no need for you to spend hours learning the back-end and the formalities presented by the field. While educating yourself is never a bad idea, your shipping partner will have you covered in this regard as they will know the legalities surrounding customs, appropriate delivery routes and what constitutes as lawful and unlawful when executing deliveries.

Outsourced Shipping From Easy Collect & Drop’s Perspective

To serve as an example, Easy Collect & Drop (ECD) is always looking for ways to give the last mile customer satisfactory services that make the executing of business operations easier and more efficient. Through the added warehouse management service, customers are provided with reliable warehouse space and stock management services.

Customers and businesses are able to rent the warehouse space that they need. The ECD team conducts regular stocktaking checks to provide customers with regular, updated reports of their inventory. This way customers are always informed and can rest assured knowing that their stock information is up to date.

ECD knows that entrusting someone with one’s shipping needs comes with a lot of uncertainty and angst. To give customers peace of mind, any missing or damaged items caused by the ECD warehousing service are reimbursed. Through a one stop solution approach that is sure to successfully tender to customers’ business’ warehousing and delivery needs, ECD ensures that they receive safe, secure and efficient service delivery from a reliable and flexible team.

Outsourced Shipping Really Does Take the Weight Off

As provided in this article, outsourcing your business’ shipping poses a number of benefits. Not only does it help your small business in meeting your customers’ order demands in a timeous manner, it also acts as a business strategy that can help you reach those customers who are positioned in distant markets. In the fast-paced world we live in where instant gratification is of high value makes it an ever-important goal to achieve to ensure that your customers are never kept waiting. Make it a point to fully understand your business’ shipping needs in order to ensure a shipping company that you will have the perfect chemistry with.