Small Business Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Value’

A business plan template is an important tool, especially for an entrepreneur learning business plan format for the first time. These are some of the benefits of buying and using a business plan template to create your business plan.

Shortcut For Outlining

A template will present you with a workable outline for your plan, giving you all of the major sections and subsections of the business plan in the order you should present them. All of the section headings and a table of contents will be prepared for you, saving you the time of creating this. With a template, you are more or less ready to jump into writing the text after you buy a business plan template.

Example Text

Some business plan templates will come with text for a sample business within each section of the plan. This serves as a placeholder and, if well-written, a good example of the type of writing you must create. This should show you what a professionally written business plan will look like and what questions must be answered in your own writing. Read the sample text carefully before starting your own writing so you are better prepared.

Some templates include lists of questions for you to answer within each section rather than sample text. This can be just as useful, as the questions funders will want to see answered will be similar for most types of businesses.

Financial Statement Preparation

A template should include an Excel financial model which facilitates the creation of financial statements, charts, and summaries for your business plan and appendices. Using a template for this should save a great deal of preparation time as the basic outline for all of the statements should be prepared with formulas to automatically update the statements based on your changes to financial assumptions of revenues and costs. The time and skill required to set up a financial model like this is considerable. With it you can try out different types of projections and immediately see how this impacts your income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement.

There is a huge difference when you talk about local SEO. For one, local SEO is all about target market, specifically focusing on geography and how keywords should function together with location. This way, local clients and customers can find a specific business in their area by through search engines. By specifically optimizing a geographical keyword or list of keywords, local business can also compete and get a lot of possible market online.

Local SEO may just be a new term in SEO, but this already has established a lot of websites targeting business locally. As compared to SEO in general, local SEO is all about target keywords with geography as the modifier. The keywords for local SEO should be related to your business, product or service. Examples would be “Florida tattoo parlors” or “Miami dress shops”.

Are you trying to reach to your target market though the Internet? Are you a small-sized, medium-sized company operating locally? Are you thinking if Internet marketing is healthy or effective to your business?
If one of the questions above is exactly what you have been trying to figure out, then local SEO is for you. Have you heard about local SEO before? If not, local SEO is a branch of SEO who targets businesses who want to build their consumer base. It also helps businesses make a higher sale of their products and services locally by targeting keywords geographically.

Unlike SEO in general, local SEO keyword research should include geography plus the keywords your target audience are looking for in the first place. Such keywords examples are “Florida SEO” or “Orlando Real Estate”. These are geographical keywords that can help your business be found on the pages of search engines.

After establishing your target keywords, you should also be able to start developing a website with individual pages that will support each brick and mortar location. The keywords you hav established should also be reflected in the ff. areas:

1. Link
2. Title
3. Meta
4. Heading
5. Content

Many local businesses are still weighing if SEO is right for them or not. Some are even hesitant that SEO is not what they need since they are just small companies focusing on local business. But on the other hand, web presence is proved equally important to even small and local operating businesses.

Reviews are crucial to any business, most especially to business who decided to operate and promote mostly online through their website. You can make full use of these reviews by searching online for related review sites and then all you have to do is to submit your website to these third party sites. Then once your website listing becomes available, people like your clients or old customers and visit the link of your listing and drop some comments about your products and services.

The Internet age now has paved way to many businesses to promote their products and services online effectively. With this, people also turned to online searching when looking at a particular product or service available.
It is highly suggested that local businesses use SEO for their products and services. Using local SEO for marketing is very much cost-effective: it only takes less time to gather targeted visitors to your product and service site. This is the magic and relevance of web marketing to local business companies. Good luck!

Info at hand is the “Business Portal” and central application in our CRBM Platform. Depending on your perspective or roles played in your business processes, you will find a benefit and perhaps many that apply to you. If you are a manager or book keeper there are several features that can help you track assets, inventory and help you gather solid business intelligence. If you are a production manager or talent resource there are many tools for managing project and improving efficiency or collaboration of your team. If you are a system administrator there are many tools for managing roles, teams and other system wide configuration and customizations.

There are really 5 clear value propositions that make the CRBM platform a perfect choice for virtually any small to mid-sized business:

1. Consolidated business management with reporting, automations, HR, Project Management with project profit loss tracking, Timesheet, and more.

2. Seamless integration with the Joomla CMS for virtually unlimited expandability for front end customer portal, partner portal or social networking community.

3. e-Commerce synchronization for a full transaction life cycle management and ERP inventory management capabilities with Shipping and Receiving.

4. One time licensing fee on premise model and low cost of entry.

5. Close integration and two way synchronizations with QuickBooks and Microsoft Outlook.

Our Info at hand based CRBM (Customer Relationship Business Management) has helped large number of organizations to manage their various functions including:

Marketing Management
Document Management
Inventory Management
Receiving
Shipping

1). Marketing Management:

1. A).Sales force automation:

Sales force automation includes lead capture, and the promotion of leads to Opportunities;
Opportunity tracking with sales stage and percentage likelihood;
Sales pipeline tracking, with graphical charts that offer drill-down from the bar or segment of the chart to the data that underlies it;
Definition of sales teams and territories, to manage information sharing and track sales performance by territory;
Sales forecasting and comparison of forecasts to quotas and actuals, by team or by individual;
Lead source analysis of sales and opportunities;
Flexible reporting, to extract precisely the information you want to see;
Corporate calendar management, for arranging calls and meetings; and
Integrated Inbound and outbound Email, which is automatically added to account and contact history.
B).Email & Letter Mail Marketing Campaigns:
Marketing campaigns may be conducted with email templates for automatically customized emails, management of prospect lists, and tracking of campaign click-through rates.
A target list for an email campaign may be assembled from a mixture of prospects plus pre-existing contacts and leads. You may create a target list as the output of a report, facilitating the targeting of prospects or existing clients with specific characteristics. A special Quick Campaign feature makes it quick and easy to perform spur of the moment email campaigns.
You can also import lists of prospects (in either Comma Separated Values (CSV) or Tab Separated Values (TSV) formats).
A mail merge feature enables the execution of letter mail campaigns, and target lists may also be exported to MS Word for a variety of purposes.

2). Document Management:

Info at hand enables the sharing of business documents – from HR claim forms and Marketing collateral to Engineering designs.

Multiple revisions may be stored ensuring only approved documents are used.
Documents in any format can be filed, and may be searched by title, description, file type, status, department, keywords and owner.
Documents may be associated with Projects, Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities, or Service Cases.
A project can have all of the project’s documentation attached to it. An account, lead or contact can have all related documents attached. And supporting documents for a service case can be attached to it.

3). Inventory Management:

Info at hand includes a full inventory management capability. Two key modules perform the bulk of inventory management – Shipping and Receiving. In addition, the Sales Orders and Purchase Orders modules, as well as the Invoices module, evolved to support the tracking of partially received Purchase Orders, and partially shipped Sales Orders or Invoices

4) Receiving:

The Receiving module lets users in shipping/receiving document the receipt of a shipment, list the items and quantities received, and link to the related Purchase Order (and Sales Order if any). It documents the inbound shipping provider, number of packages and weight, the supplier’s packing slip number,

5) Shipping:

The Shipping module lets users in shipping/receiving record the shipments they send out. As well, it links to the FedEx and UPS shipping and tracking web services to automate those activities when using these shipping providers. It documents the outbound shipping provider, number of packages and weight, the packing slip number (it can also produce PDFs of packing slips), and the date shipped.

What is customer service? Have you ever stopped to really think about this question? We have trained literally thousands of people and hundreds of organisations in customer service. No matter who the person or what the organisation, the answer to this question is always generic. They will say: “Customer service is about giving customers what they want” or perhaps “it’s about satisfying customers” some times they will say that it is about “making customers happy.”

While at first glance these answers may sound correct, nothing could be further from the truth. Say for example that you ran a restaurant. If a customer were to enter your restaurant and ask for some office supplies would you be able to give the customer what they want? Would you be able to satisfy a customer who was looking for some jewellery if you worked in a hardware store? No, it would be impossible. The best that you could do would be to politely tell the customer where they can go and get Jewry. Obviously, customer service is not about giving customers what they want, or even satisfying customers.

The same is true for the way we give customer service. When we ask the question: what is the most important thing for good customer service, almost everyone we ask will answer: smile. While this may be good in some cases it is not appropriate in all cases. Just imagine if a distressed mother came up to you and told you that she had lost her 2 year old child in your store. Imagine how she would respond if you were to smile at her? Or imagine if a customer told you that he/she slipped while climbing the stairs or escalator in your store and as they explained their excruciating injuries you smiled back at them.

The truth is that customer service is not about practicalities, it’s about principles. The practicalities may change but the principles stay the same. Staff are not meant to smile all the time, to give customers everything they want, or to satisfy all their needs. Staff are meant to promote the organisation and its values. If you want to increase the impact of your customer service teach staff to represent your organisation and its unique traits.

When we teach customer service training modules we first focus on what the organisation values, what it’s all about and what does it want customers to see. Once we have done this, we move on to how to serve in light of these values. This is a very easy way of getting staff to change the way they serve, it produces better results and is a lot more fun to teach.

Here is something you can do to help your staff engage in effective customer service. Take a black/white board and draw a very basic house. Ask staff to take a piece of chalk or the white board marker and to take turns to turn this basic house into your organisation/company. They may add pictures or words to the basic drawing. Some will add words like: quality, professionalism, friendliness, service, money, speed, or simplicity while others may draw things like customers and staff.

Now ask staff this simple question: in light of this picture, what does a good customer service representative do? The participants will now find it easy to see what customer service is really about in your organisation. They may say for example, in light of us being a friendly company we should smile. Or perhaps they will highlight the organisation’s professionalism and explain that it’s professional to stand up straight and to dress appropriately.

Instead of teaching staff practicalities teach them principles and the practicalities will follow naturally.

When you’re working on a book or ebook—any writing project you intend to sell—the question, “Will people actually want to buy this?” inevitably comes up. Although in most cases this is your inner critic trying to sideswipe your creative efforts, the question is valid. Will people actually see the value in the information you’re providing? Will they want to spend their money on your book?

The answer to these questions often lies more in packaging the material than the material itself. You can add value to your book or ebook, and enhance its marketability at the same time, by adding features that can’t easily be found anywhere else, and then using them to appeal to your audience. In most cases, these added features aren’t hard to find and create. You probably have the information ready to go; you just need to know how to work it into your book.

To make your informational product more marketable, consider the following seven ways to add value to your book or ebook.

1. Add a list of online resources

Compiling a list of online resources that pertain to your topic and supplement the information you present in some way will give your readers a place to go to find more. For example, if you’re writing a book about dieting, add a list of Web sites that post healthy recipes. This strategy is simple enough to do because you probably know of several resourceful sites that relate to your topic, and it adds value to your manuscript because it saves your readers the time of searching recipe sites online.

2. Add a list of books that supplement your information

This strategy works in the same way listing online resources does; it adds value by saving your readers time and guesswork, and it’s easy enough for you to do because you probably read all the books on your topic while you were researching your material.

Even creating a bibliography of all the sources you used in your research increases the perceived value of your book because readers can see where you formulated your ideas and concepts. It makes you and your expertise more trustworthy. And a bibliography or list of additional books makes your book more resourceful.

3. Add diagrams

Not all people learn and retain information in the same way. Some people can read and understand new information, but some learn best through visual aids and representations. You can add value to your book and make it easier to use for a broader audience by incorporating graphs, charts, diagrams, and other visual aids that clarify and reinforce your main ideas. If you want to include visual elements in your book, talk to a graphic designer about how to create them and incorporate them into your material.

4. Add profiles

People add color and character to every story, therefore adding profiles of people who either work in your industry or have successfully implemented your strategies to your book is a great way to make the information come alive for your readers.

If your book is about running an online business, then profile successful online entrepreneurs. Ask about their inspirations, successes, failures, and advice for your readers. To find anecdotes for your book, search your client database first—satisfied clients will be happy to help. Then you can advertise online for more stories by posting an inquiry on your Web site for viewers to submit their personal experiences.

5. Add checklists at the close of each chapter

If you really want your information and ideas to stick with your readers, then adding a checklist of main points at the close of each chapter, or even at the close of each subsection, is a great way to accomplish that goal and add value at the same time. To create a checklist, just identify your main points and assemble them in a list using bullet points or numbers to designate each item. Aim for three to five items for each chapter.

Checklists are easy to create and work into your manuscript. Plus, they are a marketable feature in a book because people like to receive new information in an easy-to-swallow format. Checklists that summarize your main ideas also make it easy for readers to refer back to your book later.

6. Add exercises or worksheets

If your material warrants doing so, you can take the checklist idea a step further by closing each chapter with a quick list of questions or activities for your readers. These can be activities you use in your own work, strategies you teach your students, or exercises that you create especially for your book. Readers will like the ability to apply and practice your information and concepts immediately after reading it. Then, you can compile the entire list of exercises into a bonus download that drives traffic to your Web site, or expand it into a workbook later.

7. Add an index

How many times have you been relieved to find an index at the back of a reference or how-to book? An index is a very user-friendly characteristic for a how-to, educational, or business book to have – it makes your information easier to find and apply quickly and without a long search. If you want your book to be perceived as a resource, then an index is a worthwhile addition. Some computer programs can create indexes, or you can hire an indexer to do it. The extra step will pay off for your readers and for you.

Your Book’s Value

If your goal is to create a valuable resource that your readers can easily use, then these seven strategies will help you accomplish that goal. Although they may not all be appropriate for your material, you can choose the strategies that best suit your and your readers’ needs.

When your information is easy to find and apply, readers will refer back to it time and time again. Incorporating one or more of these seven features contributes to your book’s perceived value and marketability. And when readers see value in your informational product, they willingly open their wallets and buy.

Historically, checklists were simple to-do lists that served as reminders; attend the sales conference, fax or mail the contract to a customer, or distribute an employee memo. Even today, most dictionaries define a checklist as a document that serves as a reminder for a series of tasks to be completed. However, checklists have now evolved to important business management tools that do much more. In addition to listing action items, checklists are effective business processes that enable organizations to grow and progress systematically, and in a planned manner. They have become important organizational tools for business enterprises.

Business checklists enable you to evaluate organizational goals, and prioritize objectives so that while you are managing all the high priority actions, the smaller yet necessary tasks are also incorporated and dealt with. They allow you to stick to the planned course of action and recognize deviations before any adverse eventualities occur. Moreover, it is important for any business entity to move faster than its competitors. By prioritizing and organizing action items and schedules, checklists allow the company to save time and stay abreast, even ahead, of its industry.

Marketing checklists, business management checklists, employee development checklists, financial checklists, and several other such checklists enable you to plan business, marketing and sales strategies and organizational development along with moving the business down a well-defined path.

Checklists are valuable tools for long-term as well as short-term planning. They can be utilized by any member of a business organization involved in planning for organizational or business development, production and customer operations, or even human resource management. Checklists can be developed and used by any type of commercial enterprise, including a retail store or restaurant, technology company or producer of consumer durables such as automobiles.

Business owners and managers from all size businesses now acknowledge the benefits of and recognize the value of checklists as an important tool for business growth and profit. Checklists are not simply task lists, they also carry important details about strategy, key personnel responsible for activities, and required resources needed for success. Most importantly, business checklists drive all activity toward the target completion date and the intended business goal.

Business checklists are best used by the personnel directly involved in managing and coordinating specific activities. It is always advisable to make a single person responsible for tracking progress and, if necessary, updating the checklist. Multiple changes will only lead to confusion and errors. Periodic reviews will allow you to readily measure progress and better control application. If you have multiple locations and the checklist includes actions or tasks for long-distance workers, then you can easily make the checklist available via means such as web pages, company newsletters or the intranet.

The importance of using a professionally designed management checklist to serve as a guide for managing your business operations cannot be overstated. A sound checklist aids management by organizing important criteria, enhancing objectivity and guaranteeing reproducibility. A checklist makes planning, monitoring and guiding operations, and assessing business objectives, an easier and a far more efficient process. With such a tool, you greatly enhance your ability to provide consistent customer service, meet your financial and profit objectives, be focused and organized as well as operate your business more efficiently.