Published on: 19 January 2017
Last Updated on: 10 September 2021
So you’ve decided to bite the bullet and start up your very own business. If it’s the first time you’ve ever dared to create your own venture, you’re probably intimidated. But if your passion is deep and your willingness to work is significant, a lot can happen. But first, you must address some first steps to starting a successful business. Here are our tips and pointers to doing just that:
6 Pointers to Starting a Successful Business:
1. Create a Plan and Implement It:
The most essential step to founding a new business is to simply start. Research and create a plan that details the sequence of steps you need to take to create a business from scratch, approximately how long it will take to implement each step and your budget for each stage. Sticking to a blueprint will help you focus on your long and short-term business goals and keep you from getting distracted. Take advantage of the many free and paid resources across the Internet that help you structure and create a business plan. Once you have a plan you’ve researched inside-out, follow it!
2. Learn to Delegate:
You may be tempted — particularly if you are on a shoestring budget — to establish your business on your own. But this is not the best path to business success. With the budget that you have, consider enlisting the help of a virtual assistant, a mentor or volunteers that help you get out of the day-to-day minutiae of your business. Doing this will enable you to focus on the bigger decisions and strategies that help you automate and build systems that keep the business running on a day-to-day basis. Don’t skimp on just hiring anyone though, really invest time in finding the best employees for the position you are advertising. Employees who are intent on helping you with the best of themselves will be the lifeblood of your enterprise.
3. Investigate Your Audience:
If you’re able to think of five independent profiles of customers off the top of your head who’d be interested in your product or service, then you’re on to something. Investing time and thought into finding out crucial information about your target audience is incredibly important to your business. Ask yourself the following questions: What target group would buy your products? Why would they value your product enough to buy it? When you are able to deeply identify your target audience, you’re more likely to be able to figure out avenues of how to reach them.
Knowing your target audience is what will ultimately guide you in the development of your product or service as well as your marketing. Make it a point to occasionally ask your customers what they think about your market, your product/service, and other such valuable information. If they would support website localization or foreign language subtitling for your onsite videos, for example, you should know about that. Doing this will help you prepare a positive, seamless experience for them from the moment they first hear of you to when they buy your product or service, and beyond.
4. Work Out And Stick To Your Rates:
Many business owners make the mistake of charging what they think the market would be willing to pay. But instead, your baseline should be to charge the minimum, or more than the minimum, of what you need to earn to keep your company afloat. Set realistic goals of how much it will cost you to stay in business. Once you have a final figure in your head, set a rate or price that honors that figure while enabling you to make a profit. Try to set a price on the value of your service or product, rather than just cover a simple margin more than what it costs to provide or create the service or product.
5. Tap Into Your Passion:
Beyond the nuts and bolts of the plan behind putting your business together, there’s the human aspect — your drive and passion for wanting to make it happen. The truth is that most successful entrepreneurs will often do whatever it takes to make their business successful. Starting a successful business is rarely easy — it requires long hours, occasional failures, setbacks and disappointments that will make it difficult for you to continue. When you have the drive and determination to overcome these, you are that much more likely to find the success you deserve.
6. Roll Up Your Sleeves and Get Busy:
Don’t wait until you’ve got all your eggs in the basket to start putting your business together. Waiting for the right moment means it may never arrive. If you have an idea that is compelling and have undertaken the research and necessary planning to get it off the ground, go for it. But be prepared to learn some tough lessons while adjusting your plan along the way. Start now and commence your journey towards launching a business. Remember, even if you fail, you’ll be that much more experienced when you revamp your ideas and strategy and start afresh.
Abdul Aziz Mondol is a professional blogger who is having a colossal interest in writing blogs and other jones of calligraphies. In terms of his professional commitments, he loves to share content related to business, finance, technology, and the gaming niche.
Have you been recently fired from your job because of the Coronavirus problem?
Are you looking to sustain yourself by earning during the lockdown period?
Do you know of certain high-paying and profitable opportunities, which you can take up?
With global economic losses crossing the $2 Trillion mark, Coronavirus is jeopardizing millions of livelihoods. According to financial experts, we are going to witness a period of global financial recession.
In these testing times, we have two options in front of us-
We can either mope or blame our destiny for all the bad that is happening. Or,
We can put ourselves together, invoke our entrepreneurial spirit and work our way out of the problem.
You might have heard the proverb, ‘when God closes a door, he opens a new window.’ In this article, we are going to open five windows for you.
5 ways to earn income during the Coronavirus lockdown: The List
1. Start a News Blog on Coronavirus or COVID 19-
You do not need a flair for creative writing if you are looking to start a news blog. All you need to do is create a simple WordPress website for your news blog and start a social media page. Publish five to ten 500 word articles every day and see the traffic flowing.
People are interested in knowing about everything related to the Coronavirus. This is a good time to look up government sources, Reuters and different news publications and collate them all in one place. Once you get decent site metrics and traffic, you can earn income through Ad displays, guest posting, and other ways.
2. Take up Cryptocurrency trading in a major way-
Did you know that you could easily earn hundreds of dollars every week by just trading cryptocurrencies? With the rise of cryptocurrency trading platforms, you can easily become a trader. All you need to do is open account and start trading.
The technologically advanced software of the platform is going to guide you when it comes to making the best trades. By investing a small sum of money, going for low-risk trades initially, you can become a seasoned and experienced cryptocurrency trader in no time.
3. Get paid by signing up for Surveys and Options Sites-
There are many survey sites, businesses and companies, which pay up to $10 USD per survey. This is a great sum of money when you consider that you can easily do a minimum of five surveys per day. This is not only going to help you earn, but also explore new opportunities.
Big businesses work with market research firms to find out about the opinions of consumers. By signing up to such platforms, becoming part of interviews and focus group discussions, you can earn close to $3000 USD per month.
4. Food or Grocery delivery agent in your neighborhood-
Almost all nations around the world have exempted online companies from the lockdown. This means that these companies are hiring aggressively as more and more people are ordering things while sitting at home.
If you have a bike, you can easily sign up with one of the major players in your neighborhood and start delivering to people. This is not only very profitable now, but also very humane. You are going to help someone get their medicines and other essentials on time.
5. Start your own Freelance Gig-
If you are good at writing, start bidding for content writing jobs on freelance websites. If you are good at cooking, you can start your own food delivery gig. No matter what your passion, you can always make it into a fully income-generating opportunity.
As more and more companies are looking to cut costs by firing people, they are not going to stop their operations altogether. Approach them as a freelancer and offer your services for an attractive fee. You will be surprised to see the results of your outreach.
Conclusion
In this article, we have listed five great income-earning opportunities for people who have been laid off because of the Coronavirus. All these opportunities do require time and effort. However, if you are able to do them right, you will see cash flowing into your account.
Can you think of some similar opportunities to earn cash? Let us know in the comments section below.
Read also:
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Is an online degree in business management worth it?
Are you struggling to keep pace with the ever-evolving demands of your Agile projects? In today's fast-paced development environment, scaling your team efficiently is not just an option; it's a necessity. Therefore, you must use staff augmentation, a strategic solution that can rapidly accelerate your Agile project delivery.
Discover how integrating skilled professionals into your team can bring unparalleled flexibility and expertise, significantly boosting your project's efficiency.
We'll explore the tangible benefits, practical strategies, and insightful best practices to help you effectively scale your Agile team through staff augmentation.
Get ready to transform the way you manage your projects and achieve remarkable results.
Understanding Staff Augmentation: A Quick Primer
Staff augmentation is a flexible strategy for outsourcing the right talent for the right job. This strategy is followed by big firms globally for managing augmented teams.
Unlike conventional hiring, which often involves a lengthy recruitment process and long-term commitments, staff augmentation offers a nimble approach to scaling teams.
This strategy is particularly beneficial for businesses needing specialized skills for short-term projects or to fill temporary skill gaps.
Here’s a breakdown of how staff augmentation differs from traditional hiring:
Time Efficiency: Staff augmentation services enable quick onboarding of skilled professionals, reducing the time-to-hire significantly compared to the traditional recruitment process.
Cost-Effectiveness: It eliminates many overhead costs associated with full-time employees, such as benefits, office space, and long-term contracts.
Flexibility and Scalability: Companies can scale their teams up or down based on project requirements without the long-term commitment of a full-time hire.
Types Of Staff Augmentation
There are three main types of staff augmentation, which are:
Short-term: Typically used for specific projects with tight deadlines or to cover temporary absences.
Long-term: Ideal for extended projects where ongoing support is required.
Specialized: Focuses on providing experts in niche areas or new technologies that are not present in-house.
Understanding these distinctions and the types of staff augmentation available helps businesses make informed decisions about how to effectively scale their teams and meet project demands.
This approach is increasingly popular in Agile environments, where adaptability and speed are key.
The Role Of Staff Augmentation In Agile Project Management
Integrating augmented staff into Agile teams can significantly enhance project management efficiency.
In Agile environments, where adaptability and rapid iteration are paramount, augmented staff provides the necessary skills and manpower to meet fluctuating project demands.
Impact on Agile Processes and Workflows:
Enhanced Skill Set: Augmented staff bring specialized skills that might be lacking in the current team, facilitating more diverse and innovative approaches to problem-solving.
Increased Flexibility: They allow Agile teams to quickly adapt to changing project requirements, ensuring that deadlines are met without compromising on quality.
Improved Productivity: With more hands on deck, teams can manage larger workloads more efficiently, accelerating project timelines.
A practical example of successful integration can be seen in a tech startup that leveraged professional IT staff augmentation to speed up the development of a new software product.
Facing a tight deadline, the startup augmented its existing team with skilled developers who specialized in the required technology stack.
This integration allowed the team to maintain Agile methodologies, like daily stand-ups and sprint planning, while effectively managing the increased workload.
As a result, the product was developed and launched within the desired timeframe, demonstrating the effectiveness of staff augmentation in Agile project management.
The key to success in such integration lies in ensuring that the augmented staff are not only skilled but also align with the company's Agile culture and practices.
This alignment ensures seamless collaboration and optimal results.
Benefits Of Staff Augmentation For Agile Teams
Staff augmentation offers a myriad of benefits to Agile teams, enabling them to tackle projects more effectively and efficiently. Here are some of the key advantages:
1. Access To Specialized Skills And Expertise
Staff augmentation allows Agile teams to bring in professionals with specific skill sets that may be lacking internally.
This is especially valuable for projects requiring niche expertise or for navigating emerging technologies.
2. Flexibility And Scalability
Agile projects often fluctuate in scope and scale, necessitating a flexible workforce.
Staff augmentation provides the ability to scale the team size up or down based on the current needs of the project, ensuring that resources are optimally utilized.
3. Cost-Effectiveness And Efficiency
By augmenting staff, companies can avoid the long-term costs associated with permanent hires, such as benefits, training, and other overheads.
This approach is also efficient in reducing recruitment time, enabling teams to focus more on project delivery rather than on lengthy hiring processes.
4. Enhanced Productivity
With additional skilled resources, Agile teams can manage workloads more effectively, leading to increased productivity.
This also allows for faster turnaround times on projects, as tasks can be distributed more evenly and handled more competently.
5. Focus On Core Business
Augmentation frees up internal resources, allowing teams to focus on core business activities.
This is particularly beneficial for smaller teams or startups, where internal resources are often stretched thin.
Overcoming Common Challenges In Staff Augmentation
While staff augmentation offers significant benefits to Agile teams, it also comes with its own set of challenges.
Addressing these effectively is key to leveraging the full potential of this strategy.
1. Addressing Skill Gaps And Training Needs
One of the primary challenges is ensuring that augmented staff possess the right skill sets and are up to date with the latest technologies.
Regular training and professional development opportunities are essential to bridge any skill gaps.
2. Navigating Administrative And Legal Considerations
Augmenting staff often involves dealing with contracts, legal compliance, and administrative tasks, especially when hiring internationally.
It's important to have a clear understanding of these aspects or work with a partner who can manage them.
3. Ensuring Quality And Performance
Maintaining the quality of work and ensuring the performance of augmented staff can be challenging.
Setting up key performance indicators (KPIs), regular performance reviews, and continuous feedback mechanisms can help in monitoring and maintaining work standards.
4. Cultural And Communication Barriers
Augmented teams might face challenges due to cultural differences and communication barriers, especially in a remote working environment.
Encouraging open communication, cultural sensitivity training, and team-building activities can mitigate these issues.
5. Integration With Existing Teams
Ensuring seamless integration of augmented staff with existing teams is critical.
This requires clear communication of roles, responsibilities, and project goals, along with fostering a collaborative team culture.
The Best Staff Augmentation Practices In 2024
If you want to make the most of staff augmentation for agile project management, here are some necessary practices that you must inculcate:
1. Maintaining Clear Communication
If you wish to have a strong team that gets theory work done on time with zero errors, having clear and open communication channels is a necessity.
Having proper communication between all the members of the team is necessary for development. This is because it facilitates everyone in the team to work together and solve any issues that may crop up.
Moreover, open communication improves team bonding, which is crucial for all team members to understand their strengths and weaknesses. This helps the team leaders to make better decisions regarding the allocation of work according to everyone's strengths and expertise.
Therefore, use team communication tools like Slack, Asana, Trello, Skype, and Microsoft Teams.
2. Clearly Define Job Roles
To get the most out of staff augmentation, you must define everyone’s job roles. If all members of your team know what they must do - and what they shouldn’t do - to get the job done, it prevents chaos and conflicts between your team members.
Moreover, having clear job roles will make everyone's daily tasks clear. In addition, having a job role comes with various expectations. Therefore, it will help team leaders better measure the performance and efficacy of team members.
3. Learn How To Use Project Management Tools
If you want to lead a project from initiation to its completion, you and your staff must use the best project management tools in 2024.
Project management tools provide better documentation and storage of all work done by your team. Moreover, this helps in staff augmentation since many outsourced employees might be from other countries. Therefore, giving them limited access to to your sheets will help you better track and manage their work.
The best project management tools in 2024 are Trello, Jira, and Microsoft Office 365.
4. Encourage Documentation-Driven Development
How do you know that an outsourced staff member has done their work? No word of mouth will be tolerated here. The only permissible proof is proper documentation of your work.
Therefore, team leaders and managers should encourage a work culture where all staff members (especially augmented staff members) must have proper and updated documentation of their daily work.
This will help you keep track of everyone’s work and help you asses future actions and strategies.
Conclusion: Scale Your Agile Team with Staff Augmentation
In conclusion, staff augmentation emerges as a powerful strategy for scaling Agile teams, addressing skill gaps, and enhancing project delivery efficiency.
This approach provides a pragmatic solution to the dynamic challenges of modern project management, offering flexibility, specialized expertise, and cost-effectiveness.
To recap the key benefits:
Access to a global talent pool for specialized skills.
Scalability to meet fluctuating project demands.
Cost savings compared to traditional hiring.
Increased productivity and efficiency.
However, it's important to approach staff augmentation with a strategic mindset.
Choosing the right partner, ensuring cultural and process alignment, and effectively managing augmented staff are crucial steps towards success.
Additionally, overcoming challenges like administrative hurdles, quality assurance, and team integration is essential for a seamless experience.
Moreover, following the best staff augmentation practices will help you manage and track everyone’s work. In addition, it also facilitates clearer communication with outsourced staff members as well.
Read Also:
Top Ways Contract Management Software Helps to Mitigate Contract Risk
Why Should I Get Started With Event Management Software?
Which Marketing Mix Element Deals Specifically With Retailing And Marketing Channel
Despite the plethora of advertising resources available in the digital marketplace, one key issue still has not been resolved - how do you build strong customer relationships? As a direct link between you and your customers, an email address will allow publishers to build a personal connection with an audience. Below are further marketing tips that can be used to develop a stronger client relationship using email marketing.
The Best Methods To Build Strong Customer Relationships
1. Move The Social Media Audience To A Direct Channel By Gaining Their Email Address:
To strengthen your target audience relationship, you should reconsider how you view Facebook. You cannot connect with a target audience on a platform where all algorithm tweaks reduce its reach and take you further from your potential customers. Instead of playing "cat and mouse" using Facebook's algorithms, it is recommended that you utilize the social platform as a channel for acquisition. Making use of social media platforms CTA features will help you support your email newsletters to the target audience and lead the social audience to your company's email list. From this point, you will be able to engage with them without any interference from the social platform.
2. Using Email Capture Apps To Connect With The Site Visitors In An Inbox:
When visitors arrive on your website via an organic search or from social media, they are likely to leave the site as soon as they arrive. By utilizing onsite capture resources to collect their email addresses before they leave, you will be able to set up a direct and long-term form of communication with the audience. Not only will email subscribers build up more lifetime website visits than visitors from Facebook, but they also tend to view more site pages during their session.
To maximize the email conversions, it is recommended that you utilize active capture widgets with a contextual newsletter offer. This is likely to convert passing visitors to the website into lifetime subscribers. In this way, you will be increasing the likelihood of engaging users in the long-term and nurturing these subscribers with new content.
3. Building Strong Reading Habits With The Audience Via Newsletters:
In the traditional text publishing world, the typical delivery of publications builds reading styles with their target customers. The newsletter via email is the option most similar to that traditional form of publication and habit-forming print media. By sending a constant street of relevant content to the audience's inbox, you will engage the audience continuously; thereby, demonstrating the value of paying for your website's content.
You can deepen this engagement through cross-promotion and encouragement of the audience to subscribe to additional newsletters. The quality of newsletters is why the New York Times found that people are more likely to pay for a subscription if they first subscribed to their newsletter; therefore, the email newsletter is the ideal resource for building relationships necessary in the digital publishing environment.
Before online transactions and exchanges became the norm, brands were responsible for fostering physical and in some cases emotional connections with their clientele. This resulted in a strong and loyal brand audience, repeat purchases, and other immeasurable value for the business. In today's society, the majority of brands will opt for social media and social marketing to engage with consumers and substitute human interaction. Understanding that humans require relationships in their personal lives and when purchasing items, businesses acknowledge the need to build relationships with consumers, form user engagement, and drive more beneficial sales.
While some companies engage with their consumers well using online measures, not all brands are as fortunate. So, how can we stand above our rivals when trying to engage with a target audience? There are several ways in which a smaller company can drive more sales by building strong online consumer relationships.
4. Surveying The Consumers And Gain Their Opinions:
Providing your consumer with exactly what they want is potentially the best method to make sales, increase trust in the company, and gain repeat customers. It is the ideal situation and is a building strategy that can help a company get its way with almost any customer. The question remains, however, how do you discover what a consumer's needs are and how do you meet them? Simple, find out what they want by sending them surveys.
Before marketing became digital, practical market research was performed via traditional questionnaires or surveys. The original question of how much you agree with a statement would find out if the person strongly agrees, strongly disagreed, or was somewhere in the middle. Regardless of the standard of error metrics that tend to bore the average person, this technique can provide companies with good insight into their consumer market.
Customer feedback and surveys can now be conducted using email, via social media platforms, or on different websites. One of the survey platforms available allowing companies to send targeted surveys to consumers through social media and emails is SurveyMonkey. Companies can also gain insight from consumers using Qualaroo as they provide information as soon as the consumer visits the website.
5. Using Email To Communicate:
Forming an email list is potentially one of the most significant methods a business can remain in contact with its consumers, build trust, and make sales - unless you are a spammer. If all emails you send are "sale-sy", then you are engaging incorrectly and will more than likely be considered spam. Emails should provide valuable information for the customer to share and once you have provided content to address their needs, you can build rapport and foster the digital relationship to be successful! They can also act as promotions later with the help of a Houston search engine marketing firm. By creating an aesthetically pleasing and informing sales copy to go along with your email, it can make a great impact!
Real-Time Video Chat For Consumer Support
Real-time video chat is considered one of the hotter topics with businesses that are looking to build relationships with online customers. In late 2017, Amazon implemented the "Mayday Button" - a new feature on the Kindle Fire to allow a user to receive video communication with a client support agent. Never before had this type of online support been available and the user is now able to speak with a representative in an innovative manner. Today, Amazon notes that consumers can use video chat in under 15 seconds and this is much better than waiting on the telephone for a new customer agent to take your call.
Read Also:
Not All Customers Are Always Right
How To Write And Design An Article That Attracts New Customers To Your Business
5 Steps On How To Market Your Business Using Social Media
