How to take your fledgling business to the next level

AUTHOR: MICHAEL JOHNSON 

Developing a fledgling business. Where to begin? No matter what your service or product, you’re going to need a vibrant and easily identifiable online presence. Even if you’ve budgeted for a storefront design that will turn heads and filter the crowds in from the streets, lack of proper attention to your online offering is like only firing up one of the plane’s engines and acting like there’s no possible way that things could be better. So. You’ll need some staff. Designers, programmers, writers? OK. That’s a start. But let’s begin thinking a bit more medium term. No matter how new your business, any failure to prepare for the near future will only serve to condemn you to a repetition of today’s processes and revenue. Let’s start planning for the next level…

Marketing agency support that delivers  

You may not have the budget to hire an in-house marketing team with years of experience and bags of knowledge on how to dominate your niche. Even if you do have the budget, maintaining an in-house team has the potential to become a foolishly costly expense. What you need is a marketing agency. In exchange for a monthly fee, expert marketing staff will deliver unbeatable results in terms of driving traffic and revenue. Except, what if they don’t? Perhaps you’ve tried a marketing agency previously and found the outcomes to be little more than a drain on your budget. What you need is agency selection support from a highly motivated business mind with years of experience in choosing the right agency. Consider this service a sort of impartial TripAdvisor style review that can help you to navigate the options with huge rewards. 

Invest in your staff

Your staff doesn’t become complacent at performing all tasks they were hired to do. They become pigeonholed. They become so specialized and irreplaceable at performing certain tasks within your business processes that it no longer makes sense to waste their time on anything but a few high-value tasks that they know how to do so well. The only problem is that this stagnates the workforce, preventing innovation. Invest in your staff to make sure that your workforce remains engaged with working practices, helping to develop new and possibly money-saving strategies that can be taught to new employees – which also gives an incentive for industry professionals to seek employment with your company. 

Pay attention to the 20/60/20 rule

You may have heard of the 20/60/20 rule before, but if you have failed to implement the benefits of how the rule applies to your workforce, you are missing a trick. You see, the rule simply states that 20% of the workforce will support you, 60% are indifferent, and 20% are against your business direction. Each cross-section of your workforce must be handled appropriately in order to develop a fledgling business into a workplace that retains staff, instead of falling into the hire and fire spiral of despair. Take the time to understand the 20/60/20 rule and reap the benefits of appropriate employee management.