None of us would fly on a plane that didn’t have any emergency procedures or oxygen masks in place. Yet when you are the owner of a small business it is easy to put-off installing ‘in-case-of-emergency’ measures.

Small businesses cannot afford to function effectively without such planning, especially in times of constant change.

Outsourcing is not a sign of weakness as some busy business owners may think. In fact, outsourcing is an intelligent move because it gives you back the time and energy you need to focus on your business.

So before you sit down to tackle the marketing, accounts, or business administration, evaluate how much your time is worth.

Training fails for lots of reasons. Among these, inadequate preparation is the most common. If you fail to prepare professionally, your training will fail. And the time and money spent on the actual training will be wasted. 1. Accept Responsibility It’s an oldie but a goodie: “If the student hasn’t learnt, the teacher hasn’t taught”. [...]

For any business the experience of being the subject of a fraud is not a pleasant one: being defrauded by an employee can be devastating particularly for a smaller business. Apart from the financial loss (which in some instances can be enough to destroy the business) the experience can be highly damaging to the working environment throughout the organisation.

Whether you work in retail, hospitality, finance or engineering you’ve probably heard of public liability. In fact, most people probably wouldn’t even dare think of trading unless they had a public liability insurance policy in place.

Would you like to have more customers, greater consistency in your sales and cash flow? Are you afraid of getting a “no” and being rejected when you ask a potential customer for their business?

The key to your business success lies in your ability to effectively promote yourself and your business – Here are seven ways you can turn your prospects, leads and enquiries into customers.

Building trust is really important in any aspect of a person’s life. Every person you encounter has been raised with slightly different morals and ethics. They also have varied manners. So, with you putting your content out there for people to read, how can you build their trust to entice them to keep coming back or at least take you seriously?

Here are 7 ways to build trust with your audience:

Articles are meant to provide useful information that can positively influence people. We all like to read information that can add to our knowledge or that which can guide us in our daily lives. It is then for this very reason that in writing articles for the internet, we should strive to always keep our target readers in mind.

You’ve got your swank new logo, a whip-smart tagline, a killer website design, letterheads, business cards and even a pull-up banner. Everything you need for international brand domination, right? Think again … without some serious brand discipline, your plan to take over the world will quickly succumb to inconsistency and confusion.

The prospect of being interviewed by a journalist is a nerve-racking one to many small business owners. We all want to make the right impression from the word go and avoid that really embarrassing comment. The good news is, most journalists are not there ‘to get you’ but simply to hear your story and get the [...]