Business Advice – Page 2

The Double Edged Sword of Your Personal Appearance

If you are a woman in business you may have become aware that your personal appearance can be a double-edged sword. You do everything to make yourself attractive and presentable for the job only to find you can’t advance because someone thought you were too attractive and that would distract the male employees. If you’ve been in business for some years and have wondered if you should get Botox treatment for those fine wrinkles, take this into account.

Of course you want to look your best, but the trouble is that if you appear too attractive you’ll have to work twice as hard to make people take you seriously. Those with suspicious minds may have other thoughts on how you got the job in the first place or how you managed to keep it. This is why it’s good to go with what you like and don’t pay too much attention to what other people think of you.

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What Should be in Your Business Plan

Business Advice / Business Plan, financial planning / April 18, 2017

Behind every successful business there is a comprehensive business plan. According to experienced financial planners Andep, there are many things this plan should contain, apart from your personality, including a financial planning section. This should be written by a financial advisor, or at least from information they have provided. Having a financial planner to help will show any lenders that you are serious about your business and they will be able to quickly see whether it is a viable investment opportunity for them.

Here are some of the other things that should be in your business plan: –

The title page is more important than you might think. By including this page your lenders will be able to quickly see what the plan is for and general information about it.
A one-page business summary. This will need to be written after everything else, but it should be included in the front so investors can get a comprehensive, but brief idea of your business.
About your business: this is all the information about the structure, registrations, premises, location, staffing and your products or services.
Your marketing plan: You need to do a marketing analysis of the industry you are entering, describe your target market and your competitors. Detail your key marketing plans and how you intend to meet your targets – digital marketing, traditional marketing, email marketing? This will show investors you know what you are doing.

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Business & Your Appearance

Business Advice / Your Appearance / January 16, 2017

It is said that a woman’s age is told by her hands rather than her face. Whether that is true or not, many women in business turn to cosmetic surgery in particular botox in order to present a smooth and young looking face to the world. But if the back of their hands are wrinkled and spotted, their age is still going to show up. That is why it’s important to take care of your hands as well as your face.

There are many facial cosmetics that can hide small veins or age spots on the face, but not as many for the hands. In any case, you need to wash your hands often and that would remove the make-up on them. The best way to keep hands looking young is to slather them in moisturiser at night and after washing them.

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How to Find the Best Corporate Property to Lease

Business Advice, Legal Advice / Corporate Property / December 11, 2016

Professional legal advice will tell you that there are many different criteria to finding the best lease, but before you can even start to look at what is in the lease you have to find a new office building that suits. Here are some tips to help find the property best suited to your kind of business.

Know your target market. Only by knowing the market and where they are likely to be can you be sure of putting your business in the same place. While location is not that important for some, it can spell success or disaster for others. So if you have a coffee shop or a butcher’s shop you need to be right where the foot traffic is, but also where there is plenty of parking. If you sell bulk supplies of timber or hardware your business will be in the industrial area. But you’ll need room for larger vehicles to drive in and access their goods rather than multiple parking spaces for cars.

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What You Need to Do to Start an Ecommerce Store

Business Advice, Website Development / Ecommerce / June 15, 2016

Many businesses both large and small are consulting digital agencies in order to make use of the Internet to enlarge their business and increase their bottom line. Even sole traders can start up an e-commerce store from which to sell their products or advertise their services. In fact, a great many people have found success in doing this. If you are thinking about starting up such a project, here are some tips on what you need to do.

Create a plan. This will include several components such as deciding what to sell, finding out where to access it, working out how you will differ from the competition, locating your target market and getting the legalities and store policies into place.
Setting it up. There are many things to decide in this step. Will your store have phone support? What domain and plan will you use? What will be the name of your store? Will you use drop-shipping or have stored inventory and if the latter, where will you store it? Selling digital goods saves a lot of problems with storing and packaging. You need to create a special bank account and decide on your merchant account so that people can pay you. PayPal makes it easy, but they do take a percentage of each transaction.
Decide on your website details. It is essential to make your website easy to navigate, with all the important details highly visible. Make sure it is responsive so that people using iPhones and iPads can use it easily. A content management system (CMS) like WordPress will make it easy for you to add and edit content instead of relying on – and paying for – a website designer to do it each time. You will need to write the product descriptions, including all the relevant information to help customers make their choice. You also need to write your privacy policy and get an SSL certificate to protect customer’s credit card details. Get a marketing plan and to learn how to measure results with analytics.

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Tips for Leasing Business Premises

Business Advice, Legal Advice / Business Premises / January 2, 2015

If you start up a business that cannot be run from home, you will need to lease business premises. There is a great deal to consider and plan including getting professional advice from lawyers and in this case, an experienced property lawyer because signing a lease will mean you are committed to pay a specific amount on a continual basis for the term of the lease. In addition, you may need to outfit the premises before you can start selling to get an income. Here are some of the things you will need to consider apart from the price.

The future needs of your business. You may need to expand, so are the premises large enough? If you expand in a different direction, is there anything in the lease that may prohibit you from selling different goods? Moving from the location after you have built up goodwill there can mean you are virtually starting all over again, so get it right the first time.

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Running your online business like a rock star?

Business Advice, Website Development / June 9, 2011

An interesting pocket of web design is found on Naldz Graphics, with a gallery of 40 websites of rock bands. Now, the point of this post is “look at designs, be inspired in your own designs” and in fact some of these might work better for businesses other than a band.

We asked our own resident rock ‘n’ roll expert (he has a Frank Zappa poster in his cubicle) to rate how these designs work for a band as a business case.

Here’s some of the verdicts:

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