Business Advice

Choosing the Right Commercial Cleaning Partner for Your Office

Choosing the perfect cleaning service for your office is not a simple decision; you are making a serious investment in the health, productivity, and image of your office environment. Office cleaning brings order and beauty to any premise; it gives off the first impression of your business. Therefore, selecting the best commercial cleaners is highly important, the decision you make here can radically affect not only the look of your office but also health and efficiency of the employees.

Understanding Your Cleaning Needs

It is important to know your particular cleaning requirements before you start using a cleaning agency. You need to look into the nature of your floor space before committing to any cleaning program; for example, does your office have high foot traffic requiring daily full clean ups or will less frequent deep cleans do? This is important to consider because it is the basis for all decisions. Adapting the cleaning service to your specific needs provides an efficient and effective way to maintain a clean and inviting atmosphere.

The Importance of Professional Experience

Involving experts with experience in the cleaning industry is encouraged as experience is tightly connected with performance. Among other things, the selection of a trustworthy office cleaning company with proven experience and a tailor-made approach to commercial cleaning is valuable, as cleaning an office becomes more specific than merely a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution. This tailoring of services guarantees each part of your office is properly taken care of to the highest standards, which greatly increases the space’s hygiene and usefulness.

Continue reading “Choosing the Right Commercial Cleaning Partner for Your Office”

Making The Most Of Motivational Team Building Activities

One of the biggest benefits of team building activities is that they give your team a huge motivational boost, and as the leader of that team, you should make the most of that. Motivating a team through team-building activities is of no use if the levels of motivation only stay high momentarily and drop once the activities have stopped.

What you really want is for your team to keep their motivation levels high continually, and that can be achieved if you set up and implement your team building activities in the right way. Most crucial is that you plan and consider the motivation elements of any team building exercise carefully for maximum effect. Your team-building activities with leadership training should have these four critical elements which will help to motivate your team.

Fun

It does not matter whether you training a football team, a group of dancers, or a team of salespeople, for them to feel motivated, they have to enjoy what they are doing. Your team building activities should have an element of fun so that the activity is not seen as some kind of chore, or worse, a penance.

Actually, this applies to any training which you give your team, but it is especially important with regards to motivating them. Working together on a task which solidifies the team spirit, but at the same time allows them to have fun, is always going to produce better results than activities that are boring and downbeat.

Continue reading “Making The Most Of Motivational Team Building Activities”

5 Strategies to Help Manage the Cost of Business Litigation

When a business goes through the unpleasant mess of litigation, it will cost them a great deal in legal fees to their lawyers as well as what they have to pay the person who sues them – always supposing they win. However there are other costs that are largely hidden and often cannot be recovered, let alone even worked out because of their very nature.

The cost to the reputation of the company can bring it to its knees because such things can drag on for years. During this time the media will make a big fuss and the public tend to think, Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. In other words, they convict the company in their minds and this usually translates into not dealing with them anymore.

The CEO and other management have to spend a great deal of time with their lawyers and external stakeholders – they may even bring in external risk and reputational management professionals with whom they will have to spend time. This means they are not focussed on managing their business to the extent that they should be. Under such stress, they may make poor business decision, or lose a client due to neglect. This too, has a great cost that can never be worked out.

So here are 5 ways a business can manage the cost of litigation

Continue reading “5 Strategies to Help Manage the Cost of Business Litigation”

Business Start-Ups And Their Links To Drug Addiction

It is the dream of many individuals to start and run their own business, and we all know many people do it successfully, but what might not be so commonly known is the link between start-up businesses and drug rehab. Before anyone thinks we are talking about someone starting an illegal drug running and supply business here, we are not. Instead, we are talking about legitimate new businesses whose owners succumb to drug addiction.

It has long been known that drug addiction is not restricted to those that might be considered to be at the lower end of the income and social ladders. The fact that someone is in a respected and professional job and is earning a six-figure salary does not preclude them from the possibility of becoming addicted to drugs from cocaine to ice addiction.

This also applies to those who wish to start a business, and given that doing so normally requires levels of entrepreneurship, intelligence, and in almost all cases the financial means to get the business off the ground, we are once again looking at a demographic that most people would not automatically consider being prone to drug addiction.

The fact is that whilst being in poverty can be a trigger for someone to start taking drugs, possibly in an attempt to find some kind of escape, equally true is wealthy people also seek refuge from their problems by taking drugs. The trigger here is not the size of their bank balance, but instead the problems, stress, and anxiety they face. The specific problems might be widely different, but the means of escape is not…drugs.

Continue reading “Business Start-Ups And Their Links To Drug Addiction”

7 Tips For Generating Prospective Clients For Your Landscaping Business

For any landscape architect who is ambitious in terms of wanting their landscaping business to grow and expand, one of the barriers they often come up against is not knowing which ways they can effectively market that business to gain new clients. Should that include you, and you are seeking marketing tips for promoting your business, read on and you will discover seven such marketing ideas, all of which are highly effective at generating new leads for local businesses.

Social Media

Having an effective social media marketing campaign can bring you leads from multiple places online. When you consider how many social media sites there are, and how many local people will be using them, it is a marketing channel that must be utilised. The key is having interesting, amusing and even shocking or controversial content that hopefully becomes viral and gets you noticed by even more potential clients.

Continue reading “7 Tips For Generating Prospective Clients For Your Landscaping Business”

5 Tips To Ensure Any Google Ads Campaign Your Create For Your Family Lawyers Business Is Successful

In terms of cost, there are two options that you have with regards to promoting your family lawyers business. They are paid and free. To be honest, to call the latter free is a bit misleading because whilst you might not pay for each individual click or visitor to your website, there are costs with respect to time, and potentially to the SEO agency who optimised everything to rank your website highly on Google in order to gain those visitors.

The ‘free’ route also takes longer to see results so if you want to start gaining new clients as soon as possible then it is paid advertising that you need. One of the most effective paid advertising options online is Google Ads. Previously called ‘AdWords’, this allows your business to bid for clicks for specific keywords and if the bid is successful then your ad, and more importantly, the link to your website, appears at the top of the page.

It seems fairly straightforward and at its core it is a relatively simple concept to understand, however, the means by which you become one those top spots has a bit more to it in terms of learning and actions. Nevertheless, even this is not that difficult especially if you follow some simple rules. In addition, you need to approach the setting up of your Google Ads campaign with a plan and strategy , rather than just randomly choosing and bidding on keywords.

Continue reading “5 Tips To Ensure Any Google Ads Campaign Your Create For Your Family Lawyers Business Is Successful”

4 Positive Benefits Of Relocating Your Business

If you are a business owner or manager and you the idea of relocating that business has entered your mind, we assume that the decision to move would only be if you could see positive reasons for doing so. before you start planning your move and hiring expert removalists, you must first ascertain what benefits that your business is going to accrue as a result of relocating.

You also want the positive aspects of relocating to be ones that actually benefit your business, your staff, your clients, and yourself. Simply doing it for a change of scenery, or because you have become bored with your current location is not enough reason to move, especially if your business extremely successful being located where it is at the moment and the profits are rolling in every single month.

On the other hand, if your business is not achieving the results that you are aiming for, and you believe that for this, and for other legitimate reasons, an office relocation would make a difference, then by all means plan for one. In doing so, you will be looking to see what other advantages there might be, and to point you in the right direction, literally, here are 4 of them.

Continue reading “4 Positive Benefits Of Relocating Your Business”

5 Ways Employers Can Support Employees Who Have Drug Addictions

For any employer that discovers one of their employees has a drug problem, including ice addiction, it can come as a bit of a shock. It might be that the employee has already undertaken drug therapy, has gone through drug detox, and is now on a drug rehab program. On the flip side of the coin, it might be the employee has a drug addiction that currently exists and is in need of rapid support.

If the end of the drug use scale one of your employees is on includes serious drug addiction, hopefully, you are an employer who sees your role as one which provides support for them, rather than one where punishment is the only action to take. Obviously, that is your choice, and it is not for us to tell you how to run your business. all we would ask is that you consider all the options open to you.

If you want those options to include ways of supporting employees who have a drug addiction, then there are some guidelines below as to how you and your company can provide that support.

Continue reading “5 Ways Employers Can Support Employees Who Have Drug Addictions”

Cancellation Policies And What They Should Include

One area of debate within the world of business is that of cancellations and refunds, and when we say debate, that has a wide scope and ranges all the way from a reasonable discussion to a heated argument. In the most extreme cases arguments about a cancellation or a refund have gone to litigation, and thus the business has had to ask their litigation lawyers to step in and help resolve the matter.

Of course, this can happen on both sides of the fence for business owners. Either they are the one who sold the goods and services and there is a dispute over their own refund or cancellation policy, or they are the customer of another business and they have found that their rights to cancel or receive a refund for faulty or incomplete goods and services are being denied.

These issues arise for many reasons; some are as a result of a business not making its cancellation and refund clear enough, a business not fulling its obligations with regards to cancellations and refunds, or it might be that a customer believes that they are entitled to cancel and receive a refund in all circumstances, which we hope you already know is not the case.

Continue reading “Cancellation Policies And What They Should Include”

7 Tips For Making Your Office Relocation As Easy As Possible

Going through office relocations can be stressful for everyone who works there, from the business owners all the way down to the office cleaners who no doubt might be thinking of what mess they might be left to clear up afterwards. The simple fact is that if you plan and prepare properly, plus use the services of a removalist company who specialise in office relocations, it should all be relatively straightforward and stress-free.

Apart from hiring professionals to help you, there are a number of other ways in which you make any office relocation easier than it might otherwise be. Here are 7 of our top tips to make that happen.

Find The Correct Premises

It still amazes us that office relocations do not work out for some businesses, simply because the new premises that the business is moving to, turn out to not be as suitable as first thought. This often happens when just one individual is making the decision, whereas if the heads of each department had some input, this may have highlighted issues that had otherwise not been thought of.

Plan Well In Advance

Planning is essential for any office relocation to be successful, and that applies to all the major aspects of the move, as well as the minor details. One idea is to place an individual in charge of the planning for each individual section or department. You will also want to create a timeline so that deadlines for things to be arranged are met.

Continue reading “7 Tips For Making Your Office Relocation As Easy As Possible”

3 Business Benefits Of Having Your Carpets Professionally Cleaned

If you run a busy and successful business, it is more than likely that commercial cleaning is not often the top priority in your business diary on any given day. Not that we are suggesting that it should, however, what we would ask to consider is the benefits that having clean carpets throughout your premises can bring.

Now, we are not suggesting that having a professional cleaner clean your carpets will double your sales overnight. However, it will give you some advantages over your competitors who choose not to clean their carpets, which must be a benefit to yours.

Healthier Employees

You would be horrified by the number of bacteria and other undesirables like pollen and dust that lurk within carpets. All these undesirables, in several different ways, can be harmful to health.

Think of those who suffer from hay fever for whom pollen can cause all sorts of issues or those with dust allergies having difficulties due to the amount in the carpets. More seriously bacteria living in carpet can cause illness that leads to vomiting and diarrhea.

Continue reading “3 Business Benefits Of Having Your Carpets Professionally Cleaned”

Call Tracking And How It Can Benefit Your Business

With everything seemingly moving online it is easy to forget that there are still some offline business services and tools that can be of huge benefit to your company. One of them is the telephone, and no doubt there are many people reading this for whom speaking on the phone is still the number one way that you close deals and makes sales.

As with everything, modern technology can enhance how you use the telephone and make it more effective, and along with using chatbots, one of the most popular amongst business owners is ‘call tracking software’.

This enables you to track telephone calls and has other features such as recording calls, and most importantly for your marketing, that can help you monitor and assess which campaigns are working with regards to generating calls and which are not.

You can track calls from multiple sources which include your pay per click ads, social media, your website, and offline advertising such as newspapers, magazines, and even radio ads.

To give you a better understanding of call tracking, we are going outline some of the main features it has and give you more details on how they can benefit your business.

Dynamic Number Selection

Quite simply this means having an individual number for each of your marketing campaigns. This allows you track the calls coming into each of the numbers and thus you can see which campaign is generating the highest number of calls. It will also let you assess the quality of lead that each campaign is producing too.

This should enable to massively increase your return on investment for any of the marketing campaigns you are running as you can either switch off the campaigns that are not working, or at least seek to improve them by changing their ad copy for, example.

As it is also showing what the winning campaigns are, then you can increase your budget for them with a view to seeing an even greater number of calls, coming into your business.

Continue reading “Call Tracking And How It Can Benefit Your Business”

What Sort Of Records Should I Be Keeping As A Freelancer?

As a freelancer, bookkeeping can sometimes become very difficult. Unfortunately, a lot of people aren’t really sure about what sort of things they should be keeping records of and what is unnecessary, which tends to lead to one of two situations:

A lot of time is wasted on keeping records that simply aren’t necessary. This time could be better spent on other aspects of the business.
The records that are kept simply aren’t good enough, which can lead to problems when it comes to submitting a tax return. Most freelancers only make this mistake once or twice.

As you can see, understanding what your record-keeping and tax requirements are as a freelancer is very important.

First, consider how the ATO sees you:

If you are a freelancer, the Australian Tax Office (ATO) will see you in one of two ways. If you only freelance part-time and don’t earn very much, then your freelance work may be seen as a hobby, which means that you don’t have to pay any tax. However, if you earn a decent amount and undergo the freelance activity with the purpose of making money, you will be classed as a business and will have to pay taxes.

Unfortunately, it can be difficult to decide how the ATO will see you. Usually, your activity will be defined as a hobby if it is largely for pleasure, if it makes you money to cover the costs of tools or materials, and if it is not undertaken commercially. As soon as you start doing something with the aim of making a profit or on a commercial scale, you will be classified as a business. If you are unsure, contact the ATO for a private ruling.

Continue reading “What Sort Of Records Should I Be Keeping As A Freelancer?”

What to Do When That Mortgage is Finally Paid Off

Many people spend a large part of their lives paying off the mortgage on their home. Those who are wise, seek the advice of a financial planner like www.andep.com.au to help them reduce the interest and get the debt paid as soon as possible. This kind of financial planning can mean you save thousands and may even be able to pay of the debt earlier. So what happens when it is finally paid off?

Apart from throwing a party to celebrate, there are many things you can do.

Go on a cruise or a trip
Buy something you always wanted
Enjoy being debt free
Keep on paying the same amount of instalments into a savings fund

After spending 20-30 years paying the mortgage off, if you’ve been able to still live comfortably during that time, paying the same amount into a savings fund shouldn’t really worry you. At least you’ll still have it as your own money rather than seeing it all go to the lender. When you consult with a financial advisor, they will be able to advise you on the best way to invest that money to grow your wealth.

Continue reading “What to Do When That Mortgage is Finally Paid Off”

The Importance of Dress Sense in Business

Dress sense is not something difficult to achieve once you understand what it includes. Being well-dressed in business will help you to gain the respect and position you deserve. Some people choose to enhance their looks with Botox injections; others choose to make the most of themselves by choosing styles and colours that suit them.

Both are good choices, as Botox treatment can eliminate ageing wrinkles from your face and can also be used to prevent underarm sweating which will ruin any kind of outfit you wear. Men especially, are prone to sweating and those white or blue business shirts certainly show up the wet patches. You also have to think of body odour when you sweat excessively.

Why colours are important

No matter if you’ve bought the most expensive and elegant outfit for work, wearing the wrong colours can make certain skin types look sallow or pale and that often makes you look as if you are unwell. That’s not the impression you want to give the boss or anyone else you have to deal with in business.

Wearing colours that suit your skin type will enhance your looks and make you more attractive. Knowing you look your best gives you more confidence. When you have confidence you relate better to others and this can certainly give you an edge over the competition in the workplace. When management sees that customers are happy dealing with you, they’ll be more likely to give you a promotion or a pay raise.

Continue reading “The Importance of Dress Sense in Business”

How to Choose a Digital Agency

Once you have decided to get your company’s website up and running you will need to choose a digital agency to help you with the many elements that are essential for success. It is important to think carefully about what your business needs so that you can choose the best agency – one that you will be able to work with, that has the skills needed for your particular business.

Find out what they offer

Not all digital agencies offer the same things. One might only design and implement websites and not do any social – or other – marketing. Another may perform SEO but nothing else. You need a digital agency to have the skills required for your business so it is vital to speak with them first and find out exactly what they offer.

Choosing the right professional digital marketing agency is somewhat like choosing the right builder. If you want a high-end home built, you would not choose a project builder who prefers to erect cheaper homes, or vice versa. Once you have found several builders, you choose 3 and ask for quotes. So you can do a similar thing when choosing a digital agency.

Continue reading “How to Choose a Digital Agency”

How to Get the Best Out of Your Adwords Marketing Campaign

Once you have decided to dip a toe into the waters of an adwords marketing campaign you will need to do everything possible to ensure success. Unless you have a large budget, you may be concerned about what adwords will cost. If your budget is low, here are some tips to help you.

Don’t aim for those high ad positions. Most people think the top three ads are the place to be as they will convert best. However, analytics show that this is not true. Often, the lower positions get better conversions. Experts have found that many people who click on the top ads do so on impulse, rather than because they are looking for something specific with the intention of following through.
Long tail keywords are your friends. For a start, they are much more specific and will attract people who actually want what you offer better than if you used a general, single keyword with a broader meaning. For instance, “Perth dentist” is a more specific keyword than “Dental Clinic”. It is much more likely to attract people who want a dentist in Perth CBD, so your ad is more targeted and hence, more successful.
Create a separate campaign for broad, popular keywords. These can be a drain on your more specifically targeted ads if lots of people click on them quickly and use up your daily budget before the other ads get a chance to show.

Continue reading “How to Get the Best Out of Your Adwords Marketing Campaign”

Why You Need a Corporate Lawyer for Shareholder Disputes

There are many different kinds of shareholder disputes and the best way to solve them is to consult with commercial lawyers. A lawyer will be able to see things with an impartial eye and help you negotiate through what is often a painful maze to get the best outcome for you and for the company. So what kinds of disputes can happen if you own or are a director of a company?

Here are just some: –

Disagreement over the direction the company is taking
conflict of interest if you or any other director has an interest in another business
Poor performance from a director or a shareholder
Disputes can arise if the directors or board members are paying themselves high wages instead of paying shareholders
Disagreements between partners for various reasons.

If you are an owner, it is wise to be prepared to handle disputes in advance so that you can get on top of them immediately rather than letting them drag on or escalate, neither of which will do the company any good.

A corporate lawyer can set up an agreement as to the steps you will take if and when a dispute between any parties happens. Having a legal agreement will ensure that the dispute is settled quickly.

It may prevent the need – and cost of – going to court to settle. Mediation by a neutral party can ensure that a fix that is agreeable to both parties is found. This may be that the aggrieved party is bought out by the others at a fair price.

Continue reading “Why You Need a Corporate Lawyer for Shareholder Disputes”

Company Structure – Why You Need an Experienced Corporate Lawyer

Many people dream of of setting up their own business without really looking into it. While you may have special skills that would make a great business, you also need to know a lot about setting up and running it. In fact, you really need an experienced corporate lawyer to help you set the company up in the first place. Why?

For a start, there are four different business models, so which one is best for your business? What you choose can have a big impact on things like insurance, tax, asset protection and even legal costs. Rather than choose a model that suits you at the moment, you have to include your future vision for the business and ensure the model you choose will still be right for it when you expand.

Your business may even take a different track that you hadn’t thought of, into the future. If the business model is inflexible, you face all the costs and hassle of changing over to one that suits your plans better. It is a wiser course of action to be guided by a property lawyer, who will ask the right questions to get you thinking about the future of your business.
Continue reading “Company Structure – Why You Need an Experienced Corporate Lawyer”

Differentiating Between Branding and Logo Design

To get the best logo design for your business, it is important to know the differences between branding and logo. Some people think of them as being the same thing, when in fact, they are not. The terms cannot and should not be used to mean the same as each other. This is confusing because if you think of branding as the same as logo design you will be leaving many important elements out of the equation.

So what’s the difference?

Branding is about the identity of the business. It is the corporate image as perceived by the public that includes information about the vision, aims and goals of the company. As such, emotion plays a big part in branding.
Identity forms a part of this but consists mainly of the visual aspects from the overall brand.
A logo is a way of identifying that business by the use of an icon, thus logo design will have elements that reflect the important parts of the business. These elements may be text, colour, shape and even animation, but the design does not necessarily need to have every element.

Continue reading “Differentiating Between Branding and Logo Design”