Can A Business Consultant Help My Organisation?
Running a small business can be difficult, and it is often a struggle to see the wood for the trees. You may have a general idea of where you want to go but aren’t quite sure how to get there. That is where a qualified business consultant comes in. A business consultant can help you plan your strategy and enable you to set up benchmarks to measure your ongoing progress. They can offer simple recommendations on pricing or marketing that will improve both your sales and cash flow exponentially. A qualified consultant can even provide advice on competitor analysis or suggest tools to make your business run more efficiently. Here are some reasons why you may consider hiring a business consultant. A business consultant is knowledgeable in a particular field As an entrepreneur, you may be knowledgeable in creating a product, but not in selling. You may be good with the small details but cannot focus on the big picture. Wherever you may be lacking in your skillset, a business consultant can help. Rather than struggle in an area which you know nothing about, a business consultant can jump right in and offer advice. A business consultant can help...
Read MoreHere’s Why A Deadline Is So Important
A common misconception among the general public is the thought that when you own your own business, you are “the boss” and free to set your business hours as you like and only work when it pleases you. The ability to control things such as your working hours is one of the chief incentives that tempt many creative types to go into business for themselves. When you are working for yourself, it’s true that you are no longer an employee that receives some sort of warning from a manager for showing up to work a few minutes late. But, you also don’t have as much freedom and flexibility as you might wish when it comes to setting your working hours. When you open your own business, it’s important to remember that even if you hire a staff to take care of sales and customer service, you will still have clients and customers who will have a set time for when they expect to receive your product or service. You will need to either produce the service yourself, or oversee operations to ensure that these products and services are produced and delivered before your customer’s due date. Creating and delivering...
Read MoreBusiness Tips From A Fashion Designer
Entering a crowded market and finding a way to compete is difficult, especially when your core business involves one of the creative fields where you actually make, create or build something. Creative types, however, can gain an edge over their more established competitors that follow more traditional business models. They just need to take their unique way of looking at the world and apply it to the way that they do business. In a recent Open article, the internationally known fashion designer Annie Thompson shared her secrets to making a creative business thrive, despite being in a competitive space. Try some of these strategies to increase your success in a crowded market. Do It Your Way – Craft Your Business Model Around Your Passion and What Feels Right to You When you start a business, there is a lot of pressure to copy what others are doing, but this can make it difficult for creative types to compete against larger operations that can churn out a larger number of items more cheaply or that have a larger number of locations from which to sell their products. Thompson is passionate about designing and creating limited runs of clothing with a...
Read MoreWhy Showing Your Ethics Helps Boost Sales
Consumer labels like “Fair Trade” and “Free Range” have become so mainstream, buyers are now on the lookout for information on the origins of an ever increasing range of products. In order to make purchasing decisions, consumers want to know how, where, and by whom a product was made. Making this information freely available, especially when companies have nothing to hide, is a new marketing trend. In the fashion industry, and many others, displaying ethical considerations and policies can increase sales. Formerly, clothing manufacturers thought making information about their creation processes available would diminish their competitive edge. Doing so could invite rivals to imitate profitable practices, or lead competitors to access particular supply chains. These days, in order to combat speculation about sweatshop production, or environmentally unsustainable manufacturing processes, some brands are letting trade secrets loose. Some in the industry believe in the future disclosing such information will become mandatory. Bruno Pieters, former art director for Hugo Boss, is one who understands how consumers gather information either from the addition or absence of thorough product labelling. He has pointed out that, “If a brand is proud about something, they’ll make sure we know about it; if they’re doing something...
Read MoreHow To Use Your Creativity In Business
Many of us go through our entire lives being told by others, that if we are creative, there isn’t a place for us in business. That we need to “stick to the arts,” and leave complicated figures, management and the other challenges of running a business to others who have a more “logical, rational” way of thinking. Thankfully, this traditional way of thinking, while popular, is simply a myth. The Facts About Creativity Versus Analytical Thinking A growing body of research is showing us that nearly everything that we thought we knew about the brain, especially about left brain versus right brain, or analytical versus creative, simply isn’t true. In a 2013 interview with NPR, one of the world’s leading researchers in cognitive neuropsychology, Dr. Kara D. Federmeier, discussed recent research she has conducted at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and explained how both sides of the brain are involved with both creative and analytical tasks. The latest research and studies show that there are many more connections between both hemispheres of the brain than even researchers suspected, and everyday more studies show that both hemispheres are involved with tasks that are traditionally thought of as verbal or...
Read MoreWhat are our clients saying
"Sophie is so professional – careful, attentive and punctual – she has made managing my accounts not just easier, but a whole lot less stressful" Fast Ed, TV Chef from Better Homes & Gardens.
See More Testimonials
Recent Comments