Essential Time Management Tips for Entrepreneurs

Time management is not something that all individuals are born with, nor is it something that’s often taught in schools—but nevertheless, time management is something that can obtain. Not only can they, but they should, especially if they happen to be business owners. There is no one who more urgently needs time management capabilities than the entrepreneur. Running a start-up or a small business is always challenging, but it becomes exponentially less taxing when you know how to make the best possible use of your precious hours and minutes.

It takes some discipline and some practice, especially at the beginning, as you seek to cultivate the proper habits and rituals. With that said, business owners who begin working on their time management skills now can find themselves exerting mastery over their time, sooner rather than later.

KEY STEPS TO EFFICIENT TIME MANAGMENT

1. ‘CALENDERIZE’

The first step, and one that will seem obvious to some but revelatory to others, is to take the time needed to put everything on a calendar. The need to ‘calendarize’ your time is great. The time you spend on every task, including driving, shopping, having meetings of phone conferences—all of this needs to go on the calendar.

Business owners should not only include the time it will take for each daily task, but also the time of day when they intend to have everything finished. Schedule the time when your day will end, and try to abide by that. You need some down time to recharge your batteries, and, for many business owners, the only way to get that down time is to schedule it.

Making a calendar will take up additional time at the start of each day. The goal, though, is for it to ultimately open up still more time, as you better prioritize and coordinate your daily activities.

2. TACKLE YOUR BIGGEST CHALLENGES EARLY

Another secret to effective time management is tackling the most arduous and daunting tasks early in the day. You need to address your biggest challenges when you are at your peak—your most alert, your most energetic, and your most productive. For the vast majority of us, that’s in the morning.

The best-case scenario of tackling your biggest challenges early in the day is that you put them behind you, and you can breathe a sigh of relief. The worst-case scenario is that you have to deal with follow-up issues, which may throw your daily routine off just a little, yet it’s still better to handle these issues on the same day rather than roll them over until morning.

3. FILE AS YOU GO

Another tip is to avoid the need to schedule “filing time” by simply filing things as they materialize. One of the quickest ways to create more work for yourself is to start a to-file pile, because then you just have to stop and schedule a block of time for filing, at some later date. By contrast, filing as you go eliminates this need and allows you to plow forward with greater efficiency.

This is true not just for physical document but also for e-mails, contacts, and other important pieces of data.

4. DELEGATE

Of course, time management and delegation go hand in hand. When you have people working with you who you can trust and depend on, that makes everything easier, and it allows you to farm out assignments and free up more time for yourself. Many business owners will say that they just can’t trust the people who work with them—but if that’s the case, you have a personnel problem, not merely a time management one, and you need to address it urgently.

In all business contexts, there are assignments that can easily be delegated. It may be something as simple as running an errand, but that’s still time saved, and one less thing you have to deal with.

5. MAP OUT TOMORROW’S TO-DOs

While taking some down time in the evenings is important, it can sometimes be helpful to take just a few moments in the evening to prepare for the next day. Mapping out your appointments and starting the next day’s to-do list can help you to get a running start when the next work day begins.

6. MAKE USE OF WAIT TIME

Still another piece of time management advice: Make use of ‘waiting’ times. Whether you’re in a waiting room before an appointment or you’re on a plane, every minute counts—and there are some easy steps you can take to redeem that time. Whether it’s responding to e-mails or confirming LinkedIn connections via smartphone, you can absolutely use this time to your advantage.

7.  MANAGE MEETING TIME

Insist on seeing an agenda before attending any meeting. The agenda will let you know if it’s really something you need to spend your time on, and it also suggests that the meeting will be run in a somewhat orderly fashion. Get an agenda, or else politely decline the meeting.

One final thing to remember: Avoid multi-tasking, If there’s something that needs doing, give it your complete focus—and avoid having to re-do it, or spend more time on it than it really necessitates.

One final thing to remember: Avoid multi-tasking. If there’s something that needs doing, give it your complete focus—and avoid having to re-do it, or spend more time on it than it really necessitates.

Marketing Success Tips for Startup Budgets

Creating a successful startup takes more than just a good product or service. Up-and-coming businesses require well-planned marketing strategies. To pull in a client base, it’s vital to create an identifiable brand, connect with prospects, and establish a solid industry niche.

Without ample financial resources, new businesses often find that marketing is hardest when they’re just getting started. Startups often face challenges when they’re getting off the ground. Their main concern is getting their product out in the world, but they don’t always have the financial means for a full-throttle marketing campaign.

Even a genius new product can flop if it fails to communicate its purpose or concept to consumers. In fact, great products often fail because they do not get the public attention they deserve.

SET YOUR BRAND APART

 “Your product needs an audience, and if you really want it to succeed, it’s best if you get the audience before you launch,” argues Manish Dudharejia in a Venture Beat article.

Before jumping into marketing, take some time to develop a strategy that will set your campaign apart from the multitude. It is essential that the concept is consistent, unique and fits with your company goals.

According to a MaRS report, startups often fail to realize that brand identity is “the glue that bonds customers to their product or service.” And yet in today’s competitive world, it’s more important than ever. Consumers are bombarded with about 6,000 ads a day and 25,000 products a year. That’s a lot of competition for consumer attention.

ZERO IN ON A SPECIFIC TARGET

Those unsure where to start are advised to think about who the prospective customers are. Companies can go much further if they zero in on a specific segment that is more likely to help business grow, according to a Mashable article. This might be a select community of early-adapters, similar to what Google did with the invitation-only release of its Google Glass. Focusing efforts on the most valuable group at first helps save resources and perfect a product’s flaws.

GET NOTICED & CONNECT

Publicity and attention is useless unless it can capture and convert an audience. The web makes it cheap and easy to connect with clients through tools like social media and email marketing. Social media already gets plenty of attention for its marketing benefits, but companies shouldn’t ignore the importance of email marketing. In fact, Monetate's Ecommerce Quarterly report found that email marketing had a 3 percent conversion rate compared with social media, which was calculated at less than 1 percent. The statistics were based on 500 million shopping experiences in Q1 of 2013.

But social media must be done strategically in order to bring success to your company. Facebook and Twitter aren’t just there for you to freely promote your product or business. You should post content that people are interested in seeing and that they will share with their friends.

Social media isn’t the only way to make a brand visible to a target community. Direct community outreach is a surefire way to get some attention. Startups can reach out to local media companies like newspapers or radio shows to see if they would be willing to offer promotional bits. Entrepreneurs can also participate in or sponsor charity events or local competitions to get more visibility and forge investor connections.

GROW SHARE-THRUS & COVERAGE

Once they establish an engaged client base, startups can encourage those customers to share their discovery. This could mean offering a discount for customers who “Like” a Facebook business page or tweet about a product. Contests and free side products are another great way to reach out. By eliminating “the obstacle of payment,” free products “have a way of going viral with minimal effort on your end,” according to Venture Beat. Freckle – a tech startup that developed a paid time tracking tool – used this method when it launched a free side product called EveryTimeZone, which tells users any time zone in the world at a glance. Despite its simplicity, the tool took off and got some valuable coverage on CNN and other media platforms.

ONLINE SEARCH & VISIBILITY

When it comes to online marketing, content plays a major role in a company’s visibility and search engine results. Every startup should develop a strategy for branded content. “Branded content is a great way to align your company with themes that are pertinent to your industry, and if you have something intelligent to add to the dialogue you immediately establish yourself as an expert,” suggests a Mashable report.

There are a few considerations to keep in mind when developing unique, branded content. Business executives should be sure to avoid a promotional tone and should instead focus on educational and relevant information that establishes them as a thought leader in the industry. Secondly, they should develop content that stands out amid the deluge of Internet media. In addition to publishing articles, creating a YouTube video or publishing a free eBook are two effective ways to accomplish this.

Startup businesses face a multitude of hurdles when it comes to marketing. Lack of financial stability or a client base makes marketing investments challenging at first, although this is alleviated by the possibilities afforded by the Internet.

Retail Business Strategies that can Boost Online Sales

Whether a retail company operates online or out of a physical shop, the basics of business growth and success remain the same. Anybody looking to start and grow a successful ecommerce website, then, can better do so by emulating the same steps that successful retailers in brick-and-mortar stores take.

There are some fundamental elements of a retail business that hold up at their core across all commerce models. Between a shop in a physical building and a shop on the Internet, obviously there needs to be some tweaks made to better suit the environment and the method. Nevertheless, the ideas behind these key business rules remain the same.

First, Choose a Product to Sell

This step is a no-brainer, and everyone figures it out first, usually even before they take any other action to begin their business.  Regardless, it is the first step and deserves to be emphasized. Before you can create any retail business, you need something to sell.

The benefit of selling online is that almost any product is fair game and can find an audience. Anything a consumer wants, they can find for sale on the Internet. This means that an online site often represents a business’s best chance to reach their widest possible audience.

Choose a Good Location

It’s a cliché now, but location really is everything. If your customers can’t find you, they can’t do business with you. For brick-and-mortar shops, this means a building that’s convenient for both the shop owner’s purposes and their customers’ travel. For ecommerce sites, this means a website with a sensible, easy to remember domain name and reliable hosting.

The layout of the store itself is also important. Products have to be well organized, easy to get to, and prominently displayed. For online businesses, this means designing their site in such a way that navigation comes easily to every customer. Make it easy for visitors to see what you have to offer and find what they want. If they have to click through menu after menu just to see what’s for sale, many of them won’t bother, and you’ll be hurting your sales.

Be Present and at the Customers’ Disposal

With a brick-and-mortar location, there is always somebody around to welcome the customer, communicate with them about their needs, and serve them as necessary. Obviously, an online store will not have this same level of customer interaction. This does not, however, mean that retailers cannot have any presence at all in their own stores.

If the online retailer seems anonymous and/or hard to contact, it can hurt their credibility. Instead, have information on your site about your company and the people behind it, including who you are and how to contact you or anyone else involved as necessary. Customer service doesn’t stop being important online, so don’t skimp on these crucial areas to build your credibility as a retailer.

Make Purchasing Quick and Easy

Convenience is a major factor in any retail sale, for both sides. Whether an online or physical store is more convenient for the customer is a matter of his or her personal taste and situation. There are, however, steps that both types of retailers can take to aid in this convenience, and the big one is making the shopping itself as easy as possible.

At a traditional store, customers simply hand their payment to the retailer and walk out with their product. It’s a simple and easy method no matter whether they’re using cash, a check, or a card of some sort. Online retailers need to emulate this simplicity as much as possible by making their online payment systems intuitive, simple, and streamlined.

In other words, online shoppers should not have to fill out long forms full of information for every single purchase. Keep it as simple as possible for customers to flow through decision-making and final purchase.

Also make sure to offer as many payment options as possible such as credit card, debit card, electronic funds transfer, and so on. There are also other options that only online retailers can take advantage of like PayPal or online merchant accounts. If your customers can only pay you in one or two specific ways, you’re not being convenient or accommodating, and they’re more likely to simply take their business to a physical store instead.