Category: Business Insights

The Benefits of Having a Great Business Mentor on Your Side

Posted on by [email protected]

There are a very few successful people that are truly “self-made”. Mostly every success story is linked to someone that helped the person along the way. Although this is not always the case, most of the time the person that helped was a mentor. Understanding the benefits of having a great business mentor is something you need to think about.

Basically, a business mentor is an individual who is there for you to guide you in the right direction. He/she gives you direction through their experience and listens to your ideas. Mentors have years of experience in the field and they have gone through the problems that most new business owners will go through. They share that experience with you so you don’t have to go through those problems. In this way, a mentor can help save you a lot of time, money, and frustration.

Following are some benefits of having a great business mentor:

Expert Advice

The best thing about having a great business mentor that has experience in your industry is that they can give you a more reliable, specific advice. Because of their years of experience, they know the issues that you are facing, and how to deal with those issues in a quick and efficient way. The important thing to remember is that you are getting a sound advice. The mentor’s job is not about telling you what to do. They can simply offer advice on the basis of what they know, and what they have been through in the past. Every situation is different, so it is up to you to decide how to deal with each situation based on what you know as well as the advice that your mentor gives you.

A Different Perspective

Another benefit of having a business mentor is that they can act as a sounding board for your ideas. Your mentor can offer a different perspective that might help you to adjust or clarify those ideas so that you can present them to others. Apart from this, your mentor can also act as a sounding board as you try to determine what the best reaction is to a certain situation that you are currently facing. You may be in a position to deal with a difficult employee, and your business mentor can hear how you want to handle the situation. Your mentor will be able to play “devil’s advocate” to make sure that you are fully prepared before you meet with that employee.

Connections

Since your business mentor has years of experience in your industry, they are likely to have many connections within the industry as well. As your business grows and develops, your mentor may be able to introduce you to people that you wouldn’t be able to meet otherwise. Those connections could lead to promotions and/or opportunities that may not be available to your competitors. As a business owner, your connections are extremely important to the life of your business. Those connections become the suppliers or customers that will help your business to be profitable.

Emotional Support

You may be alone as a business owner, but your entrepreneurial journey doesn’t have to be isolated. Your business mentor can fill the gaps by offering emotional support. This is one of the most critical roles of a great business mentor. As your grow in your business as well as in your personal life, it is helpful to have someone who can ask you the difficult questions regarding how you are doing as a person. They can question you on whether you are making time for your family, how you are treating others, and most importantly, how you are doing ethically.

Developing Confidence

Restoring enthusiasm and confidence on the part of the business owner is the endgame of business mentoring. By encouraging, teaching, and assisting, a mentor can turn a burnt-out business owner into a fireball of productivity. As a business owner, when you realize that your business is not a ball and chain which requires 60 hours of your time every week but a vehicle that can significantly improve your own life and develop real equity, you will become far more productive.

These are just a few of the key benefits of having a great business mentor. But you should keep in mind that nothing is guaranteed. You still need to work hard in order to make sure that your business is successful. However, with an experienced business mentor by your side, your probability of success will certainly increase tenfold.

6 Changes You Can Make Today To Have A Greater Impact As a Leader

Posted on by [email protected]

A true leader is the one who creates an impact with their leadership on their organization, employees, team, and stakeholders, as a result of their behaviors, attitudes, and actions. Qualities of a great leader include being appreciative of the good abilities of certain employees, patient, attentive listener, and thankful for accomplishments of their team as a whole. There are many ways you can create impact with your leadership and earn the respect of your colleagues and staff.

Following are some tips that will help you create impact with your leadership

1. Be a Role Model

Leaders must lead by example and walk the talk. Your team looks to you to lead them and show and communicate your expectations, particularly during change. You cannot expect your employees to change their habits if you are not willing to do so yourself. That’s why when you make some changes, make sure to follow them with the same action you expect out of your employees or team. If you are a role model and responsibly take the lead, your team will follow you.

2. Be a Coach

Respected and influential leaders put their staff ahead of their own needs by recognizing the employees who always give their best and that go beyond their job descriptions. If you want to create impact with your leadership, then you must find ways to enable your employees to reach their true potential. You will need to coach your employees in order to do this and share your wisdom, knowledge, and experience with them. With proper guidance, you will open the doors for continued success of your valued staff members.

3. Don’t Be Afraid to Take Risks or Acknowledge Your Mistakes

Influential, strong leaders know that you have to take risks from time to time and even acknowledge when you have made any mistakes. These are the leaders who can challenge ideas and take risks to gain a competitive edge. They know when drastic measures are needed to be taken in order to keep certain operations within an organization moving smoothly and are always willing to act on their decisions. Unfortunately, sometimes the decisions a leader makes aren’t what are best for the team or organization. Respected leaders are the ones who acknowledge their mistakes and openly admit that they have made a bad call. This makes employees or team feel valued.

4. Reinforce a Culture of Accountability

Accountability is the key to creating an impact with leadership. When you, as a leader, hold your team accountable, it helps them understand that they are accountable in all things they do. Your words and influence will fall on deaf ears if there are no accountability measures in place. Your employees need to see the way in which you lead and do business. Cultural elements, and internal systems and processes are in place for a reason.

5. Create a Positive Executive Presence

When you are respected by your employees, only then you can create an impact and leave a long-lasting impression. Executive presence is a powerful tool which you can use to make your employees and team feel appreciated and valued. Influential leaders are the role models for their employees. When you create a positive executive presence, your employees will welcome the constructiveness and will be open to critiquing without worrying about the source that it’s coming from. This is the kind of presence that you can utilize to create impact with your leadership and create a positive influence for the whole organization.

6. Give Credit Where Credit is Due

Respected leaders recognize and reward colleagues and employees they are sharing the success with. Bad leaders hoard positive recognition and focus on themselves. In reality, those are the leaders who wouldn’t succeed without the help of their team and the employees working for them. When valuable efforts are recognized and rewarded, it encourages innovation, hard work, and stimulates new ways of thinking. Respected leaders make it their duty to focus and improve the progress of their colleagues and staff as opposed to themselves.

 

If you want to create impact with your leadership, then you must earn respect of your team and employees. Because without it, you are not going to see any success. Being a great leader is about being passionate about what you and your team do and being a navigational tool for all your employees and colleagues. Stay mindful of the ways to improve the working environment so that a better workforce is created and you stay competitively relevant.

9 Marketing Ideas To Boost Your Business Profile

Posted on by [email protected]

Marketing is extremely important for the growth of a small business. Without any marketing plan, it would be like operating a business with a blindfold. As a small business owner, you must know the different marketing techniques and strategies that will work for your business. The idea is to understand marketing as a way to keep improving the way your business is doing. Smart business owners know that they must always work toward finding new ways to improve their sales, revenue, and profit.

Following are some marketing ideas and tips that will help you gain a competitive edge:

1. Know Your Market

Making sure that you have a solid grasp on your targeted market is the first step in developing a successful small business marketing strategy. Identify your customers. After that, identify the problems, aspirations, and dreams of your targeted customers. Learning about your targeted market will provide you insights regarding how to design your products and services in a way that meet and exceed the expectations of your customers.

2. Know Yourself

After learning about your targeted market, the next step is to know yourself (your business). Ask yourself what your business does and how it is different than your competitors. Also try to find the answer regarding how your business helps solve your customers’ problems. Once you have learned these important aspects of your business, you will be able to define your unique selling proposition – the aspects that make your business stand out from the competition. Make that unique selling proposition your business’ identity.

3. Check Your Competition

It is important that you learn what marketing strategies your competitors are using. You should analyze the marketing campaign of your competitors and try to look for something they are missing. Your aim should be to find a different, unique way to market your services and products so that you don’t go head to head with a competitor that has been in the market for years.

4. Create Social Awareness

It is highly recommended that you create a social media marketing channel so you can develop and generate leads more profitably. Focus more on the trendy social media platforms and start engaging targeted audience. Use your social media marketing channel for publishing out.

5. Communicate Well with Your Targeted Market

Simply being informative on your web page is not enough. You need to be virtually everywhere else to get as many people to have more knowledge about your brand, products, and services. Offer free valuable information related to your services or products so you can give your targeted audience the impression that you are the authority in the service/product that you are selling.

6. Keep Your Ads Short and Concise

As compared to longer ads, short and direct to the point ads are relatively more effective when it comes to attracting customers. They prove to be highly beneficial to small business owners as they don’t have to write a lengthy ad anyway. Furthermore, they are also relatively more cost-effective.

7. Put Business Information on Everything

Whether you are marketing your existing small business or starting a new one, getting your brand out there is everything. It is recommended that you make sure that your brand logo, name, and contact information are on everything you do. Include them on your invoices, website, and any paperwork you send out.

8. Email Marketing – Build Your List

Email marketing is an extremely important part of small business marketing and it is something that will not go away anytime soon. If you are starting from scratch, then building your list may seem like a difficult task, but the effort is worth it as email marketing is still one of the best ways of getting people interested.

9. Advertise Small

Don’t try to mimic advertising campaigns by big businesses as the cost will be simply too much for your small business. Besides, you really don’t need to spend so much on your advertisements because you are a new, relatively small business. So, it is recommended that you find out how to use your small ads properly and convert them to sales.

Final Word

As a small business owner, it is extremely important that you come up with ways to keep your customers coming back to you as well as attract new, targeted customers. Marketing for small business can be attention grabbing and inexpensive. Use the marketing ideas and tips listed above to come up with a personalized marketing plan for your small business. It is also recommended that you play around with different ideas until you find those that work best for you.

Admin Ideas to Improve The Efficiency of Your Small Business

Posted on by [email protected]

As a small business owner, you don’t have any time to waste. There are a million things on your mind and a million things to do, and simply not enough hours in the day. But you can relieve some of that pressure, increase efficiency, and maybe save some time by implementing some key time management techniques.

Following are some admin ideas and tips that will help you save time and increase your small business management efficiency:

1. Always Have a Daily Plan

While living by a plan may not exactly seem glamorous as a small business owner, it is one of the best ways to be efficient and stay on top of everything. It is recommended that you start out your day listing down your goals and plan accordingly, and then prioritize those goals. You won’t find yourself wasting as much time when you have got things down on a list with a specific plan to follow.

2. Delegate

Admitting that they cannot do everything themselves is probably one of the most difficult things for small business owners. While it may be a bit scary to give up control and rely on others, it is a necessity. Learning what and how to delegate can be a great time-saver and helps your business to be relatively more efficient. And delegating does not only work for tasks, when it comes to putting together strategies and answering some of the important questions you face as a small business owner, you can ask other people to help you out.

3. Prioritize

There are lots of tasks that go into managing a small business, but not all of them require the same amount or level of attention. Every business is difficult and focuses on different areas. For instance, a brick and mortar store may decide to prioritize sales and advertising strategies while an online business should probably expect to prioritize social media use and article writing since the owner has to gain website traffic as well as build credibility. What’s important is that the priorities of a business be detailed out and clear to everyone involved.

The key to successful prioritization is being able to differentiate between tasks that are urgent and non-urgent as well as important and non-important tasks. The tasks that have a tangible impact on your business’ success are important tasks, while urgent tasks are those that have an impending, firm deadline, with consequences if that deadline is missed.

4. Automate

Technology is an amazing thing. Small business owners these days are extremely lucky that they live in an era in which modern technologies and innovations that can help them manage their businesses more easily are popping up on a regular basis. Automation of certain tasks can help drastically reduce the time and effort required. For example, by switching to online scheduling, you can reduce the time it takes you to schedule your staff by up to 80%. Not to mention, you also get rid of your pen-and-paper schedules and spreadsheets. Nowadays, there’s probably a software solution that can help you simplify just about any business process, from running your payroll to posting on social media.

5. Outsource

The idea behind outsourcing is pretty simple. Take a task that you don’t have time to do or don’t want to do and pay someone else to do it. Outsourcing is an excellent way to offload some of your administrative burden and often have the task carried out by a professional more quickly and proficiently as opposed to handling it in-house. While it’s not always quite as straightforward or simple as that, outsourcing is still one of the best ways to reduce your workload and free up valuable time which you can then spend elsewhere. To proceed, first identify what business tasks you want to outsource. Then, start to identify potential agencies, contractors, or service providers to take on the work you would like to outsource.

6. Ease Up on the Meetings

If you schedule a lot of meetings with your staff, then ask yourself how important they really are. The time spent preparing for the meeting, holding it, and then responding to various questions afterwards can add up fast. That’s why it is recommended that you only stick to important meetings.

 

While dealing with administrative burden can be quite challenging, regardless of whether or not it’s a small business, it is by no means an impossible challenge. A few small changes in how you think about and tackle your small business administrative tasks can make a huge difference to your efficiency and productivity, leaving you more energy and time to focus on growing and improving your business.

Video: Leverage – What Is It and How Do I Use It?

Posted on by [email protected]


In this video about leverage, we discuss how to use someone else’s money to propel you to your financial goals faster.

Good Debt and Bad Debt

Posted on by [email protected]

What’s the Difference Between Good Debt and Bad Debt?

Let’s talk about debt! While some of your debts might be considered an investment, others are not. It is important that we can recognise and discuss the differences between where your debt is best distributed and how it can affect your ability to secure finance for bigger projects such as starting your own business.

Purchasing a home, new business or car are all essential debts for making your life more comfortable and profitable, right? While they seem like reasonable expenses, there are a few crucial differences in the way lenders view these transactions.

For a lender to secure you a loan, they must carry out a detailed inspection of your existing debt, they will then weigh up what they consider ‘good and bad,’ and base their decision on these factors. Because of this, you must know what debts are favourable and which will hinder your access to further finance.

Bad Debt

When we look at your debts from an investment perspective, we must assess their value based on their financial return. For example, let’s look at buying a new car – it looks great and feels fantastic, but realistically it will only decrease in value over time. Because of this, new car loans are often considered risky and a ‘bad debt.’ Debts like these will affect your ability to secure new loans and finance because of how your money is tied up, here are some more examples of bad debt:

Credit Cards

Credit card debt has to be the biggest killer for your credit. Designed specifically to purchase smaller items, the debt that occurs is most highly avoidable and unnecessary.

While it may be tempting to put that holiday or new pair of shoes on your credit card, you must keep in mind these expenses will not provide you with any appropriate benefits. Serving a ‘quick fix’ towards the growth of your finances, credit cards tie your money up over a long term period, and offer you no financial profitability or gain.

High Interest Loans

While getting a personal loan can seem like a necessary step in acquiring what you need, it’s important to understand how their high-interest rates and long term payment plans can affect your ability to secure other funds.

For example, if you are thinking of starting your own business and accessing the finances to make it happen, your other loans will greatly affect your eligibility for securing funds. If these loans are tied up in items that don’t contribute to your affordability, you are limiting your new business venture and its buying power.

Good Debt

Our relationship with debt in New Zealand needs to be refined, which means understanding where your money is best spent and what loans will advantage your financial position. A great example is getting a student loan to complete your Master’s degree at university. Yes, this loan will cost you money in the short term, but it will also increase your earning potential in the long term. Similar to this example, creditors view these loans as ‘good debt’:

Morgages

Securing a mortgage to buy a new home is a great way to build equity and secure other credit avenues based on its inherent value. Mortgages taken out on your home or rental properties are considered very ‘good debt’ and can actually allow you to make more from your money.

One of the great benefits of attaining a mortgage is the low interest rates you will pay throughout the loan and your properties potential to increase in value over time. Securing this type of debt will enable you to access greater pools of resources, making further investments in business ventures or property straightforward and secure.

Buying a Business

Buying a business is another example of ‘good debt,’ with similarities to attaining a mortgage, this investment has growth potential, as it will generate income over time. With low-interest rates and asset finance available, getting your business up and running for success is an excellent way to secure low-risk debt.

Owning and operating a business can provide you with a steady cash flow that will pay off your loan and provide you with an asset-rich investment, all of these factors make a ‘good debt.’

If you are wanting to secure a loan to start or grow your business, talk to the team at Spinach today. We can provide you with comprehensive loans and business advice that will maximise your opportunities to grow your financial portfolio.