Category: Startups

5 Tips For Retaining Your Staff During Difficult Times

5 Tips For Retaining Your Staff During Difficult Times

Posted on by Michelle Salinas

Whether you’re a team leader, manager, or business owner, your team is one of the most valuable assets your company has.

Without dedicated members of staff, you wouldn’t be able to complete necessary projects, inspire your customers, drive sales, or build your brand presence.

Unfortunately, many companies spend so much time focusing on their customers and profit margins that they forget to retain and engage their staff. Around 3 million Americans quit their job each month in search of better opportunities. 

Now that remote work solutions are making it easier for staff to find new roles anywhere, it’s even harder to convince your people that they should stay with you. 

With difficult times on the horizon for most businesses, here are some of the top strategies you can use to retain your employees and team members. 

Get Salary and Benefits Right

Although there’s a lot more to having a happy workforce than offering them the right salary, it pays to provide a decent wage. Most of the talented team members that are looking for jobs right now know how much their skills are worth. If you’re not willing to pay your employees what they’re worth, they’ll find another company that is.

Around 56% of employees say that healthcare and insurance concerns also keep them at their job. If you can’t offer the most competitive salary in your area, maybe you can make the job more appealing by offering additional benefits.

Everything from better flexible working options to access to private healthcare can boost your chances of getting and keeping the talent you need. 

Listen To Your Team Members

The easiest way to ensure that you’re going to keep staff members around is to give them a voice and listen to what they have to say. Employees are more likely to feel invested in a business that takes their opinions and insights seriously. 

With that in mind, ensure that your company culture encourages feedback and regular discussions between members of staff. If your employees aren’t happy with the way you’re currently running things, give them the opportunity to make suggestions about things they might like to change. 

Listening to your team members, even if that just means giving them a way to give anonymous feedback to your leaders, could mean that you become aware of significant issues much faster. This way, you can fix issues before they grow too large. 

Create Leaders, not Bosses

Everyone dreams of being the boss at their company. However, the reality is that it means a lot more to become a memorable leader. The unfortunate truth is that most of the employees in the current landscape don’t leave their business at all – they leave their manager. 

The people in your team responsible for leading others should have all the characteristics of an inspirational and motivational leader.

Look for people who can handle challenges calmly and think outside of the box.

Provide your leaders with training that will help them to manage positive and negative feedback and support their teams in achieving their goals.

A good leader doesn’t just dump the responsibility for mistakes onto staff members and scream at people until work gets done. Genuinely incredible leaders are the people that keep the team moving forward, even in times of trouble. 

Invest in Your Employees’ Future

If you’re not going to invest in your employees, why should they invest their time in your company? How can you invest in making your staff members more skilled in their roles? 

Most team members want to see a future for themselves in your business, which means that they need to continue developing their knowledge and talents. Offering training and educational opportunities is a great way to ensure that your staff members feel as though they’re moving consistently in the right direction.

You can even build mentorship programs so that employees can teach each other. 

If you’re not sure where to get started when it comes to offering training opportunities, try having one-to-one meetings with your staff. This could be a great way to develop individual plans for each of your team members. 

Make Them Proud to Work for You

Finally, we’re living in an age where employees don’t just want a great salary and lots of benefits from the ideal job. Your team members want to feel like they’re working for a company that’s making a positive difference in the world.

In today’s activism-fueled environment, you’re either part of the problem, or part of the solution.

Find out what your team members are passionate about and get involved. This could mean that you create a new green living strategy for your business where you can cut down on your carbon emissions. Another option involves getting involved with local charities and non-profits or investing in your local community.

The more you show your employees that you care about more than just money, the more they’ll feel happy working with you, and the more likely it is that they’ll stay with you for the long term.

Quick Networking Tips for Entrepreneurs Short on Time

Quick Networking Tips for Entrepreneurs Short on Time

Posted on by Michelle Salinas

Networking is one of the most valuable things you can do as a business owner.

Studies suggest that networking at events can gain companies up to 20% of their new customers, and a networking strategy can also be the key to finding new investors and partners that will help to grow your business.

Unfortunately, it isn’t always easy to network successfully.

Not only do you have to get used to the awkward initial introduction phase when you’re trying to make connections with others, but you’ve got some serious time constraints to worry about too.

Building connections takes time. But, as every entrepreneur knows, time is money. So how do you ensure that you’re still working on your networking strategy when you’re strapped for time?

Try these strategies…

Make It a Daily Habit

The more you practice networking as a daily habit, the more naturally it will fit into your day.

Rather than setting aside an hour a week where you can go and talk to people who could help your business to grow, you use five minutes each day. Start the morning by sending emails to others online and connecting with your peers on social media.

Put phone calls with potential partners and investors into your calendar and work through them every time you’re stuck in traffic or waiting for something else to happen.

If networking is as much of a habit as brushing your teeth or your hair, then it starts to feel more natural.

What’s more, when networking becomes a habit, it also emerges as something that you force yourself to make time for. You’re less likely to make excuses that you don’t have a moment to spare.

Leverage New Connections

Networking isn’t just about building new relationships.

There’s a good chance that you already have some quality people in your existing network who could help to introduce you to important figures in your space. A great place to start building your network is in the workplace.

Get to know your teams and learn about their background. Grab lunches with staff when you have the opportunity and look for chances to get to know new people through them too. You might discover that your internal network has a lot more value to offer than you originally thought.

Getting to know your team could also reveal that certain employees have hidden talents that you could be utilizing better in your business.

Use Existing Activities

If you already take part in social activities from time to time, why not use those as part of your networking strategy? If you regularly volunteer at non-profit organizations, then you can strike up conversations with people in this environment.

Even if you don’t gain any valuable connections, making the time to connect with others and practice your networking skills will benefit you in the long term. You can chat everywhere — from your gym to your laundry place.

Getting practice into your day where you can work on your ability to build emotional links to others is a lot more valuable than most people realize.

Schedule Important Events in Advance

If you do want to make time for a specific in-person networking event, then it’s important to prepare well in advance. Chances are that you won’t be able to attend most events at the last minute, but you can go to the important ones by staying organized.

To help improve your chances of regularly networking, attempt to attend at least one each month – even if it’s an online event. Make a list of the events that you most want to attend and add them to your calendar, so you have plenty of time to prepare.

Be selective about the kind of events you choose. Ideally, you’ll want to visit an environment where you can reach people who are going to benefit you and your business.

Use Social Media

Finally, social media is one of the most popular and convenient ways to network these days.

Make a little time each day to go through your LinkedIn connections and reach out to those who might be valuable to your social circle. The key to success with social media networking is ensuring that you don’t let it eat up too much of your day.

Set a specific amount of time aside so you can avoid getting distracted for too long. If you have multiple social accounts, consider consolidating them with a social media marketing tool, so you can share content more easily and attract potential connections to you.

Looking Forward

Networking is vitally important for your success and that of your business. Keep these tips in mind to enable you to perform critical networking activities without it taking time away from the rest of your business.

About the author:

Michelle Salinas is a well-versed Consultant with 20 years of experience in client relations, sales, marketing, and project management.

She helps c-level executives and business owners find $100,000 or more of additional revenue in their company without having to spend extra dollars on marketing or advertising. She has found $10 million dollars of additional revenue in the businesses she has assessed.

Download her book at https://TheDigitalEdgeInc.com/book

Follow her on social media at https://MichelleSalinas.co

#instabiz #success #studies

Are You Aiding & Abetting E-Myths?

Posted on by Michelle Salinas

Are You Aiding & Abetting E-Myths?

We are going to embark upon a journey through the world of e-myths and debunk them to help you avoid falling into the e-myth trap.

First, let’s take a minute to talk about what an e-myth is. An entrepreneurial myth, or e-myth, is an assumption that anyone can succeed at business with:

  • Desire
  • Some capital
  • Projected a targeted profit

This sounds great, but it just not realistic. Think of starting a business as a marathon. Sure, everyone starts out of the gate at record pace, but after a few miles people start slowing and some drop out entirely. Building a successful business takes stamina and agility.

The reality is that there are many different facets to a successful business and none of them can be ignored if you plan to find success.

Let’s take a minute to talk about entrepreneurial seizure. This defines the roller coaster of emotions that comes with starting, nurturing and the potential failure of a business.

The emotions that occur, in order, are:

  • Exhilaration
  • Exhaustion
  • Despair
  • Sense of self-loss

This is usually cause by the e-myths and assumptions we talked about. You can get your hopes so high on instant success that even the smallest lag and you are sent into an emotional tailspin. This is also brought on by the stark realization that you can’t do it all and will need help in the areas where you don’t have the knowledge. Now, faced with limited choices you may feel like you need to back out and hide, but don’t do this. Use our GUIDED TOUR to get the business coaching you need to avoid feeling overwhelmed and defeated.

 

🔺 READY TO TAKE A TEST DRIVE?

Download my FREE e-book “The Hidden Profits” at https://MichelleSalinas.com

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Kick Start Your Marketing

Posted on by Michelle Salinas

Today I’d like to teach you about the three most important start up marketing tools you need to get and keep new customers.

  1. In person: It’s essential you meet with customers/clients in person whenever possible. This shows you respect them and take the time to work with your clients to give personal attention to each of them.
  2. Follow up letter: Always take a moment to send a follow up letter about what you talked about, new agreements or partnerships made and to thank them for taking the time to meet with you. Likewise, you should always send thank you letters or small gifts to partners you find success with.
  3. Phone call: Use a telephone call to follow up with them to talk again about the matters you talked about in your meeting and offer any assistance you can to help their business run smoothly and more successfully.

None of these will work if you don’t have a quality product/service to back you up!

Here are the key steps for putting together your start-up marketing tools:

  1. Research potential customers, buyers, competitors and their preferred methods of distribution.
  2. Talk to potential customers. Take a hard look at your product from a customer’s perspective and see what it needs to be successful.
  3. Follow up with your 3-step process from above.
  4. Develop systems for contact follow through, quality control standards and customer service.
  5. Develop post-sale follow up system to keep lines of communication open is customers and build on your current relationship which increases future purchases.

“Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs” Peter Drucker, management consultant

Here’s another one I love from an icon:

“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.” Henry Ford, Founder of Ford Motor Company

This lesson has offered you the tools to put together a start-up marketing plan that can be used over and over again to help your customer base and business grow in a manageable way.