If you’re self-employed or even own a small business with employees of your own, planning for retirement can present serious challenges. That’s because self-employed individuals are subject to complex taxes, don’t have the benefits of automatic employer withholdings, and typically don’t have access to a sponsored 401(k) or pension. How underprepared for retirement are self-employed individuals and small business owners? In one survey of small business owners of all ages, 75% had less than $100,000 in savings. Considering the basic costs of living, even with support from social security, this is far from enough. Still, there is some good news. Despite several issues, with the rise of the gig economy, self-employed individuals and small business owners are making use of a growing number of retirement savings options, and they’re growing into savvy savers. And, with the help of financial planning professionals, you too can secure your financial future. Basic Barriers To Retirement Savings.For self-employed individuals to successfully plan for retirement, the first step is to identify existing barriers to savings. These include learning to budget despite a variable income and successfully allocate savings for taxes. The self-employed tax rate is 15.3%, and while self-employed individuals have access to several useful deductions, when you’re busy chasing down client payments, managing employees, and dealing with cash flow challenges, it’s hard to set aside such a significant part of your income – never mind saving more. Retirement Savings Basics.Once you know what’s standing in the way of your ability to save for retirement, it’s time to assess the options that are available to you. If you don’t know where the start, a financial planner can help you develop a retirement investment strategy, including different types of IRA accounts and self-employed 401(k)s. Depending on your personal needs and your savings goals, you can mix and match different types of accounts. Looking beyond traditional and Roth IRA offerings that are available to anyone, small business owners should explore whether the SIMPLE IRA is a good option for them. The SIMPLE IRA, short for Savings Incentive Match Plan for Employees Individual Retirement Account, allows both small business employees and their employers to contribute to employees’ retirement savings. As the employer, you can choose to make matching contributions or elective contributions to support your employees’ efforts to save for their retirement. Another good retirement savings option for self-employed individuals is the SEP IRA. Unlike a traditional IRA, SEP IRAs allow you to contribute up to 25% of your annual income, giving them a potentially much higher cap than traditional IRAs; In 2019, the cap will be $56,000 compared to a normal IRA cap of $6,000 beginning in 2019 for individuals under age 50. If, however, you are providing SEP IRAs to employees, the contribution requirements may be too high to make their use feasible. Finally, as a self-employed individual, you have the option of opening a solo 401(k). These are quite similar to SEP IRAs in that they have a higher cap than a typical IRA – up to $18,500 annually for investors under age 50. However, you cannot open a solo 401(k) if you have employees; it’s only available to individuals and business owners and their spouses. The reason that the cap is so much higher is that you are able to contribute as both the employee and the employer. While it may be more difficult for self-employed individuals to save for retirement, with proper guidance, you can learn to utilize the many different tools at your disposal. Ultimately, while you may not have outside support to fund your eventual retirement, you do have more resources than you realize to ensure your future financial stability. from http://www.youngupstarts.com/2019/04/18/navigating-retirement-savings-when-self-employed/
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by Cory Treffiletti, Chief Evangelist and CMO for Voicea Did you know more than 15% of any organization’s time is spent in meetings? 99% of the time this headline is followed by a statement of how much meetings can suck. I am 100% positive this is not how I want to think about it. I am someone who doesn’t think my cup is half empty or half full. I am the kind of person who is happy to have a cup with which to get water and my goal is to make sure everyone has the right kind of cup to work with. If you dive deeper into the information about meetings, you find that 35% of a middle manager’s time is spent in meetings. As you work your way up the hierarchy, you start to spend as much as 50% of your time in meetings. Maybe more. If as your experience level and position grow in a company, and you spend more time in meetings, is there a correlation between meeting value and influence in an organization? In other words, meetings are intended to be valuable. In fact, they are possibly the most valuable part of anyone’s day. The issue is how do you turn what is talked about in a meeting into something of immediate value without creating too much additional work. Simply out, how do you turn talk into action quickly, efficiently and effortlessly? To maximize the time spent in and after a meeting, you have to do 3 things.
Focus.In a meeting you are intended to collaborate on a topic. You get multiple people into a room or on a call to tackle a topic because more brains are better than a single point of view. The challenge is that being in a room doesn’t mean you are removed from other work that needs to be done. Too often we are in a room, but our computer screen is open, or our phone is on the table. These devices create notifications and distractions that make it hard for you to be focused, present and in the moment. These distractions make it hard for you to apply your brain to the task in front of you. If you do manage to overcome those distractions, you are still too often balancing your own engagement with note-taking for later. This can result in you either missing key elements or not being able to add value by processing the current conversation. You are more focused on what happens later than what is happening now. To overcome these challenges, you have to take the following steps: 1. Establish a set of rules, or a “Meeting Manifesto”, that guides participation and sets expectations for meetings. This can a simple set of guidelines such as “no open laptops” or “no phones face up” so that people know they are expected to focus in the meeting. You can also set expectations for who should be in a meeting, what topics do not require meetings, and more. 2. Designate someone or something (like AI) to take notes. Having a single person or entity focused on creating a record of the conversation allows the rest of you to have something to go back to. That record, or source of truth, gives the attendees something to come back to or clarity after the meeting. In our case, we obviously recommend using an AI to capture the important moments and record and transcribe the entire conversation for later. 3. Be respectful of people’s time. When they are invited to a meeting, start the meeting on time. If people are late, don’t wait or start over. You can subtly recognize the people who are abiding by the guidelines you’ve established, and they are setting a good example of how to be engaged in a meeting. Translate to action.The not-so-great secret is most people take bad notes, if any notes at all, in a meeting. Most people don’t have much information to work with after a meeting other than what they remember, so their follow-up can be less effective than it should be. This is coupled with the fact that in many cases, the people required for follow up are not even in the meeting. There are extended team members required to get work done who are influenced by what is discussed in a meeting but may not have been in the room when the topic was discussed. These are both examples of why you need a record of the conversation that can not only provide context, but also create clarity in the actions that need to be taken, and by whom. Translating what was said into clear and definable actions is key. If you do this well, then you dramatically reduce the time spent after a meeting. After a meeting is when people are trying to find out what happens next, who does what, why they are doing it and what elements may be influencing what they need to do. That source of truth for the conversation gives everyone the same accurate information to work off of. It means you remove confusion and reduce swirl. The fact is swirl creates inefficiency. Swirl is the nemesis of productivity. To translate properly and reduce swirl: 1. Identify no more than 3 clear actions from a meeting. If you go forward with too many things to do, you risk overloading the next meeting with too many things to follow up and you risk creating more work coming out of a meeting than you had going into it. 2. Make sure everyone involved has the same information to work from. The worst thing you can do is give separate pieces of information to different people or you risk the “elephant in a dark room” issue where different people are touching different parts the elephant and might think they are engaging with different problems rather than a single animal. 3. Organize the recap, actions and notes quickly. You want to follow up while the content is fresh in people’s minds. You want them to recall all the key elements while they still can. For us, it’s about giving the user control to make sure what you identified as important is easily turned into actionable content. In the past a meeting was a temporal, ethereal moment in time. Now it becomes a tangible, actionable piece of content for the organization. Activation.Once you know what needs to be done, and who needs to be doing it, go to where they work. The last thing people need nowadays is another platform where they have to get work done. They need to have the action items in whatever system of record they and the tea, already works in. In our case, it’s about making sure action items and meetings highlights are delivered to your email, your project management system, your note-taking platforms, etc. It’s about where you work and where your team collaborates most often. We try very hard to make sure you only need to come to our platform to curate the notes if you so choose, but otherwise what happens in a meeting can be pushed to where you get work done. In that way we approach the topic from a “voice first” perspective and this is likely where most UI is going to go in the years to come. As you work your way up the chain in an organization, you spend more time in meetings. With your career level, you become more influential in an organization and the best way to be successful is to set an example of how you approach collaboration and time in and after a meeting. Your colleagues look to you to find ways to be productive and creating a strong, highly productive and positive meeting culture is one way to do that. I am 110% positive about that!
Cory Treffiletti is the Chief Evangelist and CMO for Voicea (formerly Voicera), a voice AI and productivity technology company based in Mountain View, California. Voicea leverages AI technology to harness voice in the workplace and increase productivity through, EVA, the Enterprise Voice Assistant. Voicea is backed by leading investors including Battery Ventures, Cisco Investments, e.ventures, GGV Capital, Greycroft, GV (formerly Google Ventures), M12 (Microsoft Ventures), Salesforce Ventures, and Workday Ventures. from http://www.youngupstarts.com/2019/04/17/how-to-maximize-your-meeting-culture/ by Loretta Breuning, PhD, author of “Habits of a Happy Brain: Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin, & Endorphin Levels“ The brain chemicals that make us feel good are inherited from earlier mammals. They are not designed to be on all the time. They evolved to do a job, and when you understand their job, you can find sustainable ways to trigger them. Your brain rewards you with good feelings when you do something good for your survival, but it defines survival in a quirky way. That’s why we do quirky things to feel good. Fortunately, you can replace unwanted habits with new habits by building new pathways in your brain. Here’s how! 1. Turn on your dopamine by taking a small step toward a goal, and then another. Give yourself a long-term goal, a short-term goal and a middle-term goal. Then you can always shift to a different goal when one of them is blocked, so you will always be stepping ahead and stimulating dopamine. 2. Stimulate your oxytocin by taking small steps of social trust.We mammals long for safety in numbers, but we get tired of following the herd. Oxytocin is stimulated by social trust, but trusting everyone everywhere does not promote survival. Misplaced trust can be a survival threat, so our brain learns to fear trusting where our trust was disappointed before. That fear can deprive you of oxytocin. To overcome it, offer trust in small steps, wait for reciprocal trust, and take another small step. 3. Enjoy serotonin by focusing on what you have instead of what others have.Mammals make social comparisons because it helps them spread their genes. The mammal brain rewards you with serotonin when you see yourself in the position of strength. The good feeling of serotonin is soon metabolized and you want more, which is why we keep seeking social power. But the quest often leads to frustration. Instead, find small ways to feel good about yourself without putting others down. 4. Spark endorphin with laughter.Endorphin masks pain with a good feeling. It evolved for emergencies only, but you get a little bit when you laugh because it jiggles your innards. Laughter is an important part of your life so you may just have to plan it in. Upload comedy so it’s ready in a moment of need, and avoid angry comedy. What your friends think is funny may not work for you, so make time for your own sense of humor. 5. Build a new happy-chemical pathway by feeding your brain a new experience repeatedly.Your brain controls the happy chemicals with pathways built from past experience. Old pathways are never a perfect guide to happiness because they were built from the random experiences of youth. You can wire in new pathways by carefully designing a new behavior and repeating it for 45 days. 6. Save your energy for building new happy habits.Blazing a new trail through your jungle of neurons is hard work. The electricity in your brain flows effortlessly into the old roads in your brain, but it doesn’t flow easily into new trails. And it’s scary to blaze a new trail because it’s not connected to your accumulated knowledge of pleasure and pain. We’re tempted to fall back on our old roads, even though they lead to bad habits. You need new habits to enjoy life, so save your energy for this challenge instead of squandering it elsewhere. 7. Take a break when your stress chemicals turn on.Cortisol is your brain’s signal that you face an urgent survival threat. When your life is safe, it is triggered by small disappointments. Cortisol creates a full-body sensation of urgent danger even though you know you’re safe. Everything looks bad when your cortisol turns on. Fortunately, most of it is metabolized and excreted in an hour — unless you trigger more. So take a break and do something unthreatening. No one has happy chemicals all the time. We all struggle to feel good with a brain that saves good feelings for survival action. We all strive to meet our needs with a brain wired by past experience. Nothing is wrong with you! Nothing is wrong with “our society.” We’re big-brained mammals! And we have the power to update our wiring in small steps. Find a complete step-by-step plan to rewire your happy chemicals in: Habits of a Happy Brain: Retrain your brain to boost your serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin and endorphin levels.
Loretta Breuning, PhD, is Founder of the Inner Mammal Institute, which offers resources that help people rewire their mammalian brain chemistry to live happier, healthier lives. As Professor Emerita of Management at California State University, East Bay, her work has been featured in Forbes, Time, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, Psychology Today, Men’s Health, The Dr. Oz Show, and many more nationally-recognized outlets. She is author of “Habits of a Happy Brain” and “Tame Your Anxiety: Rewiring Your Brain for Happiness“. from http://www.youngupstarts.com/2019/04/17/7-habits-of-a-happy-brain/ by Lonny Kocina, CEO of Media Relations Agency and author of “The CEO’s Guide to Marketing: The Book Every Marketer Should Read Before Their Boss Does“ A well-executed marketing plan is like a GPS. It guides your customers into your sales process. Done right, your marketing should result in more leads, higher sales and a stronger brand. Following steps in a logical progression, without going off on tangents, is one of the fastest ways to achieve your goals. Negotiating business contracts can be complicated. Navigating regulatory issues can be complicated. Thankfully marketing your business can be simple, if you have a system in place that everyone on your team wants to use because it makes their jobs less stressful. That’s what I like about the Strategically Aimed Marketing process, called SAM 6 for short. It’s a six-step process that keeps marketing focused and on point. SAM 6 is easy to understand and logical to implement. Basic implementation tools can be found for free online. The six steps are: 1. Gain competence in marketing concepts and principles.This ensures everyone is speaking the same language and has a working knowledge of marketing. This is an essential starting point for creating a great marketing plan. 2. Fill in code sheets.Code sheets are a means of gathering and documenting important information about your company and the products it promotes. They help ensure that your messages are consistently focused for the best possible response. These details include the offering (product), company vision and mission, the market, key messages, positioning and brand statement. Code sheets help direct and control your creative staff. They are like a framework around which all your promotional messages are built. Use the code sheets both before a promotion is created and for evaluation before the promotion goes out. 3. Select appropriate promotional mix channels.Choose from among publicity, advertising, website, social media and personal selling. The promotional mix channels you choose to employ depend on many variables including your message, the market and your resources. 4. Schedule your promotions on a calendar.This ensures that you’re delivering a constant and maximum flow of on-point promotional messages. Begin by determining which products will get the most attention and how often the organization in general will be promoted. Keep in mind: you are not drafting the content. You are just documenting products, value points, markets, channels and frequency. 5. Develop a control template for your creative team.A control template provides the guidelines for your writers, designers and other creative staff to follow. It enables these imaginative professionals to create attention-getting content without losing site of the marketing necessities. Much of the Control Template information is filled in from earlier steps, such as the product and primary message themes from your Code Sheets, or the channel from your calendar. Other components help your creative team produce the most effective content. For example, identifying the sender lets your creatives incorporate a unique voice or image. Including the keywords necessary for SEO or hashtags for social media help them create searchable content. The content itself is written into the AIDA — Attention, Interest, Desire and Action — section of the Control Template. AIDA is a helpful tool for writing marketing prose. 6. Engage your creative team.Assemble the right people for the job, and then let these creative souls work their magic within the parameters you created. Business is complicated enough. Marketing can be made simple with a straightforward process. Access free basic tools for implementing SAM 6 at Publicity.com.
Lonny Kocina, CEO of Media Relations Agency is a visionary who is passionate about marketing. He pioneered the concept of Pay Per Interview Publicity® business model which enables clients to purchase publicity by the story. He currently teaches his popular Strategically Aimed Marketing (SAM 6) process, outlined in his best-selling book “The CEO’s Guide to Marketing: The Book Every Marketer Should Read Before Their Boss Does” to business leaders and those working within the marketing industry. from http://www.youngupstarts.com/2019/04/16/how-to-write-a-marketing-plan-in-just-six-easy-steps/ by Vella Mbenna, author of “Muddy Roads Blue Skies: My Journey to the Foreign Service, From the Rural South to Tanzania and Beyond“ Have you fallen into a routine of drudgery? Do you feel stuck there? You’re not alone. If we’re honest, many of us will admit that we’re kind of going through the motions — work, home, eat, TV, sleep, repeat — and living by default instead of design. Life isn’t bad; it’s just dull. Uninspired. Actually (and ironically), a bit lifeless. We shouldn’t just accept our adventure-starved status quo. Life is meant to be really lived. I’ve come to believe adventure is a deep human need. We read about it in books and we watch it in movies because deep down we crave it. And we owe it to ourselves to pursue things that give us that spark, that jolt of excitement. It doesn’t matter how old you are or what your income is. You can and should weave some adventure into your life. Growing up in rural Georgia, I dreamed of travel and excitement. But after college I found myself broke, divorced, and struggling to raise my child alone. All that changed when I joined the Foreign Service and embarked on a 26-year adventure in which I lived in dangerous parts of the world, performed high-states diplomatic work, and defended my country in the wake of deadly terrorist attacks. My career provided the adventure I had always craved. If you too feel adventure-starved, don’t worry. There are plenty of small ways to infuse totally ordinary days with life-shifting excitement — and it doesn’t require a globetrotting career or a big budget. Follow these tips to create the adventurous life you’re dreaming of: First, commit to a self-imposed TV or social media ban.Before you can start your adventures, you need to stop doing the stuff that sucks up all your free time and keeps you in a state of lethargy. When turning on the TV or browsing Facebook is no longer an option, you’ll have to fill up your time with something. If nothing else, boredom will push you out the door. Force yourself to do something that scares (yet excites) you.You’ll never reach your full potential by living small. So take a risk and challenge yourself to step outside your comfort zone and do some things that intimidate you. Start training for a marathon or sign up to be a foster parent or go for that promotion at work or even start the business you’ve daydreamed about for years. When you challenge yourself, you’ll truly find out what you’re made of. It’s okay to start by taking small risks. If you’re normally silent in a meeting, speak up. Or if you’re getting over a painful breakup, join an online dating service. The idea is to practice leaving your comfort zone in small degrees, until you’re ready to make a bigger leap. Take a class or learn a new skill.Learning shouldn’t end once you’ve left school. Exploring our interests is what keeps us alive. You might take a coding class, or learn to speak Russian, or learn how to scuba dive. The learning itself is an adventure, and so are the activities that naturally flow from that learning — the trips you go on to speak the new language you learn and the events that pop up when you meet new people in the classes you take. Plan frequent mini adventures…When you need to shake things up a bit, choose a destination you’ve never visited within 100 miles of where you live and take a day-long road trip with your friends or family. This quenches your wanderlust without breaking the bank. … and budget for a great trip.If you dream of traveling to the exotic locales you’ve seen only in photographs, you can absolutely make it a reality someday. Start an “adventure fund” by putting a small amount of money aside each month. Over time, it will add up, and even if it takes a few years, you will one day be able to go visit those places you dream of today. Expand your circle.It’s fine to socialize with a core group of friends most of the time, but don’t close yourself off from meeting new people. You never know how a new friendship or relationship could transform your life. So, go to a Meetup group that interests you or join a sports league or running club as a way to socialize and have fun with new people. Say yes to every invitation that you possibly can.As you start meeting new people, they’ll invite you to do things. Maybe they’ll ask you to be on a committee or join them in a fundraising effort. Hopefully the events themselves will be exciting, but they will also lead you to meet new people who, in turn, may invite you to do other things. Don’t waste the weekends.Yes, you’re exhausted after the work week. I get it. But if you’re not careful, you’ll go into crash mode and squander the weekend “recuperating.” Don’t. Napping all weekend isn’t rejuvenating, anyway. Ever noticed how sluggish it makes you feel? Plan ahead so that there’s a mini-adventure scheduled into every weekend. Be intentional about how you spend this rare and precious time away from work. Weekends are for trying new things, taking day trips, attending local festivals. If your spouse or partner doesn’t want to get out, grab the kids or a girlfriend and just go. Get outdoors every chance you get.There’s a reason we associate “adventure” with the great outdoors. That’s where the mountains and oceans and rivers are. It’s where you get to camp under the stars or navigate whitewater rapids or hike dark, wooded paths to the top of hills to see the sunrise. It’s also where you might get caught in a thunderstorm or encounter a snake — and that’s part of the adventure equation too. Being out in nature is a little risky. That’s good, though. It’s hard to be adventurous inside four climate-controlled walls. Find novel ways to celebrate your milestones.Big achievements — like promotions, anniversaries, graduations, or even birthdays — deserve thoughtful commemorations. Celebrate them by doing something you’ve never done before. You don’t have to go skydiving on your 50th birthday — unless you really want to — but you could go ziplining or save up for a trip to Costa Rica. Instil curiosity and wonder in your kids.You can teach your kids to enjoy an adventurous life by exposing them to the world from an early age. Take them with you when you travel, introduce them to other cultures and unusual foods, and challenge them to be brave even when it feels uncomfortable to do so. You really get out of life what you put into it. So if you’re stuck in a life that’s underwhelming, it’s up to you to shake things up. It’s never too late to infuse your one and only life with great adventure. And the passion, excitement, and joy that you discover along the way will make any temporary discomfort you feel well worth it in the end.
Vella Mbenna is the author of “Muddy Roads Blue Skies: My Journey to the Foreign Service, From the Rural South to Tanzania and Beyond“. Throughout her youth, Vella dreamed of escaping small-town USA and traveling the world. In 1989, that dream came true when she was offered a position with the US Department of State Foreign Service. During her highly successful 26-year career as a diplomat, Vella served with honor in 13 foreign countries as well as two tours in Washington, DC. from http://www.youngupstarts.com/2019/04/16/are-you-living-an-adventure-starved-life-11-ways-to-shake-things-up/ A businessman by nature living in the Bahamas and avid equestrian and philanthropist at heart, Robert Genovese, or Bobby as his friends call him, is a serial entrepreneur who has founded and developed a range of businesses throughout the span of his career. At the age of 25, Genovese founded his first company in his home of Ontario, Canada. Today, with years of experience in tow, Bobby Genovese spends most of his time helping other entrepreneurs achieve their goals, as well as working on his various philanthropic efforts. Among his passions, Genovese is also concerned about land conservation, and has partnered with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection with the mission to protect ecotourism land and waterscapes of several Florida state parks. Genovese also dedicates his time and resources to supporting Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children. He is also was the chair of the annual Car and Boat Rally Scavenger Cups, which began in 2007, and has helped raise more than $20 million for the hospital’s cancer research efforts. We sat down with Bobby Genovese to gain his insight on both entrepreneurship and the importance of giving back. You started your own business at the young age of 25. What were some of the challenges you faced at the beginning of your career and how would you do things differently today? Bobby Genovese: Well, I think every entrepreneur has the best intentions of what they hope their company will do. Back then I was so streamlined focused on growing my business that I forgot to look at the bigger picture. You have to be able to look ahead and ask yourself, What’s next? How will I achieve those larger goals? I think the most important thing is that you truly love what you do and you’re passionate about it. Building a new company and leading it takes a lot of work and there are plenty of obstacles along the way. Having passion for what you’re doing makes it a lot easier to overcome the obstacles that you will inevitably have to confront. In a competitive world that is in a constant phase of evolution, what advice do you give entrepreneurs hoping to break into the business world? Bobby Genovese: Find a good mentor. As an entrepreneur, you already have an independent streak as well as the drive and passion for whatever business you are trying to establish. However, there will come a time when you hit those inevitable low points, and you won’t be exactly sure what steps to take next. When you reach that point in your journey, it’s important to have a business mentor to help. A mentor is anyone in your industry with more experience than you and who are invested in your success. They need to have a deep understanding of your field of work that you don’t quite have yet. Go to them. You’ll be grateful for the advice. Echoing philanthropists around the globe, you have said that giving back is a privilege. Why do you feel charity work is important and how do you encourage other entrepreneurs to get involved? Bobby Genovese: Entrepreneurs, with their creative-minds and unrelenting drive, already have the means to invest in community projects and provide financial support to local charities. This enables further development beyond their own ventures. The qualities that define an entrepreneur are the same qualities that should motivate them to pay it forward. Ecotourism is: “Responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment and improves the well-being of local people.” Your involvement with ecotourism in Florida is encouraging. Why has bringing an awareness to this issue been important to you? Bobby Genovese: As someone who has been fortunate enough to travel quite a bit, I was given a tremendous appreciation for the diverse cultures and wildlife on our planet. Simply put, ecotourism creates value for natural areas that remain pristine, unaltered, and natural. We’ve got to be able to protect the land and waterscapes around us while attracting people to enjoy their beauty and ensuring accessibility to visitors. Social responsibility is about everyone playing their part in society and giving back to worthy causes. How can this be accomplished within a business organization? Bobby Genovese: Again, get involved with the community. Support health research, sponsor a child in need, go out and start a community garden, organize a sporting event and raise funds for a charity – any of these initiatives will get your people out of the office and into the community to lend a helping hand. This not only demonstrates how successful we can be in coming together for a common cause, it also shows how necessary it is for each of us to be involved as a society.
from http://www.youngupstarts.com/2019/04/16/interview-bobby-genovese-on-ecotourism-business-leadership-and-giving-back/ There are so many factors that are part of attaining business success. There are just as many factors that are part of maintaining it for a long time as well. If you want your business to epitomize positive results, then you need to be 100 percent willing to put in all of the necessary work. This may involve putting a lot of energy into branding concepts. A+ branding is indispensable for businesses that want to shine in contemporary society, and that’s a fact. Why Do You Have to Brand Your Business?Business branding is no longer a question. It’s an essential thing. Consumers these days are savvier and smarter than ever before. They know all of the options that are in front of them. They know exactly what to expect, too. They strive to connect with the brands that offer them services and products. It’s unrealistic for consumers to connect to brands out there that are devoid of “personalities.” If you want people to be able to pinpoint and appreciate your business, then you need to put a lot of thought into branding. Branding can help people genuinely grasp the nature of your business. It can help people anticipate all of the things that are coming up for your business, too. Branding establishes familiarity for businesses. It encourages people to come back to businesses over and over again as well. Branding can help people identify all of the components that are distinctive about your business. The world is chock-full of all kinds of similar businesses now. It can in many cases be tough for customers to be able to tell them apart successfully. If you want to steer clear of the risk of blending in with your competitors and with being dull and predictable, then you need to prioritize quality branding techniques as soon as possible. Branding can give your business a sense of distinction that’s rare and precious. It’s critical to enable consumers to get fully acquainted with your brand. People are reluctant to commit to brands that make them feel uncomfortable in any way. If people spot your product on the Internet, you want them to feel fully at ease about getting their hands on it. There are all sorts of options accessible to people who wish to familiarize the general product with their products. Collaborating with a company like OMG Commerce may help businesses that want others to grasp the aims and practices of their businesses. Companies and Digital Marketing Practices.Digital marketing is indispensable for businesses that want to achieve a lot. If you want the people who are in your target audience to be able to grasp your brand and its concepts, then the assistance of a well-rounded digital marketing campaign can go an amazingly long way. There are many different aspects of digital marketing, too. If you get professional guidance from digital marketing experts, they can talk to you in detail about social media networks. They can talk to you at length about website development, website design, blogging, content creation, reputation management, PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising, and even SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is critical for all businesses that want to take the world by storm. SEO enables consumers who are in target audiences to be able to track down businesses in the first place. If you want to strengthen your company’s search engine presence in a big way, then you cannot avoid SEO concepts even for a second. Internet advertisements can also do a lot for business representatives who want to conquer their digital marketing destinies. Ads online give people the opportunity to delve into your brand. They give people the chance to come up with conclusions on their own as well. Social media branding can be a truly influential thing. If you want your product to get to people who are part of all kinds of age ranges and demographics overall, it can be intelligent to take the time to study up on social media branding. Branding via Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus and Twitter can do a lot for businesses that are not okay with others beating them. If you’re a business representative who is motivated as can be, then you need to learn all about the intricacies of social media branding. from http://www.youngupstarts.com/2019/04/16/companies-and-branding-power/ If you’ve been asking yourself why your social media marketing tactics aren’t hitting the spot, then you’ve come to the right place. In this short post we take a look at some of the common reasons why businesses fail to connect with their customers over social media postings and how you can go about remedying that. Lack of planning.You’ve thrown together some tactics, such as write a bunch of posts and send them out on a daily basis but you don’t have any real end point so the posts you’re writing a disjointed and meaningless. Your customer doesn’t really relate to them so they are becoming ignored and disappearing into the ether of discarded posts and tweets. While it’s almost essential that businesses have a presence on social media, having an ad hoc attitude to it will not get you the results you’re looking for. Instead mould your tactics into a strategy and to get that off the ground you’ll need to start with some clear and tangible goals that you want your strategy to achieve. You’ll also need to concentrate on where your social media is sending your customers to: your website, so factor in web design in your whole plan. Your posts could be smarter.Know the difference between brand or full URL links? Well, you should and if you know the details like this, you’ll what using brand, or vanity, links can make to your click through rate on a page. These shortened versions of the long URL also contain a shortened version of a brand’s name adding trust to the link and increasing the number of visitors to your page. You don’t know your customer.If you have your strategy in place and the tips ands tricks you need to inspire click through to your website but don’t know your customer, your strategy is doomed to fail. There is simply no point tweeting regularly to a customer base that spends the majority of their time on Instagram. It might feel like it’s a good idea, but it’s not; it’s a waste of your time and your money. As part of your strategy building, find out who your customers are. Get to know their age, their job, their restaurant preferences and of course their social media hangouts. Don’t leave it to chance, it’s key to the success of your strategy. You’re not consistent.Don’t drown your social media in content and then turn the tap off. Be consistent and timely with your post in order to get the best response and to establish yourself as a brand that’s present, reliable and consistently there for customers. Answer comments in a timely manner and have someone monitoring your interactions to work on repeating the kinds of posts that get the best results. Your digital marketing doesn’t need to be overly complicated but it does need to be based on the kind of research that will make your strategy work. Get the right customers on the right platforms and start conversations that get converted into results time and time again. Adjust and keep going with great messaging and a consistent presence and you’ll find your social media hits the spot. from http://www.youngupstarts.com/2019/04/16/socials-that-hit-the-spot/ by Katie Lundin of crowdspring Between 2012 and 2017, the number of craft breweries in the US increased from 2,420 to 6,266 – an increase of 159%! It’s no wonder craft beer is so popular. Starting a brewing business is hard work. But we’re here to help. Here are 5 of the 9 steps you’ll need to know to start your own brewery business. If you like what you read here, be sure to read the complete 9 step guide on how to start a brewery business. 1. Choose a business model.In our guide on how to start a small business, we suggest that aspiring entrepreneurs choose a niche for the best chance at success. The Brewer’s Association for Small and Independent Craft Brewers identifies four separate market segments for the craft beer industry:
Once you’ve decided which overall business structure is the right fit for you, we recommend that you write a business plan. For more information about how to create a business plan, the Small Business Administration has you covered. 2. Get to know the legal stuff.The alcohol industry is governed at both the federal and state level. It’s important that you know and abide by all existing federal laws governing beer and alcohol. These resources from the Brewers Association should help you get started with your state law research: 3. Fill in the business blanks.Starting a craft beer business isn’t all brewing and drinking. For instance, you need to choose the legal structure for your new business. Sole proprietorship or LLC? Will you incorporate or register a partnership? We discussed these options previously in our article 15 Tips for Turning Your Craft Hobby Into a Successful Business. Licenses and permits. This article walks you through the overall brewery license and bonding process. And, you can find a tutorial and get started with your permits here. Vendor and employee agreements. If you need help with vendor or employment, take a look at Quickly Legal, which offers entrepreneurs, small businesses and startups an easy and inexpensive way to create, sign and manage business contracts. 4. Define your brand.Craft breweries are known and celebrated for their unique brand personalities. If you’re going to get noticed, you need to consciously develop your brand identity. As we’ve previously discussed, …your brand is your company’s public identity. Ideally, your brand should embody the best (and most essential) attributes of your company. The importance of your brand identity cannot be understated – especially in the world of craft beer. With so much creativity and unique personality already on display, a lackluster brand will fail to take off no matter how good your brews are. Here are a few questions to guide you as you think about your brewery or brewpub’s brand:
Your answers to these questions (and others like them) will build the core of your brand. All of your future branding decisions should expand on these ideas. Your business name, your logo, your website design, your beer can or label designs, and your brewpub or tap house decor should all grow from the concepts you lay out here. 5. Optimize your packaging.Before any consumers can enjoy your beer, it has to be packaged. And, it needs to look good. Luckily, you have more options for packaging than ever before. You’ll still be working with bottles, cans, and kegs. But, new technology in materials and labeling mean you can make smarter choices for your business. Here are the topics that should be on your radar when planning your beer packaging… DIY or hire a service. Depending on the size of your operation, and thanks to mobile canning and bottling services, you may be able to avoid purchasing, housing, and running your own bottling equipment. Look to see if there are mobile bottling and canning services in your area. Then compare their fees with the costs you’d rack up buying and running your own packaging system. Alternately, keep in mind that packaging your own beer allows you to control the quality of the process to a more exacting degree. But, it also means training and paying staff to run the machines and paying for repair costs. Bottling vs. canning. Bottles are the traditional choice of craft breweries. But, cans are growing in popularity. Purists will claim that beer tastes better from a bottle. But, cans keep beer fresher longer, are more eco-friendly, and are cheaper to ship due to their lighter weight. The differences don’t stop there. Bottles offer the flexibility of a cap, neckband, and label to share your packaging design. But, cans offer more physical space for design. There’s no wrong choice. But, don’t make a decision without weighing the pros and cons. Choosing your packaging design. When it comes to packaging design, consider both the materials the design will be printed on and the package graphics. There’s a dizzying array of bottle label materials to choose from; including paper, matte film, glossy film, metalized film, wood finish film or clear film. Each of these communicates a different message to your consumer; so make sure to select a label material that reflects your brand identity. Cans don’t offer quite so many options. You can print directly on cans or apply a plastic shrink-wrapped sleeve. Printing directly on the can limits the number of colors you can use and it’s hard to achieve bright vibrant colors. Can sleeves offer a more vibrant look and a quicker turn-around. Once you know what material your design will appear on, you can enlist the help of a professional designer. Make sure to let them know the dimensions and materials for your packaging, as well as detailed information about your brand and the product itself. The more information you can provide about your brand personality, mission, and beer, the better. These details equip the designer to create a design that will embody your beer and your brand. If you’d like to see lots of design options before settling on a final design, consider using a crowdsourced design service like crowdspring. Conclusion.There’s no doubt about it – starting a craft beer business is hard work. But, brewing is a work of passion. And for those who follow its call, it’s a rewarding, fulfilling career.
Katie Lundin is on the customer support team at crowdspring, one of the world’s leading marketplaces for crowdsourced logo design, web design, graphic design, product design, and company naming services. Katie helps entrepreneurs, small businesses and agencies with branding, design, and naming, and regularly writes about entrepreneurship, small business and design on crowdspring’s award-winning small business blog. from http://www.youngupstarts.com/2019/04/15/how-to-start-your-own-craft-beer-business/ by Jesse Newton, author of “Simplify Work: Crushing Complexity to Liberate Innovation, Productivity, and Engagement“ We live highly cluttered lives, have become addicted to checking our phones, are too responsive to interruptions, and do not nurture, protect, and direct our most productive energy. We experience a constant stream of interruptions. We have phones that vibrate or ping anytime we receive a new email, a calendar invite or reminder, a LinkedIn or Facebook update, or a notification from the plethora of apps that want to keep us engaged. These disruptions break our focus and reduce our ability to think deeply. But we don’t seem to mind. We are now so addicted to checking our phones every few minutes that if we are away from them for any extended period of time, we suffer withdrawal. According to one publication, we check our phones well over 100 times per day and up to every six seconds in the evening. If we’re working on our computer, we have instant messaging popping up at random times breaking our focus. We have multiple programs open at the same time and seem to click back and forth between them endlessly. We have the browser open with multiple pages up at the same time. We make it too easy to get distracted and pulled from the work that matters. We allow our calendars to be booked back to back with meetings on every topic imaginable. Our global teams demand an always-on mentality, and that’s what we give them. We do not recognize when we do our best work and religiously protect this time to focus it on what matters most. And we don’t let ourselves recharge our batteries when we’re not doing work, thereby increasing the speed of burnout and generally limiting our potential. It’s time we took a step back and simplified our complex lives. Here are three steps you can take to do this:
1. Get Clear on What is Truly Most Important.One of the major issues with highly complex lives is that we become highly reactive and we lose focus on what is most important. Your time is spent on relatively lower-value activities as you get caught up reacting to requests or the latest issue. Your ability to make a big impact on the most important stuff is diminished, and it can seem hard to break free from it. Getting clear on what is most important, those things that will deliver the greatest impact on your highest priorities, will allow you to free yourself from the chains of reactive working and take control over your time and focus. Take some time to answer the following questions:
2. Plan Effectively.Effective planning can serve to keep you focused on what matters most, both professionally and personally. It breaks down how top goals will be achieved and carves out time to be spent on personal priorities like family and health. But it requires discipline to stick with the cadence and not get pulled away from the structure. You can break down your planning process into annually, quarterly, and weekly. The planning process begins with an annual plan. This is obviously very macro as you formulate the broad objectives for the year ahead. An important strategy with annual planning is to start by melding your professional and personal goals so you have a comprehensive view of your goals. I think of the traditional “balanced scorecard” that some companies use to broaden how they measure the performance of their business. In using this method to meld professional and personal goals you can distill and combine goals to establish a broader view, such as:
Annual goals should be broken down into quarterly objectives. Quarterly planning enables focus to be retained on what is most important for you, professionally and personally. The output of this level of planning should drive the next level of planning: weekly planning. At the end or the beginning of each week take time to set a few specific objectives for the week ahead. With your quarterly goals in mind, craft a list of specific actionable goals. Once you have your weekly goals, you need to plan your week around achieving them. This is where your calendar plays an integral role. You should be living by your calendar. You should hold sacred the time you carve out in your calendar for each activity or commitment. 3. Manage Our Energy.Mindfulness is a buzzword that has become quite popular over the past few years. Being mindful is essentially being present in the moment, not focused on what is coming up, like a critical corporate event or a vacation. Being in the present enables clarity of mind and reduces stress and anxiety for things that have not yet happened. It also encourages appreciation of the now, which is a major driver of happiness. Meditation is a great exercise for being mindful and fully aware in the moment, and it is increasingly being used in the corporate world. Just practice sitting still in a preferably quiet place and direct your focus to your breath. Straighten your back, relax your shoulders and your face, and keep focusing on your breath. Actively let all of the noise in the front of your brain quiet, and let go of all the things on your to-do list and any concerns you may have. If your mind drifts and you start to think about an email you need to write, bring it back to the present. If you have no experience meditating, you’ll likely find it very difficult to keep your focus on your breath and the present, but the more you bring it back and focus on quieting your brain, the more you’ll slip into deep meditation. Only a few minutes in a meditative state is hugely energizing. When you emerge from only five minutes of meditating, you’ll find that your perspective has shifted. You’re no longer mentally grappling with all the things that need to get done and you now have a quiet recognition of the bigger picture. This exercise to get to a mindful state can easily be done at your desk or on a lunchtime walk and is a highly effective way of recharging your energy as well as simplifying the seeming complexity of all your to-dos. In this day and age the opportunity to simplify our lives is significant. By getting clear on what’s truly important, planning effectively and managing our energy we can build the skills and discipline to simplify our world, get a handle on complexity, and take control of our productive capacity.
Jesse Newton is the author of “Simplify Work: Crushing Complexity to Liberate Innovation, Productivity, and Engagement“. He is the founder and CEO of Simplify Work; a global management consulting firm that helps organizations throw off the shackles of debilitating complexity and reignite top performance. from http://www.youngupstarts.com/2019/04/15/three-steps-to-simplify-our-complex-lives/ |
ABOUT MEHi my name is Maxine 27 years of age living in Pittsburgh, PA. I own a small business and spend my time reading tips about incresing sales. ArchivesNo Archives Categories |