Business | Shannon Procise

How to Celebrate Important Milestones at Your Business

October 5, 2022 By Shannon Gronich Leave a Comment

If you own a business, you know how hard it can be to meet important milestones. Experiencing growth and success can be especially difficult given the current economy and how competitive businesses are with one another. When you see growth and success, it should be celebrated appropriately to boost employee morale and maintain momentum. So what can you do to celebrate reaching important milestones?

Create a Gift Basket

Employees love receiving gifts. Gifts show employees they have a more meaningful relationship with their employer than something that is strictly work-only. Don’t just pay attention to your on-site employees though. Gift baskets are also great for creating unity in an increasingly remote-based workforce. This is because employees—no matter where they are—will have physical objects and gifts to remind them of the company. Employees may feel more united with the company and their coworkers when they receive a gift basket. They will know that their individual efforts are noticed and appreciated.

Host a Party

A party is a sure way to celebrate any major event, including reaching important company milestones. Employees will be able to celebrate with you and the company. Parties make it easy for everyone to soak in positive vibes and get excited. Not sure how to get everyone pumped? Start with music. Music at your company event can help set the mood. Make sure you choose appropriate and upbeat music if you’re the DJ. If you’re hiring a DJ for your party, clearly communicate your expectations and standards for the music they play.

Have Giveaways

Giveaways are another great way to get your employees celebrating. Choose to invest in high-quality gifts, not just company paraphernalia. Even if it’s good quality and on the more expensive side, giving away company paraphernalia comes across as cheap and boring. High-quality gifts suggest more thought and effort went towards procuring gifts for the giveaway. Employees will understand that the company is doing well thanks to reaching milestones and has the budget and the desire to get great gifts for giveaways.

As your company continues to grow, your idea of an important milestone will change as well. Milestones may include things like hitting a goal for a certain number of clients or sales within a quarter. Remember, no matter how small or large your business is, it is still crucial to celebrate milestones. Celebrating and recognizing your important milestones can help you reach many more in the future.

Are you ready to take your business to the next level? Shannon Gronich can help! Click here to see how you can benefit from using Shannon for your business and marketing consulting needs.

Filed Under: Business

How to Avoid Critical Mistakes When Running a Business

October 5, 2022 By Shannon Gronich Leave a Comment

Boss and executive team feeling stress and serious of fail business, partners holding heads in hands depressed by failure and exhausted with problems with a pile of work.

Running a business is incredibly intricate and complicated. There are dozens of moving pieces, and it’s easy to slip up now and again. However, any big mistakes could lead to your business closing and financial trouble for you. Follow these tips to ensure that you avoid costly mistakes while running your business.

Create a Comprehensive Plan

Running a successful business takes massive amounts of organization and planning. To ensure that you avoid any critical mistakes in the day-to-day of your business, it’s important to create a comprehensive business plan. This should ideally be done in the very beginning stages of running your business, but it’s always important to update your plan as your business grows. This plan will include things like customer interaction, pricing, return policies, etc. Having this plan as a constant reference allows you to know how to handle more situations and avoid making mistakes.

Keep Track of Your Financials

If you make mistakes in your business’ financials, it has the potential to cause detrimental damage to your business. Your business’ finances are what allow you to pay employees, restock your inventory, and pay for your business space. Working with a professional accountant will help you clean up your finances. It can be expensive to hire an accountant as a full-time member of your staff. It’s much more financially feasible to outsource your accounting needs when they come up. Your accountant can help you see where you’re spending too much, and can also help you file your taxes when the time comes.

Delegate

As a business owner, it can be easy to take on extra responsibilities and quickly become overwhelmed. Because you started the business, you likely feel as if you need to personally be invested in every aspect of it. However, you must learn to delegate to focus on more important parts. For example, you may want to personally oversee your business’ finances. However, if you’re not a trained accountant, this can actually cause more harm than good. Hire experienced, well-trained professionals to handle various parts of your business that you don’t love or aren’t skilled in. This leaves you with more freedom to focus on the aspects of running a business that interest you.

Running a business involves a lot of trial and error, and you will definitely make mistakes. These are great learning opportunities, but it’s important that you avoid making any large errors that could damage your business. Be sure to avoid making errors like these when running your business.

Check out this article on what your business needs to stand out visually!

Filed Under: Business

Accounting Mistakes You Should Avoid at Your Business

October 4, 2022 By Shannon Gronich Leave a Comment

Accounting is fundamental to all business. No matter how much you would like to stick to the interpersonal, creative side of your business, you’re always going to need to run your finances properly to function. Here are some of the most egregious accounting mistakes that new business owners tend to make.

Not Recording Every Expense

Carefully and methodically recording every expense may be a pain. It might be obnoxiously time-consuming as well. But at the end of the day, having an accurate record of your expenses will be enormously useful to you for a myriad of reasons. First of all, having an accurate expense record will help you create an accurate budget. You’ll be able to see – without exception – every business cost, ranging from insignificant to life-changing. You’ll be better able to confidently organize and plan costs for the future. And, at that special time of every year, you’ll be prepared for tax season.

Getting Taxes Wrong

Taxes are probably the most important single reason that you need to record every single expense. Messing up your taxes can result in the best-case scenario of a hefty fine, and the worst-case scenario of you in prison. Having a comprehensive record of expenses will mean you will know exactly what you need to deduct on your tax paperwork. It’s critical to get things like tax withholding right when doing payroll, and your records will help you keep that process straight. And finally, if the IRS ever decides that it’s time to audit you, you will have a complete and clean record to let them parse. Being audited when you haven’t kept your records as thoroughly as you should have can be disastrous.

Constant Planning and Budgeting

Most business owners know that they need a financial plan before opening their business. But to run as smoothly as possible, you’re going to want to keep an ongoing, updated plan that can be adjusted when you need to. Looking at your business’s current financial trends means that you can try and better understand in which direction your market and your business are headed. You can create budgets based on conclusions that you or a consulting analyst have drawn.

Good financial practices will ensure that your business avoids that worst-case scenario. Start-ups and small businesses demand a lot, after all; they can bankrupt someone who isn’t careful or lucky. All the more reason for you to put in the effort and care your business deserves.

Check out this article on how to maintain your company’s app!

Filed Under: Business

How to Keep Employees Happy at Your Company

October 4, 2022 By Shannon Gronich Leave a Comment

When you are running your own business, it is important to make sure that you are doing what you can to make your employees happy. They are one of your most important resources and without the help of a great team of employees, your business can’t be successful. As a business owner, you are in a great position to assess the needs of your employees and work to meet them so they are happy working for your business.

Promote Work-Life Balance

Sometimes you are going to need a lot of work to be done, but even in those times, it is important to promote work-life balance. Burnout can be a huge problem for business owners, and the main contributing factor is having employees who are overworked and stressed. You must establish a company culture that prioritizes taking breaks and getting away from work so your employees can focus when they are in the office. This will help to reduce burnout and improve productivity by creating a positive work environment for your whole team.

Create a Robust Benefits Package

The benefits that you provide your employees show them that they are valued and help to keep them healthy and happy at work. As you are working to create a benefits package, talk to your employees about the things they need. Once you have established your benefits package, it is important to maintain those benefits to keep employees feeling supported at work. Your benefits should include health insurance, PTO, and retirement benefits in addition to other benefits that are specific to the needs of your team. As an employer, you have a variety of retirement plans to choose from.

Recognize Good Work

Your employees are working hard to make your business the best it can be. There is some satisfaction in doing a great job, but it also helps to have an employer who will recognize your good work. When you have a great employee, you can help them to be happy at work by recognizing the great things they do. As you show your employees that you are paying attention and value the work they do, you will build a stronger relationship that will help to move your business forward.

As you continue to grow as a business owner, you can find more and more ways to make your business great. The most important part of that plan is making sure your employees are valued for the work they do. When you can maintain your employee relationships, you can make your business an incredible place to work.

Check out this article on how to diversify your risk as an entrepreneur!

Filed Under: Business

How to Train a Functioning Remote Workforce

September 28, 2022 By Shannon Gronich Leave a Comment

Since many of the COVID-19 restrictions started in 2020, an unprecedented number of businesses have transitioned to having remote workers. There are a lot of benefits to having a remote workforce, including minimized office expenses, but it can be challenging to know how to train and manage them. Here are a few tips that will help you to know how to train a functioning remote workforce.

Set Standards for Communicating

First of all, you need to set standards for communicating from the very beginning. These standards will help your workers to understand the expectations for communication throughout the day. For example, if you have daily or weekly meetings through a video call, they’ll need to be aware of those. Regular meetings can help to clear up any questions that anyone might have on your team and can also build camaraderie between team members. Make sure that your remote workers are also aware of how and when you’ll be checking in on them. (More on the benefits of this later!) If your standards of communication are clear, your workers will know how to reach out to you when they have questions, and your team tasks will go smoothly.

Teach Them Good Cybersecurity Practices

If you have a remote workforce, you’ll also need to teach them good cybersecurity practices for them to work effectively and safely. With an increasing number of employees working online, an increasing amount of data is stored online and outside of your business front or company office. You need to make sure that your employees know how to protect the data that they have access to. For example, if your employees work remotely, they should know that free public Wi-Fi can be insecure. Good cybersecurity practices can protect you from threats and breaches.

Check-in Regularly

Finally, make sure that you are checking in regularly with each of your employees. This doesn’t have to be through a formal meeting or discussion. It could consist of a quick message or phone call. Many employees start to feel a little bit disconnected from each other when they work remotely, and it can feel quite overwhelming at the beginning. If you check in regularly with each of your employees to make sure that they’re doing alright, you’ll be able to answer any questions or concerns that they might have. This will help your entire team to work better, both individually and together.

So, if you’re starting to have a remote workforce, keep these tips in mind to get your team working effectively and successfully. Remember to set standards for communicating, teach good cybersecurity practices, and check in regularly with your employees. Soon enough, you’ll be reaping the benefits of having a functional remote workforce.

Check out this article on how to maintain your company app!

Filed Under: Business