Having entrepreneurial goals and aspirations is great, but until your business takes off you may find yourself stuck in a full-time job. That can make it tough to make the transition to owning your own successful business. While difficult, it’s not impossible. With careful prioritization and discipline, you can successfully make that transition.

Continue Your Education

Depending on the business you’re building and the industry you’re operating in, it may be necessary to obtain occupational licensing or certifications. Earning these usually means taking courses to get the necessary knowledge and training to do the job properly and then taking an exam to prove you’ve learned what you need to. Since you already have a full-time job, you may find the flexibility offered by online courses to be a good fit for your lifestyle. Succeeding in an online course will require you to set goals for yourself. Be disciplined in sticking to them.

Start Small

Businesses don’t tend to be successful or able to sustain themselves right from the start. It takes time, work, patience, and diligence. Start small until you feel your business can sustain itself and you, enabling you to step away from your full-time job and more fully into the role of a business owner. As your business picks up, you may need to reduce your full-time hours to part-time hours. If your job offered benefits, those may have been contingent upon your full-time status, so make sure you know what your 401(k) options are and you’ve made arrangements for health insurance.

Keep Your Job Entirely Separate from Your Business

It may be tempting to use whatever downtime your job allows you to work on your business. Sending a quick email about your business using your employer’s computer isn’t hurting anyone, right? Not necessarily true. Using your employer’s property to move your own business forward can lead to legal issues down the road. Plus, you should never assume emails are private when sent using company property. This could lead to being disciplined for not using company time properly, even costing you your job before your own business is ready to support you fully.

Making the transition to owning your own business while still working a full-time job can be a real challenge. Be disciplined in how you use your time and prioritize your education. Be patient with yourself and your business as you work to make it self-sustaining. Remember to keep your full-time job and your business separate. It’s a lot of work upfront, but making this investment in your future now can pay off down the road.

Read this next: How to Put your Business in a Better Position to Weather Hard Times

Even the very best businesses and business models are susceptible to hard times. They can come about due to pandemics, market crashes, bad publicity, political climates, and many other factors. How your business may come to face a hard time may not be clear. However, you will face hard times. Here is how you can prepare yourself.

Build Cash Reserves

The novice business owner will take all their profits as payment. Unfortunately, this leaves their business entirely unable to handle any unexpected expenses. A much wiser approach is to build up reserves of cash. That way, if the business goes through a period of low profits or faces other troubles, they will be more prepared to deal with them. One way that this may happen unexpectedly is through pivots. A business pivot is when a company changes direction in response to the changing industry. Pivots cost money. If a business has cash reserves, it can successfully pivot in a hard time to stay afloat. If a business has no cash reserves, it may be unable to make a pivot and go bankrupt when major industry changes occur.

Creative Customer Incentives

When the general economy is facing a hard time, most consumers will stop spending on their wants and only focus on their needs. This tends to further increase the economic difficulty. Offering creative incentives is a great way to entice your customers back to your stores. For example, rewarding loyalty can improve sales and keep your customers happy. Another option is to offer bulk discounts like, “Buy 1, get 1 half-off”. These bulk discounts will appeal to your customers’ frugal mindset as they try to weather the economic downturn.

Business Insurance

Insuring your business can help compensate your business when things get tough. You can insure your business against potential lawsuits, natural disasters, and in some cases loss of profits. While you can’t insure your business against your poor business management, some insurance companies offer policies that will compensate you if your business loses its ability to make a profit due to circumstances that are deemed outside of your control. You may find yourself thinking that you don’t want to pay insurance costs, but you’ll be glad you paid insurance costs if you ever find yourself needing help from your insurance company.

As mentioned earlier, it’s pretty much guaranteed that your business is going to face challenges and hard times. Now is the time to prepare for these things. Don’t just put it off for another day. Being caught unprepared could cause countless hours of your hard work to be destroyed. On the other hand, by being prepared, you can be in the prime position to turn tough times to your advantage.

For more tips on how to better run your business, sign up for some coaching!

To stay out of the red, a business needs to have a steady stream of clients and customers that bring in enough income to cover costs, and hopefully generate a profit. Sometimes that’s easier said than done. Getting clients on board with your services can sometimes take a little convincing, but it is possible.

Show You Care

Clients are looking for businesses that are interested in and capable of solving their problems. If you’re going to get them on board with what you have to offer, you need to prove to them that you care about what their needs are and how their problems get solved. Showing you’re passionate about their goals makes your business more attractive than another who might be more inclined to see their clients as a number on their accounts receivable list. It’s one way to build value in your services and set yourself apart.

Get the Messaging Right

If you’re going to effectively show your clients that you care and can meet their needs, you need to get your message right. The content needs to be clear, concise, and compelling. Explain what you have to offer and how it solves your clients’ problems. It’s also important to note that just sending it out once isn’t likely to be adequate. Messages are most effective when you repeat them 7 to 20 times. For this reason, running multiple marketing campaigns and being repetitive (without being annoying) is an important component to successfully getting your message across.

Be Transparent

Transparency matters in business dealings. You need to be upfront and clear about what your service can do for your clients. As tempting as it can be, don’t over-promise just to land a client. If you aren’t able to deliver, they’ll leave and not come back. In a similar vein, let your clients and prospective clients know exactly how much they can expect to pay for your services. No one likes to get hit with hidden fees. Have answers to all the “why” questions. The more information you can provide your clients when they ask, the easier it will be for them to make informed decisions.

It takes time and effort, but convincing clients to get on board with your services is possible. There are a lot of things that impact a customer’s willingness to do business with you, but if you show you care, take the time to get the message right, and are transparent, you’ll likely see your efforts pay off. Your work will help put your business in a position to not only make ends meet but to generate profits.

Read this next: How You Can Help Your Employees Feel More Valued in Your Organization

As a new year begins, there are many goals your business may have. One of those goals should be forging better client relationships. No business can function without a solid client base, so make sure you put in the time and effort when it comes to your clients.

Learn to Communicate Better

According to Smarp, communication is essential in all areas of business. It is important to communicate well with your clients. When you speak with clients, use language that demonstrates collaboration. Make sure you’re speaking to them in ways they’ll understand and avoid jargon. When listening to your clients, make sure you ask questions. Doing so can help them feel listened to and it can help you be sure you are understanding them correctly. Finally, try to use a variety of communication methods. Instead of just sending emails, set up video chats or phone calls, and do in-person meetings when possible.

Get to Know Them

Knowing your client well is important for many reasons. First of all, it shows them that you are invested in them and that they are a valued client. They will be more likely to return to your business if you show interest in them. According to Agility, you should spend time on small talk with important clients to build a better relationship with them. This is a great way to grow more comfortable communicating with them and it helps to form more of a connection. Getting to know your clients also helps you to be more aware of their needs. If you know someone, then you can better serve and help them. This will also improve your relationship with them.

Be Honest About Opinions

It may seem like a good idea to always agree with your client, but this type of approach can be damaging to relationships. If you want to build trust with your clients, be honest about your opinions. Of course, you should still be polite when doing this. By sharing your opinions, you demonstrate your expertise in the field and you display your initiative. Consistently sharing your opinions will show your clients that you will do more than just tell them what they want to hear. It shows that you will make any effort for them and guide them towards good decisions. According to Unbabel, you should be honest with clients so you can build a stronger relationship.

Building client relationships is important to any business. It helps you ensure future business and it increases customer satisfaction. Seize the opportunity of a new year, and employ new strategies to improve client relationships.

Need more help running your business and keeping good client relationships? Schedule some coaching sessions with us!

Technology is constantly advancing, offering businesses seemingly endless opportunities to equip themselves with the latest and greatest equipment. While most areas of a business can benefit from technology, payment technologies offer benefits to your customers as well as your business. If you want to offer your customers the latest in payment technologies, there are some options you need to be aware of.

Mobile Payments

If you’d told businesses 30 years ago that in the future people would be paying with what amounted to a pocket-sized computer, you’d probably have been laughed out of the building. That’s where we’re at now though. People can connect their debit and credit cards to various apps and scan QR codes to pay for their purchases. Many businesses have incorporated such features into their apps, making easy payments one of the many benefits of having an app for your business.

Source: https://www.alacriti.com/mobile-payment-benefits 

Contactless Payments

Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, people are more conscious now than ever about what they touch and who touched it last. Considering how literally dirty money is, that makes contactless payments one of the most desirable payment technologies, from a customer’s point of view. In fact, more than 70% of customers want contactless payments to continue when COVID-19 restrictions are lifted. Between Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay, and others, there are a variety of platforms out there that will allow customers to pay in such a way. Between the variety of platforms making this payment method accessible to most customers and the demand for it, it’s definitely worth investing in POS equipment that supports it.

Source: https://www.podium.com/article/customer-advocacy/ 

Payment Security

As technology advances, it becomes increasingly vulnerable to security threats. Your business needs to take payment security seriously. There have been advancements in this area of payment technology as well. Biometric security is being introduced, and specialized codes offer customers greater security when paying via phone or online. The importance of payment security was what prompted the development of card chips that get inserted into POS systems instead of just swiping like you used to. These chips generate a dynamic code that is used to verify its authenticity. This prevents the chip from being duplicated by someone who’s stolen your card information.

Source: https://www.cardfellow.com/blog/biometrics-payment-security/ 

Payment technologies have advanced recently, thanks in no small part to the pandemic. Mobile payment and contactless payment options are increasingly popular. With those advancements comes the need to protect the security of various payment methods. Make sure you’re properly prepared when offering your customers the latest and best payment methods to give them the best checkout experience possible.

To make sure you stay on top of the best business practices, sign up for some coaching with us!