By Guest Author Theresa Oesterreich
As a young entrepreneur just starting out, you may have a great product you wish to retail, or a service you wish to provide. Renting a nice office suite, or a retail unit in a busy shopping mall, will help establish a local presence very quickly. Unfortunately, you also have the expense of rent and rate payments, power costs, and staff wages.
Starting online can provide you with an immediate world-wide customer base with the minimum of outlay. Many online businesses start off in the owner’s front room, with stock stored in garage, shed, or the bedroom.
Online businesses tend to fall into one of two categories, selling products or services to the general public, or providing technical assistance to other online businesses.
Online Retailer
As an online retailer, your prime consideration is having a website for potential customers to visit, pick their products, pay for them, and get them delivered. To this end, unless you are very web-savvy, contracting the services of a good website builder is the first thing required.
The website needs building, plug-ins added for shopping carts and email contact, search engine optimization (SEO) needs to be formulated, along with content marketing, and social media exposure, and all need updating on a regular basis. While you’re busy dealing with customer purchases, getting them delivered, and sorting out customer queries; your retained website management team will deal with keeping your site at the top of the search engine pages. Staff requirements in the early days, should be minimal.
Online Services to Businesses
As a business offering web building services to other online businesses, the situation could be somewhat different. Unless you are capable of providing all website services yourself, then employing specialists in the different areas is a must. Programmers, SEO specialists, content marketers and blog post and article writers, are all required to work as a unit if problems with sites you manage are to be avoided.
As your business grows, then greater numbers of staff will be required. Whether they are delivery drivers, packagers, extra personnel to deal with emails, or greater numbers of software engineers, they all become part of the team. Keeping them focused, happy to work, and feeling they are part of the business, is your job.
Engage With Your Staff
In this digital age, bosses are becoming younger. The old style boss, sitting in his office all day, issuing orders and checking the accounts, is becoming a thing of the past.
Nowadays it’s all about interaction between management and staff. Arrange to have brainstorming sessions. Discuss the way forward, what’s not working, and how to put it right. Organize team building exercises such as paint-balling. Take your staff on adventure days, where for instance, working as a team they have to build a bridge over a chasm against the clock.
While all must accept the boss is the boss, working with your staff, making them feel they are an integral part of your growing business, is the best way to ensure maximum productivity, from a happy and contented workforce.
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