Tag Archives: Corporate Business Solution

Happy Workers, Successful Business: 4 Tips to Motivate Your Employees

Posted on by

What makes a business successful? There isn’t just a straightforward answer. It requires dedication, leadership, cooperation, creativity, determination, and so much more.

For a company to grow successfully, though, you can narrow down the traits to something more specific – your team.

You can only do so much as the owner until you reach the moment when employees are necessary to keep moving forward. Without them, you’re left drowning in tasks with no time to grow your business.

It’s more than just having employees, however. They also need to be happy and enjoy coming to work for them to stay and be productive. To help ensure they stay, reviews for Corporate Business Solutions have four tips to motivate your employees.

Be Nice, Honest and Respectful to Employees

First, one of the best ways to keep the peace in the office is how you interact with your employees. Bad management is one of the top reasons why employees quit their jobs.

Put yourself in the shoes as an employee (or, you’ve likely already experienced it). If you have a boss that undermines your work, is rude, closed off, and difficult to communicate with, how would that make you feel? Likely, frustrated and wanting to leave fairly quickly.

As the boss, be a positive influence in the office to help keep employees happy and ready to work.

Provide Room for Growth

If you want employees to stick with you long term and motivate them to achieve greatness, you need to provide them opportunities to grow. Change their mindset that they’re merely working at a job to the possibility of it being a long-term career.

Part of growth opportunities comes with creating positions within the company, so employees have somewhere to strive for. Next, you also need to provide training opportunities. Even if employees don’t want to move into a different position, offering chances to further their skills shows them that you care about their development and want them to stick around.

Give Them Encouragement and Feedback

Work satisfaction comes in various forms, including feedback you provide as the boss. When you’re told you’re doing an excellent job at something, you likely feel pretty good about yourself and want to continue performing well. Positive feedback and encouragement is contagious and can do wonders for motivation and happiness.

Feedback shouldn’t just be all positive, though. There is such a thing as constructive criticism too. Again, it’s about showing that you care about their performance on many levels and want them to achieve in their position.

Listen to Your Employees

One of the best ways to improve office happiness and motivation is to seek out what your employees want and need from you. You can do this in many ways, but a good idea is to have an open door that employees feel comfortable walking through. If you show them that you value their opinion, they’ll be more likely to express what they need from you to help them be their best at work.

Keep your employees motivated and happy with simple things. Although offering rewards and pay raises are excellent, it doesn’t always have to be monetary. Being available to talk, offering support, and encouraging your employees to succeed can go a long way.

How to Start A Business From Home

Posted on by

With all the changes we went through in 2020, you may be wondering how you can make a business work that can withstand a global shutdown. Many home-based businesses were still able to operate in some capacity (with some not affected at all).

Home-based businesses are an excellent way to make an additional income or use it as your career option altogether. You may be interested in working from home for many reasons, so why not get one started?

Reviews for Corporate Business Solutions has five tips to help get your home-based business started and on the path to success.

Make a Note of Your Talents

Before beginning, it’s a good idea to jot down you’re talents. What are you good at?

When going into business, working on a path that uses your talents can help in many ways. For one, you’re more likely to enjoy the job if it’s something you’re good at, and it will show you if you’re suited for running a business.

Brainstorm Business Ideas

Next, spend some time brainstorming ideas that you could turn into a business. Start with ideas that use your talents already listed. Next, move onto any hobbies you have that you could sell as a product or service. Many home-based businesses begin from someone’s hobby.

Create a Business Plan Draft

Once you have an idea, you’ll need to ensure you can turn it into a business. Do that by starting your first draft of your business plan. Your business plan is something you’ll refer back to as your business grows and use it for any financing you may need.

When writing your business plan, start with a summary of what your company would look like. How would you operate and make a profit? What would your target audience look like and the competition in your field? As the business grows, you can start to include growth goals to move forward.

Do a Test Run

So, you have a plan in place and ready to open the doors. However, it’s a good idea to do a test run of your business with friends and family. Ask for their honest opinion about your plan, if they think the public would like it and if it’s something you can make a living from.

If you get positive feedback from that test run, you can then take your business idea into the public world as a beta. Beta is when you’re testing what your business sells to the public to get honest feedback. You can do this by creating a social media account and asking for a select amount of people to do a test run on what you’re offering. Provide them with a discount to entice customers.

Legalize Your Business

After you’ve gone through everything above and feel confident that you have a solid business idea, it’s time to legalize your business. That means applying for a business name, creating tax accounts, and getting any required licenses.

Upon legalizing your business, you can then create your website and social media accounts to promote your new home business.

Starting a home business has its challenges but can very rewarding when it takes off. Stay dedicated, work hard, and enjoy the journey of starting a home-based business.

How to Manage Your Time Like the Boss You Are

Posted on by

Time management is a crucial skill that every business owner should know. Good time management can be the difference between checking off every task on your list and falling behind in growing your company.

Why should you work on your time management skills? For starters, it’s an excellent way to help relieve some stress in your day (by completing everything you wanted that day), give you more time for a better work-life balance, and even open more opportunities for your company.

With time management having such a positive impact on your life, here are six tips from your Corporate Business Solutions consultants that will help you master this necessary skill.

Plan Your Week and Day

One step for time management is to plan your upcoming day and week. Having a plan for what you need to achieve that day will help you stay on task, rather than feeling overwhelmed, trying to determine where to start.

Prioritize Your Tasks

Prioritization is another element of time management. If you spend most of your time in a day working on tasks due at the end of the week, rather than focusing on something due tomorrow, you’ll feel less rushed and stressed about everything. Plus, prioritizing allows you to see what items you can delegate to your team so you can focus on what’s the most important to the business.

Start Your Day With the Most Important Task

Are you someone who dreads working on certain things? Rather than dwelling on them throughout the day and procrastinating, schedule them for the morning so you can get them out of the way. You’re likely to have the most amount of energy at the start of the day, and completing those problematic or annoying tasks right at the beginning is an excellent motivator.

Remove Distractions

Did you know that a distraction can cost you roughly 25 more minutes than what you expected? A study into workplace disruptions found that it takes the average person almost 25 minutes to recover from a distraction and refocus on their task. If you kept track of how many times you got distracted in one day and added 25 minutes to each distraction, how much time was wasted?

Eliminating distractions is a crucial element of time management and keeping yourself organized, focused, and motivated. Close down additional tabs on your web browser or close your office door so you have more privacy. Whatever your main distractions are, think of how you can remove them or minimize how often they steal your attention from your work.

Focus on One Task at a Time

Think of this tip alongside removing distractions. Do you find yourself trying to work on multiple things at once? Maybe you’re in a phone meeting and shooting off emails to a client. Trying to accomplish multiple tasks at once doesn’t have the effect you’d hope. Instead, pick one item on your list and focus on just that task until it’s finished, then move on to the next one.

Set a Time Limit to a Task

A good trick to try is to set a time limit for each task you do. Whether it be doing the dishes, writing a report for work, or even cleaning your office, setting a time limit can help keep you focused and motivated to finish the job.

Don’t stress trying to master time management, as it’s a skill you’ll always be learning. However, making it a priority in your life will help ease stress and stay organized.

5 Tips for Setting Your 2021 Business Goals

Posted on by

Do you set goals for yourself and your business? If not, it’s something to consider, as goals are an excellent way to keep yourself motivated for bettering yourself and your company.

There are many benefits to setting goals in a business. To start, it can help you stay organized and prioritize what’s most important for growing your business. You’ve likely been in the overwhelming position of determining where and how you need to grow your business, only to not do anything about it. Setting goals is one way to battle feeling overwhelmed and allow you to progress forward.

Are you ready to grow your business this year? Use the following five tips from Corporate Business Solutions to help you set smart goals that will lead you to success.

Determine What You Want to Accomplish

Before setting an actual goal, you need to distinguish what you want to accomplish this year for your business. It could be focusing on growing your clientele, increasing your income, or even starting a new branch in your company. Whatever it may be, make a list of the things you want to accomplish with your business, as you can use this list to start setting goals.

Be Realistic

It’s important to stay realistic when setting goals. Trying to take on too many things or setting unrealistic timeframes are quick ways to set yourself, and your company, up for failure and disappointment.

You’ve created your list of things you want to accomplish. The next step is to prioritize what is most important for this year. Remember, you can’t do everything at one time.

Be Specific

For goals to work, they need to be specific. If your plan in 2021 is to grow your customer base, that’s a good starting point for creating a goal. However, it’s quite vague still and doesn’t give you much to work with.

When setting goals, be specific in the details. Using the customer growth example, you could break it down and say you want to grow your active customer base by 12 clients by the end of 2021. Stating a number with an end date can help you create a plan that enables you to achieve this goal.

Create a Plan

Once you have your general goal in mind (and it’s a good practice to start writing them down), you can then create your action plan. Think of your plan as mini-goals that are the stepping stones to achieve your end goal.

For our customer growth example, you could start your plan by adding one new client each month. Then, you’ll want to explain how you’ll do that. What ideas do you have that will allow you to add a new client each month? Write out your steps as part of your business plan.

Make a Commitment

Setting goals and making your plan is only part of the process. You need to commit to what you come up with. Otherwise, you won’t achieve your goals.

Make a commitment with yourself, your employees, or your customers (depending on your goals). Track your results as you progress and reward yourself for each milestone you hit, as this will help keep you motivated.

Ready to take your business to the next level this year? Use the above five tips to help you set realistic goals that you’ll be able to achieve.

Organization 101: 5 Tips for Daily Planning

Posted on by

How do you start your day? Do you hit the snooze button multiple times before rushing to get ready? Maybe you get upright when you’re alarm goes off and jump right in the shower before enjoying your morning coffee. Whatever it may be, it’s worth considering adding daily planning to your routine.

Daily planning can help you with many aspects of your life, not just with the organization. You’ll be more prepared for upcoming obstacles and deadlines, reduce your stress, knowing you have a plan, and will help hold you accountable for the task at hand.

If you’re ready to take a few extra minutes each morning for daily planning, the following five tips from CBS-CBS.com will help.

Physically Write Out Your Daily Plan

Daily planning doesn’t mean you take a few moments to think about everything you need to accomplish today. Chances are, you will forget lots of it halfway through. To be successful at the daily plan, you need to physically write it out. Having a calendar with space to write out each day will help.

Set a Time for Planning

Why should you plan your day at the same time, whether it be the night before or while having your morning coffee? It will help you create a habit. Once-daily planning becomes a habit, your chances of forgetting to do it will significantly decrease.

Have an Ongoing Task List

If you struggle to think of all the things you need to accomplish in a day, create an ongoing task list. Whether you make it a weekly or monthly list that you have on hand, you can refer back to it while you’re planning your day. That way, you always know what tasks are coming up.

Not only that but having that list will help you prioritize what’s most essential and what can wait for another day. Prioritizing is an excellent organizational trick that will keep you on track of everything you need to do.

Give Yourself More Time Than You Think

A trick you’ll quickly start to realize is that tasks often take longer than you expect. Distractions occur at any given moment that can throw you off schedule. If you give yourself some flexibility in your daily plan, you’re less likely to fall behind and get stressed and more likely to achieve everything on your list.

Reflect on Your Day and Carry Over Tasks

You’ll have days when you don’t accomplish everything in your plan, and that’s okay. Try not to stress over what you couldn’t get done. Instead, reflect on your day and carry over any tasks to the next day.

Taking a moment to reflect on your day can help you in a few ways. First, you can see if you overscheduled yourself or if you had too many distractions that took away your attention. Reflecting can also boost your confidence when you see everything you did achieve in the day.

Incorporate daily planning into your morning or nighttime routine. It will help you stay organized, prioritize what is most important right now, and will likely help prevent you from feeling overwhelmed with what to do.

6 Tips For Setting and Maintaining Your New Year’s Resolution

Posted on by

Do you set New Year’s resolutions? Chances are you have at some point, only to break it shortly after. Don’t worry. You’re not alone. A 2018 survey found that only four percent of those who made New Year’s resolutions actually kept them. If you’re not one for making a resolution, you’re amongst 54 percent who didn’t that year either.

Why are only a handful of people actually achieving their resolution? It often starts at the beginning – people set unrealistic resolutions that are nearly impossible to achieve.

Whether you’re making resolutions for yourself or your business, CBS-CBS.com has six tips to help you set and maintain your New Year’s resolutions.

Don’t Go Overboard With the Number

First, make only a few resolutions, or even simply one. It’s easy to get overwhelmed and ultimately abandon your resolutions when you have too many. You’re more likely to stick to your list of goals when you have only a few at a time. Remember, you can’t change everything all at once.

Set Realistic Resolutions

One of the top reasons someone will likely fall short of their resolution is that they set something unrealistic. If you set yourself an unattainable goal, how do you expect ever to achieve it? For example, if you love sweets but want to cut back, saying you won’t touch sweets for the whole year will be extremely challenging.

Setting something realistic for you provides you with a better chance to succeed right from the start. So, that sweets resolution? Instead of saying you’ll never eat them again, set a resolution that you’ll start to cut back.

Have a Plan

New Year’s resolutions are goals with a different name. What’s the best way to achieve your goal? By creating a plan to get you there.

Continuing with our sweets goal, create a more specific plan for cutting back. You could start by saying you want to reduce how much money you spend in January on candy. That can give you a better idea of how you move forward in February. The point is, create a roadmap for your success.

Set a Meaningful Resolution

A resolution that has value to you is something you’re more likely to stick with. A common goal is to become healthier in the new year. If that isn’t a top priority for you at this moment, you likely won’t make it a priority moving forward.

There isn’t a right or wrong resolution to make, as long as it has meaning for you.

Track Your Progress

It may seem like extra work, but tracking your progress is another excellent tactic to stay on task with your resolution. When you see progress, you create momentum and motivation for yourself to continue with your plan.

Be Okay With Setbacks

Resolutions aren’t an all in or fail idea. You will likely have setbacks with your journey, and you may even abandon your resolution entirely, and that’s okay. Don’t get too hard on yourself if you don’t see much progress, or if you find a few months in that the resolution just isn’t working for you.

 

New Year’s resolutions can be a fun way to create new habits in your life. However, they can also cause a lot of stress too. Avoid them turning stressful by using the tips above to set and maintain a positive resolution.

Setting Up for Success: 5 Tips to Prepare Your Business for the New Year

Posted on by

Welcome to December – where every business owner has experienced the overwhelming feeling that comes from year-end. There is the extra pressure to finish any lingering tasks before the year wraps up. Because of everything racing through your mind to finish in the remaining weeks of the year, many entrepreneurs miss an excellent opportunity to prepare their business for the upcoming year.

During your year-end wrap-up, you can do a few things to help prepare your business for a prosperous new year. Add the following five tips to your year-end to-do list from Corporate Business Solutions to help you prep for success.

Analyze the Past 12 Months

The best way to prepare for the upcoming year is to analyze what happened in the last 12 months. All of the data you collect from January through December provides valuable information on where your business is at and where it’s heading.

If you’re a goal setter, drag out the goals you set last January. Did you achieve them? What step did you take to reach your goal? Don’t just focus on the goals you achieved and forget about the rest. For any goals you set that you and your business didn’t hit, what happened?

Perform a KPI Analysis

Have you ever done a KPI (key performance indicator) before? If not, now is a good time to do one. KPIs help you measure your company’s success. You may want to focus on your business’s finances or choose to analyze other aspects like customer and employee retention.

Set Goals for the New Year

You want to start with data analysis first so you can set realistic goals for your business. Before the new year, write out a list of short-term and long-term goals. They could be anything from increasing your revenue by a certain percentage by quarter two or that you’ll implement a new routine for employees to help with efficiency.

When making goals, make SMART ones – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-based. Many people end up setting themselves up for failure right at the start, which is discouraging. By following the SMART goal method, you can set a goal you’ll achieve.

Clean Up Your Mailbox

How often do you open your business email to have a mini freak out because your inbox is almost full? Don’t bring that unnecessary stress into the new year. Block off a few hours to go through and organize your email. You’ll be thankful you did when you start work again in the new year with a clean inbox.

Have a Year-End Meeting With Employees

What better way to get a pulse on how your business operates than to ask those who help keep the doors open? Schedule a year-end meeting with all of your employees. Ask them questions like how they felt the past year went, what didn’t work, any ideas they have for the new year, and what could you do differently as a boss? Just make sure to give them advance notice so they can all come prepared.

Simple tasks that have the most significant impact are the way to go when wrapping up the year. Start the new year off with a bang by preparing ahead of time.

Social Media Marketing 101: 5 Tips for Running a Successful Facebook Ad

Posted on by

Small businesses often look for cost-effective advertising methods. That’s because your advertising budget (and overall budget in general) tends to be a little slim. You may not have the same amount of money as a large corporation does to spend on marketing. Luckily, Facebook has the option of posting and boosting ads that can go as cheap or expensive as you want.

Facebook ads can reach a wide range of audiences. However, if not done correctly, all that time and money spent creating the ad will get lost in news feeds that aren’t relevant to your current clientele. That is why the following five tips provided by reviews for Corporate Business Solutions will help you get the most out of your next Facebook ad.

Make it Eye-Catching

The goal of your ad is to grab the attention of your targeted audience. That is easier said than done. With social media, you need an ad that will stand out amongst all the jumble on an individual’s newsfeed – making an eye-catching and visually appealing ad will do that.

Use online services that allow you to design a graphic or short video to start. Especially if you’re new to social media advertising, getting help from online services will point you in the right direction.

Include a Call to Action

A call to action is a simple tool, yet often overlooked in any ad, not just a Facebook one. Adding a call to action is directing the audience to go precisely where you want them – a particular step that results in a sale for you.

Do not underestimate the value of an excellent call to action. Think of a short phrase (“click here now” or “learn more here,” for example) that tells the reader exactly what to do.

Narrow Down Your Target Audience

It’s crucial to have a defined target audience before you run an ad. That’s because if you pay for an ad without one, you’re wasting money on reaching for an audience that isn’t relevant to your business. Instead, if you narrow down to a more specific audience, your money will go further with your ad.

Track Your Progress

It doesn’t matter how much research and time you put into an ad. You’ll never honestly know how it will perform until you test it. That is why it’s essential to track the progress of your ad.

Facebook offers analytics to your ad. It can be overwhelming at first, but once you learn the basics of these analytics, you’ll be able to adequately track the ad’s performance and make tweaks where necessary.

Always Have a Goal in Mind

As with most aspects of running a business, you need to have a clearly defined goal in mind when creating an ad. Your goal helps narrow down what the ad will be, what details it needs, who you’re targeting, and even when you’ll post the ad.

Don’t let Facebook ads overwhelm you to the point of not even trying them. Yes, they can be challenging at first. However, with a little time and practice, you’ll be able to create an ad that draws in more customers, which eventually equals more sales.

Like your reflection.

4 Tips to Help You Run a Successful YouTube Channel

Posted on by

YouTube – the second largest search engine available (second to Google). It’s a powerful tool that many small businesses forget or think the platform isn’t for them. However, we’re here to tell you that you should utilize YouTube to reach your audience.

We’ve said it before about the benefits of starting a YouTube channel. Today, we’re here to help you be successful. It’s a tricky platform to gain traction on. With dedication and planning, though, you’ll be able to utilize YouTube to promote and grow your company.

Try the following four tips from CBS-CBS.com and running a successful YouTube channel.

Create a Content Calendar

A content calendar is what it sounds like – a calendar you create that keeps track of all your content. YouTube likely isn’t the online social media platform you’re using (nor should it be). With so many avenues to take, it can get confusing and overwhelming.

Create a content calendar that maps out what you will post on social media and videos you plan to upload throughout the month. Have a separate section that breaks down your YouTube videos so you can plan them out ahead of time.

Consistently Upload

One of the worst things you can do for your YouTube channel is to upload periodically. If you want it to be successful, you need to have a consistent upload schedule.

A good idea is to start with weekly videos, if possible. Don’t set an unrealistic schedule for uploading multiple videos each week. Start at a reasonable level and work your way up if you want to.

Add Call to Actions in Your Video

Call to actions (CTAs) are a powerful statement that tells the viewer what you want them to do. You likely add them to your video description, but have you thought about adding them to your video?

Many YouTubers begin and end their videos with an introduction and a CTA to subscribe to their channel. Throughout the video, you can add CTAs to go to your website or social media accounts. YouTube has the option to add cards that allows the viewer to click and direct them to where you want.

Spend Time on the Title and Description

When searching on YouTube, the first thing you see is the video’s title, a few lines with a brief description, and its cover graphic. These are essential elements of uploading a video and are not ones you should quickly whip up.

Your title should include keywords related to your video. Remember, YouTube is a search engine. That means people are searching for specific words like they would on Google. To get your video recognized, include those keywords in the title and description of every video.

The cover graphic of your video should somewhat resemble what it will be about. It doesn’t have to be anything flashy, and sometimes less is more. However, it does need to grab the viewer’s attention and entice them to click on your video.

Have fun as you create and upload videos. YouTube has the potential for your business to reach a wider audience across the world, and eventually increase your revenue.

Don't blend in.

An Environment for Productivity: 7 Tips for Decorating Your Home Office

Posted on by

Whether you started remote working in 2020 due to the global pandemic, have always worked from home, or looking to have an office space to relax in, how you decorate your home office can have a dramatic impact on your productivity levels.

Your environment plays a role in how you feel and focus. Too much clutter and things going on around you can cause distractions and lead to increased stress. Even the color choice on the walls plays can impact how productive you are.

Design the perfect home office that supports a productive and focused atmosphere. Your Corporate Business Solutions consultants have seven tips to help you out.

Give Yourself Enough Space

Chances are, you’ll spend quite a bit of time in your home office. So, give yourself enough space to work comfortably. Don’t toss a desk in a closet-like room to preserve space in the house, especially if there’s a perfectly fine guest room that rarely gets used.

Let in Natural Light

Again, think about how much time you’ll spend in your office. Imagine how you’ll at the end of the day if you’re in a packed room with no natural light. Eventually, that will take its toll. Having natural light not only brightens up the room for work, but research has shown that it helps create a productive atmosphere.

Set Up Your Office in a Realistic Way

Although a setup may look aesthetically appealing, is it actually practical for when you’re working? If you have to get up frequently to grab something across the room or have a desk with no storage, is it serving its purpose? Set up an office that works for you.

Spend the Money on a High-Quality Chair

Your office needs to be as comfortable as possible, and one of the most critical aspects around that is your desk chair. Maybe you’re tempted to buy something cheap because it’s just a chair. However, you’ll quickly realize that’s a big mistake.

Since you spend hours sitting at your desk, having an ergonomic chair helps support your body and keep you from getting too sore.

Think About Your Wall Colors

Another design element that doesn’t seem like a big deal is the wall colors. Before you slap on a coat of expensive paint, think about how the color could affect your mood. Certain colors help promote a happy, energetic, and productive feeling, while others can promote sleepiness.

Decorate with Minimalistic in Mind

When decorating your office, less is often more. Having many items all over may seem cute at first, but too many of them can end up feeling cluttered. If t you’re sacrificing desk space for picture frames and other knickknacks, it’s time to eliminate a few of them. Remember, your home office is a space for work, not storage.

Keep It Clean

The most important tip to take away when designing your home office is to keep it clean. Many of our recommendations focus on the atmosphere and feeling of the room. That is because if you decorate in a way that makes you uncomfortable, why would you want to spend time in the room?

Use these seven tips to help you design and decorate the perfect home office for you.