Business: 10 Hiring Tips for Small Business Owners

10 Hiring Tips for Small Business Owners

Written by Peggie Arvidson-Dailey

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Ask your insurance carrier about your responsibility for insuring your team members. Whether you hire Independent Consultant's or Employees is a topic for another article, however, you need to make certain that your company is covered.

Determine your time-off policy. Just like you, your team members will need time off - whether to recover from repparttar flu or just to re- charge. How will you handle these absences?

Create a disciplinary and review process. Whether you need to tackle issues of poor performance, or chronic absenteeism -- have a policy in place before you bring on your first team member. Questions to address in this process include: How many emergency absences are acceptable in a given time period? How will you deal with customer complaints and concerns? How will you reward outstanding performance? What format will you use to communicate with your team?

Find a reputable company for conducting background checks. If your company’s product or service requires your employees to access clients’ homes, children or possessions do not overlook repparttar 103439 importance of conducting a background check. You can search on repparttar 103440 web, ask your insurance provider, or talk to your local police authorities for recommendations on companies to conduct this check for you. In each instance, you will need repparttar 103441 applicant's signature and understanding that you will have a third party conduct a background check as a condition of employment.

Create a Fact Sheet for Applicants that you can provide along with an application to interested candidates. This sheet should cover your basic job description, expectations and hiring process.

Create your training program. Whether a detailed manual or one-on-one training for a specified period of time - make sure you have a written outline. Your training program should include all aspects of repparttar 103442 job you expect your new hire to complete. Many misunderstandings and frustrations occur simply because a new hire didn't understand repparttar 103443 expectations of repparttar 103444 boss.

By following these tips, you are well on your way to a happy and productive working relationship with all your new help!

Small Business Success Coach, Peggie Arvidson-Dailey, is the author of “How to be a Client Attraction Guru” and the creator of the Pet-Care Business Success System™. To learn more about this step-by-step program for making your pet-care business stand out from the crowd, and to sign up for FREE how-to articles and FREE teleclasses, visit http://www.peggiespets.com

Success Tip : Making Your Business Look BIGGER to Your Customers

Written by Bob Decker

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this, you round out your organizational landscape and reap repparttar

benefits of decades of experience without having to pay a VP’s salary and benefits until you are financially ready to do so. ANALYZE YOUR SALES AND MARKETING INFRASTRUCTURE TO BECOME MORE COMPETITIVE The first step in becoming more competitive is to perform a complete, objective, analysis of your sales and marketing infrastructure. It will be extremely difficult for you to view your business dispassionately and perform an objective assessment. For this reason, you will probably want to look at contracting with outside professionals to perform your assessment. These industry experts have decades of corporate experience in building successful sales and marketing strategies to help them understand your challenges and how to address them. An outside consultant can provide you with a comprehensive analysis that culminates in a gap analysis and steps to address repparttar 103438

holes in your sales and marketing efforts moving forward. Once you have this assessment and know where repparttar 103439

gaps are, you can begin to build a sales and marketing plan that will enable your company to effectively win against any and all competitors, big or small. You can either perform repparttar 103440

steps to execute repparttar 103441

plan internally, or hire outside expertise to perform those functions that you don’t have repparttar 103442

knowledge and experience to perform. This straightforward and easy to implement process will get your company on repparttar 103443

fast track to more sales. GETTING STARTED: DON’T HIRE PERMANENT EMPLOYEES! The catch 22 is this: you need help to compete with repparttar 103444

big boys, but you can’t afford to hire and maintain repparttar 103445

type of staff your bigger competitors have. How do you compete? Eventually, as you reach your sales and revenue goals and meet repparttar 103446

growth expectations you have put into place, you will be able to hire repparttar 103447

expertise you need for all aspects of your successful business. However, hiring permanent personnel is not usually repparttar 103448

best option in repparttar 103449

early stages of your business plan. Permanent employees will cost you much more in repparttar 103450

form of benefits and taxes and must be paid month after month, even during times when their roles are not needed. By contrast, outside consultants can be engaged on a project by project basis and generally offer you more expertise than you would be able to afford on a permanent basis. In short, hiring an outside resource provides repparttar 103451

expert sales and marketing knowledge capital that allows a “small business” to look and feel like a big company, without accruing repparttar 103452

costs that come with being big. By engaging a trained consultant on a project basis, your company gains repparttar 103453

added freedom to refocus resources in other areas as your needs change. START WINNING IN THE MARKETPLACE Sales and Marketing Pros can guide you through repparttar 103454

process of giving your company repparttar 103455

look and feel of a much larger organization. SMP’s Opportunity Maximizer Workshop performs a full-scale assessment of your sales and marketing infrastructure and provides you with a gap analysis and steps to close repparttar 103456

identified gaps. SMP also offers part or full time Advisory Services, allowing you to just pick up repparttar 103457

phone and request help as you need it. SMP is ready to work with you and your team to package your business so that it embraces repparttar 103458

future. Wouldn’t you like to put your competitors in repparttar 103459

position of having to explain why their offerings aren’t as good as yours. Once you take away their size, all they have left is their products…and you know you have them beat by a mile there. It’s time to let your customers know that too. Contact Bob Decker at 952-955-1200 or visit www.salesandmarketingpros.com for more information.

Mr. Decker is the Principal of Sales and Marketing Pros (SMP), LLC, founded in 2003 to foster venture incubation, market entry, and growth services to technology and services companies. Prior to founding Sales and Marketing Pros, Mr. Decker was a Senior Sales and Marketing Executive with IBM Corporation. He holds a Bachelor in Business Administration Degree with a marketing major from the University of Notre Dame.

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