How To Manage Your Business?

Remember our yesterday’s post? Well, of course, you remember, it was yesterday! 😀 We were discussing the first steps one should take, to start his or her own company. We sincerely hope that our short guide will be helpful to anyone who decides to take these steps and enter the gigantic world of business.

And for everyone who does, we have prepared another short guide, this time concerning bigger steps that one should take after setting up his or her own company. Now that the gears started turning let’s make sure that they won’t stop until we are really something on the market 😉

Now I’m my own boss. What’s next?

You tell the world about it. Is your website ready to go? If not, make sure that someone is working on it. And that this someone knows his/her job well! (this was all mentioned in our previous post about starting your business, check our related posts if you haven’t seen it!) There are some nice, quite cheap details that would compliment your ‘bossness.’

• Know your customer – Prepare a profile of your typical customer. Answer questions: “What can you offer?; Who would be interested in this type of services?; How can you reach those people?” Dedicate a few hours to this task – such profile will help you attract the right group of clients.
• Create your brand’s logo – But if the only tool for graphic design you’ve ever worked on is MS Paint, then perhaps it will be a good idea to hire a professional. You may also use a logo maker to help you generate logo designs.
• Have your own business card made – The pure joy of taking it from your wallet and giving to the person that you want to do business with (or to a friend if you want to show off a little -.^) should be the reason enough. But, actually, a business card can be your main asset and source of customers, even if you work strictly online.
• Show yourself – Even if you are freelancers and very much appreciate the comfy interior of your house, you have to get out of it from time to time and inform others about your existence! Go to the meetings, lectures, events – you may be surprised when you find out how many of them are organized. Expand your list of contacts, get many valuable tips from people long in the business, and learn as much as you can!P.S. Those meetings give you a great opportunity to give people your freshly printed business cards! 😀 Remember, always make the best impression, you have to constantly sell yourself as a businessperson.

Compose a marketing strategy.

Your brand must be easy to find; you have to make sure that it is visible on the huge, entangled web. Your social media pages, your website, your mailbox – they have to be alive. Never miss an opportunity to promote.

• Your social media profiles have to be active–  Have a strategy prepared beforehand. Post interesting facts concerning your brand and industry branch that you are connected with. Inform people about your plans, successes, or events that you will participate in.
• Start writing your blog – An interesting and entertaining post can attract a lot of attention. Write about the things that you know well – they don’t necessarily have to be connected with your job, but it’s good if you at least mention it in your posts. Share them on your social media profiles and promote on the web.
• Find new opportunities – Offer guest posts to those people/companies that share your area of interests. The online community is usually very open and kind, and people tend to help each other. You may find many propositions for exchanging guests posts in your mailbox. Do not turn a blind eye to any!
• Keep an eye on what’s going on in the business – Follow the most popular blogs and social media profiles run by the industry leaders. Find forums; Twitter chats, Facebook groups and subreddits that concern your branch and actively participate in the exchange of information. Every day is a great opportunity to learn something new. If you want to be the best, you have to grab this opportunity by the horns.

Don’t do everything on your own!

You don’t have to control every single aspect of your work. There is software that can do it for you. There are, literally, hundreds of tools that can help you manage your company, boost productivity, take some of the tedious work off your shoulders, etc… Check out our related posts where you will find some interesting examples of these.

While we will focus on TimeCamp! Our time tracking software that can significantly improve your efficiency. Use it to monitor your computer activities, and it will provide you with detailed information about your daily performance. You can create invoices for your clients based on the tracked hours, and control your budget. TimeCamp has a lot of useful features, like:

• The tool is available for Desktop (Windows, Mac, and Linux, and has native mobile apps available for iOS and Android to help users track their time regardless of location,
• Automatically records time usage of each application running on your computer.
• Monitors the time devoted to individual documents,
• Easy budgeting – budgeting function lets you estimate how much time the implementation of individual projects will take, and thus effectively plan the use of human resources and make a valuation of future similar projects,
• Integration with popular project management software such as Trello, Basecamp, Podio, Pivotal Tracker, Wunderlist, Jira,
• Records the time spent away from a computer – detects when user ceased to be active and for how long it lasted,
• Automatic time tracking based on keywords which allows you to switch between tasks without any effort,
• Accurately bill your customers,
• Turn time entries into invoices basing on estimated hourly rates.

If you would like to try TimeCamp, you can do this for free, just sign up here! Give HeySpace a try as well our complete collaboration and task management software – you won’t believe how many amazing features it has. Sign up here and try it now!

Summing Up

Once again we tried our best to provide you with the most useful tips that should help you develop your company. We’re certain that by following our advice you heighten your chances to achieve success! If you think like we’ve missed some essential detail, you have to tell us! Share your experiences in the comments below and remember – Go forward! Never lose faith in yourself! The World is your oyster!