Happy Holidays from AWE, We Look Forward to 2012!
We just wanted to take a moment to wish all of our current and future customers Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year! 2011 was a great year for our company as we made many changes and improvements all for the betterment of our customers. We look forward to 2012 and hope that if you are thinking of further developing your business, chances are we already have the solution you may be seeking elsewhere.
Please follow the links below to learn more about our Business Development Services!
Organizing Your Company
Organizing Your Company
Strategies for Small and New Start Up Businesses
Developing your company organization involves tapping into a variety of resources that you will need to put your company on an even playing field with the more seasoned or experienced businesses in your field.
Most new and small businesses cannot afford the overhead burden to hire the professionals necessary to cover all of the major functions required for effective and efficient business operations. When you think about what you will need consider the following:
Housekeepers – These are your corporate office support staff who take care of the day to day operations of your business which includes functions such as administrative support, human resources, finance, accounting, and payroll.
Hunters – The hunters are your marketing and business development staff who are out searching for new contracts and/or new work for your business. This will also include the staff needed for advertising your business through use of websites and the internet. They help to build business through networking and seeking new business relationships.
Farmers – After obtaining new work/contracts the farmers are your line managers and supervisors working on your current contracts. These individuals help keep your clients satisfied while working to grow your existing business with added services or products.
As your company grows and you can afford to add more full-time staff to each of these areas, your organization chart will expand adding different tiers to your staff or in other words as your pasture grows you will need more farmers, and field hands.
You may need to re-organize your company organization each time you win a new contract to ensure that you can properly manage the new work and guarantee your new client quality services and or products.
Copyright © 2011 by AW Enterprises
Five Steps to Create a Marketing Plan
Five Steps to Create a Marketing Plan
How business owners can put together a detailed marketing guide for business growth.
By Tim Berry
While your business plan generally outlines your entire business, a standalone marketing plan focuses specifically, and in more detail, on just that one function. When business owners want to dive deeper into their marketing strategy they will likely put together a detailed plan that outlines their marketing goals — as well as the steps needed to accomplish them.
The standard components of an effective marketing plan can vary depending on who you ask. Here is my recommended five-step process for developing a marketing plan that will help you achieve your goals for business growth.
Step One: Look inward.
Think of your company as if it were a person with its own unique personality and identity. With that in mind, create separate lists that identify your business’s strengths, weaknesses and goals. Put everything down and create big lists. Don’t edit or reject anything.
Then, find priorities among the bullet points. If you’ve done this right, you’ll have more than you can use, and some more important than others. Kick some of the less important bullets off the list and move the ones that are important to the top.
This sometimes requires input from your managers as well. For example, your management team thinks being conservative on spending is a weakness but you don’t. That might be something to drop off the list.
Step Two: Look outward.
The next list you’ll need to make outlines your business’s opportunities and threats. Think of both as external to your business — factors that you can’t control but can try to predict. Opportunities can include new markets, new products and trends that favor your business. Threats include competition and advances in technology that put you at a disadvantage. Read More
How to Estimate Startup Costs
How to Estimate Startup Costs
By Tim Berry
One of the reasons having a business plan is a good first step for starting a business is to answer the fundamental, and critical question of how much money it will take to get the venture started. I’ve had two good friends who, with different businesses in different years, started strong but failed because they ran out of resources.
In the first case, additional funding might have been available had my friend planned better and applied for a larger loan. But when things went bad, his credit suffered and he wasn’t able to ask the bank for more money. In the case of my second friend, she probably would have planned to use fewer resources and ramped up more successfully if she had a more detailed estimate of her startup costs.
The point is, having an educated idea about startup costs can benefit your business more than not having a plan at all, and facing more unforeseen surprises. The key is to look at your business expenses as individual components.
You can calculate starting costs by making three simple lists, a few educated guesses and then adding them all up.
List spending on assets. Your business assets are the things you need to use in your business over the long term. For example, if you’re starting a brick-and-mortar store, that might include items such as shelves, tables, a cash register and so on. A graphic artist might need specialized printers and a drafting board, among other things.
If you’re either making or selling products, think about the inventory you’ll need to have at the start. The easiest example is the books a bookstore needs to stock its shelves or the raw materials a manufacturer might need to start assembling a product. If you’re starting a service business — meaning you don’t make or sell products — then don’t worry about inventory. You can skip this step.
All of these items make up your starting assets. While you might also think the money you have in the bank is an asset to list here, we’re going to save that for another list later on. Read More
Does College Matter for Entrepreneurs?
Does College Matter for Entrepreneurs?
By Carol Tice
Does college get entrepreneurs ready for success? Or, is starting a business straight away a viable alternative for those who don’t want to slog through four years of higher education?
This question came to mind after recently perusing a small-business-focused infographic from the credit-card comparison site CreditDonkey. Among the fun facts about entrepreneurship in the graphic: Just over half of business owners have a college degree, according to recently released survey data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
This stat is particularly interesting because it would seem that entrepreneurs, on a whole, tend to have more education than the general public. Of the American labor force, fewer than half of workers don’t have a degree — 25 percent have only a high school diploma while another 19 percent attended but didn’t graduate from college, according to the Census Bureau.
It may be a chicken-and-egg question, but I’m betting that somewhere along the way the egg cracked and yoke got all over the place. Read More
Follow us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
Follow us on LinkedIn
YouTube
