August 2019 - Page 2 of 2 - Striven

Month: August 2019

The 5 Best Small Business Books You Can’t Afford to Skip

Posted on by Scott Hammer

In the small business world, knowledge is power. From knowing the “ins and outs” of your market and ideal customer to capturing trends in software and social media, every ounce of information you gain can be your big advantage. One of the most effective ways to gather that intel? Turn to your nearest bookstore. Here is our list of the best books for small business owners:

(Read also: The Best ERP Software Systems for SMEs in 2021)

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It- Michael E. Gerber

erp software myths

In The E-Myth Revisited, Michael Gerber (@MichaelEGerber) dismisses common myths that come with starting and successfully running a small business. He first rejects the E-Myth— that professionals in a technical field will be successful at spearheading a business in that field. In fact, Gerber argues, adherence to that myth is often why small businesses fail. In The E-Myth Revisited, Gerber explains how, instead, you need to play three roles in order to run a successful small business— equal parts entrepreneur, manager, and technician. You’ll learn how to navigate all phases of your business from infancy to maturity and how to work towards being able to work “on your business rather than in it”. It’s a modern classic, and one of the best books about small business we’ve encountered.

 

 

 

SELL LIKE CRAZY: How to Get As Many Clients, Customers, and Sales as You Can Possibly Handle- Sabri Suby

business management books

When first starting a company, it can be difficult to translate your passion into getting sales. In his debut novel, SELL LIKE CRAZY, Sabri Suby (@sabrisuby) gives readers an inside look at the 8-phase selling system he has perfected and implemented in more than 167 different markets. Suby is the founder of King Kong, Australia’s fastest-growing digital agency. Using his pioneered system for his own business, Suby took his company from $50 to over $10 million in annual revenue— in just 4 years. Covering everything from Google AdWords to Facebook Ads, this book is your one-stop-shop for valuable advice. If you’re looking for one of the best books on growing a small business’ sales utilizing digital marketing, be sure to read SELL LIKE CRAZY.

 

 

 

Speaking to Influence: Mastering Your Leadership Voice- Dr. Laura Sicola

business management books

Exceptional communication skills are essential to any great business leader. According to an Inc. article on the subject, the “success and growth of a business hinges in large part on communication skills.” In Speaking to Influence, Dr. Laura Sicola (@LauraSicola) expands upon the idea that a great leader and strong communication skills go hand-in-hand. Dr. Sicola is a leadership communication coach with over 20 years of experience and founder of Vocal Impact Productions. Her client list is impressive, boasting major companies which include Comcast, IBM, and Chase Card Services. In Speaking to Influence, you’ll explore techniques of storytelling, vocal habits, and other topics about effective communication. Although this isn’t a small business book, it can teach you valuable skills to help you run your business. Dr. Sicola guides you through using communicate to increase your credibility and power of influence in business.

 

 

 

Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business- Paul Downs

business management books

If you’re looking for the typical “5 Steps to Creating Your Dream Business” book supported by studies, this is not the book for you. Instead, this small business book tells the story of Paul Downs (@paul_c_downs), Founder and CEO of Paul Downs Cabinetmakers. In Boss Life, you’ll follow the company through the year 2012 and all of the ups and downs that came with it. Each chapter represents one month, starting with the bank account balance for that month. We think this is one of the best small business books because Downs doesn’t sugarcoat. In fact, one of the first things you’ll read is Downs calling himself “a survivor, not a financial success.” Throughout the book, Downs explains how to run a successful business, all while trying to balance work and family life. If you’re interested in another person’s perspective about the struggles and triumphs of running a small business, pick up Boss Life.

 

 

 

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t- Jim Collins

business management books

When running a small business, knowing what doesn’t work can sometimes be just as valuable as knowing what does work. In Good to Great by Jim Collins (@level5leaders), you get both. During the 5-year study this book is based on, Collins and his team found 11 companies that had achieved “good-to-great” business status. Not only had they achieved that status, but the companies profiled maintained that status for at least 15 years. To compare, they also profiled 11 companies in similar industries that had failed to achieve the same “greatness.” Throughout Good to Great, you’ll learn the characteristics and differences between the two types of companies. You’ll gain insight into the leadership qualities, disciplines, and company strategies that can take any small business from good to great— and why some companies fail to make that jump.

ERP Collaboration Software Frees You From Endless Emails

Posted on by Scott Hammer

We all want our work inboxes to resemble a peaceful zen garden. Quiet, organized, and stress-free. Instead, most of them look more like a junkyard: scraps of banal conversation littered among unanswered (but urgent!) messages.

Email Overload

As long as your company relies primarily on email to get things done, it’s unlikely that you’ll ever master your inbox. But with the right online collaboration software, you’ll be able to communicate more efficiently and avoid those endless email conversations.

Let’s go through four time-consuming, junk-producing email conversation types that happen daily. In each case, we’ll see how team collaboration ERP software provides a solution that will not only free up your inbox, but also free up your time spent looking at it.

Scheduling a Meeting

Me: Let’s have a meeting.
You: Sure, when are you available?
Me: I’m free all day Wednesday.
You: That day won’t work for me. Can we try next Monday?
Me: I’ll be starting my vacation then… How about the week after?
You: Sounds good! Where should we meet?
Me: Is Conference Room #2 available?
You: I’m not sure. Let me check with Rob.

problem that erp software solves

Does this conversation look familiar? Maybe you’ve had it in person or over a chat server. More likely than not, though, you regularly have it over email. Messages like these emphasize the difficulty in planning even the simplest meetings. 

You should know instantly when your colleagues are free. But you don’t. You should be able to check meeting location availability in a few seconds. But you can’t. Instead, you’re left with a seemingly interminable process and an inbox that’s filling up.

Team collaboration software tools can help you with this in the most fundamental way: by preventing you from ever needing to have these conversations again.

A truly versatile solution can allow you to:

  • See any colleague’s calendar appointments and times they’re available
  • Schedule locations and meeting types
  • Resolve time and location conflicts
  • Add notes, hyperlinks, and docs to your appointments

Surveying Employees

Internal surveys are an easy way to plan company outings and events without having to rely on the lengthy email chain. You’ve seen these before: someone forgets to hit “reply all,” creating side conversations in the thread, and others are left out of messages that contain important information. Meanwhile, employees are so annoyed by the amount of inbox clutter that they’ve soured on the event you’re trying to create.

Online collaboration software also allows managers and teams to gather information about how things are going at work. By surveying your employees through an internal system, you’ll make sure you’re getting consistent feedback on topics of your choice. It’s a great way to take the temperature of your company culture and get suggestions for improvements.

When you’re searching for ERPs that include survey functionality, it’s important to find one that has the versatility to create multiple question types and formats.

Company Newsfeed

You have an important message to send to the company. So you create the email and hit send. Before you know it, someone has clicked “reply all” and thanked you for the announcement. Other employees take this as an invitation to also reply. 

Congratulations, you’ve created a monster.

Fortunately, there are better ways to make announcements. The best collaboration software products come with internal newsfeeds that let you share company news, important announcements, employee updates, and events. It can promote your company culture or share an urgent notice. All without email.

Company Hub

If you’ve ever requested a file from a colleague via email, you know it doesn’t stop there. You also need the revision. Then you need to involve another colleague who helped with the revision. What happens when you were accidentally sent the wrong file or the wrong version?

More emails.

erp software document storage

Team collaboration software gives you a centralized location to store links, files, documents, and other important company content. You can create custom searchable sections to classify and organize your information. Best of all, you won’t need to take files from one system and transfer them to another.

That means you no longer need to use email to request files— because you no longer need to request them at all. Instead, you’ve got a place where everything is stored, and an easy way to find it. No more email, no more time wasted.

Conclusion

Email can be a great way of communicating throughout your company. Unfortunately, it enables people to write plenty of unnecessary messages with details lost in lengthy threads. Many of us consider email the most “official” way of completing tasks or organizing time. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The true purpose of team collaboration software isn’t just to make your inbox smaller. It’s to get you organized, help you work more efficiently, and make your workday feel better. ERP software is the solution for team collaboration.

There’s a lot to love about being liberated from endless emails. When you’re ready to find out how great it can be, let us know and we’ll show you how it works.

How Small Businesses Can Maintain Cash Flow

Posted on by Scott Hammer

If you run or manage a small business, there’s a lot about accounting that’s in your control: payroll and taxes are just a few. But when it comes to how you maintain cash flow, you’re probably relying on payments from customers. 

More than we’d like to admit, those customer payments often come in late. And late paying customers pose a major risk to the livelihood of small business cash flow. 

Send and Receive Money

What happens when you’re ready to outgrow your current accounting software?

An Intuit study, as reported by Small Business Computing, found that 69% of small business owners said that “they’ve been kept up at night by ongoing concerns about their cash flow status.”

The same study reports that “33 percent of U.S. small business owners said their company currently has more than $20,000 in outstanding receivables.” At the same time, “the average U.S. small business has $53,999 in outstanding receivables.”

Those are significant numbers for small businesses. One solution to helping solve them? ERP software.

Why Customers Pay Late

Block Advisors, a tax preparation group, has pinpointed one of the top reasons customers don’t pay on time: payment options aren’t convenient enough. 

time is money with erp software system

There are other (perhaps deeper) reasons, too. Outdated payment processes, poor communication between your company and your customers, and lack of project insight all contribute to late payments.

Preventing late customer payments is all about establishing clear lines of communication with customers. That means you have to make things easy for them, and you have to remind them (in tasteful ways) of the value your product or service provides.

In many cases, these issues are unavoidable. But, by utilizing the best ERP software, they can be remedied.

How to Avoid Late Payments

Here are some strategies and processes you should have in place to make sure customers are happy. They’ll keep your payments on schedule and your cash doing what it was meant to do: flow.

Understand Who Owes You, and How Much

Before you do anything, you should understand how much your customers owe you, how much has been paid and credited, along with late payments. A detailed accounting software can produce these reports in seconds, allowing you to filter for specific customers and date ranges.

If you’re not keeping track of this information, it’s going to be very difficult for you to properly understand your cash flow. The best approach to tracking? Consider software that integrates accounting with both customer and project data. That way, you’ll always be sure your numbers are correct. Having to pull data out of different systems and check for accuracy unnecessarily wastes your employees’ time. 

Accounting software with a powerful customer portal will show you all of your accounts receivable transactions that your customer is responsible for, including invoices, credit memos, payments, sales receipts, check refunds, and journal entries.

Give Customers an Easy Way to Pay You

mobile ecommerce erp

Know that feeling you get when you’re in line at the grocery store and the person in front of you is paying by check? Frustrating, right? That’s because, to all of us who pay with cards, the process of writing a check has become too painful to watch. 

Now think about your customers having to get stamps and envelopes at the post office, finding their checkbooks, writing the checks, finding a mailbox…

You get the idea. It’s laborious and time-consuming for people to pay you with a physical check. By giving your customers an easier way to pay you, you’ll not only make them happy—you’ll get paid faster. 

So how should we define easy? A couple of clicks (or less)! Having a portal where customers can log in, find their invoices, and pay them by credit card or e-check instantly is an ideal solution. Even better, they’ll get immediate confirmation the invoice was paid. Customer portals also allow them to track their payment history.

Give Customers Insight into Project Status

Great relationships with customers are built on transparency. The more insight they have into the work you’re doing for them, the more they’ll see the value of that work. And because great relationships enable smooth and reliable payments, you’ll be setting yourself up for success. 

Think about it this way: if your customers have to inquire about the status of a project, they’re probably already unhappy. Being proactive and, more importantly, giving customers the tools to be proactive themselves will prevent the need for project conversations in the first place. With software that has a customer portal, they can log in, check the project status, and feel confident that you’re on track.

Conclusion

Running a business well depends on maximizing cash flow, and timely payments from customers contribute significantly to your company’s financial health. But those payments aren’t just transactions— they’re representations of relationships that you’ve worked hard to create. 

Money Transferring

Having the right ERP software to make sure you’ve enabled a good relationship and a streamlined payment process is only part of the story. When you give customers insight into the work you’re doing for them, you promote the value of that work. 

When you’re looking for software that has the right features to make your customers happy and get them paying on time, think about their experience with your product or services. Put yourself in their shoes. What will keep your company top-of-mind for them? What will keep them happy? When you’re able to match functionality with your customer relationship goals, you’ll have found your solution.