Spring Cleaning Your Business - Revitalizing Business Ideas
As the sunlight delightfully begins to stretch longer into our days, we welcome spring in both terms of warmer weather and new business energy and ideas. With the holidays past and summer still some weeks out, shop owners should take advantage of this relative lull to spring clean their businesses. All aspects of life require reflection at some point, and your business is no exception.
1. Reimagine Space
While adding avant-garde light fixtures or outfitting your floors with terracotta tiles could certainly spruce up your storefront, simply altering the layout of your floor plan will do wonders for the shop’s aura.
Consider testing out a loop, free-flow or grid floor plan, taking into account your store’s unique space, the placement of your various products and customer traffic flow.
With the layout renovation, your store will come off as fresh and creative. Additionally, the space changes alone could help trigger further business strategy ideas for you, the merchant.
2. Optimize your Bookkeeping
Ensure your accounting and bookkeeping services are up-to-date with the latest updates and integrated mobile point of sale system (mPOS) solutions to make the tax year 2018 a breeze.
If you haven’t already invested in an mPOS, consider it! Being able to accept multiple forms of payment from anywhere you can receive a wifi signal or obtain mobile internet such as 3G will revolutionize your business.
Technology of the 21st century allows you to combine both bookkeeping and payments on an mPOS. For instance, SumUp offers an mPOS which, besides allowing you to easily accept payments via your mobile phone, can provide you with more responsive analytics platforms from the customer data it collects, boosting your overall business strategy.
This mPOS system can also conveniently be integrated with an invoicing software such as debitoor, which will allow you to easily offer discounts to your customers, follow up on unpaid invoices and create professional invoice templates.
Having these services in one place, digitalized and integrated will enable you to devote more time to your business, which is paramount to its growth, no? For further information regarding the cost-benefit analysis of operating with a credit card reader, click here.
3. Cast a Marketing Vision
Consider your future marketing campaigns. Advertising and self-promotion take time to plan. Set aside time to look at the year as a whole; planning for your business matter.
What do you want to be the focal point of your next campaign—a certain holiday, a local event or a new product debut?
With your next campaign in mind, the following step would be to ascertain how best to advertise it. Consider your customers and the ideal method(s) by which to reach out to them—social media, mailers, emails or even face to face as they browse in your store. Reaching out to customers online can be particularly effective. This article from Entrepreneur offers some unique ideas that you can employ to greater develop your customer base.
It’s essential that you know your customers. See “How to Create a Buyer Persona” to develop a better idea of your target customer.
4. Consult the Customer
Your customers’ opinions about your business are vital to its success. It’s imperative that you check in with them to see what’s going well and to note areas for improvement. The customer survey should cover customer service, products, overall experience and anything else you deem relevant to how your business runs.
These surveys can be carried out face-to-face in the storefront, via email or social media. Some shops offer a discount for completing one in order to increase feedback, but even if you don’t, make sure to respond to the praise and criticism offered. Make your customers feel valued and heard, and in doing so, you can earn their loyalty.
5. Staff Care
If you require employees to run your business, it is essential that you and your staff are in sync. Cultivating a team that shares your business goals and operates with your store’s best interest in mind takes work, but is well worth the effort. A devoted and satisfied team is a brilliant asset as it works more efficiently, multiplying your store’s customer loyalty as shoppers are served by happy team members, all of which will end up saving you money.
Begin by having spring self-assessments so that you can see how your employee(s) views their contribution to the company. Use this as an opportunity to make sure your goals and company values are well-known and utilized among your staff.
Lastly, team-building exercises, regular performance evaluations, and meetings will help to foster an innovative and harmonized team that knows and loves your business (almost) as much as you do.
Whether you’re remodeling your physical storefront or revamping your business’ strategy, consider the above ideas and make way for new business opportunities that will rejuvenate your company’s growth.
