Navigating Coworker Conflict (from an owner’s perspective)

Unresolved or unaddressed conflicts at work can impede productivity and impact staff morale. While these situations are often a normal consequence of people working closely together, there are some tactics that will help to defuse these common occurrences and get your team back on track.

Conflict in the workplace

A successful mediation may even set the stage for increased productivity and provide affirmation to your team that their hard work and efforts are greatly appreciated. Let’s take a look at some of the skillsets that business owners can implement for successful mediation during coworker conflict. Some of these are in direct response to conflict while others are more preventative in nature.…

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Producing Great Membership Cards: DIY or Outsource?

If you run a business, club, gym or organisation the chances are you may need to produce membership cards. Hobby clubs and gyms use them a lot as a way to make sure that only members get access to certain areas. Effectively these double as simple ID badges.

Hyatt Gold Passport membership card

Many firms also use them as a way to reward customers for their loyalty perhaps taking a percentage off the bill for people who carry the card or only allowing people with a card to benefit from certain offers. Some firms use plastic ID cards with a magnetic strip or simple smart chip embedded in them.…

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How to Choose the Right Printer for your Business

The majority of businesses are majorly dependent on technology, and if you’re a small business owner you’ll probably have already bought a number of different gadgets in order to help you manage your business as best you can. Printers are just one piece of technology that are essential for any business – even though you can do a lot of things online or via email, you’ll probably still need to print documents such as invoices and receipts, and documents that you need regarding tax. If you’re planning to purchase a printer for your business, there are a number of things that you’ll need to take into consideration.…

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More Than a Vendor: How to Turn your Vendors into Partners

For many small businesses, vendors serve a defined purpose: They provide a product or service. Once that is done, the business pays the bill and moves on, until the next time they need the product or service.

Business partnerships with vendors

In some situations, this model works. However, many businesses have found their vendors are an important part of their success, and are instrumental in their company reaching its goals. Those companies that have developed strategic partnerships with their vendors are often in a better position to achieve their objectives and to maximize their results than those who take a more transactional approach to working with vendors.…

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5 Times You Should Relocate Your Business (and When You Should Stay Put)

Deciding to move to a different city when you work for someone else is a major decision. Balancing the emotional with the practical can lead to tough choices, even when it appears that moving is the best thing for your family, your career, and your life.

Relocating business location

When you own a business, making that decision is even more difficult. Even if your business is mostly online, or you work with clients everywhere, pulling up the stakes and heading to a new city requires thought, planning, and a healthy tolerance for risk. That being said, there are a few signs that it’s time to move your business somewhere else, especially if you want to grow.…

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5 Ways to Be a More Ethical Leader

In today’s business environment, perhaps no principle is more revered — and yet more misunderstood — than ethics. Leaders and business owners claim that they want to be more ethical, or that that conduct their businesses in an ethical fashion, yet have difficulty articulating exactly what that means to their daily operations.

Ethics

Often companies will devote considerable time and resources toward becoming a more social responsible — ethical — organization, with the intent of attracting more business and a more loyal customer base. And there is some evidence that those efforts pay off; in a recent Wall Street Journal report, researchers found that consumers are more willing to support, and will pay more for products from, a company that they believe acts ethically.…

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Securing Your Shop: Standards and Simple Steps for Using Safety Tape

Safety in a factory or workshop is a serious matter. There needs to be proper training for everybody in the work-place in how to keep themselves and others safe and how to use equipment properly. Communication is key to compliance with safety standards, and one of the aids to communication that can be very useful is a surprising one: safety tape!

Safety tape

Marking Boundaries

Obviously, machines with moving parts can be dangerous. The machine operator has a safe area where he or she can position himself to work. The machines should be fitted with all appropriate protections, but sometimes a complete physical barrier isn’t possible.…

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4 New Experiential Technologies for Trade Shows

For many industries, trade shows are an essential component of building brand awareness and major partnerships, as well as generating sales. But increasingly, simply having a simple booth and brand representative aren’t enough, and many great businesses have taken the leap to use new technologies to make dramatic impacts at trade shows. Trade show attendees and potential clients of all kinds are becoming better informed and often more reluctant to make commitments to brands.

Nintendo experiential expo booth

Sure, most trade shows have now included an aggressive social media marketing regimen for attendees and demonstrators. Paper brochures and flyers are now largely a thing of the past, and even pre-event, many demonstrators of a trade show are allowed to share pertinent business information with the social profiles of attendees hours or day before the floors open.…

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How To: Targeted Advertising For Your Underground Print Campaigns

The London Underground has over 1.2 billion passengers annually, making the numerous advertising spaces available very desireable. Unlike buses and overground trains, the tube doesn’t allow access to the internet, leaving many passengers with nothing to look at except ads.

Ads in Piccadilly Circus Underground Station

London poster print company Ro-Am Posters says that the essence of a great poster campaign lies in ‘communicating to audiences through eye-catching visuals and succinctly presented information’. A bigger advert doesn’t need you to include more information, in fact less can be more striking and will grab the attention of passengers.

As with any advertorial campaign, budget plays a huge part in where you can advertise.…

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4 Misconceptions about Running your Own Business

Running a business is a dream job for many and becomes a living nightmare for others. For the ones on the latter side, this may be partly due to what they thought running a business would be like compared to what it actually is.

Overwhelmed entrepreneur

We all see really cool stories of the Richard Branson’s of the world buying up islands because they happened to have the same name as their companies or the billionaire 30-somethings that jet set around the world while Anderson Cooper tags along. We then think, “Wow that could be my island” or “That could be me and my friends going to surf by private jet.”…

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