Categories
Startup

7 Expert Tips To Allocate A Marketing Budget For A New Startup Business!

According to a report in the Times of India, “India is home to 81 unicorns as of now, with a total valuation of $274 billion.” With so many startups joining the league of Unicorns, it has become essential for the existing ones to focus on their branding and marketing game.

Branding and marketing are those two pillars in an organization that help a business to reach out to its potential customers. But as there are so many marketing avenues, small startup businesses often face the challenge to determine where they should invest their limited marketing resources.

Startups often lack clarity at early stages on how much time, money, and effort they should spend on their advertising, public relations, branding, social media planning, and content strategy at the outset.

So, if you have a startup business made from your dreams, passion, and determination, here is a list of some of the most effective strategies to help entrepreneurs and founders to develop first-time marketing budgets to optimize their investments and achieve maximum results:

1. Master One Method First

Just like when we learn driving, we want to do everything at once. But, as the primary rule, we learn to control the steering wheel. Similarly, as an entrepreneur, you should pick one thing and do it well. Once you have mastered it you can start focusing on building out the other options as you begin to get more business. Focus all your efforts, time, and money on a single method and use that as your power to get more business and break through the noise.

2. Pick Measurable Outcomes

When looking out for the best marketing choices, it is best to find out what you want for your measurable outcomes to be. For instance, if you want to sell 200 products in your first month, with an average value of INR 500 per customer, you should provide this to a marketing company to receive quotes on actions, and not just marketing services. It will help them to filter out the options deemed best for your business on actual budget samples.

3. Allot a Budget to a Few Targeted Areas

It will be unrealistic for any business to allot a budget without considering their revenue. A new startup must need to consider its targeted areas and how much budget should be allocated. It is best to focus on one target area and then grow into others as traction is gained. You can also take an online business course for entrepreneurs to learn more about marketing and advertisement.

4. Find Out How Each Strategy Will Impact Your Business

While budget allocation initially is a smart decision, understanding how each strategy is going to impact your business is paramount. Dedicating between 10 to 20 percent of gross revenue is a good starting point to invest in marketing and advertisement. Basics such as collaterals should not go beyond 5% of your gross revenue unless a brand strategy calls for it. PRs, advertising, communications are all similar. But to determine what will help your business to grow and attract your potential customers is essential. Focus on what is going to help you succeed.

5. Build a Scalable & Multi-Year Strategy

In the first year, you need a logo, a website, and some basic branding elements. But one most essential thing is content. You need great content for any marketing strategy to work. And as your company grows, you can spend more on advertising and promotions. When your company begins to scale, you can increase your budget.

6. Know Your Customer Journey

One of the most crucial things that every startup must do is that they should have a solid understanding of their customer journey. Run test ads on social media platforms and Google to find out how much you will have to spend to acquire a customer. You can also take an online course for entrepreneurs for marketing.

Investing in PR and branding can help you to lower your ad expenditure, only if done right. It will also increase your conversions, and give you a better idea of how much you must invest and in which medium of marketing.

7. Begin with Organic Marketing

There is no magic formula or shortcut to marketing your brand and advertising your products to increase your revenue. Startups should always begin with organic efforts, such as content marketing, PR, SEO, before diving into big ad spending. Why? It offers three benefits:

a).  It reduces your budget

b). It lets you find out what works by trial and error before investing in advertising.

c). Delivers ROI

Every single penny plays an essential role in a startup budget. Hence, it is important to allocate the budget carefully for marketing and advertising. Hope the above-mentioned techniques will help you to seek out choices that will give you the best results for your startup business.

Having a compelling marketing idea is great. But you know what is even better? Personal guidance to increase your brand presence consistently to facilitate sales, engage your customers and close leads. Our Problem Solving Courses can help you to overcome marketing and advertising challenges.

Categories
Motivational

Six Crucial Time Management Tips For Busy Entrepreneurs

Being an entrepreneur is like walking on a double-edged sword. Where the flexibility to work for your dreams without having to be accountable to anyone else is liberating, managing multiple tasks at hand in 24 hours can be challenging.

Time cannot be bought and sold. And just like Jeff Bezos and Ratan Tata, you too have just 24 hours to accomplish what you want to. Neither there is any way to get the lost time back, nor can it be bought from Flipkart or Amazon. It ticks away every second of the day. And if wasted, it is lost completely. Every online course for entrepreneurs talks about time management.

As an entrepreneur, the to-do list is always growing, and to tick everything off the list, you should know which elements hold the most importance. Not all time management methods work for everyone, you must get a broader view of what works for you and what don`t.

Successful business owners know how crucial time management is to ensure that things get done on time. So, if you are an entrepreneur who is struggling to finish tasks at hand, here are 6 time management tips to ensure that things get done:

1. Make Your P-0 List

Every morning, when you get up, you should not just throw yourself into the rabbit hole filled with random tasks. This will not just waste your time, but will also put your important work in the back seat. So, every morning, write your essential tasks on a piece of paper that needs to be completed in a day. Though many management tools are available on the internet, sometimes they can be overwhelming. But, if you are comfortable with managing your time with the help of those tools, go ahead.

Avoid Parkinson`s Law which states, “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” So don`t just will your day with non-essential work, just because there is time left in the day.

2. Give Yourself Deadlines

Not having someone externally putting pressure on you can be a positive as well as a negative impact on the work. If you are not careful, this can lead to unproductive multitasking and procrastination. You can keep extending the deadline or keep postponing the important meeting with clients if you don`t give yourself a deadline to meet. This is something that no online business course for entrepreneurs teaches.

Setting firm deadlines can be extremely helpful for almost any task. Whether it is writing a report or creating content for a website, meeting, or phone calls, a deadline can help you with accomplishing tasks at hand under a specific period.

3. Stop Stalling

Time is a luxury. And, if you want to afford it, you should learn the art of time management. So often we spend our time on social media or chatting with friends, eating, or giving ourselves a break every other hour, however, it could lead to more waste of time. If you too have the habit of giving yourself too many breaks, then it is time to stop. Time yourself and give yourself a strict deadline to finish things. Block your schedule, delegate, and time yourself. Everything works until you decide to delay simply because you have done a great job at delegating work and doing other things.

Managing time does not mean that you should have less fun; it is the art of knowing when to work and when to play.

4. Build Up Momentum

A day is going to be productive or not this decides the first few hours of it. There is a reason why the mornings of successful entrepreneurs start early and many businessmen are in the 5:00 AM club. When you are already up early in the morning and have taken care of a couple of tasks, it keeps you ahead of your competitors and sets you up for success for the rest of the day. Most often, we procrastinate because tasks are daunting. This takes away the momentum for the rest of the day, allowing you to do more.

5. Do Right Tasks at the Right Time

Time is by far the scarcest resource and the best way to maximize it is to work in a way that keeps you in sync with it. If you are a morning person, you can wake up early and take care of important tasks. While you can`t make more time, you can use it more efficiently by doing the right tasks at the right time. By making time for yourself, you can also take some online course for entrepreneurs to update and upgrade yourself.

6. Adopt the 80/20 Rule

80/20 rule has proved to be a game-changer for many successful entrepreneurs. According to this principle, 20% of your activities will account for 80% of your results. If you have 10 tasks to finish only two of them will produce any results. However, we waste our time by doing other eight things. Always analyze the outcome of all your tasks to determine which ones are producing results and which ones have just turned into a busy day. Once you have those answers, you will be able to adopt the 80/20 rule.

So many people complain about not having enough time to achieve all that they truly desire. If you too feel like this, the problem is not probably with the day, but with how you utilize the time available to you. Try the above-mentioned techniques to manage your time efficiently.

Are you looking to find solutions for your burning problems? Get practical solutions easily with our step-by-step learning strategies, action plan, frameworks that are designed to empower you with various business functions. Find solutions to every business challenge with our Problem Solving Courses.

Categories
Strategy

5 Effective Strategies To Retain The Best Manpower

Manpower is the superpower of any organization. An organization is nothing without the right employees. Despite this truth, not many organizations take many steps which they should make their employees want to stay.

A hard-working employee who is talented and better skilled is aware of the fact that there are many opportunities available to them, so staying with your organization might not benefit them at all. Where a high turn-out rate is a problem for HR personnel, it could also impact the performance of the organization.

So how can you retain your best employees? Watch it here:

As a business owner, if your employee turnover is high, it is time to reevaluate the business. Your first job is to evaluate why your employees are leaving your company before you know how to stop it. There could be many reasons, but some of the most common ones could be a lack of one or more of the following: flexibility, growth, support, appreciation, engagement, and vision.

When one or two employees decide to leave your company, it may seem negligible, but if a large number of employees are leaving your company, especially the important ones, it is a cause for alarm. Here are a few strategies that you can implement to retain your best employees:

1. Provide Flexible Work Options

Since the pandemic has hit the world, many individuals have realized that they can have flexible work hours and still can be extremely productive. Many employees are now looking for an organization that offers a hybrid work system and would take a job over a higher-paying one. Flexibility does not have to be in the number of hours alone. It may extend to working hours, vacation days, or day-to-day regulations including many other things.

Most often people don`t want to work in an environment where rules are set in stone and have no scope of flexibility. Rules are meant to ensure a smooth workflow. But when they are too rigid, employees start to feel smothered. You can also take help from a business motivational coach to build a suitable plan to reduce the turnover rate of your employees.

2. Extend Support to your Employees

Everyone wants to feel they are valued, including people who are working in an organization. An employee who feels supported by his or her employer will likely stick out more with an employer. Ask your staff which area of job they find unnecessarily taxing and what you can do to make it easier for them. This one step can also prevent burnout. Employees who feel overworked will lookout for better opportunities. Support your employees in learning a new skill for their current role. It will be beneficial for you and the organization both.

3. Provide Positive Feedback

At many companies, the only time employees might garner attention for their work is when something goes wrong. Issues need to be addressed to ensure that organizational goals are met. But focusing on the bad can lead to a negative work environment. Your many employees might get overlooked just because they are doing their job well. There could be many teams that are excelling every day, with no one from management ever calling attention to it. Once, employees feel unappreciated they tend to look out for other professional opportunities.

4. Pay Them Well

Financial motivation is the biggest motivation that can make employees stay in an organization. So no matter how many cultural changes you make in your company, it might not make a difference if you are not paying your employees a competitive salary. The desire for higher pay is one of the most common reasons people leave their jobs. After all, a job that you enjoy but doesn’t pay well and cover your financial needs isn’t worth it, especially if another company will give you the same job for better compensation.

5. Be Open to Feedback

Many corporate trainers and business coaches might give you expertise and countless strategies on what should be done to improve the retention rate of your employees. However, not all will help you. Your employees might want different things than what others recommend, and they are the ones you want to worry about. If you want to keep your employees happy, ask them. Let them know you are open to feedback.

In the end, the most essential key to increasing your employee retention rate is common sense. You know that with dictatorship your organization can never sustain. Appreciate your employees, cater to their genuine needs, and reward them for their hard work. Hold onto your best people by treating them as they want them to be treated.

The idea of managing a business is easier said than done and we completely agree with you. This is why to help you move forward with your business goals, we at Bada Business offer an exclusive online business course for entrepreneurs that come with Foundation courses, specialized courses, and value-added courses.

Categories
Startup

5 Reasons Why Strategy Execution Fails In A Startup Business

Building strategies is one of the most critical aspects of a business as it directly impacts growth. However, it is no longer a secret that most companies struggle with strategy execution.

According to research by McKinsey, “around 70 percent of change efforts fall short of desired results.” Today, senior leaders across the globe have started to take notice of it and realized that the financial losses induced by execution failure are massive.

Building a great strategy is an amazing start. But, organizations must be able to deliver on their intent. Strategies involve changes, and the natural human tendency is to resist them. So, no matter how strong your strategy is or how fantastic your new products and services are, it will only work once it is implemented successfully. To learn the art of executing strategies one can also take an online course for entrepreneurs.

Also Watch here, 4 Step Formula for Strategic Execution by Dr Vivek Bindra:

The first step in finding the biggest challenge that comes in executing strategies is to identify the most essential problems that are acknowledged already.

There are multiple reasons why many organizations fail at the execution level. The common are listed below:

1. Ineffective or unclear communication

Whether it is a personal relationship or a professional relationship communication plays a huge role. The most common problem in strategy execution is bad communication. It means that the communication which is too little, too vague, too late, too early, too much, to the wrong people, or otherwise ineffective can be termed as bad communication. Anything that is communicated vaguely can play a hurdle when it comes to implementing important strategies.

2. Ineffective Management

Failed strategy execution is often seen as a misalignment problem. Alignment means achieving coherence and consistency between different levels of strategy: business strategy, corporate strategy, operational strategy, and functional strategy. Misalignment results in silo behavior and not everyone being on the same page.

3. Ineffective Change Management

The strategy usually involves various changes at all levels. Hence, managing change is an important aspect of strategy execution. Challenges in this area include resistance, no buy-in, lack of commitment, and keeping up appearances. These challenges are largely emotional and mindset problems that come from not engaging people throughout the organization during strategy generation and execution.

4. Ineffective Performance Management

“What gets measured gets managed, and what gets managed gets done.” Hence, performance management is the key to successful strategy execution. If this is done ineffectively, it leads to problems such as unclear or missing objectives and targets, wrong use of measures and performance indicators (KPIs), counterproductive incentives, and failing resource allocation. If you too are facing this challenge, you can take an online business course for entrepreneurs.

5. Ineffective Project Management

Systematic follow-up and project management are two important factors that constitute good strategy execution. The lack of it is a fifth key problem in strategy execution. It comes with unclear responsibilities, missing or conflicting priorities, exceeded budgets, delays, bad time management, and poor or missing leadership at various levels in the organization.

Together, these five problems are responsible for a great share of strategy execution failure in most organizations. These challenges are not new. They have been acknowledged in the 1980s. And so have their solutions. Hence, organizations must consider these challenges and their solutions to ensure that strategies are very well executed at every stage.

Of course, strategy and execution are complex, and resolving these 5 problems can be extremely challenging. But, if there are challenges, so are their solutions.

The idea of managing a business is easier said than done and we completely agree with you. This is why to help you move forward with your business goals, we at Bada Business offer an exclusive online course for entrepreneurs that comes with Foundation courses, specialized courses, and value-added courses.

Categories
Startup

How To Take Your Startup Business From Good To Great In 2022

Summary: Great businesses don`t happen by luck. It is your commitment to excellence, hard work, and dedication to improvement that helps drive your business.

Many people love the idea of having a successful business that is generating revenue and experiences growth, day-after-day. But truth to be told, great businesses don`t happen by chance. It needs a strong commitment towards excellence, hard work, resiliency, and an unwavering dedication to improvement.

This commitment needs to be renewed every single day because things that will come at you for the rest of the day will most certainly try to veer you away from those beliefs. You will start preferring ease and comfort and that will lead you to consider compromising on your work.

So to build a great business, you must have the desire and the passion to do whatever it takes. Here are key tips on how to take your small startup business from good to great:

1. Make Creativity your Best Friend

Want your business to stand out? Then you will have no greater partner in your business than creativity. It can move mountains and resolve conflicts smoothly. It is an inventor and a developer. It will make your business unique and help you bring originality to your business. You can find new paths & new solutions through creativity.

If you have a team under you, encourage yourself and everyone who works with you to explore, find better ways and challenge the status quo. Allow for failure while aiming for success. Creativity does not mean you need a brush, it is a mindset.

2. Be Flexible

The world today is evolving at a great pace. So, if you are not flexible when it comes to adaptability, you might finish up last in the competition. Look ahead more than you look behind. To thrive in your business in the long run, you need to reinvent and improve the things you just discovered.

Great businesses are always part of the solutions and the changing landscape. This requires thinking fresh, regularly. Sometimes you may realize that your prior thinking fits the bill, sometimes it would not. That said, one way or the other, you must challenge yourself and your thinking.

3. Be Curious

Where creativity helps your business to stand out from the rest, curiosity helps you to keep moving forward. It helps you to explore more, open new doors, and do new things. It will help you to climb ladders to see overalls. It will help you learn new dimensions of the business. You can also take an online business course for entrepreneurs to channel their energy in the right direction.

4. Have Partners

It is a blessing to work with people who have the experience that you likely don`t. Vendors, suppliers, and sometimes even sales people may have insights and experience that can be beneficial for you. So, keep your ears open, ask questions, and get to know their business and how it will impact yours. Always remember that you can learn something from everyone.

5. Give Up on Giving Up

Business depends on various factors that include both- internal as well as external. Some of these factors are controllable, while others aren`t. But, no matter what, if you have passion for it, be the person to find your way through, over, and around hurdles that might come your way. Obstacles are everywhere and sometimes they are in the human form, sometimes in difficult situations. They are all hard to accept, and they can kill motivation. If you want to be successful, never give up.

These five tips will help you to take your business from good to great. Running a business is not an easy deal. It needs someone with passion, maturity, optimism, and the ability to take a punch, get back up, and punch back even harder.

But also don`t forget to live beyond your business. Go out, and get new experiences to keep your creative juices flowing. The idea of managing a business is easier said than done and we completely agree with you. This is why to help you move forward with your business goals, we at Bada Business offer an exclusively online business courses for entrepreneurs that come with Foundation courses, specialized courses, and value-added courses.

Categories
HR & People Management

6 Effective Ways HR Can Help Create A Sustainable Company Culture

Whether it is a startup or a big organization, solid company culture is the key to success for the business. Having a healthy company culture determines how engaged your employees are and for how long you can retain them. And one department that plays a vital role in maintaining company culture is its Human Resource Management.

In simplest terms, how a company performs is directly related to how well HR empowers employees to give their best at whatever they do. The pandemic has taught entrepreneurs many harsh lessons, but chief among them is that if you don`t take care of your employees, they won`t take care of your business.

An HR professional`s job is to develop and maintain a company culture that is sustainable for the long run. Hence, the HR department needs to enhance a company`s culture that makes every employee come to the workplace every day.

So how can Human Resource department help to create a sustainable company culture? Here are five ways to do that:

1. Be Proactive

The major role of the HR professional is to be an active organizational culture consultant to the teams. HR professionals need to analyze and understand the current company`s culture. Post that they should come out with a strategic cultural plan that also aligns with the organization`s values and goals and then collaborate with leaders to enhance and implement the plan.

2. Define & Communicate Clearly

HR leaders need to define a clear understanding of sustainable company culture. What does it mean? How can they improve on it? How is it measured? What role will leaders play? How will employees have an impact?

Once it is defined, they must involve everyone at all levels in the communication. Developing and fostering a transparent environment engages both employees and leaders in ownership of achieving these goals.

3. Make Employees an Integral Part

HR leaders must foster a company culture that was derived from employees` feedback, and not from something that they heard at a round table conference held inside the ac rooms. Just like every individual is different, each company`s culture is different. Hence, the Human Resource management must include employees when deciding how to build a culture in the company that can contribute to their as well as the organization`s success.

4. Enable Strategic Alignment

The HR department can play a pivotal role in an organization when it comes to building roles and sustaining a company`s culture. They can consult and collaborate with the leadership to align the organization`s mission, vision, values, and core principles with the performance management process.

They can also encourage leadership to cultivate recognize and reward programs to reward positive behaviors. Lastly, HR should be a great role model, easily approachable, and should coach other leaders.

5. Identify Key Areas

It is vital for HR to identify the best practice areas of focus that can help to cultivate and promote the desired culture. Once it is clear and defined, HR needs to assure the value proposition for the change is clear. It simply means that the leaders and the employees must have a clear idea about what`s in it for the company and the employees.

A company`s culture is defined by the environment and how it feels when you walk through the door and interact with employees. To build and maintain a sustainable culture that feels positive and empowering takes the whole village.  Hence, it is the responsibility of the HR department to talk to the top management leaders and remind them how business decisions are perceived.

6. Find & Retain the Right People

A company`s culture is composed of people. People make the culture in a company. No matter how capable leaders or the operational processes are in place, if the right people are not hired, the organizational goals will never manifest into reality.

The sacred and the foremost duty of HR professionals is to help managers bring in the most compatible candidates, maintain open communication, recurrent feedback, proper documentation for the rights ones, and protections in place for when the wrong ones need to be sent out of the door.

If you are an entrepreneur and feel that you do not need an HR professional, you couldn`t be farther from the truth. HR is the glue that helps to stick every department of a company together.

If you want to start a startup, you can take our ‘Entrepreneurship course. This course is an online business course that prepares you to face the challenges of the business world. It also helps you to build a startup from the scratch.

Categories
Process & Business Expansion

Importance of online business courses for entrepreneurs

Learn from Home: Advantages of an Online Business Course

We all believe that our home is the first place to learn the lessons of life and what better opportunity when you get to learn from best through online business courses. In an ever-changing business environment, the good thing is that you don’t need to go to a university to learn about new strategies, new business models and new technologies. Everything is available at your convenience and at the click of a button.

At Bada Business it has always been our endeavor to empower the ‘Real Bharat’. Provide small businesses with tools and knowledge that will help them grow their business 10X and make profits.

Here are some of the benefits of subscribing to an online business course for entrepreneurs:

1. Convenience & Comfort

We all know that education is a very powerful tool and can give you information that can do wonders for your business

An online business course can be studied at any time, at your own speed and at any location. It provides you the comfort and convenience that a business owner would need as he is already juggling with many things at hand

Back in the olden days, you might have to visit a Business school to get this information, but in today’s time with the advancement in technology, learning can be done as per your comfort

2. Professional Development

Enrolling for the best online business courses can help small business owners understand some of the core business processes and concepts. It helps you in your professional development

Online business courses help you enhance your skills for managing different functions of the business

One of the top-selling models at Bada Business is the Problem Solving Courses (PSC). These are video courses designed especially for Tier 2, 3 & 4 city entrepreneurs, women entrepreneurs and students. We are curating world-class content with teaching methodologies used by global universities to ensure that our customers don’t just learn, instead, they implement the learnings and grow business

More interactive videos with case studies helps entrepreneurs to understand the strategy & its implementation in an easier way rather than learning from text-based books in colleges. Each course in our PSC module has 15 – 20 videos curated by Bada Business along with subject matter experts

3. Lower Cost
Online courses don’t need a brick and mortar set up, there is no requirement of a physical building and infrastructure, and hence online business courses are much cheaper than traditional campuses

The cost-saving benefits of online courses help in saving money that can be invested back into the business

Our PSC courses are also priced very nominally and we deliver content for a period of 2 years which turns out to be low on cost & high on knowledge

4. Learn from Billionaires & Experts

In your lifetime as an entrepreneur, you might not ever get an opportunity to meet or learn from billionaires in our country. Online business courses give you this chance to learn strategies and effective tools from business icons

In our ‘Everything About Entrepreneurship’ product, we talk to some of the topmost billionaire entrepreneurs on strategies that can be implemented for small businesses. Leaders like Manu Jain (Xiaomi), Kiran Mazumdar Shaw (Biocon), Mohandas Pai (Manipal University), Keki Mistry (HDFC), R.S. Sodhi (Amul) and Acharya Balkrishna (Patanjali) have become Bada Business Professors to educate entrepreneurs

Even in our ‘Problem Solving Course’ subject matter experts are bought onboard to give you the right technique, the right tool, and the right methodology to run a business

5. Better Opportunities for Networking
Networking is very critical for all businesses. The online business course allows learners to interact with people from all parts of the country

The opportunity to interact and engage with fellow business owners is in itself a rare opportunity.

An online business course is affordable, time-saving and a fun way to update or extend your knowledge. Having a good understanding of some of the processes, concepts and developments in your business can also help you to employ the right team to take your company forward. So reap the benefits of the immense knowledge available.