You can’t just be running your business without stopping at some point to gauge where you are. When it comes to assessing your growth, you can adopt some techniques to achieve this. The important thing is that you should implement consistent techniques that cover different areas of your business — both internal and external factors. Keep reading to learn more.

Step #1: Compute Your Business’ Book Value

Your business’ book value shows the difference between your business’ assets and liabilities — it’s simply the net value of your business’ entire property. When you want to determine your business’s book value; compute your assets – fixed assets, current assets, as well what the company owes (its debts) – fewer liabilities such as loan balances and unpaid bills.

Step #2: Calculate Market Capitalization

This calculation would apply if your company sells stock publicly. In this case, you will use market cap measurement to determine the company’s outstanding stock’s total value. In order to calculate this, you need to multiply the total number of shares outstanding with the current stock price.

Those who engage in market capitalization do so when they want to calculate the growth of a business over time. And, this assessment is a common indicator of the size of a company. It is a technique engaged by financial professionals. By the way, the best way to achieve accurate business growth measurement is to outsource the task to financial experts. Your company’s annual report contains information that would be used in calculating market capitalization. You can also leverage any stock market news website for this purpose.

Step #3: Determine Your Cash Flow Growth

To determine the amount of actual money your business is generating, you need cash flow information. If you decide to outsource your business growth measurement to financial experts as suggested earlier, they will request for your cash flow report as one of the sources for the measurement. This would aid them in determining the value of your business or company. Adopting the discounted cash flow analysis process, future cash flow is extrapolated in order to find a value for the business. You use current cash flows as a measure against previous cash flows, which in turn would reveal if your business will remain solvent or not.

Step #4: Compute Your Business’ Price/Earnings Ratio

If your company is a publicly-traded one, your price-earnings ratio shows the premium on the stock of the company. In essence, this is the Current Stock Price/Average Earnings per share in the past twelve months (the slash represents a division sign). If the result from this computation is high, it simply implies that investors are looking forward to a high value in the future.

Kick-off your business growth’s measurement with the tips above.

Daven Michaels is a New York Times Best Selling Author and CEO of premiere global outsourcing company, 123Employee. The company employs hundreds of young bright individuals on three continents. His International event, Beyond Marketing Live! inspires entrepreneurs to build & grow their business with revolutionary new theories and systems allowing them to design the business and personal lifestyle of their dreams.

It’s important to say upfront that social media marketing is work! In essence, it’s not something you pay lip service to. It requires time dedication, plus a working knowledge of how to successfully market on social media. Therefore, if these conditions do not fit into your schedule, you should highly consider outsourcing social media marketing to social media marketing experts.

The engine rooms behind social marketing are websites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and the rest. Many businesses of various kinds are leveraging the power of these social sites to promote their brands and ultimately grow their businesses.

Now, don’t jump into social media marketing until you have formed a solid social media strategy by adopting the following steps;

Step #1: State Your Social Media Goals Clearly

Whether you want to outsource social media or do it yourself, the first step is to write down your social media goals. You should have other goals in addition to boosting your followers. These additional goals would include increasing your first-time customers, boosting sales with great posts, and generating more positive reviews.

Social media marketing is not all about increasing your following base, but also ensuring that the followers are interacting with your brand in one way or the other — e.g. clicking on your links or buying your products, which is the ultimate goal of embarking on social marketing.

Step #2: Embark on a Survey

You should embark on the brand survey, targeting your existing customers. Create an online survey that you can send to your existing customers. Some of the useful services that will help you achieve this effectively include SurveyMonkey and Google Forms.

Simply feed in the questions you have prepared into the survey generator. Subsequently, you can email the link to your customers. Another method to share the link is to post it on your social platforms. The questions to include in the survey should target the customers’ age, location, gender, and other demographics. You should also find out how and if they use social media.

Step #3: Spot the Most Suitable Platforms for Your Brand

The survey you carried out earlier will help you in determining the most suitable social platforms for your brand — your traditional marketing technique will always be useful for this purpose.

You should focus on the top 2 to 3 platforms where your current customers congregate. This way, your content will reach your target audience effectively. And, whichever platforms you choose, don’t forget to prioritize Facebook because of its exceptional popularity. In essence, strive to have a strong presence on Facebook.

Finally, make sure your website is mobile-friendly, bearing in mind that most people use their mobile devices to access social media platforms. So, you should outsource your website design to a professional graphic designer.

Daven Michaels is a New York Times Best Selling Author and CEO of premiere global outsourcing company, 123Employee. The company employs hundreds of young bright individuals on three continents. His International event, Beyond Marketing Live! inspires entrepreneurs to build & grow their business with revolutionary new theories and systems allowing them to design the business and personal lifestyle of their dreams.

Looking for an effective way to grow and expand your business? Some of the great methods to achieve business expansion include opening another branch, franchising and business diversification. This post will focus on how to diversify your business in order to achieve business expansion and growth.

Offer Complementary Products

If you have already built a substantial customer base for your current product and/or business, it would be a smart step to consider offering complementary products. For instance, if your business line is phones and laptops, you should consider diversifying to accessories that come with these products such as replacement chargers, headphones, casings and so on. This way, your revenue source will become multiple, and your business’ inventory will go up.

In addition to offering a complementary product or service, you may also consider offering additional service. For instance, if you run a restaurant, you may consider creating a section for selling healthy and organic fresh foods – this will help complement and augment the revenue from your restaurant.

Consider Exporting Your Products

Diversification for expansion purpose can also take place through exportation of your current product and/or service. It simply means you are selling what you offer to interested vendors in other countries and boundaries. This option is particularly lucrative and popular among businesses that offer products that appeal to a wider audience. Also, such products usually take less to manufacture in terms of time and resources.

Indeed, exporting is a great way to build a larger customer base. However, there are rules and policies that govern exporting in the U.S., UK, and other countries. So, get in touch with your local business bureau for details before embarking on exportation.

Engage Your Customers on Social Media

Take advantage of social media to expand your customer base and engage your current customers. If your business appeals to the younger generation, social media is a great avenue to gain business expansion — even the older generation is increasingly engaging with social media as well.

Using social media platforms, you can drive massive traffic to your business’s website when you post business updates and events on a regular manner. At this point, it’s important to say that this is more work than it sounds on the surface. Successful social media marketing will make serious demand for your time. So, if this is not something you are willing to pay the necessary sacrifice, you should outsource social media marketing.

Look out for Other Potential Markets

This includes the online market. The starting point is to spot the demographic that intensely patronize your offers, then you can look for avenues such as social platforms to reach out and engage with such demographics. Also, traditional spots can be a great way to expand your business. For instance, if your product appeals to college students, you can look into how to include colleges when you market your product.

Daven Michaels is a New York Times Best Selling Author and CEO of premiere global outsourcing company, 123Employee. The company employs hundreds of young bright individuals on three continents. His International event, Beyond Marketing Live! inspires entrepreneurs to build & grow their business with revolutionary new theories and systems allowing them to design the business and personal lifestyle of their dreams.

We all know that outsourcing is simply effective for business — with it, you can do more with less. But, you also have to consciously plan to outsource, so that it can deliver the exact result you have in mind for adopting it. So, how do you make outsourcing work for you? Keep reading to learn more.

First, Do not use Outsourcing because it’s the In-thing

This is the mistake that many businesses make, and at the end, they will feel disappointed for using outsourcing. When you do not define the purpose of wanting to introduce outsourcing in running your business, there won’t be a way to measure the result. So, this leads us to the next tip on how to make outsourcing work for you.

Define Your Purpose for Outsourcing

Yes, spell out the reason you want to adopt this business tool. Is it that you are short-staffed and you want to fill in the gap by outsourcing some of the tasks? Or does it feel like salary is eating deep into your business profit, and you are looking for a way to cut back on salary expenses?

Other reasons business owners may want to use outsourcing is to fill in skill gap or access a larger pool of experts. Whatever the reason is, you have to make it clear and unmistakable. This way, it won’t be difficult to determine whether or not outsourcing is working for you.

Determine what to Outsource

What exactly do you want to outsource? Do you want to outsource help desk, admin, HR, or online marketing? It’s important you determine what you want to outsource before thinking of the right contractors to contact for the task.

In determining what to outsource, your outsourcing goal should be a driving force. For instance, if your goal is to free up time by outsourcing, then you should look at those tasks that take up the most time — they are the most likely tasks to outsource based on your goal. Typical examples of such tasks include administrative tasks such as bookkeeping, online promotional campaigns, secretarial tasks (you can get virtual assistants to handle all of your emails, bookings and more) and other routine-oriented tasks.

Look for the Right Persons to Outsource to

The right persons, in this case, are experts who are specialized in performing the task you want to outsource. They should also have experience and proofs of expertise on the tasks you want to outsource to them. As much as possible, see if you can speak with a business in your niche or industry that they have rendered similar service to so that you can determine if the client was satisfied or not.

Finally, to make outsourcing work for you, make sure you track an outsourced project to a conclusive end.

Daven Michaels is a New York Times Best Selling Author and CEO of premiere global outsourcing company, 123Employee. The company employs hundreds of young bright individuals on three continents. His International event, Beyond Marketing Live! inspires entrepreneurs to build & grow their business with revolutionary new theories and systems allowing them to design the business and personal lifestyle of their dreams.

Everyone wants to become an entrepreneur — “it pays to be one”, that’s what you often get to hear. No doubts, the statement is true — but there seems to be imbalance because you don’t often also get to hear that entrepreneurship can be a rocky endeavor as well. The truth is, it is the mixture of sweet and bitterness that would eventually make you a successful entrepreneur.

So, if you’re just getting started with entrepreneurship, you should pay attention to the following;

Get Practical with Money

The first step towards becoming an accomplished entrepreneur is to be practical with money. This is particularly necessary when it comes to generating income and managing funds and profits. As a beginner, don’t be like those who spend time thinking about how to make money. Instead, your focus should be on what is on the ground — the financial needs for building the business at the moment. You should brainstorm on critical questions such as the following;

• What’s the amount of money required to ensure the business stays active?

• Are you equipped with the required amount that will help kick-start your business and take care of the expenses associated with running a business at this start-up stage?

The above should be the major priorities for every first-time entrepreneur. These should precede the plan on how to generate money with the business. Particularly, here are two mistakes that start-up entrepreneurs engage in;

• Not raising venture capital and funding the business: What you will often see is that a number of first-time entrepreneurs only make provision for six months in terms of funding the business. And, when the business doesn’t generate ‘quick’ profits and income as they expected, they become confounded. And, if they do not take calculated efforts to redeem the situation, the business folds up too quickly.

• Not Taking the Right Steps to Generate Income – Even for those who have the initial required funding, a number of them do not take calculated steps that help generate revenue for the business. As a result, the business will gradually start dwindling and going down the drain.

Invest the Time Needed to Succeed in Business

First-time entrepreneurs should realize that starting your own business is work and requires a huge commitment. Yes, becoming your own boss is work. You need to acquire the right creative moves up front and in the course of the business and spend substantial time deploying those skills in building your business. You should burn the midnight candles brainstorming on the most success-prone techniques and investments that will move your business forward.

Finally, you should consider adopting outsourcing either at the beginning or later to help simplify your duties and responsibilities.

Daven Michaels is a New York Times Best Selling Author and CEO of premiere global outsourcing company, 123Employee. The company employs hundreds of young bright individuals on three continents. His International event, Beyond Marketing Live! inspires entrepreneurs to build & grow their business with revolutionary new theories and systems allowing them to design the business and personal lifestyle of their dreams.

Thorough and proper interview of offshore resources is necessary and important for a successful outcome. Typically, you should carry out the first set of interviews in the course of vendor selection stage. The essence of this interview is to determine the capability of the vendor in building a team. You may want to adopt the speed-dating style for this interview — limiting interview with each vendor to 20 minutes — so that you can interview more people in one day.

Now, in preparation for the interview and to accomplish productivity, here are essential steps you should undertake; outline the qualities and features you want the group to possess and pass them across to the vendor in the course of the interview.

Typical examples of group feature may include the following;

• Business Analysts
• Tech Leads
• Project Managers
• E-commerce Website Developers
• Automation Engineers
• …and so on

Additionally, you may also want to point out specifics in terms of requirements for each position outlined above. Typical examples of such specific requirements may include more than 5 years of experience in e-commerce website development or 6 years+ experience in project management.

Also, in the course of the interview, do not fail to communicate to vendors regarding your goals and objectives. One of the ways to make your interview with offshore resources easier is to prepare cheat sheets featuring questions and answers — print.

Subsequently, you should use a simple spreadsheet to track the progress of the interviews. For example, you may choose to include these as the major fields of the spreadsheet intended for tracking the interview’s progress — Name, Role/Skill, Experience/Yrs, Lead, and PM.

It’s a good idea to share the results with the winning vendors — this could be a humbling experience that the vendor would not forget so easily. You should also consider further descriptions for each position you’re interviewing.

Another essential step in interviewing offshore outsourcing resources is to organize and secure an interview squad. This is the team that would play a role during the resources selection process. You should not fail to clearly outline the roles as well as the responsibilities of each team’s members. In addition, you should make job requirements known, list out the process, and declare techniques.

Get the interview tests and questions ready. By so doing, you won’t waste time as many would normally do when carrying out the ad-hoc interview. Subsequently, your team will stay productive and focused. Some of the vital areas that your tests/questions should focus on include —- Talents Discovery, Skills Validation, Personality Assessment, and Abilities Assessment.

Finally, ensure you accomplish the following essentials in the course of the interview;

• Information Gathering
• Information Provision
• Good-will Radiation

Daven Michaels is a New York Times Best Selling Author and CEO of premiere global outsourcing company, 123Employee. The company employs hundreds of young bright individuals on three continents. His International event, Beyond Marketing Live! inspires entrepreneurs to build & grow their business with revolutionary new theories and systems allowing them to design the business and personal lifestyle of their dreams.

Outsourcing has been around for a long time, but it is becoming more and more trending because of its super effectiveness as a business solution. If you consider outsourcing to be trending, then you’re probably getting to know this business tool.

Well, if you consider outsourcing to be a popular buzz word in today’s business arena, then you should find out the reasons below.

1: It’s a Great Way to Bridge Skill Gap

As a small business owner, you’re probably wishing you can have the kind of resources that would enable you hire missing skills set such as programming expert. Then, you’re wondering how the other business that is smaller than yours is able to have such expensive experts in their outfit.

It may surprise you to know that your competitor is probably taking advantage of outsourcing to hire experts that the owner wouldn’t have been able to afford ordinarily. So, it’s double benefits in one — you’re hiring the best skill set and at the same time saving enormously on salary because you will pay far less on a freelancing basis.

2: It’s Time Saver

Ask any business using outsourcing solution and they will tell you what a huge time saver outsourcing is! Instead of getting all engrossed with routine tasks, you can outsource your admin and other routine tasks. Do you know what this would do? It will help free up time for other essential tasks that will help your business move forward.

Research has shown that one of the best time savers for businesses is outsourcing — this is because of the reasons stated above. Well, outsourcing does not just save time, it also helps speed up processes, so that your product does not stay long in getting to your target audience.

Of course, you know what would happen if your competitors get to the market with their product before you do. You are going to lose some customers or a segment of the market to them — the first to come is usually the first to grab more customers, especially if the product is great and offers competitive price benefits.

3: It Grants You Access to a Large Pool of Skills

The freelancing world is quite huge. It doesn’t matter the skill set you seek, you will find tons of providers that match your requirement. In fact, the client is usually the one dictating the pace because of the saturation of the market. So, you will have the opportunity of interviewing as many experts as possible before narrowing down your choice to the very best.

Finally, outsourcing helps your business to be in front of the customers 24/7. One of the best ways to achieve this is through help desk outsourcing to offshore providers.

Daven Michaels is a New York Times Best Selling Author and CEO of premiere global outsourcing company, 123Employee. The company employs hundreds of young bright individuals on three continents. His International event, Beyond Marketing Live! inspires entrepreneurs to build & grow their business with revolutionary new theories and systems allowing them to design the business and personal lifestyle of their dreams.

It’s every business owner’s aspiration to grow and expand. The BIG question is; are you prepared for growth? What happens when sales start pouring in, more people want to partner with you and you need more hands to help out? These are all signs of growth and if you aren’t prepared, you may ruin your own business!

Growth can become a Setback if It Lacks Systems

As said earlier, growth is what all entrepreneurs crave for in business, but it can also become a setback if there’s no readiness to absorb the growth. Solid foundation and systems are essential tools for managing growth properly to the benefit of your business.

This “Orrah Effect” which means crippling of business because of unpreparedness for growth is common to average entrepreneurs. So, don’t be so assertive and say “it won’t happen to me!” — except you have made the necessary preparations. Your focus is to build your business, to target where you aim at in the future, not your present state. When you do this, you will be able to meet customers and clients’ needs at all times, so that they do not turn away to where there’s no supply seizure.

Adopt a Forward Thinking Strategy

Putting the systems that would help you manage growth properly is not an uphill task. The best part is that you will even spend less on achieving this. Thankfully, the internet, varieties of software programs and advancement in technology are helping to simplify processes. Besides, you can adopt outsourcing to partner with others in order to achieve things you couldn’t do on your own.

Case Scenario: For instance, for someone who runs a digital marketing business and offers lectures/courses on digital marketing tips and strategies to individuals, small businesses and even large corporations — the corporations, for instance, find what you teach useful but cannot implement your suggestions due to lack of bandwidth.

Now, they are asking if you can help them with the implementation. Instead of declining, you should just partner with a web agency that specializes in the technical aspect of digital marketing – you can find the best hand via outsourcing platform. Subsequently, you will mark up the fees you charge the corporation and make the implementation aspect appear to be also an aspect of your digital marketing.

The same model described above can also be applied to other types of businesses. The point here is that you’re putting the right systems and structures in place that will help you handle growth and expansion. You have the future in mind as you build your business.

Indeed, you can kick off your readiness and preparation for growth by starting out with the tips above.

Daven Michaels is a New York Times Best Selling Author and CEO of premiere global outsourcing company, 123Employee. The company employs hundreds of young bright individuals on three continents. His International event, Beyond Marketing Live! inspires entrepreneurs to build & grow their business with revolutionary new theories and systems allowing them to design the business and personal lifestyle of their dreams.

You’ve lined up approaches for running your business and you’re wondering if outsourcing should be at the forefront of the strategies you’ve outlined for your business? Well, a number of business owners have also asked a similar question regarding outsourcing integration in running a business. Keep reading to find the response I’ve consistently given to those who ask this question.

What Do You Intend to Achieve with Outsourcing?

In response as to whether outsourcing should be in the list of top strategies for running a business, I would always ask business owners what they intend to achieve with outsourcing. As you already know, when the purpose is not defined, abuse is inevitable. So, before deciding on when outsourcing should come in while running your business, you should first determine what you intend to achieve with outsourcing.

Some of the reasons/purposes that businessmen would want to integrate outsourcing would include the following;

• Fill in the gap in-house in terms of specialized skills or tools — this particular purpose or reason has become a trend in recent time. More and more businesses are beginning to adopt outsourcing to particularly fill in skills that are lacking in-house rather than employ those skills full-time. But in the end, they will still achieve desirable cost-saving as an added advantage.

• Spend Less in running a business: In time past, this was the major purpose of adopting outsourcing for most businesses of various kinds and sizes. But right now, a number of businesses are making it a secondary goal and focusing more on filling lacking skill sets with outsourcing.

• Gaining increased competitive advantage. You may decide to adopt outsourcing solution to enhance competitive advantage. You want to consistently gain a larger part of your target market or market segment by ensuring your product gets to the market faster — using outsourcing to achieve this.

• Increased social presence: Social media marketing is hot and trending. It can be a super-fruitful strategy to generate quality leads — but you need to devote the quality time that social marketing requires. In this case, you would want to adopt outsourcing to ensure you engage both your existing and potential customers in social platforms round-the-clock.

• Round the clock service. If you wouldn’t want your business to come to a halt because of time constraint (when you use regular 9 am to 5 pm workers), a great and less expensive alternative would be to hire independent contractors. This works best for service companies that need to attend to their customer’s round-the-clock.

The above and many other reasons could drive you towards adopting outsourcing for business. Obviously, these reasons are all cogent and require that outsourcing should be at the forefront of a business strategy.

Daven Michaels is a New York Times Best Selling Author and CEO of premiere global outsourcing company, 123Employee. The company employs hundreds of young bright individuals on three continents. His International event, Beyond Marketing Live! inspires entrepreneurs to build & grow their business with revolutionary new theories and systems allowing them to design the business and personal lifestyle of their dreams.

Indeed, SEO is a lot of work, which is why many companies do not want to dabble into it. As a result, the question that would always come to mind when it’s time for SEO campaigns is whether to outsource SEO or squeeze out time to do it in-house. Well, there are some factors you have to consider when making a decision on whether to outsource or handle SEO task in-house.

Factor #1: When Should You Outsource?

Finding out when to outsource is the first factor to consider as you evaluate the SEO task at hand. Undoubtedly, outsourcing is a desirable alternative to handling some routine and tiring tasks in-house. SEO is one of those tasks you wouldn’t want to dare to handle in-house.

Besides, it is not possible to just convert an accountant or admin person in your company to an SEO pro overnight — bearing in mind that SEO is sensitive and as a result should be handled by an expert in the niche. So, when should you outsource SEO campaigns? You still need to ponder on another question before you can truly determine when the time is ripe to contract an independent contractor for your SEO tasks.

That question is; is there an insider that can handle search engine optimization like a pro? This is very important. Someone who is well acquainted with the ins and outs of search engines’ algorithm should be the one handling your company’s SEO — which is the only way you can generate returns on SEO investment.

So, if you do not have an expert in-house, you may want to hire an expert to train a segment of your in-house workforce for SEO. But then, is this really the best thing to do? Have you considered what it would require both in terms of cost and efforts to go that route? Besides, the people you may want to train may not be interested in the SEO niche — and as a result, may not grasp the nitty-gritty of SEO.

Okay, what about hiring an SEO expert in-house? There are issues with this option as well. Remember, SEO is not something that runs indefinitely, a time would come when you will take a break to watch the outcome of your SEO investments so far. So, if you hire the expert, it means you will keep paying salary even when there’s little or nothing for the expert to do.

On the other hand, outsourcing your SEO would mean stopping to pay remuneration to the SEO expert once you take a break from SEO campaigns — obviously, outsourcing comes in handy as the best option when considering SEO activities and campaigns.

Factor #2: When to Stay Away from SEO Outsourcing?

While there’s a time when you need to pull back from SEO to see what the efforts so far would yield, it doesn’t stop SEO completely. In essence, SEO is an ongoing process, especially when you want a non-stop SEO work for an extensive time-frame until your online presence becomes unshakable. In this case, the follow-up tasks after the main SEO work can be handled in-house. So, you may refrain from outsourcing SEO and train people in-house to follow up on SEO efforts.

Daven Michaels is a New York Times Best Selling Author and CEO of premiere global outsourcing company, 123Employee. The company employs hundreds of young bright individuals on three continents. His International event, Beyond Marketing Live! inspires entrepreneurs to build & grow their business with revolutionary new theories and systems allowing them to design the business and personal lifestyle of their dreams.