5 ways to ruin your business
Running your business is a challenge. There’s a lot to manage, and sometimes it’s easy to miss tasks. But, missing important things to do can later prove fatal to your business. Here are 5 simple things you should stop doing to keep your business running smoothly.
Not taking care of your finances
The quickest way to ruin a business is by ignoring your finances. Paying the wrong amount of tax, not keeping an eye on your cash flow or receiving too many late payments can at best affect your liquidity and at worst have serious consequences for your business, like having to close.
Using a online accounting solution like Bokio is a great way to keep your finances in check. You can upload your receipts and other documents, then record them quickly and easily. Automated reporting and and VAT returns make it really simple to manage your finances. With our invoice generator, you can create and send professional invoices to your customers, and track their status so you’ll never miss a late payment again.
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Fail to protect customer data
Your customers trust you with their data, so protecting it is really important. Safely and correctly handling data are a legal necessity thanks to the GDPR regulations, and if you have a data breach you need to let your customers know as soon as possible.
Make it clear to your customers how you will use their data, and only collect data that’s totally necessary for your business. You need to let users choose their cookie settings when visiting your website, and make sure you have unsubscribe options in your emails. You can take extra steps to make sure data is kept safe, like having an encrypted SSL certificate for your website, ensuring all data is password protected, and deleting any data you no longer need.
Treat your employees badly
Your employees are an important part of your business so you should treat them with respect. Upset employees can not only be disruptive in work, but can also damage a company’s reputation to customers and other potential employees.
Paying employees on time, managing expenses correctly and remembering they are people, not just jobs, are all musts when running a successful small business. Have clear communication, get to know your employees and reward employees who are doing a great job can all help to create a happy work environment that benefits everyone.
Misuse social media
Social media can be a great way to promote your business and find new customers, but it can also have dire consequences if it is misused. Consider how comments could reflect on your brand before you post, and if you have someone else running your social media for you then set guidelines for what is and isn’t appropriate to share.
Customers often use social media as a customer support channel, so make sure you respond to any queries quickly and effectively. Sometimes, resolving a problem can create better feedback than doing the right thing in the first place. So, keeping on top of your social media profiles and what your customers are saying there can have long term benefits for your business.
Ignoring your competitors
Competitors will always be there, and ignoring them isn’t going to do your company any good.
Researching your competitors and keeping up to date with what they’re doing, whether it is marketing, pricing, or different sales strategies, is a great idea to keep your business on top.
By seeing which offers they are launching or which communications they are using, you can then be reactive, and be able to clearly see what your unique selling points (USPs) are in comparison. See some free tools that will help you with your business needs.
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