Occasional employee absences or tardiness, although inconvenient, are part of the human condition. However, an employee who habitually arrives late, calls out or simply doesn’t show up is being unfair to everyone who has to take up the slack. Not to mention impacting production schedules, customer deliveries and productivity.
Whether you own a CNC shop or are responsible for bringing in business for your employer, you’ll be more successful if you move beyond basic sales tactics to developing and implementing marketing strategies.
Few of us like to think about the end of things, especially a business we’ve just started or have been nurturing for some time. Plus, with all of the other day-to-day workplace challenges, who has time to plan that far ahead?
Most of us like to think that the buying decisions we make are based strictly on facts and figures. We look at specifications, evaluate the differences between options and make a perfectly logical choice. The truth is, every buying decision is also influenced by our emotions.
Social media is not a panacea for building your business, but it is an important part of an integrated marketing program. Along with personal selling, a strong Internet presence, advertising and public relations, social media can help you increase orders from existing customers and introduce your shop to new ones. Here are 5 other reasons to use social media:
Confident that the U.S. economy is on firm footing, the Federal Reserve Board has begun gradually increasing interest rates and plans to do so at least two-to-three more times this year with additional increases in 2018. Along with the average consumer, businesses will soon begin to feel the effects in some obvious and not-so-obvious ways. This is especially true for small business (defined as those with 500 or fewer employees) who own or employ about half of the American workforce.
There’s no question that finding good employees for your CNC shop is challenging – as is holding onto them. Employees leave companies for a variety of reasons including uncertainty about their financial futures, particularly their ability to someday retire comfortably. One way to relieve this concern is to establish a 401 (k) plan. The IRS has specific guidelines for such plans, but in general here’s how they work:
Many who run small to mid-size businesses tend to think of cybercrime as only a big business problem. While it’s true that large corporations, governments, banks and retailers are likely targets for Internet based crimes, smaller businesses – including CNC shops – are not immune. According to the 2016 Internet Security Report from Symantec, 43% of cyberattacks last year targeted small businesses.
Let’s say you’re a CNC shop owner looking for new ways to compliment your existing business. Or, perhaps, you have an itch to add a new business to your portfolio. In either case you can start from scratch, or acquire an existing enterprise.
Succession Planning Question 10: What will you do after you sell your business?