Friday, April 14, 2017

How Can Your Business Benefit from Analytics



Data analytics has taken the business community by storm recently. The rise of powerful computers as well as the amount and variety of data being generated has helped businesses of all types and sizes gather insight into many aspects of their business like never before. These days Google and Amazon can tell you what you will need or where you are likely to go for vacation even before you know it. When done right analytics can help your business grow sales and improve efficiency significantly.



There are various ways in which you can perform the analytics as shown by CAMO. A method called descriptive analytics is the most basic type that analyzes the data from the past to identify patterns. Other forms of analytics include predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics.

What is Descriptive Analytics?


The purpose of descriptive analytics is to analyze and summarize the data from the past and tell you what happened and why. Descriptive analytics is mostly based on standard aggregate functions like average, maximum and mode in databases that require nothing more than grade school math.

Descriptive analytics can be classified into three categories:
  1. Event counters such as number of posts and followers on social media
  2. Simple mathematical operations like average response time and average number of replies per post
  3. Filtered analytics, such as average posts per week from the United Kingdom vs. average posts per week from Japan

Descriptive analytics can reveal insight into key performance indicators and they can be displayed in the report or dashboard view.

Tuesday, March 28, 2017

What Options Are Available to Get into Business Yourself



Maybe you grew up helping your parents in their own corner store. Maybe you genuinely love customer service. Perhaps you make something super awesome and you want to build a business around it. Whatever the reason, you want to have your own business, but you’re not sure where to start. Here are some tips on various options available to you to start the business and how to get there.



Franchising


Franchising is a great option for people who really believe in a specific brand and who want to bring more of that brand to their own towns and cities. A lot of people believe that franchising is only for restaurants, but this is a myth. There are many different types of franchising opportunities out there. For some, the best franchise opportunities will be more service oriented, like a UPS store franchise. For others, something more fashion related is a better option. Whichever niche you want to enter, though, you can find a franchising opportunity or that.

The best part about opting for a franchising opportunity is that you don’t have to worry about building buzz from scratch. Instead, you’re serving an already enthusiastic market. A lot of the work is already done for you.

Going it Alone


If you decide that you want to build something of your own, from scratch, there are several factors that must be considered and decided upon before you can start building:

Do you want to sell other people’s products or your own?

Thursday, March 2, 2017

How Can Team Building Activities Help Businesses Grow



Many of us have either participated in or led team building activities in our professional career at some point. Some of those activities may have been very straightforward and short such as playing a game of “two truths and a lie” or “find your way out.” Others could be very intense and may have spanned over multiple days such as climbing a peak or going on a long hike. No matter what the duration or type of activity, it is well-known that team building can help improve communication and employee morale, leading to a better business environment overall.



Team building activities can take on many different forms and can be used for multiple purposes. Some ice breaker activities are good to get employees to know each other while others such as problem-solving activities can help strengthen cohesion between different teams. Some activities can be done in a short 30 minute window, while others can be structured as dedicated activities in a remote location over multiple days. Team building activities can provide a number of benefits to all types of businesses, no matter what their size or type of activity. Here are some of the benefits you can achieve from team building activities:
  • Improve Teamwork – No organization can achieve its goals by relying on a few individuals. The success of any business is dependent on its employees working as a team. The team building activities can show employees the strengths of their peers and how they can work together for the greater benefit of the business.
  • Motivate Employees – According to research, organizations with higher than average levels of employee engagement realized 27% higher profits, 50% higher sales, 50% higher customer loyalty levels, and 38% above-average productivity. Team building activities can show employees their greatest potential and allow them to give their best effort not only during the activities, but also in the normal course of business afterwards.