As a small business, you’re looking to carve out a unique niche in your target market. You want your brand to pop into potential customers’ minds whenever they think about the product or service you provide.
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To accomplish this, you need to intentionally and carefully build your brand image, both online and in your local community. Try these four strategies to build your brand identity and recognition within your community and your target market.

Up until now, you’ve run your small business on your own. As time has gone on and you’ve seen your success—and workload—increase, you’ve reached a tipping point and realize it no longer makes sense to do everything yourself. Congratulations on reaching this milestone! That, in itself, is a big deal. But before you take the leap and bring someone on board to be employee #1, you need to prepare. There is a lot to think about when adding an employee to your business model.
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Take these 7 steps before you hire your first employee.

​Do you need to have an employee handbook for your small business?
 
That might be the wrong question.
 
While there are compelling business and legal reasons to have one, the focus on “do I gotta?” hides the real opportunity in creating an employee handbook—the opportunity to create a shared vision of what makes your company unique and wonderful. 

​Effective feedback is an underutilized tool that can have an enormous impact on your employees and your business. When done well, feedback motivates employees, helps them improve performance, and strengthens the employee’s relationship with you and your organization.
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The key words there are “when done well”.

​As a small business owner, it can be easy to get overwhelmed with the many demands on your time and attention. One area where it often makes sense to get help is with handling the intricacies of human resources. As soon as your business expands beyond a single owner-operator model, the workload—and the stakes—increase exponentially.

Your business is your baby; you dreamed up the idea, willed it into existence, and have nurtured it along. You’ve done everything for this business. You know it inside and out.
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And when the workload became too much, you finally broke down and hired your first employee. And then another. And maybe another. Pretty soon, you looked around and found yourself leading a team. Woo-hoo!

But for some strange reason, you’re still as busy as ever. You find yourself doing tasks yourself because you know exactly what needs to be done, or you don’t think you have time to train someone else and it’s faster to just do the task yourself, or you’ve developed an expectation that employees need to seek your opinion and approval even in areas that are not your expertise.

What’s going on?

It’s simple.
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You need to learn to let go… and delegate.

​Running a business in the COVID era means adjusting to new norms. More work is being done remotely, and more meetings are being held virtually. Consider adopting these six free and low-cost tools to help smooth your operations and adjust to new ways of working. 

​You work hard to find, hire, and train the best people for the job, whether it’s running your retail outlet, keeping your books, or assembling customer orders. You naturally want to retain high performers and avoid costly turnover. Paying competitive wages and awarding raises and bonuses are the default models for improving morale and holding on to workers. No doubt money is important, but if that's all you're focused on then you are missing major pieces of the puzzle. Here are four non-monetary strategies could propel your effectiveness to the next level.

​As thousands of small businesses explore creative ways to reconnect with customers, deliver goods and services—and survive—through formidable challenges, it’s a good time to consider actions that will build and deepen customer loyalty.

A shutdown of several weeks or months brought chaos to your meticulously planned business model. As you reopen, you face a new world of social distancing, limited physical access, online ordering, and uncertainly about your ability to stabilize business operations in a fluid environment. How can you keep up with changing requirements, serve customers efficiently and safely, and keep your business afloat?