Business Loan Options Blog

Although 14 million Americans are out of work, many small business owners are finding it difficult to find the right people to fill their open positions. Skilled workers seem to be hard to come by these days and the employer-employee mismatch is being felt around the country. Small business owners continue to outsource or lure skilled workers from other countries to fill our jobs here in the United States.

34% of polled employers felt they will have some trouble filling their open skilled worker positions. Of this 34%, 24% can’t seem to find the workers they need in their region and are reaching out and expanding their searches. Over 20% of those felt as though the available workers did not have the technical skills required and a smaller percentage, 15%, mentioned that candidates had sub-par business knowledge and lacked formal qualifications. Read the rest of this entry »

It has been two weeks since the deadly tsunami that wiped out villages along the North coast of Japan. The devastation is so severe, that even if all the finance borrowing options in business for Japan that are needed were available tomorrow, some experts believe it will still take at least five years to rebuild. Not only were homes and businesses washed away, but the infrastructure that supported them was completely destroyed in some areas. Large automotive companies that are known world-wide like Nissan and Toyota have had their operations completely disrupted and the supply chain that send out cars and parts to dealership also interrupted. Other types of businesses that sold computer chips or electronics are also facing the same dilemma: nothing being exported in time to meet manufacturing demands.
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Love it or hate, outsourcing started a trend that is here to stay in business. Advance technology like the Internet and computers have made it very easy to take highly skilled jobs and move them somewhere where wages are lower, increasing the profit of many companies. While the concept is fairly simple, the execution of the concept has rammed up against some social constraints that are making executives think twice about this approach to reduce business costs. Some have decided that coming back to the states is a safer approach for their information and can relieve many of the social problems that occur when outsourcing to foreign countries. This new way of outsourcing is focused on finding rural areas where wages are lower within the United States, but that have a highly educated workforce that speaks native English. This new business practice is being called “rural outsourcing.”
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There’s a new trend in town for big businesses trying to save a buck. Outsourcing is out, and crowdsourcing is in. Instead of getting merchant funding to pay someone in India or China to hire workers that will produce a product or service cheaper, some companies have decided they might get an even better deal crowdsourcing their projects instead. With so many young people out of work, the idea is that many may want to contribute to projects just for the recognition of participating in a group project, and the only expenses are setting up a system to capture contributions and putting legal terms in place to make sure they can use this information to help promote their businesses.

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Telemarketers may have stringent regulations that don’t allow them to bother you without your permission, and that’s a start. As a business owner, every minute that you spend meeting or talking with someone who is only wasting your time is also reducing your efficiency and impacting your bottom line. That’s why, even though they want to generate exposure for our businesses, they don’t want to spend so much time answering spam emails, fielding unimportant phone calls, or simply updating their social networking profiles. Business owners want to be available to their customers. Businesses want to maintain an online presence, creating massive exposure, but owners don’t want to spend their entire day hooked to an ear piece in our head, and a keyboard at our fingertips. There will not be enough time to do that and also run a growing business. To take control, they often hire others to field their communications, even acquiring a business loan, to fund the outsource with the idea of saving money in the long run.

Put In Spam Filters

There are a number of ways to make sure your blog and your email addresses aren’t harvested and spammed by email robots. SpamArrest is a popular online service that allows you to verify people before giving them access to your email account. This works well for an email address that you’ve reserved for particular clients or employees. The best way to keep people out is not to advertise that email address online, and not to subscribe to anything with it. That may not be possible, so the next best thing is to only offer permission via verification. Keep in mind that this can keep automated newsletters and other types of mass emailings from hitting your inbox too.

Outsource Your Communications

Just like people hire a receptionist to field phone calls, you can hire virtual assistants who will field calls, read email, forward important issues to you, even post on social networking sites to maintain and online presence. The problem is too many people are always trying to contact business owners as they are trying to sell them something new, ask for job, or provide information. It might be helpful for businesses, but it’s not necessary to look at that minute. Hire someone to handle these types of interactions and file them for later review.

In a way social networking has turned the rule of 100 to 1 response rate upside down. Now, you can log online, put in a social networking site, and get 100 followers or friends pretty easily just through online networking. They are contacting you, not you them. Instead of sending out 100 anonymous mailings, and receiving one response to follow up, you now have 100 follow ups to figure out the one that matters. It’s up to you to figure out which one is going to be a customer. In order to do that, they all expect some level of interaction, and if you’re stuck sitting in front of the computer to maintain a social networking presence, you’re wasting valuable time that could be spent elsewhere. You can hire social media experts or ask your virtual assistant to keep track of people who friend or follow you and give them a plan to follow to market these people. At the point they want to convert, that’s the point where you might want to be involved, or have a higher level of contact established.

Set Up Some Automatic Follow Up

There is a great deal of controversy over what to automate when following up with people and what not to do. No one likes the automated menu systems that businesses put in place, instead of a live person, but the reason they’re there is that they are cost-effective and generally get the job done. The same is true of tools that can automate Twitter and Facebook updating, return emails, deliver information products automatically upon payment, and autorespond to people via planned email campaigns. These tools exist because they work. They still have to be programmed and managed, and that can be part of the duties of your virtual assistant to help you manage a growing number of contacts, with less stress on your part. Every time someone joins you online or contacts you, the expectation is that you’ll respond fairly quickly, and automatic responders allow you to do just that. It may seem unrealistic, but those people that wait a day to respond can lose credibility in the eyes of the person contacting them. In this age of instant communication, a day of delay means you’re not as connected or with it as everyone else and that impacts your professional image. Sending an instant message confirming receipt and automating follow up is what most people expect these days.

As the economy starts to rebound from this extended recession, consumer confidence will grow which will lead to more spending and slowly also boost economic growth. These actions will increase job growth as well as overall prosperity in the country decreasing the dependence on business loans as well. Businesses are starting to do better, but many leaders are just standing by as they watch what will transpire over the next six months hoping that all that has been predicted will actually happen. It is very difficult to analyze trends as they are hard to track accurately and usually lag behind quite a bit. Polls tend to favor the growth phase as business owners are demonstrating positive and neutral opinions of the country’s economic growth aspects. 79% of small business owners seem to feel positive or neutral toward economic growth in the near future. These statistics are much better than previous polls where small business owners felt very negative about the economy and the prospects for its growth.

The polls are conducted to see how business owners feel about the economy as they are on the frontlines dealing with consumers who use and purchase their goods and services. The fact that they believe the economy may recover in the next twelve months sheds a positive light on the momentum that the recent spending by the government has created. Although new jobs are hard to come by, as the economy starts to grow, jobs will open up as we have recently lost over 8 million jobs due to the housing bubble burst more than a year ago.  Other indicators may not be as positive as this, but many are keeping their heads up and hoping for the best as a positive attitude can go a long way during a stressful economic period.

Overall, out of the nearly 7000 small businesses polled, most believe that small business will grow in 2010 and that businesses are more efficient with the resources they have. If they can continue on this path and stay afloat, many should be able to expand and add jobs by 2011, which will be great for the economy, consumer spending and the overall strength of the country. Most of the businesses polled also believe that they will either grow or stay the same this year, which is positive as just months ago; many would have assumed that they would shrink or even shut down in 2010. The companies also indicated that they would hire new employees if they, in fact, did grow this year. This attitude is an indication of overall optimism and positivity in light of the serious problems they face every day.

Outsourcing has gotten very popular as the global economy has become more viable with technologies like the Internet that makes a distant country your next door neighbor. When businesses become cash-strapped, they might try to increase cash with small business loans, or cut expenses by hiring outsourced staff, or both. There have been some major lessons learned in the race to outsource, and one of the greatest is that not all industries can be outsourced. If you require proficiency in a particular language, face-to-face interaction, and a location-specific place to do business, it can be more difficult to outsource a job. In addition, managing a remote workforce comes with a number of risks. How do you know they are working when they say they are? Who is doing the supervising? How can you establish some protocol for measuring productivity when you can’t even tell if someone has walked into the office yet? That’s why, if you outsource, it’s important to understand how to manage your staff remotely, before you turn over work that may or may not get done to your standards.

Locating Quality Talent

Obviously, you can’t travel half-way around the world to meet someone face-to-face every time you want to outsource a portion of your work. That’s why it’s important to find talent through freelance boards or outsourcing companies, but how long will they be available to you? Working with a company is usually preferable to hiring an outsourced freelancer, as there is someone actually supervising their work and able to provide a replacement, if they don’t work out. It’s their job to locate the talent. All you have to do is tell them what you need. Be as explicit as possible with all the tasks you expect to have this person do, so there are no surprises later. It’s possible to get workers who have a passing proficiency in English, can do website coding, answer emails, and Internet research. If you can plan out a week of work to show what a typical set of tasks might look like, you’re likely to get a better match. The more vague you are, the more you’re likely to not get what you want. Think your requirements through as if you were hiring someone locally and they were going to have to go through a rigorous interview and hiring process. Even though this arrangement may be temporary, if you find it works for you, you can continue it for as long as it works for you and your company.

Ask Them How They Supervise Their Employees

These days you can hire a virtual assistant over the Internet on a part-time or full-time basis via online outsourcing companies. Get a good idea how they are managing and supervising their employees. While you may not like the idea of web cams or keystroke counting software, these are some technological tools that these cultures use to ascertain their workers are on the job. At the very least, you should know when your employee is logging in and getting offline. You can pay per task, when using freelance boards, but it’s often easier to allot a salary then to negotiate the price for each contract job as it comes along.

Establish A Set Communication Schedule

Even with the outsourcing company doing some remote supervision, it’s up to you to establish a set communication schedule to make sure the work is getting done. The schedule is up to you, and can be as frequent as three times a day to once a day or once a week. At first, communications will be more frequent as the relationship between the two of you is new and will need time to cement. Once you have a set routine, you won’t need to communicate as often as the worker will have demonstrated their skills and the ability to work on their own.

Get Reliable Workers

After a few weeks, if you’re still not getting the results you need, you can contact the outsourcing company and ask for a re-assignment, in most cases. If you’re not sure you can do this because you’ve paid upfront, then read your contract carefully. What you want to do is locate and hire reliable workers who will eventually work on their own, with limited supervision. Even if a job is slotted to take four hours, if you get a worker that can shoot it out with great quality in two hours, they’re a keeper. If you get one that can’t finish in a day, move on to the next person.