10 Business Tools You Need to Run Your Business Efficiently and Successfully

When you start a small business, it’s normal to take help from whatever sources are at your disposal. If a friend is willing to come up with capital, say yes. If you find the perfect employee to be your administrative manager, hire them immediately. If you hear of a great firm that can do your accounting for you, make sure you get in touch with them. There are many tools you can use to run your business successfully. Here are 10 of them:

1. Website: In this day and age, every business needs a website. So find a marketing firm or a freelance web designer to help you come up with one. It should have eye-catching images, an interesting layout and accurate, SEO-driven content. Make sure it gives your customer all the information that they need about you and your product or your service.
2. Ecommerce: If possible, you can make sure that your website is ecommerce-enabled. This means you’ll be able to sell your product online. When you get an ecommerce-enabled website, each product should be clearly visible from a few different angles. Its color and the sizes it’s available in should be clearly written. People should have the option of paying with various credit cards, PayPal etc.
3. Social Media Pages: Nowadays, everyone is on social media; it doesn’t matter how old they are, where they live or what subculture they belong to. There’s a real possibility of social media comments going viral if they’re passed along from one person to another. So make sure you have social media pages for your business.
4. Time Tracking Software: If you are hiring a number of employees right away, you’ll want to keep track of their times. So it’s a good idea to get a time tracking software in which they log in and log out everyday. You can also use this type of software to keep track of how much time is spent in each task.
5. MS Office: Of course, it goes without saying that you’ll need to have Word in order to draft letters and reports, Excel to set up spreadsheets for payroll and expenses and Powerpoint to do presentations for clients.
6. Petty Cash Ledgers: Sometimes, people can end up spending a lot of money from petty cash. In order to prevent this money from being used indiscriminately, make sure you have a ledger where everyone has to enter their expense and sign next to it. It may seem old school but it’s still effective.
7. Outsourcing: Nowadays, you can outsource many tasks, such as marketing and bookkeeping. Just make sure that you go with a firm that is recommended by most people. Look up their customer testimonials, from a neutral website, if possible. Read the comments their customers have posted on social media before you make a decision.
8. Consultants: Sometimes, you can see that something is going wrong with your business but you don’t know exactly what it is. In this case, it’s possible to hire a consultant to do an in-depth analysis and present you with the results. Nowadays, most consultants realize that their job is also going to include rectifying the problem, not just analysis.
9. Business Plan: Make sure you know exactly what you’re aiming for, at least in the next year, if not the next five or ten years. Write down your business plan. Write down how much you hope to produce and sell, how many new employees you plan to hire etc. Make sure you strategize about all the important aspects of your business.
10. Positivity: You might not think that positivity is a tool that will help you run your business but it is. The more positive you are, the better your business is going to do. And if you hire positive employees and find positive investors, you’ll be pouring more and more positivity into your business. Take every opportunity to increase positivity and watch your business grow.

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