9 Tips For Growing A Successful Business

To succeed in business today, you need to be flexible and have good planning and organizational skills. Many people start a business thinking that they'll turn on their computers or open their doors and start making money - only to find that making money in a business is much more difficult than they thought. You can avoid this in your business ventures by taking your time and planning out all the necessary steps you need to reach to achieve success. Read on to find out how.

1. Get Organized

To be successful in business you need to be organized. Organization will help you complete tasks and stay on top of things to be done. A good way to do this is to create a to-do list each day - as you complete each item, check it off your list. This will ensure that you're not forgetting anything and you're completing all the tasks that are essential to the survival of your business.

2. Keep Detailed Records

All successful businesses keep detailed records. By keeping detailed records, you'll know where the business stands financially and what potential challenges you could be facing. Just knowing this gives you time to create strategies to overcome the obstacles that can prevent you from being successful and growing your business.

3. Analyze Your Competition

Competition breeds the best results. To be successful, you can't be afraid to study and learn from your competitors. After all, they may be doing something right that you can implement in your business to make more money.

4. Understand the Risks and Rewards

The key to being successful is taking calculated risks to help your business grow. A good question to ask is "What's the downside?" If you can answer this question, then you know what the worst-case scenario is. This knowledge will allow you to take the kinds of calculated risks that can generate tremendous rewards for your business.

5. Be Creative

Always be looking for ways to improve your business and to make it stand out from the competition. Recognize that you don't know everything and be open to new ideas and new approaches to your business.

6. Stay Focused

The old saying that "Rome was not built in a day" applies here. Just because you open a business doesn't mean that you're going to immediately start making money. It takes time to let people know who you are, so stay focused on achieving your short-term goals and give the rest time to come together on its own.

7. Prepare to Make Sacrifices

The lead-up to starting a business is hard work, but after you open your doors, your work has just begun. In many cases, you have to put in more time than you would if you were working for someone else. In turn, you have to make sacrifices, such as spending less time with family and friends in order to be successful.

8. Provide Great Service

There are many successful businesses that forget that providing great customer service is important. If you provide better service for your customers, they'll be more inclined to come to you the next time they need something instead of going to your competition.

9. Be Consistent

Consistency is key component to making money in business. You have to consistently keep doing the things necessary to be successful day in and day out. This will create long-term positive habits that will help you make money over the long term.

Conclusion

Starting and running a successful business can be rewarding and challenging. Success requires focus, discipline and perseverance. However, success will not come over night - it requires a long-term focus and that you remain consistent in challenging environments.

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2015 Business Tax Renewal Important Information

A Message from Antoinette Christovale, Director of Finance/City Treasurer

On behalf of the City of Los Angeles I would like to express our sincere appreciation to all of you who file your business tax renewal on time. Your business tax funds a wide range of essential City services such as public safety, libraries, and recreation and parks. The following are significant highlights, changes or tax reforms for the 2015 Business Tax Renewal.

1.Business Tax Renewal Form – This mailer is your official Business Tax Renewal Form. If you need any supplemental forms or instructions they can be printed from our website. In addition, forms or instruction booklets are also available at any of our Branch Offices listed on the front page of this mailer.

2.Expanded E-Filing Services – Our E-Filing services are now available in English and Spanish to assist more businesses conveniently and easily file their annual Business Tax renewals online. Over seventy percent of businesses that filed Business Tax renewals in 2014 used our E-Filing services. We encourage you to E-File as early as possible to avoid the last minute rush of businesses renewing online.

3.RENEW ONLINE – SAVE TIME, EFFORT AND POSTAGE!

Our E-Filing System speeds and simplifies the filing of your renewal. To access E-Filing, you can use either your account number, your Social Security Number, or your Federal Employer Identification Number. Visit finance.lacity.org, enter a few details and the system automatically calculates your Business Tax liability. If you qualify for an exemption or otherwise owe nothing, submit the form online and you are done! If a tax liability is due you can pay online via e-check, credit card (a service fee will apply), or by ACH (required if your tax liability is $50,000 or more).

4.New Business Exemption Changes – LAMC Sec. 21.30 now provides an enhanced three year Business Tax exemption for a new business that started in the City of Los Angeles or a business that relocated from outside the City on or after January 1, 2010 through December 31, 2015. To qualify, a taxpayer could not have been engaged in business at a fixed location in the City in the immediately preceding tax year. A new business must timely register for a Business Registration Tax Certificate to qualify for this exemption.

5.Other Business Tax Exemptions – Small businesses with total (both inside and outside of Los Angeles) gross receipts that do not exceed $100,000 and creative artists with total gross receipts that do not exceed $300,000 may also be exempt from tax liabilities. To qualify for these exemptions, you must file your renewal timely by March 2, even if no tax is due. Please check our website for further details regarding eligibility requirements for the Small Business and Creative Artist exemptions.

6.Small Business Tax Assistance Program – Businesses that qualify for the Small Business Exemption are also eligible to receive assistance in completing their tax renewal forms by calling (818) 374-6875. This program is available from January 2 through February 12, 2015.

7.Paperless Statement Program – In 2013 the Office of Finance started a Paperless Statement Program. This program provides an opportunity to help the environment, reduce costs, and provide easy on-line access to your account notifications. To take advantage of this new program, please visit our website at finance.lacity.org and click on Enroll in the Paperless Statement Program.

8.Future Customer Service Enhancements – A key priority of the Office of Finance is the delivery of excellent customer service and the continual effort to better serve the department’s stakeholders. Please check our website periodically to learn of new or enhanced services offered to assist businesses.

9.Customer Service Survey – Your feedback is important to us. Please visit our website and rate our services by taking our new Customer Service Survey.

Source:http://smallbizla.org

Online Customer Service

The Internet is AN impersonal place to buy. Thanks to this, the web client feels very little loyalty to you or your company. Several internet buyers won’t restrain their anger and upset either. They feel safe behind their anonymous email address. Therefore, in responding to a criticism, you need to quickly establish rapport together with your client. To do this, your phone skills and email rule should be exceptional. You won’t probably get a second probability to create the proper impression.

Here square measure some tips to place you on the proper track:

1. Don’t provide stock responses once clients don't seem to be asking stock questions! Lookout to Answers each question or concern that a customer poses in an email. There’s nothing worse than obtaining back AN email from a business owner or their client service representative that doesn’t address the issues you declared in your email, provides canned responses to what you asked, or causes you to want a nuisance…or a dummy!

2. Finish the decision or email on a high note for the client. They’ll bear in mind your last words best. In different words, don’t finish the speech by oral communication, “And I’m extremely sorry you didn’t receive your appliance once secure.” Say, “Martha, your appliance is on my table without delay. I’ll be packaging it right when this decision and that i can take it to the post workplace myself.” currently stop talking! Don’t be tempted to apologize once more and prompt them of the matter. Leave customers with the nice style of a resolution in their mouths.

3. In emails, use “exaggerated courtesy.” Since the person can’t see your expression or hear your tone of voice, your words should do everything for you. Browse emails a minimum of 3 times before touching the send button.

4. Take away or paraphrase phrases in your email that might be thought-about rude, such as, “As I same on the phone,” (Ouch, that’s a reprimand! we have a tendency to expect the sentence to finish like this, “As I same on the phone, Stupid!”)

5. Think about outsourcing your client service. i used to be a client service skilled for fifteen years within the high-tech  business. As a hiring manager I explore for 2 client service “virtues” in candidates: patience on the far side live and a real feeling for folks. If you are doing your own client service for your tiny business, you wish to see if you've got those qualities. If not, you may need to source your client service to somebody WHO does!

6. Raise customers what they want! Usually their request are {going to beware} additional cheap than no matter it had been you were going to do to create it right. And it'll be the answer they need, not the answer you're thinking that they want!

7. Acknowledge their pain and build it right! In my expertise, customers seldom demand one thing quite what they originally expected. Thus don’t begin providing every kind of freebies to undertake and build them feel higher. What they really need is for you to acknowledge their pain and build it right. Creating it right typically suggests that obtaining what they expected within the 1st place. And it doesn’t have to be compelled to be among a free gift. Don’t substitute “bribing” the client for genuinely caring concerning their pain. You can’t get their loyalty, however you'll be able to earn it.

8. Avoid over compensating for your company’s mistake. Gushing with defensive words and providing them the sky thanks to a tiny low shipping error will leave your client questioning your expertise. And if you’ve given them the sky for such a tiny low mistake, what the euphemism can you are doing after you extremely mess up?

9. If attainable, provide customers a selection on the answer to their drawback. They’ll read their expertise with less pain that means. If they couldn’t transfer your eBook thanks to some technical problem, they may desire a full refund, they may need the possibility to transfer the eBook once more, or they may like that you simply email them the eBook.

10. If you are doing it rigorously, you'll be able to use some client service things to upsell customers. “Martha, did you notice on our computing machine that you simply will get a second appliance at [*fr1] price? If I ship them nowadays, each widget can arrive in much time for Christmas. Gift-wrapping is enclosed, by the way.” currently stop talking and let Martha sell herself on your supply. This can be not the time for a tough sales pitch!

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Source : http://www.smallbusinessbrief.com