A growing business usually implies success. However, without the proper foundation to support the needs of the company, it can soon find itself drowning in work and desperately needing more help. Here are four ways business owners can effectively manage their business’ growing pains.

Use a Virtual Assistant

As a growing business continues to scale, areas of importance like customer service, manufacturing or direct labor will see continued demand. For a small business, a big problem here lies with not having enough people to take on the work. Using virtual assistants (VAs) provide an excellent alternative to hiring interns or on-staff employees. VAs are especially well suited for tasks like back-office work, data-entry tasks, research, lead scoring and responding to customer service requests. There will be some training needed in the beginning, and it’s inevitable that the VA will need guidance to provide solid work. However, once the swing of things is mastered, VAs continue to provide great work at fantastic prices compared to hiring someone full time. Companies can find great VAs from all skill levels for a number of jobs, including mobile developers, graphic designers and content writers.

Use Better Accounting Software

When business is booming, the company focuses its attention on keeping up with the momentum. But chances are, most small business owners don’t see keeping up with its books part of their formula to success. Without understanding how the company is doing financially, small businesses suffer from not knowing their current cash flow, which invoices are outstanding or what inventory looks like. Having online accounting software means these things are taken care of for you — financial reports are shown on the dashboard, reminders are sent for outstanding bills or receivables and inventory is tracked in real time. Regardless of size, every business owner can benefit from having a good accounting system that actively works to provide insights on company performance. Having a routine in managing the company’s financials regularly (at least once a month) and having a good accounting system are invaluable to maintaining a healthy momentum to growth.

Prioritize the Work

Effectively managing growing pains means effectively prioritizing day-to-day tasks. Small businesses have a million things to do in a day, and if the company is a one-man show, it will soon find managing the workload too daunting without an efficient task manager. Business owners should consider using a project management tool to prioritize and assign work, especially when on-boarding VAs. Focus on using a task manager that’s easy to use, easy to manage and most importantly, effective in getting the work done. Everyone in the company should be given an account and held responsible for keeping up with each task assigned. Companies using VAs or planning on using VAs will benefit from access levels, granting specific access to tasks only they need to see.

Store Files in the Cloud

Not only useful to share documents with clients or colleagues, cloud storage and backup services are useful for data security when comparing to saving files only on one computer. Small businesses should keep their files securely stored in the cloud for easy retrieval, convenient sharing and ensuring that files won’t be lost from hard-drive failures.

Growing pains are an inevitable part of a company’s climbing success. The importance of having a stable and secure foundation is paramount for early success. Remember to utilize VAs to free up valuable time for management, keep a routine for managing company financials, use accounting software that’s powerful and budget friendly, prioritize work and delegate efficiently, and store important files securely in the cloud.

Lost luggage, crowded flights, long delays, no Internet for extended periods of time — traveling for business comes with its fair share of stress, that’s for sure. According to a Carlson Wagonlit Travel study, all of these stress factors translate into an average of 6.9 hours of lost productivity per trip, equivalent to $662. An analysis of the data found that women experience greater stress than men over lost luggage and travel delays, as well as not being able to eat healthy food, while men stress more over having to fly economy class. Frequent flyers experience greater stress than occasional travelers, because they have less time to de-stress between trips before they’re off on another one.

If you travel for business, it is vital you have a stress management strategy. Here are some tips for keeping your stress under control during your business trips.

Use a Travel Checklist

Use a travel checklist to help you prepare. A comprehensive list should include such items as:

• Clothes
• Luggage and other carrying packs
• Food
• Garbage bags
• Toiletries
• Pillows and other sleeping items
• Medical and sanitary items
• Maps, pens and notebooks
• Cameras and mobile devices
• Tickets and passports
• Money and credit cards

Visit OneBag.com for a one-page checklist that makes planning easy. Once you’ve got a basic travel list assembled, you can save time on future trips by creating a travel kit with most items already packed.

Plan Your Itinerary

Have your flights, hotels, rental car reservations and dinner and entertainment reservations booked in advance. Using a travel planning app can help you organize your itinerary. WorldMate is a travel app geared toward business travelers that combines itinerary-planning features with travel briefs and notifications, calendar synchronization and itinerary sharing capability.

Get Enough Sleep

Many people experience sleep deprivation and insomnia when they travel, so take steps to help you get enough sleep. Be mindful of getting to bed early as your trip approaches. If you’re going to be changing time zones, plan adjustments to your new schedule in advance, setting your watch ahead a day or two before you leave, or even possibly getting to your destination a day or two early to give yourself extra time to adjust. Avoid caffeine and alcohol near bedtime.

Schedule Exercise Breaks

Sitting around for long periods at airports and in flight can wear your body down and boost your tension. Scheduling time to stretch or exercise can help you loosen up. CNN Travel provides some stretches you can do while traveling to help you loosen up your neck, spine, shoulders and legs.

Bring Some Entertainment

Boredom can also contribute to stress. Bring some entertainment to keep your mind distracted while you’re traveling. Some people prefer to read a good novel while others would rather listen to music or watch a movie or play a video game on their mobile device.

Bring Your Family

Loneliness is another reason many business travelers feel stressed. Taking your family along can help you have fun on your trip.

Video marketers will find success in a well-planned production that boasts the same behind-the-scenes organization as a Hollywood production. The pre-production stage of your video is just as important as the filming stage. The more organized you are, the fewer blunders you will encounter on the days you shoot. A solid pre-production plan—crew requirements, location specifics and prop sources—will greatly influence the quality of your final product. Here are some essential pre-production filmmaking tips and techniques from which you can benefit:

Hire a Crew

Firstly, hire an assistant producer who will organize the small, but important, details that are necessary measures for a successful production. The assistant producer can help you assess which crew members are key — as an example, how many cameramen, gaffers and grips are necessary and whether or not it is imperative that you have a director. If you can utilize your assistant producer as a director, that would be ideal, as it would reduce labor costs. If the assistant producer cannot direct, find a cinematographer who has an intuitive eye and won’t need ample direction. Speak with your assistant producer about the vision you have for the film and iron out what the production schedule will look like. The assistant producer can create a succinct schedule and detail-oriented call sheets for the project, while you focus on the vision and creative content for the shoot.

Location Scouting

Decide what sort of site will work best for your script and visit the site at the time of day you will shoot your video. Assess the various factors that lie within the environment, like variance of light, volume of traffic noise, the volume and frequency of people who pass by and the amount of businesses and residential structures that are nearby. If there are nearby businesses or homes, make sure you have an official handout that will explain the site and times of your production so they can prepare. Assess how accommodating your site will be for your power supplies and where the nearest power source lies. Also evaluate the area for cell phone reception, parking, and the nearest electronic store in case you need an emergency cable or adapter. Make sure the location won’t require a permit or legal permission for a video shoot. Take photos of the location, with accompanying notes, and share them with your assistant producer, director and cinematographer.

Props

Enliven your set through the use of props. Arrange with your director or assistant producer what props you will need and how accessible they are. For a smaller budget production, utilize props that you already own. You can also find affordable props at a second hand store or may obtain permission to borrow merchandise from a local shop. If a retail vendor loans you their merchandise, make sure you have a contract that entails the ramifications if the item becomes damaged and an agreed lease period. If you require any food props, visit local businesses and see if they will donate their food for the project. Utilize the Internet for prop order, as it will be the most convenient method for your prop accrual. For example, if you must incorporate flowers, browse flower arrangements online and have them delivered. Etsy is another wonderful online resource, as you can communicate and work with talented artists for custom prop design.

If you run your small business out of your house, you are probably used to wearing many hats. To keep your home-based business afloat, you are a combination of chief executive officer, human resources manager, accountant and overall organization expert. You might also juggle other responsibilities related to your home office, like general cleaning and outdoor maintenance.

While you like being involved in every aspect of your home business, there are days when you struggle to get everything done. In addition, some tasks are not in your proverbial wheelhouse, which means you spend too much time trying to master these important jobs when you should be tackling other projects.

In cases like these, it definitely pays to outsource. In addition to being a cost-effective way to get everything done, it’s also a terrific way to ensure that you do not stretch yourself too thin and that all tasks are completed in a competent and timely manner. For example, check out the following four suggestions:

Accounting, Bookkeeping and Finances

As The Self Employed notes, accounting, bookkeeping and related tasks tend to be very detailed and time-consuming projects. As a work-at-home professional, you also have to keep very detailed records to complete your taxes. Rather than tearing your hair out trying to keep tabs on all of your finances, it makes sense to hire an accountant who can help with this important area of your business, and also complete your typically-complicated tax returns for you. In order to make sure your sensitive financial information is not being compromised, you may also wish to enlist the help of a monitoring service. Instead of spending tons of time watching your accounts looking for possible problems, a monitoring service constantly watches your business checking, savings and credit card accounts and will alert you if anything is amiss.

Website Design

In order to reach as many customers as possible, you should definitely have a snazzy-looking website. While your local bookstore probably has plenty of books that will teach the average Jo or Joe how to make a website in one weekend, in reality it’s a pretty challenging task. Consider hiring a website designer who can create an eye-catching site for your business, and also provide ongoing support services. This way, if a customer calls in and says she cannot place an order because the site has crashed, you don’t have to drop everything you are working on to fix it — the website designer will handle it.

Virtual Assistant

If you find that you are spending hours a day answering emails, preparing and sending out invoices and other necessary but time consuming tasks, it may be time to hire a virtual assistant. As Kashoo notes, virtual assistants can handle these necessary “time suck” tasks with ease, leaving you free to tackle work projects, client meetings and business proposals. Most virtual assistants are independent contractors who work from their homes for a variety of clients; if you wish to have in-person contact, you might find a local assistant who will come to your home office and tackle time consuming tasks in person.

Housekeeping and Yard Work

If you have clients coming to your home office on a regular basis, you want to be sure your home’s exterior is well-manicured and you don’t have stacks of dishes in the sink. In order to make sure your home is looking clean and clutter free — which will also help to keep you feeling calm and relaxed — consider hiring housekeeping and landscaping services. This will free up some much needed time in your schedule and help you to spend your downtime relaxing and not feeling the need to de-clutter the coffee table or mow the lawn.

Employees are the lifeblood of a company, and a few bad hires can make or break a small business.  Hiring is a hard problem.  Even Google admits that they haven’t found a single best predictor for hiring the right person.   The normal approach companies take to deal with the problem is to try to attract the highest quality applicants in the first place so they have a higher probability of finding a good employee.  For this reason, companies have been showering their employees with perks: Cisco Systems offers free physical therapy and acupuncture, Southwest Airlines provides free flights for all employees and their families, and Yahoo gives discounts to ski resorts and amusement parks for their employees.

But what makes hiring such a difficult problem in the first place?  Neither parties on either side of the interview table have perfect, or even good information!  Hiring managers find it difficult to isolate qualities that tell them a candidate would be a great employee.  Applicants find it difficult to know whether or not they would be a good fit at and enjoy working for the company they’re applying to.  As Paul Oyer and Scott Schaefer put it in “Personnel Economics,” “the fundamental economic problem in hiring is one of matching with costly search and bilateral asymmetric information.”  Basically, the process is expensive and uncertain.

The goal for hiring becomes where can you find good employees as well as how to identify metrics that accurately predict the success of an employee.

Using Personal Networks

Networking, especially for startups and small companies, is often the most effective way to find qualified candidates for open job positions.  Networking presupposes a familiarity with the candidate in question, giving the interviewer more insight on them.  Implementing an employee referral program, where employees are rewarded for bringing successful job candidates to the company, is a fantastic way to improve the quality of your hiring practices.  Studies have shown that referred candidates outperform normal candidates at every stage of the hiring process and experience better cultural fits at companies once hired, setting the stage for future success at the company.  In fact, referrals now result in more than a quarter of all hires at large companies, a startling number when you consider that referrals compose only 6% of nationwide job applicants, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and MIT

Turning to Online Resources

Once a company’s personal networks have been combed through for applicants, it may be necessary to find other sources of applicants.  One of the most common solutions is to turn to a job board, such as HotJobs.com or Monster.com, to expand your company’s outreach.  Job boards can advertise your company to a lot of different candidates at once.  More sophisticated ones help you implement screening questions that will automatically filter unqualified candidates from your posting.  There is also less of a chance for discrimination when compared to networking; job boards are available worldwide 24 hours a day whereas personal networks have a tendency to attract similarly thinking people to certain companies and reduce diversity.  However, job boards flood a company with potential candidates, and if you don’t have a recruitment department or enough time and resources to evaluate all the candidates the process quickly becomes unmanageable.

Is this a “job”?

Finally, think critically about the job position you are looking to fill.  Is this an integral part of the companies mission?  Would this position fit well into the company’s structure and culture?  Building a department or new team can be expensive and difficult.  Before you choose to hire an employee, determine whether or not it may be better to outsource the work.  Lots of roles can be easily outsourced: marketing, manufacturing, digital marketing, advertising, and more.  Although there is risk associated with the lack of control, outsourcing can be a quick and cheap option for accomplishing a company’s tasks.  

Who is a good candidate?

Although it’s difficult to isolate specific qualities that indicate who is and is not qualified, remember that good employees exhibit several key traits.  The first is a strong work ethic.  You want employees that take pride in their work and perform at a high level, putting forth their best effort.  Also look for a positive attitude and exceptional communication skills.  Work is a collaborative environment where all employees work together to serve their market.  Employees that can interact easily and positively magnify their efficiency and create a more satisfying work environment.  Additionally, previous experience and a demonstrated expertise in the skillset you need is often the most valuable characteristic of a qualified candidate.  Experience is very valuable as it saves your company money during training and increases the value a candidate can bring to their department.  Finally, loyal and reliable candidates often become the best employees.  They are consistent, stable, and show an interest in developing a long-term career with your company.

Hiring practices are often the most important processes at a company.  Who you hire affects your company culture and the productivity of your departments.   It sets the future course of the business and can often be the difference between success and failure.  For this reason its important to have a robust process in place that effectively screens candidates and makes sure you have the right people walking in the door.

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