Putting together a customer survey, choosing your distribution platforms, and persuading customers to take your survey is hard enough. But getting them to provide accurate and honest responses to your survey can be just as difficult. In this post, we’re going to dig deeper into common types of response bias, why they happen, and what […]Continue reading
Retail Best Practices
How to Build Business Credit in the Retail Industry
Businesses – just like individuals – have credit reports. Establishing credit for your business can be vital to your company’s success if you intend to access borrowed capital to fuel growth and fund other business initiatives. Before you can establish and begin building credit for your business, your business needs an identity. After you choose […]Continue reading
How Startups Should be Spending Their Money
In today’s economy, there are endless new startups popping up every single day. With the market becoming so saturated, it’s clear that you need to be doing something to differentiate yourself from the 90% of startups that fail. As a startup owner or entrepreneur, it can be difficult to determine where to allocate your funds. […]Continue reading
5 Productive HR Management Trends for Small Businesses
Small businesses have the unenviable task of ensuring an optimal balance between the realization of their vision and mission on the one hand versus attending to employee needs and expectations on the other. Getting the HR function right, therefore, requires exceptional skill and adeptness at managing a diverse workforce. HR is a mission critical role. […]Continue reading
Most Effective Ways to Market Yourself as an Employer
According to Ladders, “Hiring today is very different than it was just 10 years ago.” This is largely due to the fact that we live in a candidate-driven market where job hunter expectations have a bigger impact on what hiring managers have to consider. The modern job candidate/employee is not shy about moving on to […]Continue reading
Why Your Employees Need More Than Feedback
You’d think your employees would want your feedback, right? Turns out, the six most dreaded words for any employee are: Can I give you some feedback? “Only 26% of employees strongly agree that the feedback they receive helps them do better work.” ~ Gallup It used to be that most organizations had hierarchical, top-down, command-and-control […]Continue reading
What Target Did That Retailers Can Learn From
“Turnarounds—however you define them—are hard,” says Retail Dive. “That’s especially true in retail, where tastes and the markets change quickly. If you are a retailer whose sales trends have turned negative, chances are your path back to greatness, or even stability, is steep.” While our constantly fluctuating market has sunk numerous retailers, turnarounds can be […]Continue reading
Do You Really Know What Employee Engagement Is?
Who doesn’t love fun facts? Here’s a good one for you: The song Working for the Weekend, by Canadian rock band Loverboy, still appears on VH1’s 100 Greatest Songs of the 80s. That’s cool, but what in the world does it have to do with employee engagement? Well, the fact that the song is still ranked […]Continue reading
How NOT to Greet Your Customers
It’s time once again for one of my “What Not to Do” articles for retailers. This particular experience occurred at a local discount retailer. I guess discount retail also means “discount service” for that establishment. This is what happened… I arrived a few minutes before the store was supposed to open and patiently waited for […]Continue reading
Half of All Small Businesses Struggle With Improving This
If you were asked what you anticipate your greatest challenge related to managing your workforce will be in the next 6 to 12 months, what would your answer be? If you said “productivity”, you’re not alone. When over 300 small business owners were surveyed were asked the same question, at least 52% answered, “improving productivity and […]Continue reading