5 Ways to Help Your Small Business When You’re Cash-Strapped

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 Well, no news here! Everyone gets broke sometimes, so are businesses. What counts is being able to find a quick way out of it when it happens. Experience has shown that the times when you need money the most are usually the times when it’s hardest to get. What to do? When your business is hemorrhaging money, you are running a very big risk. Finding a quick solution is what brings out the real business person in you. When your business is cash-strapped, you can do any of or a combination of the following.

  

01. Take a loan. Well, all you want is cash to keep your business running. Getting cash even at a cost is same thing as getting a loan to fund your business. Even though a loan may not necessarily fix all your problems, but it sure can help you out of a short-term cash crunch. How and where you can get it is largely determined by the cost of funds from the lender.

02. Cut your expenses. A very natural thing to do when cash-strapped! This step is absolutely the most critical. You must find and block any cash leakages to stop your business from bleeding cash. Even when the bleeding is not very obvious, you can still cut back on certain expenses which will not do damage to the business. However in doing so, you must try to be creative because if you can’t manage to get your expenses under control, then you’re going to be perpetually short of money.

03. Go liquid. That is, you must find a way to generate more cash. If you can do this creatively, it is much better than taking a loan. It helps if you can create a special offering, whether it’s a discount or a new premium package and get your clients to buy in. Going hard on your debtors to get them to pay up their debts can also help to raise needed cash.

04. Dispose of some assets. Yeah, disposing idle assets is one very viable way to raise cash. Sometimes, you may have in your stores, assets you acquired in the past you have not really used or some fairly used ones you have rested. You can dispose of these assets just like as in garage sales to raise cash.

05. Run your business profitably. It is difficult to get cash-strapped if you habitually run your business profitably. A profit mindset draws out the strictest money-management practices in any business. Putting profit first and setting aside a predetermined percentage of profit from every single bit of revenue will help you trim expenses and ensure your business remains financially solvent. That is one very sound management theory and practice which your business badly needs for survival.

5 Smart Ways to Boost Employee Morale

There is growing evidence that happy workers are productive workers. So, what do you need to do to make your own workers happy and productive? Somehow, you need some morale boosters to make your employees more productive. These here 5 tips will help. 

01. Flexible working options. Human beings need real freedom and privacy. Many tend to be more productive when they have both. With increasing improvement in technology, it becomes easier for professionals to work from home, or telecommute for portions of the day. More and more workers are buying into such loose arrangement and they are happier for it. It helps in morale boosting for such workers and companies and employers are not complaining for so long as productivity is not on the decline.

02. Continuous training. Many of today’s workers aren’t satisfied with just base qualifications. They want ongoing training and development to learn new skills and new concepts. Anywhere they get that, it helps morale because it makes them more valuable and helps to diversify their work experience so they don’t get bored or burned out very quickly. When you have a credible and beneficial training and retraining process in place, it helps to keep your employees engaged and gives them a reason to stick with your company for the long haul.

03. Decent remunerations. Of course this is a given. In this age and time, I very much doubt if anyone still expects people to work for free without adequate and decent remunerations. The better workers are remunerated, the better it serves their morale. Very directly too, productivity is also affected!

04. Growth potentials. Not very many workers like to associate with companies which have no credible growth potentials. The incentive is, if the company is growing, the workers grow with it. That no doubt is a morale booster for the workers.

05. Great working environment. Working in a cozy environment is a better morale booster than literally working in the dump. Even though changing times and changing technologies are fast affecting work environments and arrangements, the better a working environment is, the better it serves the morale of workers. Come to think of it, who wouldn’t want to work in a great environment?