Effective Habits for Successful Entrepreneurs in Baraboo, WI

At times, striving for entrepreneurial success feels overwhelming. Fortunately, keying in on a handful of focus points and developing effective habits and strategies to address them is a smart way to put you back in control. Here are three areas the Baraboo Area Chamber of Commerce says you should target, along with suggested tech tools that make it easier to drive your growth and profitability.

Understand Your Customers

With consumer polls reflecting its importance, customer engagement is something no small business owner can afford to disregard. When clients can’t connect with your company easily and across multiple platforms, you lose sales to competitors who are fully accessible and responsive..

Making use of a customer engagement platform coalesces your customer interactions by tracking, analyzing, and classifying them. A CEP simplifies your ability to communicate with the individuals or groups who are most likely to respond to your marketing messages and fosters beneficial customer relationships. They help you manage connections and create a sense of partnership between your business and your clients.

Develop and Maintain Effective Marketing

While you don’t personally need to be available 24/7, your social media platforms should be consistently updated and monitored so you don’t leave essential connections untapped. Emails, website inquiries, and phone calls must be answered knowledgeably and quickly, as every unanswered complaint or request has a negative impact on sales

You also need to be producing content that is engaging for your audience and that drives up your SEO, or search engine optimization. You want to include keywords, headlines, and meta descriptions that will cause the algorithms run by search bots to find your site and rank it highly in search engines. When you post, it’s best to avoid PDF files because they are not SEO searchable. JPGs are your best bet. But what if you have great content, but it’s in the wrong file type? If you're trying to convert PDF to JPG, find a free online conversion tool. It’s as simple as adding your file to the drop zone, selecting JPG, and clicking Convert. Then, you have a file that’s ready to share with your customers. 

Manage Your Financials

In the same way that your responsiveness to clients must be timely, the way you handle your finances must be equally expedient. The days of simple ledgers and manual accounting practices are in the rearview mirror; if you aren’t running your books with quality-tested software there’s simply too much that may fall through the cracks and cause financial setbacks.

Although programs are available to manage everything from payroll to corporate taxes to accounts payable if you invest in only one piece of accounting software make sure it facilitates receivables. After all, getting paid accurately and on time is what drives your bottom line. Providing your clients with conveniences like scheduled invoices and online payment options reduces remittance delays, and automatic posting alerts help you track your income so you always know what's in your bank account.

Be Prepared to Act

The success of your business depends on your ability to grow it, which in turn relies on the speed with which you react to opportunities. Revenue forecasting puts you in the driver's seat when you’ve got the chance to hire a top performer, lease a new prime location, or take over a competitor. Having a clear picture of your expected profitability allows you to grow without overextension.

Using an online calculator makes it easy to create both conservative and bold revenue projections. While it’s likely your true profits will fall in between the two, you’ll have a set of parameters that define how much to budget for hiring, purchasing, marketing, and expansion. Because projections reflect future income, they’re also a necessary tool for determining how much debt you can responsibly manage. By providing lenders with thorough calculations, you’ll secure loans and credit advances on favorable terms.

Put Your Plan into Action

Developing good practices when it comes to client communication, income management, and financial preparedness is critical to small business success. By understanding their importance and tapping into the resources necessary to maintain these habits, you’ll eliminate much of the stress that comes with entrepreneurship and set yourself up to prosper. Use online conversion tools to help you increase your SEO and bring in even more customers to set yourself up for success.

Access even more great resources to help your business grow and thrive in our community by joining the Baraboo Area Chamber of Commerce.