Year: 2020

Starting a business is just a half of the battle; the other half is the maintenance, expansion and diversity. Increasing your customer base and your level of functioning will help to reach your goals.

So after a start-up, the next important thing is to expand your business, make it reach a vast number of customers, and reach out to the potential ones. Then, it’s important to convert your customers into repeat business!

Growth And Expansion

After integrating into the market in the initial stage of the launch, growth is the next step. As more and more customers emerge, continuous improvement of your solutions should become a priority. By customizing products, you can maintain customers and attract more people who want solutions.

The growth of start-ups can sometimes be speedy. If angel investors like your business ideas, some companies want to include their start-ups in their activities, and even the public likes and recommends it, then the growth from one month to the next may be too high.

The structure needs to be activated at this time to keep up with so many changes. Hiring more employees, and ensuring the employees that you have are highly skilled is important. Performance management training and development can help your employees exceed expectations during this busy period of growth.

Can You Make Your Business Go Global?

Expanding your business into the international market opens doors to a larger consumer market. Entering the international market is a huge business decision that can bring many benefits to your company. The importance of globalization will only continue to increase, and companies with international businesses will have a competitive advantage over their rivals. Exporting will help your company grow, achieve market expansion, and increase profits.

Before reading further, you should know that before you start to expand your market, you should get a feel for it to see if your product or service is in demand in the specific target market you plan to enter. To succeed in entering new markets, you must also be willing to invest time and money. Develop a sound strategy and conduct necessary investigations and studies, which will help to set your business’s sales goals and determine the market where your business is most likely to succeed.

SWOT Analysis

When choosing to enter a new market, you are allowing yourself to obtain higher profit margins. It becomes more and more important to do a SWOT analysis of a market you are trying to enter; this also helps you know your potential customers and gives a blueprint of your market base. 

Before choosing to expand your business, take a moment to make a trade-off between potential sales and the costs and risks of entering a new market. This decision should not be made lightly. If your business is performing exceptionally well and if your employees are willing to put in the effort, globalization could be the best thing for the growth of your company. A certified performance consultant can help you analyze if your business is ready. If you have a careful plan, you and your business will be financially successful. A SWOT analysis worksheet is a tool for analyzing the market and its scenarios. It is used as the basis for strategic planning, from simple businesses to large enterprises.

Analyze the four factors: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats of the company’s internal and external environment.

Diversify Your Company

Don’t just seize one business market. A search for potential customers and expanding your area of business enables your company to respond to the existing opportunities in multiple different markets and will not be completely restricted by changes in the market in one country. The local market fluctuates. When you sell in multiple markets, you will not be completely affected by changes in any one market. This will help your business flourish when your competitors’ markets decline.

Every ten years, a new IT program, or a gadget, or anything that involves technology, is given birth. Sporadically, it gets to branch out to different types per product. And while that happens, innovation after innovation tends to surface making a computer product much better than ever. This time around, it’s about something that helps our hearts from the inside. While it is hard to keep up with all of the latest trends, one that had gone through ground-breaking transformations are the virtual machines turning into containers. This goes the same with containerisation.

What are containers, and how does containerisation happen?

Let’s say I am doing a webpage for a cooking website in which a series of apps altogether are being used simultaneously. In my webpage, a guest may access freebies such as Recipes under 5 minutes, The ABCs of salt, etc. And so, there are pages that I use for making the actual webpage. And there’s a specific app for setting up the membership, that will surely involve payments. So, if you use containers, the program that you are using is in an invisible container. So that one page doesn’t necessarily have to be affected when a user just wanted to take a look at videos on how it’s being done rather than reading. So, what happens is, sitting in front of the computer watching a video may be done through the app being in a container, dependent on other programs.

This makes containers beneficial to web developers because it breaks the apps into smaller operating systems that are easily manageable. You may also consider them as the lighter version of virtual machines, but with a lean system of requirements.

What else are the other benefits of containerisation?

1. Costs – Since it makes everything in its simplest and that direct, it need not go through a set of connectors and other servers, this makes the costs for transport a whole lot less.
2. Availability – because the containers are still like virtual machines, they weigh lighter and thus, offer major benefits. They virtualise at a higher level than VMs.
3. Enhanced Productivity – Containerisation promotes a fast-developing environment while providing a platform for developers with a new level of efficiency.

Containerisation as a major innovation

Because of its ability to help simplify the process of installation while decreasing dependency errors, giving you much-needed leeway when having your applications installed. On top of that, containerisation avoids major headaches in development for projects that need to be on more than one platform, so instead of developing an app for Windows PC, then having to rewrite it for Macs, we just need to containerise the Windows app, and it will be able to run on Mac structure as is. Containers are often used in cloud computing, which is a new and emerging field of Information Technology. Developers often upload their containers onto Docker hubs to share their projects for download. An example would be toolkit developers Operatr, who have a docker hub for Kafka monitoring.

The big question is if it’s the future of virtual computing.

As we have mentioned earlier, containers are still virtual machines with great upgrades. While virtual machines require hardware,  containers applications are run straight to the server that hosts them. This gives you a hint that containers should be fast enough than virtual machines. And this is because of the limited overhead.

While we’re at it, people are curious as to if containers are better than virtual machines. That would be a YES since it enables a user or a company to load a lot more applications into a single physical server. Also, VM’s had to take up several systems resources. It runs a full operating system copy and the virtual copy of all the hardware that the OS needs to run.

To conclude, whether you’re using Docker containers or not, you can run an app depending on whether it is in a virtual machine or on bare metal. Just like any decision made at the data centre, align the path you want to take with your business. If you’re wondering whether containers work well with virtual machines, they can run without them. 

The economy in 2020 is exciting, but at the same time, crucial for multiple markets. Growth on the global scale is predicted to bottom out. But, the growth in 2020 would be towards global growth consolidation, rather than a complete recovery in all aspects. These are loosely built on 

• The turns in the tech cycle, worldwide
• US-China trade tensions 
• Macro policies
• A declining USD

There is a caution based on the re-escalation of the US-China tensions. Also, the slowdown of the Chinese economy may worsen putting out more danger, along with a credit crunch on a global scale. 

If the ECB and the FED decide to run their economies hotter than earlier, 2020 may be a watershed year. Let’s look at the trends concerning major markets: 

United States

The pace of the US market growth is expected to follow the slow form it has been taking, throughout the first half of the year. The national election is coming up and at the same time, there are real tensions between the US and China. The uncertainty factor as far as the business environment and economic policies remains higher. But at the same time since the consumer fundamentals are strong, inflation might not pick up as high as expected by the Fed.

China 

The GDP growth of China is expected to go at a slow pace below 6%. 2019 was a tough year, but 2020 is expected to remain the same. Growth stability and financial stability are going to be a challenge for one of the biggest markets in the world. The slowdown in the growth has been continuing because of some reasons such as rising bond defaults, fiscal condition, lesser property investment, etc. 

Eurozone

The growth of the Eurozone is expected to be below trend and the inflation might not touch the target in 2020. There are multiple signs of stability, which might slowly crawl the economy towards inflation. The UK has left the EU on January 31 and there will be uncertainty for quite some time regarding the trading relationships with the European Union. 

Japan 

The phase of the economic slowdown has ended thanks to the rebound of the tech industry. But there are some structural drags in the major economies overseas which will probably hinder significant acceleration in growth. The monetary policy is in a deadlock, but there will be good support from a proactive fiscal policy in the form of spending associated with the public sector. 

India 

Since the domestic credit conditions are tighter, the growth of India is set to slow down during the final quarter of the year. The GDP growth is expected to be on the downside again at 5.5%. In the close term though, the prediction of inflation given by the RBI might be overshot, owing to the food price inflation and supply-side shocks. The RBI might ease in the second quarter of the year however more weight is on the fiscal policies to result in growth. 

ASEAN

Thailand is expected to come out with a GDP growth well below the potential, at 2.7%. Indonesia has some uncertainty in the structural reform implementations and it needs to be cautious of the macro policy mix in the shorter term. In the Philippines, there could be a V-shaped growth that is backed by more powerful public investment and an overall strengthening of the domestic demand. 

There are plenty of bad business partners out there and they happen to come in all shapes and sizes. If you are worried about whether your business partner is ruining your organisation – this is the article for you. 

It doesn’t matter what kind of industry you are in, bad business partners are everywhere. For example, when I used to work as a handy-man, I had a partner that was responsible for all our products. He would order things like traditional timber oil and paint. But after a few years I realised that he had worked out his own deal with a supplier. The deal was as follows: he would order large amounts of Interior furniture stain and get a cheaper price – so he could keep the balance for himself! Talk about a sneaky set-up.

Bad business partners can be anything from outright liars to complainers and those who are reluctant to communicate. It is usually really obvious that they are a bad business partner, however, other times you may not even realise that they are slowly draining the company of both energy and profit. If there are no concrete problems (such as fights), it can be hard to notice that you have a bad business relationship. 

Here are a few signs that you have a business partner that will destroy your business.

They are not solution oriented

If your business partner loves to bring problems but never has any solutions, then it can be a sign of a bad partner. It’s normal for people to have the need to vent, but if your partner seems to do it all the time (and you have passed on positive thinking plenty of times to no avail) then you may need to find another partner.

Your partner has financial skeletons

We have all made bad financial decisions at one point or another – that doesn’t necessarily make anyone a bad business partner. It might, however, if there is a long history of poor credit, if the partner has been banned from running a company before or if they have had more than one bankruptcy. They should be willing to be honest with you about their history, but if you find out later that they haven’t been, this can indicate you are working with someone who is not honest. 

Different values

You don’t need to have the same values to work well together. But sometimes it can be good to have different perspectives – like the yin and yang style partnership. Communications need to be open, and you need to ensure that you understand your partner’s communications style. You should agree on two things: one is finances and the type of work that you are willing to take on. If you are disagreeing over things like bonuses or expenses, or if your partner is focused on one thing only (such as profit), then it can definitely be a doomed partnership. Having a shared vision is important to achieve your vision. If you are too far apart on certain issues, and neither are happy to budge, then it may be time to go your separate ways.

Your partner won’t sign a partnership agreement

Partnership agreements can give you a roadmap of your partnership and they can be useful when dealing with a bad business partner. It will map out the partners’ roles and an exit strategy, should the partnership go sour. If they are not happy to sign an agreement, then it can indicate they are either hiding something, or they already want to get out of the business. Worst case, this means they are not serious about the partnership. If they won’t sign an agreement, don’t mess around and give you excuses. Instead, move on to a better business partner.

Are you doing all the work?

If you both have equal skills, but the work ethic is not equal, that should be considered a big red flag. Your partner doesn’t need to be a full-on workaholic however, the work needs to be shared equally among the two. If your partner is sitting at their desk browsing Facebook while you are serving customers, then it is time to say goodbye to this work partner.

There are plenty of business partners out there and it doesn’t need to be someone you know. Ensure you learn to spot these red flags, so you can find out sooner rather than later if your partner is a poor collaborator.