Employee training is essential to empowering your staff to contribute to their fullest. Yet, it often gets cut out of the budget in bad years and treated haphazardly even when times are good. These are 7 ways to get better returns on employee training.

1. Conduct A Needs Analysis: Determine your goals in advance. Structure your training program so that it’s tied to measurable performance standards. Evaluate areas where your company is weak so you can focus on correcting deficiencies. Maybe you need to improve your capacity to manage your financial resources or guide staff members on developing higher level supervisory skills. Knowing what you need will reduce the danger of signing up for expensive courses that sound good but may not be of much practical benefit to you.

2. Provide a Sound Orientation: Hiring a new person is a big expense so increase their chances of success by giving them a thorough orientation. By explaining the company culture and procedures you help new hires to get integrated as effective team members. The time you spend clarifying expectations can help improve job satisfaction, employee retention and productivity.

3. Appreciate the Importance of Informal Training: Employees learn many of the most important lessons about their job from their co-workers. Foster a collaborative atmosphere that rewards people for sharing their knowledge. Company materials are also a valuable resource for helping people stay informed and up-to-date. Promote self-study materials and opportunities on a regular basis.

4. Know When to Use Formal Training: Formal training may be necessary for complex subjects that need to be mastered quickly or when you sense that employees are lacking in motivation. Check out offerings from training firms, consultants and your suppliers, as well as local government and university programs.

5. Make it interactive: People retain more information when they get engaged in a course. Incorporate videos and other media. Try role playing exercises or break out into small groups for discussion. Throw in some pop quizzes to reinforce learning and identify areas that may need to be reviewed.

6. Use Story Telling: Anecdotes are a reliable way to liven up any topic. Illustrate what you mean by good customer service by picking out some best examples from your company’s history or from other sources.

7. Evaluate Your Efforts: By establishing learning objectives at the outset, you can measure whether your employee education and training programs are giving you a good return on your investment. Plan to administer written tests upon the completion of formal in-house sessions. Ask for written reports when staff members attend out-of-house sessions too. Track the impact that these activities have on actual performance.

It has been your life-long dream to start your own small business. You have taken all the necessary steps: you have a solid business plan, you have secured financing, chosen a location, obtained all the necessary permits and licenses and are ready to open your doors. But once you cut the ribbon on opening day, you realize you have not marketed your new business. Of all the necessary steps you must take to secure your new venture, the most important is marketing and advertising your new business. How do you make consumers aware of your business? How do you attract customers to buy your product or service?

Social Media

Social media has drastically transformed the way businesses market their ideas and services. Many social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are free and have the potential of reaching millions of customers. You can easily promote your business by creating a Facebook business page. Through Facebook you can describe your business, post photos of your products, add comments, interact with potential customers and advertise upcoming sales and promotions. Invite friends and family to take a look at your business page. Once they “like” your page, word of mouth will spread rapidly. It is important to keep your page exciting and inviting to attract potential customers and keep them coming back. Be sure to constantly update your page with fresh content.

Trade Shows

A trade show lets you come in contact face to face with hundreds, even thousands of prospective customers and vendors. Trade shows give you the opportunity to make important connections and keep up to date on new trends in your industry. Besides showcasing your business, a trade show gives you valuable insight into your competition. Planning is essential before you attend a trade show. Have an attractive booth. Be ready to promote your business by having plenty of business cards, brochures, products and samples of your work on display. If your budget allows, bring marketing tools such as pens, totes, or mugs with your company logo to give. Collect business cards and contact information from potential customers that stop by your booth. After the trade show follow up by contacting them and thanking them for visiting your booth.

Press Release

A press release is a more traditional way of promoting your business. Besides sending your press release to local media, consider taking a more modern approach. Websites such as PRWeb.com or PRLeap.com will distribute your press release to every major search engine and online news site. They even offer a service to help you write your press release if you need guidance. When writing your press release, take the time to make the copy engaging and memorable. Your press release will be one of thousands and it has to stand out from the rest. The most important message of your press release is convincing potential customers why that can’t live without your product or service.

One nightmare that some businesses owners may face from time to time is collecting payments from clients. If you have heard the check is in the mail excuse to many times, it may be time to start thinking about some better ways to implement your collections of payments. Keep in mind that some people may have simply forgotten and with the trying times of our economy even the most responsible of customers may have hard time paying from time to time. There are a few simple tips that may help to protect your company’s financial as well as some ways to help persevere customer relations as well.

Payment upfront- Depending on the nature of your business asking for payment upfront may be the way to go in order to ensure that your company receives the monies owed to them. This may not always be possible so your next best course of action would be to ask for a deposit. A deposit can serve as a safety net until the level of trust has been built up with the customer.
Offer payment plans- One option that can help when it comes to collecting monies can be to come to a fair and reasonable payment plan. This can be designed and catered to however you and your client see fit but always be sure to put everything in writing. Draw up a contract that outlines the specific details of the payments and have both parties sign the paperwork. Also include penalties as well any course of action that may happen if the payment arrangements are not met.

Be Careful with Extending Credit- One way to help make an informed decision about extending credit to a client would be to a credit application. Credit applications are a great tool for business owners and they can help weed out the clients who pay their bills in a timely fashion from those who do not. Even if your client has great credit, you may still want to start them out with a smaller line of credit and increase it on a gradual scale. This can be a way to let your client develop the relationship with you and can allow the business owner to extend the credit without taking a huge risk.

Talk to your clients- If the situation arises where your client is not responding to your invoices it could be as simple as they never received them. Give them a call and ensure they have received your invoice and if they have and cannot pay it in full consider working with them. Of course, that is up to you as the business owner but sometimes getting half of what is owed may be better than getting nothing at all

If all else fails and your clients are refusing to pay, you may have no choice to consider small claims courts or collection agencies. The collection process is never a pleasant event for either party and by following these tips perhaps you will never wind up with dead beat clients.