Management Archives - America's SBDC

America’s SBDC Blog

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Level Up Your Financial Leadership by Using a Coaching Approach

January 24, 2023

By Lauren Owen

As you grow your business, adding employees or even locations, you will need to develop managers who are responsible for achieving sales and profit goals. Mastering your financial coaching skills is essential to profitable growth.

Many owners are comfortable discussing marketing, operations or human resources, but struggle with conversations about financials. How can you get people engaged in this important topic? Here are some tips for creating financial insights and driving action using goal-focused, solutions-oriented coaching conversations to jump-start your managers’ financial success.

Holiday inventory: Tips your small business can use to manage inventory during the holidays.

December 14, 2022

How to navigate supply chain issues, timing, buying, and more

By Danielle Higley

The holiday season is an exciting — and stressful — time for small business owners. Increased foot traffic, bigger sales goals, and the desire to turn new customers into regular patrons means more pressure than any other time of year.

Piling atop the typical challenges of entrepreneurship, business owners are faced with every conceivable balancing act: Where to put all that additional inventory when there’s limited shelf space. How to get big-ticket items out the door. Ensuring that each item is in the right place at the right time. Meanwhile, 2020 and 2021’s supply chain issues loom like ghosts of Christmases past.

Yet despite all these concerns, Dierdre Appelhans and Barbra Huntting, co-owners of The Read Queen Bookstore & Café, exhibit an admirable sense of peace and confidence going into the 2022 holiday shopping season.

Two and a half years after opening their doors in Lafayette, Colorado, they’re sharing their lessons learned. Here are four of their small business insights for retailers looking to make a holiday inventory plan.

7 tips for gracefully managing employees during the holidays

November 29, 2022

By Alysha Love

There’s no changing the holiday rush, but small business owners can help lower the stress of the season for everyone by managing employees with grace.

That can be easier said than done. The National Retail Foundation predicts a 6-8% increase in total retail sales for the winter holidays this year. At the same time, 9 out of 10 small business owners told QuickBooks that they’ve been ensnared by supply chain issues this year. Those kinds of stressors can make graceful leadership feel unimportant or impossible by comparison.

But how you curate your work culture and manage your employees makes a huge difference in their job satisfaction — and, ultimately, your employee retention. The three overarching reasons that employees leave are because of subpar benefits, like paid time off; a lack of recognition; and poor company practices, like an unhealthy culture, a 2021 QuickBooks study found.

Small actions can speak volumes. These seven tips are a good place to start to manage your employees through the holidays with grace.

6 Strategies to Prevent Quiet Quitting from Your Team

October 20, 2022

“Quiet quitting” is the newest buzzword in the business world. While this term evokes mental images of employees leaving their job without saying a word, the reality is much less terrifying. Quiet quitting is when employees stop going above and beyond at their workplace. Quiet quitting is a response to the idea of hustle culture, a form of workplace culture that can lead to severe burnout.

Unfortunately, for many small businesses, the idea of employees doing the bare minimum for their job is unsustainable and can cause stagnant business growth. However, there are plenty of things that you can do to prevent quiet quitting. Things like valuing your employees, clearly communicating work expectations, and offering advancement opportunities can all go a long way toward preventing the “quiet quitting” phenomenon.

Here are 6 Strategies to Prevent Quiet Quitting from Your Team Click To Tweet

Take Virtual Team Collaboration to the Next Level with These Digital Workspaces

June 21, 2022

By: Steph Davidson

Digital transformation is a term many of us are familiar with these days, and the reason ‌is clear. As remote and hybrid workforces continue to hold a grip on the corporate world, integrative digital systems have become crucial for efficient communication and collaboration between multiple parties.

Technology options have expanded hugely since 2020, increasing our reliance on digital workspaces.

These powerful virtual work environments allow people to organize, store, edit, share, automate and optimize data, amplifying productivity and promoting better time management. No matter what kind of business you’re in, digital workspaces have become a modern zeitgeist for virtual team collaboration.

In fact, 72% of US companies report having a well-established digital workplace strategy as of 2022.

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