Business Services

Internet Business Services are thriving. Every day there are more and more consumers logging on and now cost-effective to carry on business services via the internet.

To operate an Internet Business Service you will need less operating costs as you no longer require a brick and mortar store and you can now have specific niche businesses or items that would have failed if they had been in a traditional business setting. Best of all, Internet Business Services will allow you the freedom to be able to work from anywhere – the office, on the road, at home…anywhere!

That being said, not all Small Business Internet Services prosper. You can still sink a lot of money into your business and have it flop. There is homework involved for the Internet entrepreneur as you have to research the business you are considering as there is so much competition out there that it may be infeasible to try to go head to head with a company or in an industry you have no chance in turning a profit it.

Use concrete data to contribute as the basis of your Internet Business Services. Likely the main factor over all to be considered is the demand for the Internet Business Service you want to create.

Here is a scenario: You are considering an Internet Service Business to sell contact lenses in the Philippines. What is the average gross margin on sale? What are the price points to be considered? Is there enough volume in terms of population demographics to support the need? If you can not get enough traffic there is no need to be in that business.

Be very wary of your competition. Who are other Internet and non-Internet Business Service providers that cater to the same need? There could be few competing Internet Businesses in your niche, but if there is not enough traffic to begin with, you are better off to find another niche

How do you intend on making your money? Will you be acquiring your revenue from online sales, affiliate commission revenue, advertising revenue, email marketing…?

After you have done your homework and determined what niche is a fit for you and you are sure of the likelihood of success with your Internet Service Business get to work on your site. Make sure it is unique, interesting and useful. Launch it-and let the sales roll in!

But the next question is who is going to build your Internet Service Business website and how are you going to pay for the construction of the site and all that goes along with it? Today there are options for financing your website. You will likely need to put some investment into the site construction and development but if you finance the site, you can make the site much more professional and high-end and then pay for it over time as your sales come in.

The catering business, like any other is extremely competitive. To stand out from the crown and win new clients you need to be better than your competitors at promoting or marketing your catering business services. Here are a few tried and tested marketing tactics that you can consider to promote your catering business.

Advertising goes a long way towards spreading your message across the markets that you are targeting. Also consider dispatching press releases to local newspapers to grab attention. You can also tap into TV networks and radio shows when they, from time to time need people to interview for their food-related programs. Put time into understanding all the advertising options that are available, budget for some methods that you feel will work and then test methods against each other to find the winners that produce results to justify the expense.

Offering your customers extra services is always a welcome gesture as customers like to have a variety of choices. Up-selling is a common strategy for generating added revenue. Perk up your catering business by adding services such as flower arrangements or setting up fixtures for outdoor events. Try to up-sell clients on more expensive foods and beverages as well.

Ensure long-lasting relationships with customers by having unique products to sell. A competitive business such as the catering industry requires an innovative mind that can keep coming up with new ideas to impress customers while still offering quality and consistency. Sustaining their support through incentive programs like discounts and package deals are good tactics.

Having the largest range of unique products and services to offer can give you a competitive advantage when it comes to promoting your company.

Mingling with competition is always healthy! You may find that your products and services are not so similar after all and that you could benefit by referring each other to clients who are looking for specific services that one of you may provide better than the other.

Aside from having healthy competitor relations you should also develop a wider network of business associates. Introduce yourself to event-related companies like decorators, event coordinators and printers and cross promote each others services.

Study business models and other successful companies to find out how they promote their products or services. There is so much to learn from the great entrepreneurial spirit! Practice what they preach and see how you can extend their ideals towards your catering business.

Showing off your corporate social responsibility can also boost your catering business. Join charity cook-off events in the community to push for further free publicity for your company. Participating in worthwhile charitable programs could also create a positive attitude among your staff (as well as your clients) as they can see that you are running a business with care and gratitude.

A lot of people know that there is money to be made online. Most people don’t know, however, that the largest sum of that money can be made by offering online business services. Online business services encompass a wide array of tasks, luckily though, all of them are incredibly easy to learn and perform.

A lot of small and medium sized businesses don’t have an in house online marketing coordinator. Plenty don’t even have an offline marketing coordinator. Both of these fields are very profitable, but we’re going to focus primarily on online marketing in this article.

Online marketing typically can consist of many things, from website design to search engine optimization services. Most small and medium sized businesses looking for such services are either looking to get their business online for added exposure, or drive traffic to their website. While designing professional websites may be a bit more complicated, offering search engine optimization services and internet marketing is not.

As is stated in the title of this article, the amount you can make offering such services is often staggering. Most businesses set aside a generate amount of their budget for online business services and are willing to pay a lot to gain exposure both on and offline. It’s very easy to make a reoccurring $800 a month from just one client. Some businesses will even pay up to a reoccurring $2,500 a month for your services. You can see how this scales up with the more clients that you have.

You can see why and how offering online business services can be possibly the most profitable business you could possibly get into. There’s very little overhead. In fact, clients often pay you in advance due to the handling of PPC campaigns. Getting into offering online business services isn’t hard to do. All that you need to acquire are the skills to perform the services and the will to succeed.

The concept of corporate Shared Services (SS) has been around a long time, with the private sector credited with starting this concept in the late 1980’s, and the public sector about a decade later. Personally, and not trying to date myself, I came across this business model at a former employer around 2005. Simply put, SS is an operating model that enables function-specific resources (i.e., HR, IT, Finance, etc.) to be leveraged across an entire organization, resulting in lower costs with agreed-upon customer-service levels. It’s utilization by both the private and public sector grew consistently over time, and then came the 2008/2009 recession. At that time, companies desired even greater efficiency, wider geographic reach, and broader scope coverage from its SS, to handle greater regulatory scrutiny for the same or even lower costs! These demands caused a bit of an inflection point, and the next stage in SS maturity started taking hold… Global Business Services (GBS). So, what is GBS?

Definition

GBS is an operating model defined slightly differently depending on which company or consultant you speak with, but they will all agree on the need for these five elements:

1) Multi-Functional – spans multiple functions, businesses, and locations across a common service delivery framework.

2) Operational Efficiency – offers greater cost savings, efficiency and compliance as compared to traditional SS.

3) End-to-End View – enables an end-to-end process view (i.e., Order-to-Cash) while driving significant end-to-end process improvements.

4) Service Delivery Excellence – focuses more on service delivery excellence, agility, scalability and innovation.

5) Client-Focused and Aligned – seeks to support business outcomes and delivers innovative capabilities to help businesses outperform competitors.

This sounds impressive, but the model clearly takes a bit of work to implement, with overall strategy and governance needing to be addressed and agreed to by all stakeholders up-front. If strategy and governance are not agreed to upfront, the transformation may move forward and even continue for some time, but will be at risk of falling short of achieving objectives or even be an outright failure.

Impressive adoption… but has the value been fully achieved yet?

Nonetheless, as a business model GBS is here to stay. The Hackett Group has been reporting for more than 10 years the percentage of SS that have moved to a GBS model. Since 2014, GBS organizations have outnumbered single-function SS organizations by a factor of three. In addition, in Deloitte’s 2015 Global Shared Services survey, approximately 60% of the 1,000 SS reporting were multi-function in nature, containing two or more functions. Even though the GBS adoption has continued to grow, not all the implementations have delivered the expected business value and outcomes. As a matter of fact, few companies (less than 10-15%) have reached the “holy grail” of GBS performance yet, except for companies like P&G and Unilever, who have been at it for well over a decade. So, as your company transitions from SS to GBS, are you delivering the expected value and outcomes to your business clients, and if not, where is your company on that journey?