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Glorious summer is almost here. Schools are letting out, beach vacations are being booked and summer Fridays are in full effect! It’s also midway through the calendar year and a great time for small business owners to audit their business, level set your goals, and create a 3rd quarter strategy for your business.
We’ve rounded up some hot ways for your business to stay cool this summer: 1. Plan a Team Outing Team building is one of the most underused techniques to keep teams connected and motivated. Taking the time to spend with your team will have a positive ripple effect on the work that they do. Team building may seem like an overused term that equates to forced unnecessary time spent out of the office, but studies show that bringing the team together for a learning or personal development type of gathering increases productivity and happiness in their job. Pro tips: schedule something fun and interactive, preferably out of the office where the team can relax. Here are some great ideas for team building activities. Check out this Forbes article for more! 2. Know Your Competition Mid-year is the perfect time to take an objective view of your business. Look at what you are doing compared to your top competition in your area or in your category of business. You can do this by spending some time on Google, searching for ways to find a business like yours. You will see your competitors come up. An example would be: “Center City Philadelphia HairStylist” - when you search a specific business and location as most people do, you can see the top competition that comes up. In most cases, the top businesses are paying for their ad space so look beyond that by checking out the businesses on the first and second pages of the search results. Knowing your competition will keep you on top of your industry’s marketing and advertising trends and offer you ideas on how you can improve yours. 3. Make moves with Marketing Just like knowing your competition is crucial, it is just as important to regularly assess your marketing and advertising strategy. It is no surprise that the internet is a primary focus of marketing in today’s climate, however, think about what is right for your business and what you haven’t tried yet. Could a direct mailer to your neighborhood be an option? For some small businesses, the old school paper trail is coming back. Email marketing is also a great way to stay in touch with your current and interested clientele. We like these marketing resources compiled by Thrive Hive to stay on top of small business marketing tools. There are also a ton of FREE digital apps available to take advantage of, check some out here. Always check in with your marketing strategy, it is an evolution and sometimes takes trial and error to configure the winning plan! 4. Outsource Your Pain Points + Prep for What’s Next This is the best time of the year to do a tax audit on your company’s earnings so far in the year. If you like to crunch digits, we recommend calculating your taxes for the first two quarters to see what you owe. This will help you determine what you can proactively do for the latter part of the year to reduce your business taxes. Read a great article in The Hartford about reducing taxable income here. If analyzing numbers sounds like a headache, hire a bookkeeper! Hiring an expert to tackle your books will alleviate the stress of messing around with the numbers side of the business. Back to that financial statement for a sec. Planning for the future of your business calls for a clear understanding of your past. Again, this is where a reliable bookkeeper comes in handy. They asses your cash flow accounts receivable and payable as well as pay attention to any type of malicious behavior. Check out a few of our top services to help. 5. Network, Network, Network “Your network is your net worth” - Porter Gale We cannot stress the importance of networking and creating dedicated time to be out in your community talking about your business. As a small business owner, this is part of your job. Whether you are good at it or not doesn’t really matter. It’s the point of you putting in the time in your own way. Join local business associations, go to industry events and join Facebook and LinkedIn groups that align with your company goals. Here are some more small business networking tips! We hope these summer small business ideas will help your business sizzle this summer and throughout the rest of the year. Check back for more small business buzz-worthy insight, advice and resources on our Better Bookkeeping Blog. Let us know what you want to learn more about in the comments below. Follow us on Social Media @capribookkeeping capribookkeeping.com
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 Ethan Capri, Founder and CEO of Capri Bookkeeping Solutions “I took a blind leap of faith and quit my high paying full-time job.” - Ethan Capri Daydreaming about a life where he could be independent, Ethan Capri’s journey started after graduating from Drexel University in Philadelphia. His career launched as an Accounting Manager at a Philadelphia accounting firm where he honed in on his craft, learning the ins and outs of small business management and company culture. Ethan sought fulfillment out of his work and wanted his contributions to lead back to something that he could call his own. An entrepreneur at heart, Ethan started to work with small business owners in South Jersey where he lived on the weekends as a fun way to make some extra money and tap into this budding passion. He quickly learned that his basic bookkeeping services for small businesses were filling a niche. His weekend side hustle was becoming more and he knew he was on to something bigger. More importantly, for Ethan, his dream of becoming an entrepreneur was on the horizon. With the intention and desire to fill a need in his community, Ethan took a blind leap of faith and quit his full-time, high paying job thinking that he would at least have his weekend clients. In four short months, he was able to make up for his 50% decrease in salary and within a year exceeded profits in his new business venture. As a small business owner in the South Jersey and Philadelphia area, the journey has been long and hard. In the first year, he was a sole proprietor and only had to account for himself as the employee. As he grew, hiring people brought on additional costs and challenges. Hiring, training and motivating a team was a new challenge but something that he quickly realized was crucial to the success of his company. He now focuses on hiring people that are the right fit for Capri but also the right fit for their life. Ethan believes in having a flex style work-life balance that keeps his team motivated. If Ethan could offer up advice for people thinking about becoming an entrepreneur, he says, “Realize that you know nothing until you work from the bottom up so you can then form a better idea of how to run your own business.” Ethan attributes his success to staying organized and proactive with his schedule. Routines are very important to his success strategy. He studies his calendar two weeks out and uses the first part of his day for the “office work” and the latter part of the day for visiting with clients and training his team. Ethan Capri is a Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor and Capri Bookkeeping Solutions is quickly growing to become one of South Jersey and Philadelphia’s go-to bookkeeping companies for small businesses. Capri Bookkeeping Solutions focused on bookkeeping, payroll, and QuickBooks for small businesses in the South Jersey and Philadelphia regions. They currently have a team of eight people and a unique approach to client service where every client gets paired up with a micro team for extra focus on their account. This team-based approach offers the Capri client with day-to-day proactive attention to their bookkeeping and reporting functions. Hear what Capri clients are saying: “Ethan & his staff pay great attention to detail. They have a strong & established on-boarding process that provides the small to mid-size employers with great payroll flexibility. Ethan is also a great partner with his clients and the other professionals they deal with. His ability to establish these relationships makes him invaluable to his clients.” Read more reviews here and follow Capri Bookkeeping Solutions on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn. #CapriBookkeeping #BetterBookkeeping = #BetterBusiness #CapriClient “Risk more than what others think is safe. Dream more than others think is practical.” Howard Shultz |
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