Business Advice – VA Business

Transforming Your Business Space with Expert Spring Cleaning Services

Since it’s a new season, things need to start over, especially in business. Your office or business will feel better if it’s clean, and clients and employees will also think well of you. Your business can look and feel like it’s brand new after a professional clean from Brilliance Cleaning.

A Fresh Start for Your Office

Cleanup in the spring is more than just a chore; it’s a chance to start over, which can be good for your business. This process does more than just wipe down the surface; it also makes the workplace lively and positive. Professional cleaners make sure that every corner is cleaned by paying extra attention to places that aren’t usually cleaned during a full clean. Each business space has its own unique needs, and the method and cleaning services are also created to meet those needs. Putting this much thought and customisation into the space not only gives it new life, but it also makes the workplace more productive and friendly.

A healthier place to live

Since it’s spring now, you should make your workspace better for your health. It looks better and is better for everyone’s health when the place is clean. Using cleaning methods and products that are safe for the environment is the best way to keep things clean without taking health risks. To get rid of allergens, it’s better to do a deep spring clean. It’s better for everyone, and people may call in sick less often. This method lets you keep the office clean, keeps everyone healthy, and gets work done.

10 Ways To Identify A Reputable Commercial Storage Facility

For any business owner looking for a reputable commercial storage facility, if you have never used one before, it can be somewhat daunting not knowing how to start looking, or more specifically, how to judge whether one storage company or another suits your business’s requirements.

Thankfully, it is not as difficult a process as some might think. To make it even easier, we have outlined the ten most important points you should assess regarding any Melbourne storage units you are considering hiring.

#1 – Research the Company’s History: Research the storage unit company’s history and reputation in the industry. Consider the company’s reputation within and its impact on your local community. Look for how long they have been in business, any legal issues, and if they have any accolades or awards.

The Art of Professional Commercial Cleaning: Tips and Tricks

A clean environment is essential for any business. It creates a safe and healthy atmosphere for both your customers and employees; not only that, but it also helps to make a positive first impression. Hiring professional commercial cleaners is a great way to ensure a space is regularly and adequately cleaned. But there are a few tricks and tips to consider, from understanding the different types of cleaning services that are available, how to prepare your space for a deep clean, the best practices to maintain a clean room, as well as when to hire a professional to do it for you.

How to Start Estate Planning When You’re Sick

Some of the most current research in Australia suggests that at least half of Australians don’t have a valid will. That means when they die without consulting financial planners and legal experts, their loved ones likely don’t know what their wishes are or how they would have wanted their assets to be divided.

Sometimes, it’s not until you become ill that you realise how important having an estate plan can be. By then, you may find yourself struggling to put a plan in place to help your loved ones. If you need a helping hand, some of the information below may be useful.

Make a Medical Treatment Plan

Making a medical treatment plan is one of the most important things to do when you find out you’re sick and begin estate planning. Discuss with your family what your wishes are, including the treatment you would want to have as you reach the end of your life.

Many people include explicit instructions in their medical treatment plans, such as a do-not-resuscitate (DNR) order, not being tube-fed to be kept alive, and not being kept alive artificially on machines.

You may have mentioned this information in passing to a family member or two, but having it written down in a valid will and estate plan that you’ve put together with legal experts like financial planners can mean your wishes may be more likely to be followed.

Make Plans For Your Organs

Around 1,600 people are waiting for a life-saving organ in Australia, yet only around two per cent of people who die in Australian hospitals are eligible for organ donation. If there’s a chance that you might be, consider adding this information to your estate plan.

Why You Should Not Panic If Your Commercial Lift Gets Stuck

As humans, we all have specific fears and phobias. One person might be terrified of spiders, and the person standing next to them might have a tarantula as a pet. Conversely, the spider lover might be terrified of heights, whilst the person with arachnophobia is an avid rock climber who thinks nothing of scaling a 1,000-foot cliff. The point we are making is that to each of us the dangers we face are equal, and it is only in the mind that our fear levels of any one of them are set.

That can also be applied to our fears of having an accident whilst in a commercial lift, and for many, the two greatest fears whilst in a lift are either being trapped in it or the lift plummeting to the ground.

If we take the latter of these, we have to point out that the chances of commercial lift falling down its lift shaft is minuscule. The modern commercial lift has sophisticated braking systems, multiple cables and often lift servicing which mean even if there were to be a serious fault, everything concerning the safety of the lift is to designed to prevent it from falling.

5 Ways That Actuaries Impact Your Insurance Coverage And Premiums

There is a quote attributed to Benjamin Franklyn that states, “The only certainties in life are death and taxes”, but many would argue that, given its influence in all areas of our lives, insurance should be added too, and if so, then it brings into the limelight the role of actuarial services within the insurance industry.

If you are wondering what actuarial services are, they are rendered by professionals known as actuaries, and the role of an actuary is to use statistical and mathematical models to establish what the likelihood is of particular future events such as accidents, natural disasters, specific crimes like burglary, and deaths from specific illnesses, to name but a few.

What an actuary does within the insurance industry covers many tasks, but in the main, they help insurance companies to determine what the risks are relating to the coverage they provide versus the premiums they charge their customers and clients. Read on, and you will learn more about how an actuary influences many aspects of the insurance policies which you hold.

5 Digital Marketing Methods For Real Estate Companies

Deciding that you wish to use the internet to try to gain increasing numbers of prospects and clients for your real estate company is a positive step, but many business owners come to a grinding halt at this point as they are unsure what options they have and how they would benefit them. An experienced digital marketing agency could outline dozens of online marketing avenues, but they actually advise that it is more effective if you focus on just a few.

With that advice taken on board, we are going to outline five of the most popular and successful digital marketing methods, most of which we are sure you have heard of. We will also point out how you can use these to boost your real estate company’s online success, both in terms of generating new prospects and turning those prospects into clients for your real estate company.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Having your real estate company’s website rank at the top of Google can not only bring you plenty of kudos and brand recognition, but when it comes to the bread and butter issue of your business making profits, it can also generate lots of new prospective clients that can help achieve them.

SEO must be looked upon as a longer-term strategy, as there are very few shortcuts to ranking on Google, and given its complexity, it is usually advisable to employ a professional SEO agency to plan and facilitate your SEO.

3 Highly Effective Office Carpet Cleaning Methods That The Professionals Use

One of the most effective ways of caring for the carpets in your office is to call upon the services of a professional commercial cleaners. These highly skilled and experienced carpet cleaners can clean carpets of all types to the very highest standards which prolongs the life of the carpets they clean, meaning their customers need not spend as much or as frequently, replacing carpets.

If you have ever wondered how professional carpets do their work, it is hopefully clear that they do not simply turn up and vacuum. What they are more likely to do is to employ one of the core cleaning methods that only professional carpet cleaning companies use.

These carpet cleaning methods normally require special carpet cleaning equipment, specific detergents, and more impotently the skills, experience and professionalism of the people employed to clean your carpets to ensure that the work is done to the highest level. As for the specifics of the methods that professional carpet cleansers employ, here are three of the most commonly used.

5 Ways Of Ensuring You Hire The Best Office Removalists Company

An office relocation is a big step for any business and ensuring that it goes smoothly and to plan is essential if you are to start in your new business premises on a positive note. The last thing you want is a shambolic move meaning you and your employees settling into your new surroundings under the proverbial dark cloud. One of the surest ways to make the experience positive is employing the best possible Toorak removalists you can.

Office removalists are essentially what can make the difference between a disorganised, stressful, and costly office relocation and one which is planned, stress-free, and goes smoothly but to get to this point, there are several steps you must take beforehand. These are the steps required to research, evaluate, and then hire an office removalists company. Specifically, there are five steps we recommend, and these are outlined below.

Establish Exactly What Your Needs Are First

It amazes us when we see business owners researching services that they think they require without actually evaluating what their needs are first. Surely the logical and sensible approach is to determine what their business needs, and then find a service that matches that.

7 Reasons Better Branding Can Boost Your Family Lawyers Business

Whilst branding might be an aspect of business that many people associate with large global companies, it is also something that all local businesses should be focussing on too, and that includes law firms. The scale of your branding activities might not be on the same level as the likes of Nike and Coca Cola, however, the benefits to your family lawyers business can be every bit as important to its success.

If you are still unsure as to what benefits might accrue from a marketing campaign that seeks to enhance your family lawyers business’s branding, continue reading and you will soon discover seven of them, all of which can boost it in both the short and long term.

Promotes Your Business As A Premium Option: When faced with the need to find a family lawyer, potential clients will want the reassurance that they are being represented by the best possible legal team. With effective branding, your family lawyers business can be projected as one of the elite legal teams in your area, which means those looking for a top family lawyer will seek to retain your services.

What information do you need to value a business for sale?

There are many different methods of valuing a business. Some investors use discounted cash flow, others use a multiple of earnings, some look at appraised assets. If you are in the same business as the business for sale that you are looking to acquire, what synergies exist between the two companies?

The amount of savings that can be generated needs to be factored into the purchase price. If you are looking to acquire a competitor who keeps low balling the prices, if you were to acquire them, that gets rid of a competitor which will result in higher prices, you need to factor that into the amount that you will offer for the business for sale.

Here is a list of items which you should have when doing your valuation

three years financial statements prepared by an external accountant. If the accountant has a designation, ie. CA, CGA, CPA, the accountant may have issued an opinion, a Notice to Reader, Review Engagement or Audit. Please read the opinion to determine how much reliance on the financial statements, if any, that you should make.
internal financial statements from the last year end up to current normalize income for the last three years. Normalized income starts with the net income reported for tax purposes and removes all personal and non reoccuring expenses which would not exist under the new owner.

How To Hide Stains In Your Office Carpet Until The Pros Can Remove Them

Ok, it is confession time. We are going to teach you how to cheat. Now, far from this meaning that we have fallen from grace and gone over to the dark side, instead, it will mean that you can keep your business premises looking great for as long as possible. Specifically what we are going to do is teach you how to hide or reduce stains in your office carpets, until you can hire professional carpet cleaners to get rid of them for you properly.

You might be thinking, “Why don’t I just call the pros in today?”, and we would answer that by telling you to go for it. However, commercial carpet cleaning is a highly popular service, so there is the likelihood that you may have to wait a few days before they can confirm an appointment. Meanwhile, your carpets remain dirty or stained which is hardly the image you want to project to prospective clients and other visitors to your business premises.

So, whilst you are waiting patiently for your professional commercial carpet cleaners to work their magic, here are some ways in which you can hide the offending areas of your dirty carpets from view, or minimise the effect of the stains which exist.

Fire Safety Tips for Businesses

As a business owner, you’ve likely got enough to worry about in your daily operations without needing to give any spare time to fire protection. However, as inconvenient as it might be to dedicate time to something that probably won’t happen, it’s essential to be prepared.

Not only can it be a legal requirement, but it could also save lives. Here are some fire safety tips from fire services that could be important while you’re putting your workplace fire safety plan into action.

Have An Evacuation Plan

Most people know that they should leave the building immediately if they see, hear, or smell fire. However, how they leave the building and what they should do next isn’t always clear. It can be if you put an evacuation plan into place and train your staff on what’s involved in it.

Five reasons you shouldn’t design your own website

In the modern world, there are countless website builders and other platforms that target beginners who want to create their own new website. The main draw of these tools is that they require little to no technical experience to use, they don’t require any coding knowledge, and they are affordable and enable rapid site creation.

However, it’s not always a good idea to create your own site. Just because a platform advertises that you can “get online in minutes” doesn’t mean you really will be able to. And even if you can get online fast, there’s every chance that you will make mistakes and run into problems down the track.

Need more convincing? Here are five reasons why you should engage an experienced Perth website designer and never try to design your own website.

It Takes Time

Despite the platforms advertising rapid website creation, the reality is that you can expect to spend at least a few days creating anything more than the most basic site. This is because web design isn’t as easy as it may appear, and there’s a lot more to it than you might realise. Employing an experienced web designer will save you time, enabling you to focus on the things you’re actually good at.

Reforms To Unfair Contract Terms Laws

Consumer law in Australia is constantly evolving, sometimes for the worse, but mostly for the better. One area of consumer law which affects both businesses and consumers is contract law, and in this area, the government has made some significant proposals recently, and particularly concerning unfair contracts. We preface this, with recommending that if you seek legal advice, you should contact a commercial lawyer.

Definition Of Unfair Contracts

As it stands a contract relating to a consumer or a small business will be deemed unfair if any terms or conditions within that contract cause any of the three scenarios below to be created.

How Commercial Law Defines Misleading Or Deceptive Conduct By A Business

It is a sad fact of the commercial world that some businesses cross to the wrong side of the line relating to honesty and proper conduct when it comes to how they communicate and act. For some businesses, their conduct might have been a result of errors and misunderstandings, but even then, it may still result in an unacceptable outcome. A point here is that even unintentional actions can result in repercussions under consumer law.

Most at fault are those businesses whose actions are deliberate attempts to give themselves a financial gain, whilst at the same time misleading and in some cases, cheating those customers who purchase their goods and services. Thankfully, commercial law has remedies for unacceptable conduct by businesses, and one area, in particular, is where a business acts misleadingly or deceptively.

The applicable legislation can be found in Section 18 of the Australian Consumer Law (ACL). The ACL applies across the entire country and thus means businesses in every state must comply with it and should not attempt any contravention of its consumer protections.

Definitions Of Misleading Or Deceptive Conduct By Businesses

There are three main ways in which misleading or deceptive conduct by businesses can be defined. They are:

#1: Future Predictions

This is classified as a business making forecasts or projections about the future which it simply cannot back up or prove with any credible evidence. Worse, it applies where a business deliberately makes false or misleading predictions. Countless examples might apply such as:

5 Core Metrics For Home Building Company’s Digital Marketing

Any digital marketing campaign which is set up to promote your new home building company needs to be measured in several ways to establish its viability and your return on investment. Many business owners believe that all they have to do to assess their marketing is check how much revenue is being created but the digital marketing experts will tell you that does not paint the full picture with regards to a campaign’s success.

There are multiple metrics and measures which can give you an indication of how much your digital marketing efforts are succeeding and building a complete picture from each of these metrics, is how you will be can arrive at a definitive answer. Here, we are going to cover 5 of these metrics, and they are the ones which every business owner, including those who own new home building companies should regard as the most indicative of their digital marketing’s performance.

Metric #1: Cost Per Prospect/Lead

Cost per prospect or cost per lead is how to calculate the cost of bringing each individual into your sales funnel. Each business may have a different definition of what they would classify as a lead, but for most, it will be someone who has effectively raised their hand and asked for more information about a product or service. Take the total marketing spend and divide by the number of individual prospects. $5,000 spent to acquire 200 prospects is a cost per lead of $25.

Should I use a business broker to sell my business?

You would like to sell your business and you are debating should you business a business broker or should you sell your business by yourself. Which option should you use? Do you sell the business on The Business Place website or do you hire a business broker? There are no wrong choices, there are advances of listing the business yourself and there are advantages of using a broker.

If you list your business for sale yourself, you will save commissions. You will also be able to control who is told your that your business is for sale. You have much more control of this feature if you are concerned about your customers finding out about your business for sale.

How is your business affected when your spouse wants a divorce?

You have been operating your business for many years and you have been having marriage problems for years. One day your spouse wants finality to the relationship and wants a divorce. How do you cope? Do you have lines of credit that still can be drawn? Is the spouse working for you. I spoke to a person the other day and they split up 4 years ago, live in the same house on two floors and still worked in the business.

No arrangement was made for closure because neither wanted to pay for a lawyer. It is difficult for a married couple to split up however there are two ways to do it, the friendly way or the non friendly way.

When you are using divorce lawyers and are fighting, the only person who wins are the lawyers. The two spouses and their family loses. I saw one spouse who was very vindictive cause the husband to lose 50% of his net worth due to fighting. The kids see the fighting and no one wins.