3 Investment Options You Should Consider for Your Business

Keeping your business successful and growing in our highly competitive world is extremely difficult: almost half of new businesses close their doors in the first five years. That's why if you want to survive and thrive, you need to be well-read, well-researched and learn how to make smart investment choices. Here are a few investment options that, while not applicable to every business and every sector, can benefit your business and expand your customer base:

Invest in Creating an Online Presence

Unless you have a store selling very cheap foodstuff to your small local village, you'll probably benefit from investing in a website, some semblance of social media presence, and maintaining an online presence. There is quite a long list of reasons why it is just common-sense, among them:

• Most people search online for a product before going out and buying it: if you take a look through a list of all the businesses that existed in your city ten years ago, you'll find that most retail stores have gone out of business. This has been a trend for more than a decade, now – people are overwhelmingly turning to online shopping. Even if you only have a local shop with no option of delivery, it is important for local potential clients to find your store when they do a preliminary search online. Some businesses even go a step further and work with internet influencers and use platforms such as fourthwall.com to successfully market their products to younger and more-online people. Even a local listing on Google Maps has the potential of getting you hundreds of clients each month.
• People have turned desensitized to sales pitches and flowery language over time, and today, it is much harder to make a client trust you, especially when it comes to more expensive products. A lot of clients do hours of research and read hundreds of reviews before spending a couple of hundred bucks on a product. If you have an online presence, potential clients will be able to read about your services and previous products on Google and social media. When they see tens of people have left 5 stars on Google and your Facebook page is filled with positive sentiment, they'll be ten times more likely to buy the product from you.

Invest in Regular External Audits

Whether it is a person or a company, retrospection and self-criticism are extremely difficult. It takes a very unique work-culture and a lot of training to be able to assemble a team that will be as critical and harsh of your work model and business processes as an external audit will be. It is very likely that your team isn't one of that small minority.

That's why you should regularly, ideally once a year, conduct an external audit to check your bookkeeping, your customer service, your delivery time, and anything else specific and important for your business's success. You're basically paying money for an agency to point out your flaws, and because your company isn't a teenager, this will be an excellent opportunity to learn where your company is weak, where are your blindspots as a manager, and how you can improve going forward. It is a very worthy investment that you should definitely consider.

Invest in Your Employees

Investing in employees is an unpopular but very effective way to ensure your business keeps being efficient and productive long term. In today's open job market, it is really hard to keep talented people on board without paying insane wages, but another way of making sure you keep talented and smart people in your company is by ensuring they are comfortable, not overworked, and have access to good facilities.

Most studies show that employees are unwilling to take a 20% salary raise to change their jobs if their workplace is friendly and comfortable. This not only keeps employees and decrease turnover rates, but it will also, paradoxically, make them more productive. Most new management techniques unabashedly support this kind of approach.