Diana Goodwin

February 6th, 2023

Business Owners: Nine Tips For Accomplishing Your New Year's Resolutions

Though they are often set with the best of intentions, it’s not uncommon for New Year’s resolutions and the motivation to meet them to fall by the wayside after a few weeks or months into the new year. Busy personal lives and stressful workdays can end up getting in the way, with “just getting by” taking precedence over any push to accomplish more than the status quo.

February 1st, 2023

10 Necessary Skills For Managing The Day-To-Day Operations Of A Business

Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or you’ve recently opened a business, you’re likely thinking about all the skills you’ll need to make your business thrive. While different types of businesses will require different skill sets of their owners, there are several skills that are universally useful across the small-business landscape.

January 27th, 2023

10 Important Expenses Every CEO Should Budget For In Today's Economic Climate

As businesses recover from the pandemic-fueled events of the last few years, as well as grapple with the uncertainty of today’s economic climate, entrepreneurs are likely to feel cautious and unsure of how to plan for the success of their businesses going forward. After all, how can you plan for something you don’t know is going to happen?

January 26th, 2023

Nine Ways CEOs Can Add Structure To Their Workdays And Maximize Productivity

Whether you lead a bustling startup or an established business, as a CEO, your days are likely full of endless meetings, questions from leadership or staff, “fires” that need putting out and very little time to get any actual work done. Without an intentional plan or schedule, your day can get away from you, allowing your work—and your stress—to build up over time.

January 17th, 2023

9 Practical Ways to Make Your Customer Service More Proactive

It only takes one unhappy customer leaving a negative review to damage a company's reputation and drive away future business. Therefore, it's imperative that customer service teams immediately resolve any customer complaints before they can snowball and turn into bigger problems for a company.

December 20th, 2022

Nine Entrepreneurs Share The 2022 Business Trends They Expect Will Carry Over Into The New Year

Social media isn’t the only place to find the latest trends. When taking a look at the business world as a whole over the last 12-month period, you’ll find a number of trends and initiatives that took hold of a large number of organizations. Whether it’s increased flexibility or organic lead capture, these trends grew popular for a reason—but will their popularity carry over into the new year?

December 19th, 2022

Business Really Picking Up During The Holidays? Eight Tips For Workload Management

With additional time-off requests, increased shopping and urgent customer service needs, the holiday season can be a busy time of year for any business. But for those seasonal businesses or businesses where sales really pick up during the end of the year, workload management can be a juggling act of responsibilities.

December 16th, 2022

Eight Ways Startup Leaders Can Ensure Their Small Teams Have The Support They Need

When you’re a small team, every employee plays a key role in the business. From marketing efforts to sales to operations, each aspect of the business needs a full team effort in order to get off the ground—and that can often mean team members work beyond the scope of the roles which they were hired for. 

December 14th, 2022

8 Predictions for How the Workforce Will Change in 2023

The workforce of 2023 will continue to change and evolve, from more hybrid work policies to a greater focus on global candidates.

December 13th, 2022

Found Overnight Success? Nine Tips For Scaling Your Business Quickly

Becoming an overnight success is every entrepreneur's dream, but when it actually does happen, it can rapidly turn into an overwhelming nightmare if you aren’t prepared for the influx of new customers and orders. Rather than allowing yourself to be buried by the consequences of your success, finding a way to scale your business quickly can ensure you keep up with rising demand.

November 17th, 2022

Aspiring Business Owner? Nine Ways To Ensure Your Passion Will Be Profitable

Many aspiring entrepreneurs seek to get into business because they're passionate about their idea. However, strong passion for an idea may not always be enough to ensure profitability, and in order to succeed long term in the business world, making enough money to both survive and thrive is vital. 

November 9th, 2022

Eight Ways Leaders Can Help Remote Employees Keep Corporate Files Safe

Whether you run a fully remote or a hybrid business, keeping corporate files safe while your employees work from home is of the utmost importance. Remote work creates new challenges for business leaders to contend with—such as employees using personal devices to access documents or working from unsecure public networks—and that means leaders will need to take certain steps to ensure sensitive information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.

November 7th, 2022

11 Ways Small Businesses Can Compete With Major Retailers for Holiday Sales

Cyber Monday and Black Friday are great opportunities to attract customers to your small business, but there is often a lot of competition from major retailers during the holiday season. While your small business may not be able to compete on the same level as a major retailer, there are a lot of strategies you can use to sell more products or services through the end of the year.

November 1st, 2022

End Of The Workday? Seven Ways These Entrepreneurs Prepare For A Successful Morning

When you’re an entrepreneur, the way you start your day can greatly influence the rest of your workday, giving you the motivation you need to stay productive or setting you up for failure before you’ve even started. Rather than leave your morning to chance, finding ways to prepare for your morning the night before can help you ensure you have the right mindset and tools for a positive next day.

October 26th, 2022

Nine Ways To Ensure Your Company Culture Breeds Successful Leaders

One of the best ways to ensure your company is always in good hands—whether you are at the helm or not—is to make sure your team is made up of great leaders. And while careful hiring can deliver a similar result, another and perhaps more effective strategy for achieving this is to create those leaders through your company culture and values.

October 21st, 2022

Avoid These Nine Blunders To Communicate More Effectively At Work

When it comes to work and getting things done, effective communication is about more than getting along with your teammates. In a business context, communication can affect not only the interpersonal relationships of the people who work there, but also the speed at which a project is completed, the quality of a product and even the rate at which employees leave the company. Effective communication, then, acts as a solid foundation necessary for any business to thrive. 

October 19th, 2022

Nine Young Entrepreneurs Share How They Measure The Success Of Their Workdays

When it comes to defining success, there’s no one right answer. It can mean owning your own business, making over a million dollars, driving a particular car or even just having more freedom with your time. But when broken down into a single workday, success can sometimes be a little more difficult to measure. Its definition can even change throughout your career as you develop both professionally and personally.

October 18th, 2022

8 Ways to Make a Professional Impression When Working From Home

Despite the more relaxed environment and constant distractions, there are plenty of ways to display your professionalism from your home office.

October 18th, 2022

Eight Signs A Job Candidate Is Portraying Their Authentic Self

October 13th, 2022

Eight Ways To Improve Vendor And Client Relationships (Even If They Live Far Away)

Whether you run a global business or you simply live far away from your vendors and clients, maintaining quality relationships with your business’s stakeholders is key to your business’s success in the short and long term. Ensuring the happiness of your vendors, clients and team often means avoiding miscommunications, preventing problems and streamlining processes that will help maintain the smooth running of your company.

October 12th, 2022

Nine Tips For Successful Social Media Marketing As A Solopreneur

When you're a solopreneur, it can be difficult to find time to both run your business and market it on social media. However, if you want word to spread and your customer base to grow, building a presence on social media is a key way to achieve that goal. 

October 10th, 2022

Seven Limiting Beliefs That Can Hold Female Entrepreneurs Back

Despite female entrepreneurship trending upward—especially in recent years—on a global scale, male entrepreneurs still outnumber their female counterparts three to one. Statistics like this one, paired with feelings of doubt and a sense of imposter syndrome any aspiring entrepreneur is sure to feel when starting out, can often leave young female entrepreneurs with one or more limiting beliefs that can hold them back from accomplishing everything they’re capable of.

September 15th, 2022

Eight Best Practices To Keep In Mind Before Responding To A Bad Review

Receiving a bad review for your product or service—no matter if it’s your first bad review or your 50th—can often feel like a personal attack. After all, entrepreneurs often put a lot of themselves in their businesses, including time, effort and passion. But a bad review doesn’t have to be a negative issue. In fact, it can be a great opportunity to learn.

September 12th, 2022

Eight Key Tips For Revitalizing Stale Blog Content

While you may have started your company blog with a wealth of original, valuable content ideas, after a particular length of time in business, you may find your creativity lacking and your blog content suffering with the same old topics and ideas. With so much content already out there on the internet, it can be difficult to constantly generate new ideas that your audience will be interested in reading.

September 9th, 2022

Back From A Long Vacation? Nine Tips For Getting Back Into Your Work Routine

Every professional needs time off to rest and recharge, but getting back into your work routine after a vacation or extended PTO can be tough—especially if you have lots of messages or tasks to sift through. All too quickly, that relaxed feeling you gained from your time away is replaced with stress and anxiety about all the tasks that urgently need your attention.

September 8th, 2022

10 Practices You Can Start Today To Promote Better Inclusivity In Your Company

While many companies are looking to improve their efforts when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion, it’s estimated that only 34% of companies currently have the resources to support those efforts. However, promoting better inclusivity in your company doesn’t have to immediately involve major staffing changes or expensive education programs. There are steps any business leader can take today that may not require any resources at all.

September 6th, 2022

10 Skills Even The Best Employees Should Always Work On (And Why)

No matter how far along you are in your career, there are always going to be opportunities for you to learn. This is especially true when it comes to leveling up certain skills that only increase in importance as you climb the corporate ladder. Skills like empathy, adaptability and even active listening all require constant practice and refinement to truly master—even for those who already feel like they have a solid grasp on them.

September 4th, 2022

10 Ways to Tactfully Decline Your Employee's Request for a Raise

Sometimes, leaders aren't able to grant an employee's request for a raise, whether it's because there's no budget for it or because the person's performance or skill set doesn’t currently warrant one. In either case, leaders need to focus on tact and kindness when declining the employee's request — a task that may feel awkward or uncomfortable for leaders who have never done it.

August 15th, 2022

Strategies For Mastering The Art Of Getting Started

No matter what you want to do—start a company, write a book, launch a podcast—you must develop one fundamental skill: the art of getting started.

August 3rd, 2022

Eight Issues To Prepare For As Your Company Approaches The 50-Employee Mark

For many entrepreneurs, a growing business is a successful one. But there’s a lot more to consider than simple growth as a measurement for success. A quality company culture, happy and fulfilled employees as well as seamless processes are all factors that contribute to a healthy company—and they all have the potential to be negatively impacted by your company’s growth.

July 26th, 2022

8 UNDERRATED FEATURES YOU SHOULD CONSIDER ADDING TO YOUR MOBILE APP

Members of Young Entrepreneur Council list the mobile app features they think should receive more attention.

July 25th, 2022

Nine Work Habits That Can Improve Your Productivity And Focus

Increasing productivity and focus is something most professionals strive for. But while there are different tricks and tips for being more productive and focused on your work, the tips don’t always work for every person. The key is to find advice that works for you and your lifestyle.

July 22nd, 2022

Eight Critical Practices Every Solopreneur Should Follow To Maintain Their Website

Creating and maintaining a website is often one of the most important parts of running a successful business. Without a website, customers will have a hard time discovering and purchasing your products or services, so it’s key to ensure your website is up and functioning properly. When you’re a solopreneur, however, and all of the work falls on your shoulders, it can be all too easy to let website maintenance fall by the wayside.

May 5th, 2021

How To Be More Persuasive In Business: Seven Unique Approaches

Most facets of business rely on persuading others. In sales, the goal is to convince the buyer that your product is better than your competitors’. In a job posting, it's to persuade the candidate that your company is better than others. The art of being persuasive, however, is something many entrepreneurs overlook, despite it being such a core component to a successful business.

April 20th, 2021

Nine Elements Required For A Truly Captivating Brand Story

Building a brand is an essential part of starting a business. The brand should accurately reflect what the company is, what it offers, its values and more.

April 18th, 2021

8 Tips for Crafting the Perfect Business Email

Writing a business email? Don't hit "send" until you've completed these key steps.

April 7th, 2021

13 Poor SEO Habits Marketers Should Avoid

Search engine optimization is a prominent concern for marketers across all industries and for any business with an online presence. Having good SEO habits is likely to get your website ranked on search engines above your competitors. However, poor SEO habits likely won’t produce the results you’re looking for and can potentially lead to your site getting heavily penalized.

April 1st, 2021

Seven Ways To Promote Effective Cross-Departmental Communication

When you're running an organization, communication breakdowns can lead to severe efficiency and productivity problems. While smaller teams may be able to quickly deal with the difficulties of communication inefficiency, this problem becomes harder to solve as the business grows and evolves.

March 26th, 2021

12 Ways to Make New Employees Feel Welcome

When you run a business and hire employees, it’s essential your new staff members feel like they are valued members of the team. Your efforts should begin on day one with an onboarding process that will help new employees feel welcome, and that will set them up for success as they start their work.

March 24th, 2021

Nine Tips All Entrepreneurs Need To Hear When Starting A Business

If you're looking for business advice, there are a lot of different places you could go. There are countless books and seminars that promise you success with your business, but many of them are built on the achievements of their creators. No two entrepreneurs or businesses are precisely the same, and because of this, their advice may not apply or resonate with you.

March 22nd, 2021

11 Tips to Always Keep Your Social Media Content On Brand

As with other marketing efforts, social media can sometimes be a challenge because it has to balance customer appeal with staying true to its brand promise. But with so many social media platforms, trends and opportunities for innovation, it can be easy to let the brand message get lost along the way. So how does a company keep all of its different social media profiles and content on brand with each and every post? Below, 11 experts from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) examine the following question:

March 4th, 2021

Streamline Your SaaS Vendor List With These 13 Entrepreneur-Recommended Tips

Many businesses rely on software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies to help them run their everyday operations. However, with so many specialized vendors, it's easy to lose track of the number — and price tag — of the SaaS providers you're working with. To help, members of Young Entrepreneur Council weighed in on the following question:

February 8th, 2021

Want a Candidate to Accept Your Job Offer? 12 Things to Include in Their Offer Letter

If you’re trying to attract highly qualified professionals to your company, it’s likely that they’re mulling over multiple offer letters in addition to yours. To incentivize a top job candidate to accept your offer, you have to find a way to make it stand out. To help, a panel of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) members answered the following question:

February 1st, 2021

10 Ways to Turn Employees into Brand Ambassadors for Your Business

Without the support of employees, a company’s branding efforts can only be so successful. It’s when the whole team comes together to promote the business, and your employees have all become effective brand ambassadors, that your business’s brand is able to truly shine. But forcing employees to take part in branding efforts can seem demanding and may not have the same result as when they contribute voluntarily.

January 22nd, 2021

11 Ways to Boost Employee Morale and Productivity During the Cold Days of Winter

For many companies, maintaining a high level of engagement and motivation among employees during the dark winter months can be quite a challenge. And with a growing remote work environment, it is even more difficult to make sure your team stays engaged and productive while also ensuring they make time for self-care. To help, 11 entrepreneurs from Young Entrepreneur Council reflect on the following question:

January 20th, 2021

12 Factors to Consider Before Becoming an Entrepreneur

Being an entrepreneur and owning your own business is an end goal for most people. It's a thrilling end result -- the fact that you're your own boss, you set your own hours, and remain accountable only to yourself can be a heady mix. Yet, the benefits of the position usually overshadow the more pertinent considerations that would-be entrepreneurs overlook. Although there are significant benefits to being a business owner, there's also a considerable amount of background work that rarely gets highlighted but needs to be done.

January 15th, 2021

Nine Strategies To Make Your New Year’s Resolutions Really Stick This Year

As the new year signifies new beginnings, most people come up with things they want to change as the January rolls around. If these resolutions stick, they could lead to an entirely new way of life. Yet so many people let these goals falter, and within the first few weeks of the new year, these resolutions are relegated to the proverbial garbage heap.

January 14th, 2021

10 Ways to Optimize Your Virtual Hiring Process

January 14th, 2021

17 Creative Ways to Bring Together Company Leaders for Productive Conversation

17 members of YEC share effective tactics for gathering together leaders in a way that will lead to actual productivity and strategizing.

January 4th, 2021

Tips for Dealing With Controversial Topics on Social Media

Social media is a place for anyone to express their opinions and beliefs, and often that means talking about controversial topics. Sometimes, a business may post something that sparks a heated debate, or its social media followers might bring up these touchy issues on the business’s page, leaving the brand to come up with a response that won't offend or alienate its audience.

December 17th, 2020

Planning For Q1 Of The New Year: Eight Tips For Success

The end of this year is right around the corner, and smart business owners will already be setting up plans and goals for the coming first quarter. Planning helps a business take stock of what it's achieved thus far and what it can hope to accomplish in the first quarter of the new year, given its available time and resources.

December 15th, 2020

12 Foolproof Methods of Growing Your Email Subscriber List

Email marketing is still among the most effective ways to target an audience. However, for email marketing to be successful, you need to encourage people to sign up for your email list. This step might seem like a simple task, but recently consumers are extra-protective about their email addresses. Individuals have been flooded with spam and have become a lot more cautious about who they share their information with.

December 3rd, 2020

Nine Simple Ways A Young Founder Can Demonstrate Their Industry Thought Leadership

When you’re young and inexperienced, stepping up to a leadership position can be more difficult than usual. Without a strong standing in their industry, a new entrepreneur may not be able to navigate the terrain as easily as others. However, these leaders can still bring fresh perspectives and ideas to the table.

November 23rd, 2020

12 Ways Service-Based Businesses Can Take Advantage of the Holiday Season

The holiday season is usually a goldmine of opportunities for product-based businesses that deploy specific marketing strategies to make their offering stand out and be relevant for that time of the year. While service-based businesses typically find it more difficult to capitalize on this season’s business opportunities, there are still several creative strategies they can deploy to make holiday marketing work in their favor. To help, we asked 12 entrepreneurs from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following:

November 19th, 2020

13 Essential Resume Elements to Warrant an Interview

Resumes are the first look that business owners get at potential hires. As a result, they must use these resumes as a basis to figure out if that person is worth bringing in for an interview or not. Each business has its own demands for potential employees and therefore looks for specific elements in candidates’ resumes to determine possible fit. How can job seekers optimize their resumes to include these essential elements? To help, we asked we asked 13 successful entrepreneurs from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following question:

October 20th, 2020

Nine Signs You're Not Being Effective Today

You may measure your effectiveness with several metrics. However, not everyone has the time to dedicate to figuring out their level of daily effectiveness and productivity. As professionals, most of us have to learn how to spot the red flags indicating that we are being ineffective.

September 29th, 2020

15 Ways to Get Return Visitors to Read Your Blog

If you're like the hundreds of content marketers out there that have invested in blog content, you want people to read it. If you've been watching your metrics for visits, you might realize that many visitors don't even bother with your blog. Sure, they might follow a social post from your media to your blog, and possibly read a single entry, but they won't engage further than that.

September 29th, 2020

11 Top Tips for Maintaining Reader Engagement

After a user likes or shares one of your posts on social media, you've got them interested in your brand or product. But how do you leverage this engagement and keep it going?

September 21st, 2020

Nine Smart Ways To Stretch Your Productivity, Even If Your Time Is Limited

Every professional knows that an eight-hour workday rarely means eight straight productive hours of “real” work. Sometimes there are distractions and emergency situations to attend to throughout the day; other times, your calendar is so booked with meetings that it’s hard to find time in between to concentrate on your to-do list.

September 16th, 2020

15 Productivity Tips to Help Entrepreneurs Succeed

Small-business owners realize almost immediately how different their businesses are to run than large corporations. For success, a small business needs to adopt its own strategies that work with limited available resources. Entrepreneurs in this position need to make critical decisions about what approaches they'll take to elements of business growth and development.

September 10th, 2020

11 Actions To Take Today If You Want To Become A Thought Leader

“Thought leadership” is a big buzzword in the business world right now, and it’s easy to see why it’s become such an important focus for leaders. When others look to you for your expertise and insight, you can become a leading, recognized voice in your industry.

August 3rd, 2020

16 Essential Skills to Look for in a New Hire

Within an organization, some skills are far more valuable than others. If your business is looking at hiring new employees, then these skills should be a primary focus for your interviews. Knowing what skills are crucial for an enterprise to grow and thrive helps you figure out if an employee may be worth hiring, even if they don't fit the ideal. Sometimes the company needs more than just the right qualifications for their employees.

July 10th, 2020

Is Your Side Hustle Idea Worth It? 10 Questions To Ask Yourself

Having a side hustle is a great way to develop a creative outlet outside of your regular career. However, these projects can consume a lot of your time, energy and money. That's why it's important to consider the required commitment and effort – and the potential return – before going all-in on your idea.

July 9th, 2020

Don't Want to Risk Your Own Money on Your Business? 13 Alternative Financing Strategies

Getting any business off the ground requires sufficient capital. However, all the financial stress doesn't have to fall on you as the entrepreneur – there are other ways to secure funding for your startup without assuming 100% of the risk yourself. That's why we asked the members of Young Entrepreneur Council the following question:

July 3rd, 2020

Seven Ways To Leverage Customer Complaints For Business Growth

Customer complaints are a necessary part of a business, but it can be discouraging to deal with them. A good leader knows how to look at customer complaints and extract the positives out of those disparaging comments. A skilled leader can take these complaints and turn them into a power to motivate and direct the business's positive growth.

June 22nd, 2020

Here's How To Make High-Level Change At Work (Even If You're Not At The Top)

Every company has both the need and the potential to grow over time. Whether a business must adapt to new trends or is simply looking to improve its internal processes, high-level change is simply part of a company's journey.

June 4th, 2020

Here's How To Effectively Gauge Your Team's Morale

It's often said that a happy employee is a motivated, productive one. If your team members are feeling good about themselves and their work, they’ll bring that positive energy into everything they do. That's why it's so important to keep a close eye on your overall team morale.

May 19th, 2020

10 Creative Ways To Find New Revenue Streams For Your Business

In the wake of COVID-19, many businesses have had to significantly modify or even temporarily shut down their daily operations. In tough times such as these, finding new revenue streams can be a great way to make up the lost income and keep the company afloat.