Maria Thimothy

June 17th, 2021

14 Podcasts That Have Impacted How These Entrepreneurs Run Their Businesses (and Why)

With the rich educational value podcasts often provide their listeners, it’s no surprise that the business community turns to this popular form of content to improve their skills and strategies. Some entrepreneurs even make major business decisions based on the information they’ve learned and the stories they’ve listened to on podcasts.

June 10th, 2021

To Brand Or Not To Brand — It Is Not A Question

Whether you are a niche company focusing on B2B or a small business offering products DTC, you absolutely need to focus on branding even if you have a limited budget.

June 7th, 2021

13 Ways to Become a Positive Role Model for Yourself and Others

A positive role model is someone others want to emulate and follow, and successful entrepreneurs often become — sometimes unknowingly — the role models for other professionals. Whether it’s at work or in their personal lives, these leading entrepreneurs become a focus of attention because they have qualities that aspiring founders strive to replicate.

May 26th, 2021

Nine Important Ways To Maintain Employee Trust During A Pivotal Moment For Your Company

Major changes are often necessary for a company that wants to keep growing and scaling. When critical moments occur, however, (such as a merger or landing a major client) leaders need to set the tone for the rest of their employees. How they respond to them will trickle down and set the example for how everyone else will work.

May 24th, 2021

Leaders: Eight Strategies For Monitoring Employee Morale While Juggling Your Work Too

As a business owner, it's easy to lose sight of the office morale around you. Most entrepreneurs are focusing on many concurrent tasks that can strongly affect the business's health and success. While important, these packed schedules and heavy workloads can mean they don’t notice the issues that may be rising all around them.

May 12th, 2021

Need a Co-Founder for Your Business? Find Your Best Match by Looking for These Eight Traits

May 11th, 2021

Eight Things Successful People Never Do In The Mornings (And Why You Shouldn’t Either)

When examining the habits and routines of successful people, specific patterns start to emerge. While they may approach their morning schedules differently, successful business leaders all include essential steps that help them prepare for their day. The small details may vary from time to time, but the overall sense of preparation remains.

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.

May 4th, 2021

Subject Matter Expertise: Why It Matters In Your Business

One of the most important ways you can continue to build your brand and maximize your business potential is through developing subject matter expertise.

April 28th, 2021

Creating Your First Company Video? 10 Tips You Should Know

April 23rd, 2021

13 THINGS EVERY CONSUMER SHOULD KNOW BEFORE BUYING A SMART HOME SYSTEM

Members of Young Entrepreneur Council explain what every prospective smart home system owner should think about before making an investment.

April 16th, 2021

Nine Small Actions Business Leaders Can Take To Ensure Diversity In Hiring

With the increasing awareness of the need for diverse workplaces and teams, diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) policies have become a pressing issue in the business world. Yet, not every business owner knows where to begin or what to do to ensure their company is hiring for diverse backgrounds and skills.

April 13th, 2021

10 Times You Should Definitely Not Text Your Customers

April 9th, 2021

SHOULD YOUR BUSINESS DEVELOP A LONG-TERM CONTENT STRATEGY OR CONTINUALLY REINVENT ITSELF?

Members of the Young Entrepreneur Council weigh in on whether a long-term or campaign-by-campaign content strategy works best for brands.

April 7th, 2021

Turn Your Weaknesses Into Strengths: Eight Key Strategies For Entrepreneurs

Many entrepreneurs learn early in their careers that they are never going to be the best at everything. When it comes to running a business, most entrepreneurs do some things really well but can be terrible at something else. However, strengths and weaknesses are all part of the human condition, and even the most seasoned business owner is not without weakness.

April 2nd, 2021

Fostering Business Innovation With Experimentation

While testing new business ideas can seem intimidating, you can mitigate the risk by understanding how to develop innovations and make calculated decisions on where and when to experiment.

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 29th, 2021

13 Subtle Traits That Can Make Someone an Influential Person

If you want to lead, you may want to nurture these traits first.

March 26th, 2021

12 Web Design Elements That Will Boost Traffic on Your Homepage

Good web design can make or break a modern business. If your website is smooth and easy to navigate, it will attract more users and is a vote of confidence for your organization. A poorly designed site can have the opposite effect, turning users away no matter how good the product is.

March 18th, 2021

Creating A Mobile App For Your Business? 14 Ways To Keep Consumers Coming Back To It

To appeal to today’s on-the-go world, many businesses have considered the value in creating a branded mobile application for their customers. In theory, it's a great idea—but app fatigue is very real, and if you don't want users to delete your app after a few uses, you need to give them a good reason to keep coming back.

March 15th, 2021

Eight Steps Managers Can Take To Facilitate An Employee’s Move To Another Department

There may come a time for certain employees when they notice that their skills or interests are better suited to another part of the company and they ask to switch to a different department to better serve their goals. When this happens, managers may not know how to react as the request may come out of the blue or it could be taken as a slight on their current department.

March 12th, 2021

15 Free Tools Solopreneurs Can Use to Start Their Business on a Budget

When an entrepreneur starts a business, the immediate concern is how much it will cost to set up. Cost can sometimes seem like a barrier to entry for those hopeful business owners looking to get started on a budget. Luckily, evolving tech has provided many free alternatives to the paid tools other professionals use.

March 11th, 2021

Seven Steps To Take When You Notice A Top Employee Is Off Their Game

Sometimes, even employees who have a track record of excellent work can have bad days. But when bad days become bad weeks or even months, leaders should take the time to investigate. However, because it could be a sensitive situation, it may be best to take it slow and follow a few key steps.

March 10th, 2021

8 Leader-Recommended Digital Platforms to Generate Paid Leads

March 10th, 2021

Nine Smart Tips To Save Money When Just Starting Your Business

When you’re trying to get a business off the ground, you don’t always have a lot of resources at your disposal. In order to gain some momentum, it may then be necessary to “cut a few corners.” However, this doesn’t mean you have to betray your ethics, as there are a few elements of business you can reasonably (and legally) cut or save money on to help give your business the kick-start it needs to get going.

March 5th, 2021

Building Client Relationships: What To Do And What Not To Do

Relationships are complicated. How many times have we heard that sentence or even believed it or experienced it to be true? Businesses, however, are often under the misconception that business relationships are simple, transactional, and black and white.

March 4th, 2021

12 Resources New Founders Can Look to for Advice

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:

March 1st, 2021

13 Easy Changes to Your Daily Routine That Will Boost Long-Term Productivity

February 25th, 2021

15 WAYS BUSINESS OWNERS CAN MAKE THE MOST OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Members of Young Entrepreneur Council offer their firsthand insights on leveraging social media effectively this year.

February 23rd, 2021

Six Ways To Ensure Stakeholders Are Impressed With Your Company’s Performance

Between investors, customers, employees and all other people with particular interest in a company, business leaders can have a difficult time trying to please all their stakeholders. But because the performance of a business is directly related to how the stakeholders feel about the company, aiming for overall stakeholder satisfaction is a necessary goal.

February 22nd, 2021

Eight Lesser-Known Ways To Encourage Brand Engagement

Encouraging and maintaining a high level of audience engagement is critical for any brand keen on building a loyal following and a tight-knit community of reliable customers. Engagement serves as a foundational pillar to growing a business’s presence in the broader market, and those happy customers are often your best form of advertisement.

February 11th, 2021

10 Important Pieces Of Leadership Advice That Will Always Be Relevant

Being a leader is more than running meetings and managing a team. It’s a skill that takes a lifetime to master, and there will always be room to grow as a mentor, coach and source of inspiration to your employees.

February 2nd, 2021

Minimum Viable Product: How To Help Clients Build Their MVP

This is why helping a client develop a minimum viable product is a very important process that, if done correctly, can prevent a client from investing their time and money in a product or service that will not work. It could also help them find the next great business opportunity.

February 1st, 2021

Eight Ways To Approach Monitoring Your Business Competition

Building a brand takes a lot of time, effort and resources—but so does monitoring the competition. No business can perform both at the maximum possible effectiveness, and so compromises must be made. Companies must balance their time and other resources to ensure they can achieve both.

January 28th, 2021

Don't Like Your Colleague? 14 Tips to Develop a More Positive Working Relationship

January 26th, 2021

11 Tips to Make Your Sponsored Social Media Posts Stand Out

January 25th, 2021

Angry Customer? 8 Ways to Diffuse the Situation

You can't avoid the occasional upset customer, but you can quickly and effectively smooth things over.

January 25th, 2021

Eight Important Ways To Promote Inclusion And Diversity In Your Workplace

Inclusion and diversity have certainly become buzzwords in recent years, but they are more than just a passing fad; They are vital elements to a business's success. A diverse, inclusive workforce leverages the knowledge and experiences of a broader cross section of society and helps bring the business closer to the people it serves.

January 22nd, 2021

Seven Steps These Entrepreneurs Wish They Would’ve Taken Before Starting Their Businesses

Information can be a valuable resource, and having enough of it is key to helping business owners make smart decisions. But lack of information or experience can also have an impact. Even seasoned entrepreneurs have regrets or moments when they wish they had done something differently if they knew at the beginning what they know now.

January 22nd, 2021

18 Tools Businesses Should Leverage for Customer Engagement in 2021

Entrepreneurs share their favorite tools, apps, and software for managing and interacting with customers.

January 19th, 2021

12 Strategies to Make Your Customer-Facing Content More Engaging and Authentic

January 7th, 2021

How To Help Clients Pivot Their Business Strategy

Market disruption happens. While it can often be perceived in a negative light, many times it actually heralds a time of innovation and growth. Some of the biggest companies around have become successful because they disrupted the market.

September 23rd, 2020

Own A Brick-And-Mortar Store? Here's How To Thrive In The Digital Landscape

As more people are working from home and staying in, online shopping has become the dominant means of commerce. It’s more important than ever for small brick-and-mortar retailers to get their products online and accessible to their customers. However, with so many large e-commerce competitors like Amazon, it can be hard to stand out from the crowd.

June 16th, 2020

Think You're 'Innovative?' Try These 8 Alternative Descriptors

[long-form emailed to Kelsey]

June 12th, 2020

15 Collaboration Tools for Remote Teams (That Aren't Slack)

With so many remote working teams in the world today, productivity requires utilizing tools that can connect the team through voice, chat and video. Slack rules the roost as the team collaboration software, but it’s far from being the only reliable one. Dozens of team collaboration tools have gained growing popularity over the last two months. Some of them offer similar functionality to Slack and might even be better at some things. Others are sorely lacking in utilities to help a team get organized.

June 11th, 2020

Why Your Message Needs To Be Customer-Focused, Not You-Focused

It takes time to develop and live up to your brand message.

June 8th, 2020

15 Ways to Bounce Back When Things Are Going Badly

In all walks of life, there will be pitfalls that plague professionals. For an entrepreneur, especially, it may occasionally feel like nothing is working out, no matter what you do. There's a saying that success only comes to those who get back up each time they get knocked down. The problem is that the saying doesn't detail how you get back up from a fall. Some leaders can find themselves falling over and over, and each time the recovery takes more out of them. 

June 8th, 2020

8 Smart Strategies for Delivering 5-Star Customer Service

[LONG-FORM EMAILED TO KELSEY]

June 8th, 2020

Hiring Your First Remote Employee? Follow These 16 Tips

Working remotely has become the new standard in the COVID-19 era. Companies that followed a traditional in-office model have had to adjust to how they presently work, and soon have to learn how to hire remotely.

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 27th, 2020

Nine Simple Tricks For Busy Professionals To Get Time Back In Their Week

As a busy professional or entrepreneur, you’ve probably wished there were more than 24 hours in a day. While you might not be able to find huge chunks of free time, you can always find a few extra minutes a day, which adds up to a few extra hours in a week.

May 21st, 2020

How to Become Indispensable to Your Clients

During challenging times, it's important to reflect on what you can do better for future success.

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.

May 7th, 2020

8 Strategic Ways to Handle a Professional Disagreement

**NOTE: This is a long-form piece for Inc, edited off-platform and emailed to Kelsey. I selected the wrong export format by mistake!**

Effective teamwork is important to any business, but not everyone will be on the same page 100% of the time. Disagreements, big or small, seem to be inevitable when working with others – but that doesn’t mean your team is doomed. It is possible to work through a dispute and move forward as a team, with better understanding than before.

April 30th, 2020

Eight Effective Methods Of Tracking Employee Work

With the number of tasks that an employee has to accomplish daily, many managers believe that it's impossible to monitor staff workloads accurately. The problem becomes even more involved in organizations where it's difficult to track the movement of jobs between departments.

April 15th, 2020

10 Smart Strategies To Convert Web Traffic Into Sales

A great digital marketing strategy can drive potential customers to your website. But high traffic doesn't always translate into revenue. Once you get people on your site, you need to ensure they have a reason to follow through on their purchase. To help you do this, we asked members of Young Entrepreneur Council how they optimize and convert web traffic into real dollars. Their best tips and insights are below.

April 13th, 2020

Why Process Matters From Day One

When you're just starting out, set up a process for even the smallest of tasks.

April 7th, 2020

10 Ways To Craft A Truly Captivating Brand Story

Competition among companies can be fierce, especially those in the same field with similar messages. With so many other brands out there, it can be difficult to make your story stand out among the crowd. However, you need to identify that “something special” about your business that truly makes it shine.

To help you, we asked 10 Young Entrepreneur Council members how to captivate customers through the art of storytelling. Here’s how they recommend crafting a brand story that captures attention and engages your target audience.

April 6th, 2020

Want To Be An Entrepreneur? 10 Questions To Ask Yourself Before Committing

Starting your own business is not a decision to take lightly. While it’s great to be your own boss with the freedom to set your own schedule, this is only part of the equation. It takes a lot more than just a dream to be a successful entrepreneur.

Before you take the leap, there are some important questions to ask yourself to understand if you’re truly ready to launch your own business. To help you make your decision, we asked 10 Young Entrepreneur Council members what everyone should ask themselves before committing to entrepreneurship.

March 30th, 2020

The Top Trait To Look For In Your First Hire

Look beyond experience and degrees for the ability to figure stuff out.