Month: May 2018
International businesses have to face risks and challenges at many fronts. Some are similar to the risks and challenges a domestic business confronts and some are unique. Even the challenges that are similar by definition differ in nature. For example both types of businesses have to face financial challenges, but an international business will be facing many factors related to global financial markets that don’t affect domestic businesses as much. They are more of a challenge in nature than risks and most of them can be handled through proper planning. Keep reading to understand these challenges better.
The challenge of international planning & strategy:
The first challenge for an international enterprise is to make a global strategy and then implement it. The managers and those at decision-making positions often find it difficult to change their thought pattern, which is not used to work in global paradigm. There are many international businesses but just some of them have truly adopted a proper global strategy. Though the situation is improving with more and more trained graduates and professionals taking on the management roles. Nevertheless, international business management requires extra ordinary management, foreseeing and leadership skills.
Financial and economic challenges:
It starts from arranging the funds to start international business and includes everything such as fluctuation in exchange rate, global economic crisis (or some economic crises in the host country), shift in oil prices, global inflation or tariff barriers imposed by the host government, also the export related policies of your own government.
International Politics:
Political know-how is a must for everybody but it becomes all so important when operating at international level. If some policies were suitable for your business, a change in ruling party can bring drastic changes in those policies. Political chaos will bring down the economy and with that your business. To prevent your business from such negative impacts, you need to make sound political judgments.
Environment, natural disasters and warfare:
Many multinational businesses have to face serious opposition by some environment friendly organizations. Citizens are more concerned about air and water pollution these days as it is becoming a serious threat to their health. Some natural disaster like floods and earthquake, or some kind of civil war breaking out in the host country is also in the list of possible challenges. A new challenge that an international business has to bear now days in some specific countries is the threat of terrorism.
Q: One of my former employees has started a competing business and is calling my clients and trying to steal their business from me. Do I have any legal recourse against him?
— Brad J.
A: I hate to break this to you, Brad, but unless this former employee signed a noncompete agreement while on your payroll, there is probably very little you can do to stop him from wooing your customers. You should discuss the situation with your attorney, but unless this person is also breaking the law in some other way (using stolen trade secrets, for example) your attorney will probably concur with me.
Renegade former employees riding the free enterprise wave is one reason noncompete agreements are gaining in popularity among employers who hope to use them to help protect their business from competitive threats launched by former employees. Many employers are now demanding that key employees sign noncompetes as a stipulation of employment. While signing noncompetes usually doesn’t sit well with employees who view them as potential roadblocks to their upwardly mobile career path, many businesses will not hire a key employee without his or her signature on the dotted line.
A noncompete agreement is a formal contract between you and your employees in which they promise not to use information or contacts pertinent to your business in a competing situation. In other words, they agree not to take everything they learn working for you and put it to use for someone else. This could mean going to work for a competitor or starting a competing business of their own.
While not popular with employees, noncompete agreements are a good way for employers to keep key employees on the payroll and protect the company’s proprietary information. That said, do not go overboard with noncompetes: not every employee should be required to sign one. If an employee does not have access to sensitive information, customer or accounting data, or is integral to the overall success of your business, there is no need to have them sign a noncompete. The janitor, for example, poses very little threat to your business if he gets a job with a competitor. Your sales manager, on the other hand, can devastate your business by hooking his wagon to a competing horse.
Which employees should sign noncompete agreements? While the prerequisites vary from business to business, the following is a good general list. The term “employees” represents executive level, management, supervisory, and non-management personnel relative to that example:
– Employees involved in research or product development. – Employees involved in the design, fabrication, engineering, and manufacturing process. – Employees who service products made and sold by your company. – Sales and service employees who have regular contact with customers or sensitive customer information. – Employees with access to sensitive business information or trade secrets. – Most importantly, employees who have sufficient information about your business that would allow them to start a competing business.
Most business experts agree that noncompete agreements are generally a good way to protect your business. The downside is that noncompete agreements are often difficult to enforce and in some states, may not be enforceable at all. Many state courts have ruled that noncompete agreements are too restrictive on an employee’s right to earn a living.
In California, for instance, noncompetes are generally only enforceable in connection with the sale of a business and not for employees. In Alabama, noncompetes are generally enforceable in only two contexts: the sale of a business and in connection with employment – but even then the enforcement requires that there be a valid interest worthy of protection.
Some states require that the noncompete be signed at the beginning of the employment relationship and will only consider the enforcement of a noncompete signed after the initial employment date if the signing of the noncompete was accompanied by a promotion, raise in pay, or other event that elevated the employee to a more important role within the company.
To be enforceable, noncompete agreements must be reasonable on three accounts: Time, geography and scope. Regarding time, you can’t restrict someone from competing with you forever, so one to three years is the accepted time period for most noncompetes.
As to geography, you can enforce restriction in the general area where you conduct business, but you can not enforce the restriction beyond those boundaries. And for scope, the agreement can restrict certain actions on the part of the employee, but can’t be so generally restrictive that the employee won’t be able to earn a living working in the same industry in a noncompetitive position.
One interesting thing to note: noncompete agreements are not enforceable against certain “professionals,” like doctors, CPAs, and lawyers (who do you think writes all those noncompetes).
At this point, Brad, the best thing you can do is contact your attorney to see if you have other grounds for suit, then contact your customers and let them know what’s going on.
Explain the situation regarding the former employee, but do so calmly and resist the urge to tell them what you really think of this guy. Showing your anger to the customer is not going to help you keep their business .
Reaffirm your relationship with the client, tell him how much you value his business, remind him of your track record and level of service, then ask one simple question: What can I do to make sure your business stays with me?
Here’s to your success!
Start An Adult Turnkey Business with our Educational Business Guide. 11 Steps to Turnkey Business Profits.
1. Choose niche market. You need to be very careful with choosing your niche market. Most people want to choose a very common market such as the typical blonde haired blue-eyed girl but this does not make any money in today’s Turnkey Adult Business. You need to choose a niche market such as midgets or gay bondage. Something Different.
2. Choose domain. Choose your domain one of two ways or for the best of both worlds go for both branding and seo’d domains. Branding is great for getting people to remember the name of the business but seo marketing domains are well positioned by the search engines. My rule of thumb is to have at least one targeted keyword in your domain name.
3. Research content companies to see the quality of content and payout to you. Most people just look at payout over niche content and the quality of such. When a Turnkey Adult Content Company offers you 80% or so of each sign up by using their content it sounds terrific but one must be careful. This 80% might mean you never get a sign up because the design of the turnkey adult website or the content is horrible. So the basic point is that 80% of 0 = 0. I will take 50% in a heartbeat for a turnkey website with good quality HD content that has a professional design to it. Don’t fall for high percentage because many times you are being set up. 50% of niche market with HD quality content might bring in 5 sign ups a day whereas the 80% payout content company may not get you a single sign up. Plus you have to look at recurring billing. The 50% content company may keep the customer on the adult turnkey site for many months. The revenue adds up. The 80% might not get a sole to stay past the first month. Also ask yourself the question would I join the site? If you would not join why would anyone else?
4. Do your homework on the turnkey adult design business you may want to work with. Check scam.com, ripoffreport or complaintsboard. You can also type in the name of the owner on Google. You can type in the company name and then type scam or complaints at the end for example: ABC Design Scam. Be careful with BBB reports for it is simple to make it appear you have no complaints when your company is actually being sued by everyone and their sister. When there is an active lawsuit against a company the BBB might have them in good standing because the lawsuit is not counted against the company by the BBB. Look for quality sites that you would join yourself. If you would not join the site you are purchasing why would anyone? Price should be low but not ridiculously low such as $70 per month for 26 sites. In this type of situation you are getting what you pay for. Again if you would not join why would anyone else?
5. Hire a Turnkey Adult Business who attempts to educate you on the industry. Remember #4 on this list and type in all of the turnkey adult design companies and owners names. Please note: some owners hide their names or utilize a different name to fool you and also to attempt to fool some watchdog agencies especially the BBB.
6. Hosting is a big issue people forget about. Hosting can be very expensive if you listen to many of the owners of turnkey adult design companies. Shouldn’t hosting be FREE in at least your 1st year or damn close to it? You should not have to worry about hosting until your second year in the turnkey adult business. Some charge $50 – $150 a month from the onset of your adult turnkey business. This is absurd to say the least.
7. Billing can also be very expensive but in the Turnkey Adult Business market you usually do not have to pay anything. For example in many agreements with content companies, the content companies themselves take care of all billing charges. This saves you thousands of dollars and a great deal of headaches.
8. Now you have to Seo or Search Engine Optimization the adult turnkey site for the search engines. I usually map out my site by the titles I want to use for each page of the site. Once I do this I then name the pages appropriately to what I want people to type in to find the pages. Page names should be relevant to the niche your site is in. For example: Blondeshairedblueeyedgirls/tour1 should be renamed Blondehairedblueeyedgirls/niche-website-adult-business. If you are targeting niche website adult business. For some reason many people do not take advantage of this. We do not know why. Index1, Index2 is doing you no good unless you want your site popular for the word index.
9. Page text. The easiest way to write page text is just that, to write it. Don’t worry about using your targeted keywords just yet, just write. Write at least 500 words per page. This is where many web designers go down the wrong road. You see, they load up on graphics to make the site look all pretty but it backfires on them because the search engines will hate it. Graphics are great when they are on the page with at least 500 words targeting the main targeted keywords for that page. This is very simple but you need to take the time to perform this. Some people seem to think this is not important; we have no clue why.
10. Meta Tags – Title, Description, Keyword, Header, Alt, anchor. Out of all of these anchors, titles and headers are most important in my opinion. This is a whole separate article and for a full explanation of all I would have to write about 10 pages of text. I would send you over to searchengineguide or searchenginewatch. Full disclosure I have no relationship with these companies other than that I read what they write. They are very knowledgeable people.
11. Links. Between titles, headers and links you have covered most of optimization of your turnkey adult site. Links are basically people placing a button, banner or text on their site that brings the customer to you when they click on it. How do you get people to link to you? Good question. You can contact people in the same niche and request they link to you and you in turn will link to them. You can also submit your site to all of the adult search engines, directories and niche specific top lists. Start blogs regarding your niche market and write articles once you become an expert on the industry. The two resources listed in #10 of this article are good places to learn everything you need to know about links even though they don’t target the Adult Turnkey Business.