In our fast-paced world, you can’t always opt to hold off working on particular projects just because you are about to embark on a business trip. Fortunately, though, you can continue to maintain a high work output even when travelling – it just requires a bit of meticulous planning as well as bringing along the right tech.

Book carefully to save money and time

If you’re leaving the office at all, it’s probably out of necessity more than convenience. A day out of the office will inevitably throw a few speed bumps in the way of your productivity – which is why, at the planning stage, you should look for where and how you could smooth over those bumps.

To this end, you could – if your budget affords it – book a faster train with fewer stops. Meanwhile, you could save money by staying with local contacts on a night or two for which you would have otherwise booked a hotel.

Pack the right productivity gear

These days, even a phone can be used for various work purposes, if not quite effectively for all of them. For example, while your trusty handset is great for quickly checking and replying to emails and messages, you probably couldn’t easily write more than a few lines of a report on it.

All the same, though, there could be situations – like on a cramped train – where an iPad mini with a keyboard attached more than suffices as a temporary, makeshift replacement for your laptop.

Nourish, replenish and exercise yourself

In a piece for CNN, Jeremy Jauncey, who founded the travel-oriented creative agency Beautiful Destinations, cautions: “Frequent travel, particularly flying, can impact your immune system, making you more susceptible to illness.”

You can help yourself to counter that effect by fitting exercise sessions – ideally outside – into your sojourn, eating healthy snacks and meals and keeping yourself hydrated with plenty of water.

Strategically plan exactly when you will do what

The nature of travelling means that you can be in one place one moment and then a very different kind of place the next. However, it’s crucial that you know exactly where you will – or at least should – be at any given time so you can plan your work accordingly.

So, if you know you will need to make calls, avoid scheduling them for when you will be in a noisy airport. When you are in one, you could switch to instant messaging via a hosted phone system.

Get as much work done as you can before you set off

Sadly, even if you follow all of the tips outlined in this article, the fact remains that working on the go entails far more than just a change of scenery.

Freelance writer and editor Sara McCord warns in an article for The Muse: “Even on my most productive travel day (i.e., one in which I accomplish everything on my list), I rarely get as much done as I would on a normal workday.” Hence, she advises putting a little extra work in beforehand.

Running a business is a venture that not everyone is willing to take. After all, it comes with a lot of responsibilities and risks. Still, many decide to choose this path because it is what fulfills them.

If you’re one of those people, you may find that learning from other people’s experiences is a great way to tread the path to success.

Of course, you can always ask a business coach for help, but even they would tell you the value of the following five business lessons you need to learn today:

Lesson #1: Know Thyself

In business, everything starts from within. So, to be an effective business leader, you have to know yourself better – your interests, preferences, strengths, skills and shortcomings.

When you understand who you are and what you’re passionate about, you’re most likely to tackle business problems in a way that best suits your skills. You’ll also be less sensitive to your weaknesses.

Besides that, “knowing thyself” also means understanding your own biases. With CEOs and company leaders looking at their organization with a tunnel vision, it can be difficult to know what’s really going on within the company if similar-minded executives already filter the information you get.

Instead of relying on the information you are being fed, you should get it straight from the source. When you’re aware of your cognitive biases, you’ll actively seek diverse opinions and ideas and practice discipline when taking a perspective on important issues.

Lesson #2: Be Humble

Humility is what defines good business leadership.

Anyone can take credit for a job well done, but only a great leader is big enough to recognize other people’s contributions to the success of an organization.

Besides knowing when to acknowledge other people’s hard work, a humble leader also tolerates risks and losses. This means that any leader who lacks humility will routinely take none of the blame and all the credit.

Ultimately, they end up having weak teams since they will have no one to back them up to soften the landing when they stumble.

Lesson #3: Steer Clear of the Status Quo

Status quo thinking is all about using the same method that worked well in the past, without even considering the changes that affect the result. After all, change is inevitable.

In business, there’s nothing more constant in the market than change. This means that whatever worked well previously won’t always be the best strategy for tackling all challenges.

To succeed, business leaders should steer clear of the status quo and keep their eyes and minds open for potentially useful tools and strategies that could lead to growth and success.

Lesson #4: Think First, Speak Later

Failure in business isn’t always about making poor decisions. In most cases, it’s because CEOs self-sabotage their success, whether intentionally or unintentionally, through their statements.

As leaders, CEOs and company presidents should practice the careful choice of words. In short: think first before speaking. This way, you can avoid leaving the wrong impression or worse – causing your company’s downfall.

Lesson #5: Have a Plan

Planning is an effective way to increase the chances of success. Whether you sought out coaching in Dubai before starting your business, someone will tell you, you need to create a business plan.

While it may sound tedious and time-consuming, having a business plan helps with three things, namely:

●     Making crucial decisions

In entrepreneurship, you’ll be making lots of decisions and dealing with crises that you won’t have time to sit down and consider the ramifications that every move you make will have. This is why a business plan is necessary.

With a business plan, you can already determine the best answer to the most critical business decisions you’ll be facing in the future. It opens up opportunities for you to think about your business’s most important elements before diving into the venture. It also lets you think deeply about core strategies and how they will impact your business.

●     Avoiding significant mistakes

When you create a business plan, you are forced to research and do your homework on different aspects of the company you’re trying to build.

With this document, you’ll be able to know whether the market needs your products or services and how much capital you’ll need to run the company until it’s ready to stand on its own.

It also includes details about the necessary workforce and determines your company’s position against the competition. More importantly, it’ll help you decide the right price range for the products and services you offer.

●     Ensuring the viability of the business

Many businesses are born out of passion. But while it is a great motivator, passion alone cannot ensure business success.

That said, a business plan will allow you to determine the viability of the business venture you’re planning for. It will confirm that your grand idea makes sense and might lead to something big.

Learn to Do Business the Right Way

Running a business is something you cannot do alone.

At the very least, you need to pick up some wise words from experts in the industry or coaches who have been counseling leaders like you. The lessons listed in this article should serve as a great starting point in your quest to learn how to do business the right way.

AUTHOR BIO

Salma El-Shurafa is an experienced Executive Coach and founder of The Pathway Project. She is a Professional Certified Coach by the International Coaching Federation (ICF), a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach from The Coaches Training Institute (CTI) and a graduate of CTI’s Co-Active Leadership program.

Global marketing is a huge topic. It involves fierce competition from companies with huge budgets. Of course, it’s not always the size of your budget that matters but how you spend it. Take an evidence-based approach to global marketing, researching everything from social media strategies to professional translation services, and you’ll be in the best possible position to succeed. In this article, we’ll run through the difference between globalization and internationalization, define internationalization, and look at some examples of internationalization to get you started.

The difference between globalization and internationalization

The difference between globalization and internationalization is an important one. What are some examples of globalization? Globalization can be seen all around us. From trade and communication across international borders to the movement of people, both for leisure purposes and permanent relocations. Then there’s the globalization of media, entertainment, culture, and much more.

What is the meaning of internationalization? We can define internationalization as “the action or process of making something international.” With companies around the world looking to sell to global audiences, the internationalization business is booming. Speaking of the difference between globalization and internationalization, Tomedes CEO and owner Ofer Tirosh say that globalization is more about the overall process that companies use to start building their brand or their operations for the global stage. Internationalization, meanwhile, refers to the practical steps that they take to achieve that, ensuring goods and services appeal to as wide an audience as possible.

Internationalization or localization?

To internationalize or to localize, that is the question. The thing is, internationalization and localization go hand-in-hand. When you internationalize, you have to localize. But before you localize, you have to internationalize. You might be thinking, huh? Okay, here’s an analogy: in application coding, modern programming platforms all support internationalization, often abbreviated as i18N in the coding world.

i18N is the standard procedure of preparing products that are to be sent to other countries. Since the products are going to other countries (internationalization), the procedure involves receiving varied forms of data and processing it to match the “local culture”, so to speak (localization). This process does not only involve language translation, but allows for easy localization of products to fit different target audiences.

According to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), i18N enables code “to support local, regional, language, or culturally related preferences.” In other words, your products and/or services must appeal to an international audience, but your marketing strategies must be localized.

So if you want to appeal to a global audience, you’ll need to translate your website into multiple languages. To do this, you’ll need to understand not just the difference between globalization and internationalization, but the difference between localization, globalization, and internationalization.

What is the difference between them? Well, the first two we’ve covered above. Localization, meanwhile, is the process of making a website suit the cultural expectations of a new audience. Global marketing is about so much more than undertaking (for example) English to Spanish translation and simply sitting back and waiting for Spanish custom to roll in. Instead, you need to focus the site on the audience in question.

There’s a famous example from the California Milk Processor Board’s advertising campaign – those “Got Milk?” ads. They went down a storm in the US, but a lack of localization left Latina customers wondering quite why the California Milk Processor Board wanted to know, “Are you lactating?”

Few examples of localization so clearly highlight the value of shaping your marketing materials to your intended audience.

When it comes to taking an evidence-based approach to using professional translation services to turn your website into a global marketing tool, research first which languages you’ll need. This will depend hugely on what you’re selling. If you’re in the business of UK penny stocks, for example, you might start by typing translation agency UK into your search engine. Your approach will be vastly different from that of (say) a company selling luxury handbags.

If you’re in the luxury goods sector, by the way, a large part of your sales business and associated marketing will likely focus on China. McKinsey reports that China was responsible for over half of the global growth in luxury spending between 2012 and 2018. That figure is expected to reach 65% by 2025 when it comes to the world’s additional spending. Time to find professional translation services specialising in Mandarin.

Global marketing and social media

Internationalization comes into play in a major way when it comes to social media. Over half the world uses social media sites nowadays. Your social posts can spread around the globe in seconds, so they have to be spot on. But again, the research begins long before you write a single post.

Which demographics are you targeting? This can make a significant difference to which sites you should target your marketing spend. There’s a wealth of evidence out there about social media usage by age, by gender, by nationality, and so on. Build this knowledge into your global marketing strategy long before you start working out how to internationalize your messaging.

When the time does come to start internationalizing your messages, be sure to work with professional translation services that specialise in social media. Social networks use a language and tone all of their own and you’ll need specialists to help you navigate cultural pitfalls as well as linguistic ones.

Exploring other global marketing channels

We’ve used the website and social media examples to show the importance of building your strategy around evidence of what works. A global marketing campaign will, of course, encompass many more forms of marketing, from email marketing to content marketing – which itself can include everything from news review blog posts to expert opinion pieces published on others’ sites. Each of these is a huge topic in itself.

Each approach has plenty of examples of internationalization and statistics that you can use as evidence to inform your strategy. Doing so will ensure you take a robust approach to global marketing that maximises your chances of success in capturing the attention of international audiences for all the right reasons.

While everyone has heard of cannabis, there is more and more talk about CBD both online and in the mainstream media. CBD is an abbreviation of cannabidiol, which is a phytocannabinoid discovered in 1940. This is one of the compounds in the cannabis plant, the other more renowned one being THC. The key thing worth mentioning is the fact that CBD (unlike THC) is not psychoactive. However, in the CBD oil, it is possible to find small traces of THC, which is why some countries have certain reservations regarding the legality of CBD. Still, in the majority of EU countries, CBD is completely legal. Here’s what you should know about this subject matter.

1. CBD oil and marijuana are not the same

The main reason why the majority of people ask this question is that they often confuse CBD oil with marijuana. The confusion starts with cannabis which is a plant with two primary classifications – Sativa and Indica. While marijuana can be a member of either of these two groups, hemp (which is the genus that the CBD derives from) can only be a member of Cannabis sativa. In other words, while the terms are related, they are definitely not interchangeable.

2. Are hemp and CBD legal in the EU?

Hemp is an industrial plant and, as such, it’s legal all across the globe. Still, due to a small dosage of THC (below 0.3%), it was on the Controlled Substances Act list until 2018. Nowadays, hemp that has less than 0.2% of THC is completely legal in the majority of the EU. There are, however, some countries with a different set of rules. Some countries like Austria and Luxembourg will allow up to 0.3% of THC in hemp, while Switzerland allows up to 1%. On the other hand, you have places like France that allows only CBD isolate with 0% of THC. Lastly, Slovakia and Lithuania still regard CBD as illegal.

3. What does this mean for the region?

When it comes to the future of the industry and agriculture in the EU due to these legislations, we can only speculate. Since CBD is a substance in great demand, it wouldn’t be that far-fetched to see how it might revolutionize the local economy in many regions. Sure, in countries like Italy or the Netherlands, it’s legal to grow small numbers of plants for personal use. So if you have a garden or a small patch of ground, you can plant some outdoor cannabis strains. However, it’s completely illegal to grow cannabis on a larger scale.

4. Public cannabis use

In some European countries like the Netherlands cannabis can be sold and used in coffee shops throughout the country. Other countries like Finland, Hungary, Greece, and Sweden see any kind of cannabis use as a criminal offense. Except the Netherlands cannabis “friendly” countries are:

• Portugal – where rehabilitation is more preferred than punishment, but cultivation is forbidden

• Germany – small amounts for personal use are allowed. Depending on the state it varies from 6g-15g

• Switzerland – Medical cannabis is completely legal, and readily available. The catch here is that the percentage of THC can’t exceed 1%. 

As you can see laws vary from country to country, and the best thing you can do to not get fined is follow the law. In countries where consumption is allowed, but under certain circumstances, see to it that you don’t attract any unwanted attention. One good way to do this is to mask the smell of cannabis. Usually people mix cannabis with tobacco for a longer lasting smoke, but there are many healthy alternatives to tobacco that can mask the smell of weed.

5. What are the properties of CBD?

So far, we’ve discussed the legality of CBD oil but why would one be interested in this compound in the first place? Well, as it happens, CBD oil can relieve pain, as well as reduce anxiety and depression. Since the last two are the plights of modern society (and the EU is no exception), this might explain (at least partially) some of its popularity. There are some instances in which CBD is known to reduce irritation and fight acne, mostly due to its anti-inflammatory properties. Even with more serious issues like heart-related problems and cancer, this oil could make a difference.

Conclusion

In the end, this is a conversation topic that constantly grows in importance. People from all walks of life are using CBD and CBD-based products, which is why this legislation has a direct impact on the wellbeing of people around you and even your local economy. However, regulations and legislation are fluid things and they are expected to change over the course of years. This is why no guide, no matter how comprehensive, will provide you with all the answers you seek. So, in order to stay constantly updated, you should constantly be on the lookout for new sources.

Did you know that for commercial buildings, the cost can be as high as 40 US dollars per square foot? That means making the best investment choices for your manufacturing facility is extremely important. You need to be able to think outside the box and find innovative solutions to maximize the efficiency of your storage facilities. You also need to maximize the returns on your investment. If you cannot wait to maximize your manufacturing facility floor space utilization, here are some useful tips that will be of great help.

Change your material-handling systems.

Material-handling systems also restrict the amount of available space on the floor of your manufacturing facility. The material-handling systems you use to move machines from one part of the building to another also need to be adjusted. While systems such as overhead cranes may take up little floor space, railcars, conveyors, and drag chains can occupy a lot of space. In addition, large material-handling systems can impede the flow of traffic and negatively impact your productivity when they are installed in the wrong location.

Examine your plant layout

Sometimes the most convenient solutions don’t necessarily guarantee the best efficiency. For example, when workers leave their equipment and inventory anywhere as a means of saving time, they may end up paying more for not storing them properly. Obstructing the efficient utilization of space in your facility can cause things to go out of place. You need to implement manufacturing techniques such as time studies, and auditing to evaluate the flow of materials in your manufacturing company. 

This is a way to discover problems with your plant layout. When you equip yourself with this knowledge, you can make intelligent adjustments to cramped facilities. In addition to that, you can design safety procedures to improve logistics. Workflow can also be enhanced throughout the facility even with little to no expansion.

Make the Most Out of Your Vertical Spaces

When you are running out of floor space, your best bet is to look up and effectively utilize your vertical space. It’s a smart decision to use elevated storage units when you are looking for more space with lower overhead expenses. The question is how do you make the most out of your vertical spaces? Well, you can leverage vertical spaces in your facility using lift trucks that can easily navigate through narrow aisles and pull things from high up storage. 

If you are looking forward to increasing your manufacturing capacity in the short or long term, consider working with Smart-Space UK. Smart-Space allows you to extend your existing space or erect new manufacturing buildings from scratch. In a matter of 7-28 working days, your manufacturing building could be up and running within that short construction timescale. 

Outsource to a reliable partner

Instead of always trying to do everything yourself, you may want to partner with a reliable supplier to free up room in your facility and focus more on other profitable ventures. The fact is that when you want to build more in your manufacturing facility, you will need a lot of floor space. However, when you outsource these functions to trusted partners through contract manufacturing, you free up more opportunities for in-house product development. 

Some companies apply these strategies to help them build their businesses for future expansion. One way to make the most out of your floor spaces in your manufacturing centre is outsourcing. But before you make such a move, you may want to weigh the advantages and disadvantages involved.

Reclaim unused shelves and storage units

Consider the last time you checked your racking and shelves. Are there wasted shelves you can reclaim? Some companies never bother to check their racking and shelves regularly after installing it. Assuming the shape and dimensions of your inventory hasn’t varied since installation, you may be good to go. But in situations where variables exist, you can re-evaluate your racking and shelves in search of unused spaces. This can save you money since you may not have to invest in expanding your facility.

Decrease the width of your aisles

Get your maths right. The volume of space in the facility partly depends on the width of the aisles. If your aisles are wider than necessary, it can decrease your operational efficiency. In that case, consider reducing the width of your aisles to boost their quantity and effectively utilize your space.

Conclusion

Are you running out of floor space in your manufacturing company? Adopt the above strategies to better use your available space. You can also invest in affordable manufacturing buildings from Smart Space to enjoy the flexibility of increasing and decreasing your production capacity as and when you want to.