There are various things that come to mind when people start and grow their own business. They think of financing, location, and even legal fees associated with their dreams of becoming a successful entrepreneur. What they often overlook or don’t consider is the need for business insurance, especially small business insurance for many, when embarking on the challenges of a starting entrepreneur. Incorporating your needs for insurance is a vital component of the start-up process.

It’s never too early to think about small business insurance when starting your business. In fact, it probably wouldn’t hurt to include it as part of your business plan. Depending on the kind of business you’re in, and the types of risks and insurance obligations associated with what you do, the cost of insurance can be a vital component of how your start-up is financed.

General business liability insurance: Ever hear of it? If you haven’t, then it’s just another reason why incorporating small business insurance early into your business plans is vital.

General business liability insurance is one of the most available means of insuring a business from liability. Liability comes in all forms and a specific policy to cover you specific business is necessary.

In essence, since doing business involves some degree of contact with the public, you expose yourself to the possibility of causing injury or damage to a member of that public. It’s not like the kind of insurance you get for your home, where most of the people who come by are family or friends. The likelihood of getting sued because somebody slipped and fell on the driveway you forgot to shovel is low.

However, the likelihood of getting sued because someone who had some contact with your business feels you’re responsible for harm to them is much greater. That’s where general business liability insurance comes in and should form an integral part of your small business insurance plan.

Given the extent to which having insurance is a vital aspect of doing business, it just follows that incorporating it into your business plans as early as possible is just doing good business.

Every single business has its own unique needs when it comes to receiving adequate coverage, which is why planning for it early becomes wise. Small business insurance can cover anything from the risk of having a tornado hit your office to the chance that someone is going to sue you for the bad carburetor you installed in their minivan that caught on fire. Having a plan in place early on to cover you particular risks will allow you to adequately assess your risks and finance your business.

It’s a common mistake to assume that small business insurance is something you get after you’ve taken care of everything else. Although this is a better attitude than believing that business insurance is unnecessary or too costly. Purchasing business insurance late in the process can mean that you’ll encounter costs you simply did not expect or, maybe even worse, which you’ll have to settle for insurance that won’t adequately meet your needs.

Is it ever too late to get business insurance? Of course not. But the point to keep in mind is that it’s never too early to get business insurance either. Most successful businesses do one thing very well. As much as humanly possible, they try to manage the future. What does that mean? Well, it can mean a lot of things. Yet, generally speaking, it means that the smart business operator will always try to think two or three steps ahead instead of being complacent or looking back.

One of the most important aspects of looking forward for any business is the extent to which they manage risk. That’s where small business insurance and general business liability insurance come in. An entrepreneur who incorporates these into their assessment of risk as early on as possible is more likely to confront the future than one who doesn’t.

Since risk is extremely large when starting a business, it only makes sense that it be dealt with in all its forms almost from the beginning. The more that an entrepreneur does this early, the more they’re doing to confront the risks associated with all startups.

The beauty of small business insurance and general business liability insurance is that it takes one part of your assessment of risk and essentially out-sources it to someone else — your insurance provider. If only all risk could be dealt with in the same manner. It’s why getting an insurance provider you can trust early on is so important. An insurance provider who gets you covered with a plan just right for you, and does it early on, will help you deal with one of the many challenges facing a starting small business.

The need for small business insurance is vital for any new business. Without it, you’re exposing your business to risks that could ruin all your other hard work and planning. It’s why insurance should form an integral part of that planning and be incorporated in something as early as a business plan. Things like general business liability insurance are necessary for entrepreneurs who expose themselves to the risk of doing business with a public you might not even see or come into contact with. That’s why a good package early on is the only way of doing business smartly.

The convergence of learning and performance management creates an opportunity to diagnose and prescribe ways to better develop critical talent. By integrating learning and performance, organizations can more easily identify workforce trends in a more predictive manner, target organizational capability gaps, and enhance connections to build alignment with the business needs.Whether the integration of learning and performance is driven by the organization’s learning group or HR, both groups need to know how to take advantage of this convergence. This paper describes five ways that performance management can improve training initiatives:
Producing development plans that work
Improving leadership development programs
Making learning opportunities more visible
Aligning the training department to organizational needs
Making learning and human resources more strategic
Introduction: Integrating learning and performanceWhen it comes to retaining critical talent, managing succession plans, and giving employees the skills they need to succeed, learning management and performance management processes need to converge.Taking the paper out of the paperwork may be reason enough to automate performance management, but Human Resources (HR) can use performance management to maintain a strong workforce and manage talent to drive top-line performance and competitive advantage. With career and succession planning tools organizations can reduce employee turnover and maintain a strong, productive workforce.However, an organization also needs to complement performance management with learning management that enables workers to build competitive skills and helps align employee training and career goals with business goals. The convergence of learning and performance management can significantly help an organization get the most out its workforce by helping to:
Develop employees beyond assessments with immediate, actionable development
Retain critical talent, develop leaders, and reduce turnover
Control succession risk and reduce the cost of turnover
Align employee goals with the organization’s goals to optimize workforce productivity
Link merit-based compensation to employee performance
Automate performance and development activities and reduce administrative hassles
Whether the integration of learning and performance is driven by the organization’s training group or HR, both groups need to know how to take advantage of this convergence, and in particular, how the training group can improve training initiatives with performance management.The following are five ways that training can use performance management to help create a true talent development framework.1. Producing development plans that workMost organizations struggle to adopt development plans managed independently through the Learning Management System (LMS). When performance management is automated and tied into the learning process, organizations and employees alike are more likely to buy into the integrated development plan. The development plans align directly with the organization’s goals and are therefore linked to the company’s overall strategy. Employee engagement in prescribed learning is certain to improve when employees see how this development ties directly to their performance evaluation and merit considerations.2. Improving leadership development programsLeadership development is one of the most popular learning initiatives – and for good reason. Demographic shifts, increasing employee turnover, and increased specialization in the workplace all contribute to significant talent shortages. Performance management, equipped with career and succession planning tools, provide the diagnostics to zero in on the job functions and targeted individuals that need leadership development the most.Performance management tools help the learning group systematically develop an organization’s critical talent. They can complement generic leadership development programs by helping to account for roles, flight risk, and potential.3. Making learning opportunities more visibleIn most organizations, the LMS is just one of countless other applications employees need to use. Engaging employees to log in and look around can be a challenge.However, an unanticipated benefit realized by Learning customers who have integrated performance and learning is a significant increase in the number of individuals who sign up for optional courses.Once mandatory processes are tied directly to salary increases, LMS usage numbers start to increase. As aspiring employees focus on competency gaps and individual development plans, they spend more time developing career plans with unsolicited development opportunities.4. Aligning training more to organizational needsIn many organizations, budgets allocated for learning and development are among the first to be cut during a recession. An effective way for a training group to change this fact is to prove how training programs directly relate to organizational strategy.With integrated performance management, talent development professionals can see precisely which development is needed most. Aggregated review data, showing competency gaps and aligned strategic initiatives, highlight the areas where learning and development groups should focus. It thus becomes easier for the training group to justify the significance of talent development within the organizational strategy. Many companies that have integrated learning and performance have been able to drastically improve their ability to forecast for and anticipate formal development needs.5. Linking training and HR for strategic valueWhen learning and performance functions converge to create a true talent development framework, both functions benefit by becoming more relevant to supporting the organization’s critical strategy.Traditional organizational development activities important to the business, such as managing mandatory compliance and certifications, are improved by automated tracking and reporting. But there are other strategic areas of the business that need strong formal and informal learning. These include many pressing talent management issues: retaining critical talent, managing succession plans, and giving employees the skills they need to succeed.Truly actionable talent development is only feasible when performance management and learning management converge.Conclusion: Applying the benefits of integrated learning and performanceThe convergence of learning and performance management creates an opportunity to diagnose and prescribe ways to better develop critical talent. Strategic integration enables organizations to more easily identify workforce trends in a more predictive manner, target organizational capability gaps, and enhance connections to build alignment with the business needs. The integration enables organizations to put together actionable leadership development programs for key employees, so they’ll be better prepared for promotion.Learning management system (LMS) solutions are part of our industry-leading unified talent development software suite, which helps organizations build a complete platform for developing more competitive employee skills. Training organizations can take advantage of our complete, best-of-breed talent development solution to make their businesses better – by making the employees better.

With the emergence of the Internet and social media platforms with the audience of thousands and thousands of people, the concept of crowd marketing is seemingly a better marketing solution for a lot of companies.What is Crowd Marketing?A popular marketing technique in which a business connects to an influencer, who is in direct contact with the target market of the product that the business is marketing. The proliferation of social media networks including the Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google+ and many other, crowd marketing has gained increased popularity among marketers as being a cheap, effective and the easiest way to reach target consumer. Unlike many other marketing strategies, the target market reach of can be monitored in terms of measurable indicators such as likes, shares, reviews, retweets, feedbacks etc. In essence, crowd marketing techniques are focused on increasing website traffic, lifting search engine rank and strengthening the brand position. The main difference between techniques like Social Media Marketing (SMM), Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the crowded marketing technique is that the later technique directly approaches to target consumers rather than focusing on the general public. One of the good examples of crowd marketing may be the celebrity endorsement technique. In this technique, a business identifies celebrities that already have a large fan base among the target market niche of the business; the business pays the celebrity to endorse its product among its target consumers. It is an effective way because people tend to be influenced by celebrities, their lifestyles and what they recommend. Such marketing technique is also used to approach the target market directly as long as the influencing celebrity personality, as well as his fan base among the target market population, are properly selected.Crowd Marketing TechniquesThe most popular techniques most recently rely on the social media platform and utilize the power of content marketing to enhance target market reach. Since social media has become an integral part of people’s lives, one of the most effective platforms is Facebook, which has over 1,500 million active users. Targeting Facebook as a platform to reach the target market has been popular these days. The technique is straightforward -leveraging content marketing method to attract the target market population among Facebook users. In this method, the business creates a compelling content, mostly product or brand-related videos, and finds an effective way to publish it over the Facebook that will ensure most return on investment. Usually, celebrity pages, celebrity accounts where many people keep their attention and the paid advertisement that is boosted by the Facebook to help reach increased customer base are utilized as crowd marketing technique over the Facebook. The number of likes, shares, and comments can be used as a measure of the success of the campaign. The most effective way to reach target market is to utilize the key influence of the business niche. Identifying target consumers, their behaviors and whom or what they follow can make the difference. If the key influencer of the target audience can be identified and can be used to endorse the product or brand, the success of convincing the audience about the reliability and superiority of the business goes higher.The Power of Social MediaAnother effective technique that warrants success is to use tools that help the business with key insights of the marketing as related to social and content marketing wings of crowd marketing. For example, few web applications help the business identify the target audience of a product, their key influencer, their position and location within web domain and provides with the best crowd marketing strategy starting from content recommendation to target markets locating. These tools make implementation of your marketing strategies easier and more effective.The Lego Group, children’s toy builder company, has been leveraging the concept of crowd marketing since the 90′s; it has used the Internet effectively to transform website traffic into effective customers and revenues. The key idea to engage target customers from around the world is novel and simple – it asks toy builders and idea-makers to share their ideas about new toys. These ideas are published on the website and are open to million enthusiastic audiences. Any builder can upload his unique design built out of the combination of thousands of different block pieces. The models are placed to audiences for marking and the models that get highest marks are chosen for the award. Moreover, the company uses fans’ ideas and models to build its toys from. Recently, it has created builds from the theme of the movie “Star Wars” and “Lord of the Rings”, which are the most popular builds from the company for years. The company has been adopting social media-based marketing campaign to increase its audience reach and enhance revenues. Last year, the company has earned about $4 trillion in revenue, most of which can be attributed to the crowd marketing strategy. Crowd marketing has also enabled it to become a global brand. The success of the company may be set as an example for all businesses who wish to adopt crowd marketing strategies.