4 Scary Business Practices to Avoid

Halloween is just around the corner, but ghouls, ghosts, and gremlins aren’t the only thing to fear this spooky season. Whether managing your own small business or coordinating with clients, there are a lot of scary business practices that you should be sure to avoid. At Corridor Consulting Company, we work hard to ensure that working is all treats and no tricks. In our work providing website, copywriting, social media, and digital marketing services, we try to create a healthy work environment at every step of the way. Though, that’s not to say that there aren’t hurdles in developing sweet business practices.

We know that juggling everything you do as a small business owner and figuring out business processes that work for you can be tricky. With that in mind, we’ve created this guide with four scary business practices to avoid. Read all of our key insights below!

1. Maintaining a Largely “Permalancer” Workforce

While hiring workers as freelancers or contractors at the beginning of your small business journey is a reality, it’s essential to decide to create permanent hires as you grow. For larger businesses, it can be a red flag to have long-term freelancers for long periods. That’s because, without the security of employment, many freelance workers are exploited and underpaid. As the Prindle Institute reports,

“over the past 5 years the number of Americans working freelance increased by 3.7 million, and the number of freelancing hours increased by 72 million hours. This included an 11 percent increase in full-time freelancers over the same period of time, namely those who were working one or more freelance positions but for 40 hours a week or more, who have sometimes been called “permalancers.”

For the people that you work with, again and again, it's essential to let them grow with your business and add part-time or full-time staff rather than only “permalancers.” This can be a difficult step, but as we’ve found at Corridor Consulting Company, it can genuinely help you and your team grow.

2. Not Having Liability Insurance

No matter what field they work in, business owners need to have the appropriate insurance in place to protect their workers in case anything happens on the job. That’s why it’s critical to have liability insurance to cover medical and legal fees if you're held legally responsible for someone else's injury or damage to someone else's property. Also, depending on your industry, you may need other types of insurance.

To make sure your business is a treat to work with, you should be sure that you have the insurance needed and other protections for your workers in place. In addition, when choosing to work with other organizations or contractors, you should ensure that everyone has adequate insurance and certifications to do their jobs to the best of their ability.

3. Poor Communication Practices

Communication is crucial for both clients and within your organization. If your business has a lack of communication or a lack of healthy communication, you could be alienating your workforce and making tasks more arduous than they need to be.

In fact, according to Salesforce,

“86% of executives identify ineffective collaboration and communication as a major cause of failure in business. However, those who develop and maintain the necessary interpersonal skills to make collaboration work the way it’s supposed to are worth more to a company than the sum of their collective hard skills.”

As a business owner, you must prioritize communicating clearly and effectively with your team members to do the best work. At Corridor Consulting company, we do weekly check-ins, manage tasks in Asana, and always have the lines of communication open in Slack so that everyone can be clear on what they’re doing at any time. Having open lines of communication and being clear on expectations will not only help your team work better but help you work better with clients. There’s nothing scary about open, clear communication.

4. Being Afraid to Admit “I Don’t Know.”

Nobody should be expected to know everything. Especially in the world of marketing and working online, there are so many skills and levels of knowledge that one person can not be expected to know. While it can be scary, there’s a lot of power in admitting “I don’t know” to your coworkers or your clients. Rather than make up an answer that could be incorrect, you can take a beat and say, “I don’t know the answer to that question, but I will find out.” Whether you’re collaborating with your team or coordinating with clients, admitting that you don’t have the answer allows you to find it and do your job better.

A big part of that is delegating tasks and hiring people who know the answers to the questions you don’t know. At Corridor Consulting Company, we are made up of marketers and strategists specializing in different areas. This allows us to collaborate and create the best possible work without worrying about always knowing the correct answers.

Need Help with Your Small Business?

Running your business doesn’t have to be scary, but if you’re struggling with marketing, it can be. That’s why it’s always a good idea to partner with a marketing team to make your day-to-day workload a treat. Corridor Consulting Company is an experienced team of marketers and strategists dedicated to helping businesses produce content with impact.

Our team of creative social media managers, designers, ad experts, and copywriters is ready to help you craft exciting new ideas and implement them to grow your business. Since opening our doors in 2018, we’re proud to say that we have a more extensive list of returning and new clients each year. Contact Corridor Consulting today, and let’s talk about your business goals. We’d love to put our expertise to work for your business. Eager to learn more about digital marketing, network with other business owners, and get tips and tricks for growing your business? Join the Corridor Community today!