Best 10 Small Business Ideas Of 2020

Do you feel bored with your regular nine to five job and looking for starting a business? Are you looking for starting an extra earning source? Or, do you want to start a small business in full swing eyeing to make it your career?The idea of starting a business can be exciting and all it requires is time, effort, money, and a fresh idea. We can definitely help you with the ‘idea’ part.Let’s get started with 10 small business ideas of 2020 that can get you started.Cooking/Baking: This doesn’t need a huge capital. If you already have the skills, you are good to go. Make a slow start. If necessary, work from home. Select your preferred arena such as Braising, Stewing, Steaming, Baking, Roasting, Grilling, etc. Start with 2/3 items and start delivering. Everyone likes a nicely cooked home meal. Advertise within your known area and let your cooking do the rest.Tutoring: This is probably the most known source of earning, though most of us don’t try to take this on another level. Tutoring is not limited to teaching academics. It can be a huge business opportunity with these extra steps:- Know how to play a musical instrument? Teach your dexterity.- Can make small yet handy crafts? Teach your techniques.- Good at editing or designing? Teach your skills.- Able to sing, dance, art, cook, or anything as such? Teach your expertise.- Confident in applying your makeup just right? People always asking, how are your attire always so perfect? Teach your mastery.- Know how to click the perfect picture? Teach your knowledge.To summarize, find out what you know because there is a huge number of potential students out there searching for your service. Remember, learning will never go out of fashion.Babysitting: Bet you have spent a fair share of time taking care of your baby nephew and nieces. Now is the time to use that experience. Watch the kids when their working parents are too busy to do so. Make your family and friends your brand ambassador in this case.Interior Designer: Have a fascination with a beautifully organized home? Then start learning of course! Online courses about the basic interior are not very hard to find. After gathering enough knowledge start doing small projects, take pictures, make a portfolio, and open a website or online page or hand out flyers if needed. The want of virtual assistants is huge in rate.Break the norm saying, Interior Designers are only for the riches. Provide your service in all possible ranges and see your business booming. Due to growing demand, you may count interior design as one of the best among 10 small business ideas of 2020.Customized Jewelry: Have a thing for jewelry? In that case, this business is for you. The opportunity in this field is huge with its growth projected at 5-6% per year. From golden to wooden, no jewelry will ever be old-fashioned. This is perfect for a small capital side business. Due to the rising popularity of customized jewelry among fashioned seeker women, this can be considered as one of the best among 10 small business ideas of 2020.Develop an app: There are apps for anything and everything these days. From finding all your essential files to finding a good night’s sleep, there is an app to the rescue. Coding skills or no coding skills, learning how to develop an app will only bring you potential business opportunities. Start with some marketing research and you are off to a great start.Translator: Now will be the time to put your language skills in use.Employment of translators is projected to grow 19 percent from 2018 to 2028 which is much faster than the average for all occupations. If you know more than one 2nd languages then you’re in luck and in great demand.Create your channel: A YouTube channel can earn around $3 to $5 per 1000 views. A successful YouTuber can earn millions by a single video. If you are up for it, this can be your only earning source as well. Hence this idea can be considered as demanding ideas among 10 small business ideas of 2020.If you have a passion for travel, standup comedy, music, dance, animation, teaching, creating, or anything of such sort, start sharing with the world.Learn about YouTube guidelines and know your tools. A decent location and a good camera can increase your chances of income.Ghostwriting: All ‘BoJack Horseman’ fans know about Diane and how she was a successful ghostwriter. She was never out of work and nor will you be if you have a passion for writing. A ghostwriter may not get credit for their work but it’s a lot of money.Many started as a normal ghostwriter and ended up having an influential career out of it. Averagely, an adept ghostwriter can net $20,000 per project and over $50,000 if the client is a celebrity. Beginners on average earn around $5,000 depending on the topic and length of any text.Freelance Content Writing: Content writing is undoubtedly one of the best among 10 small business ideas of 2020. In this age of digital marketing, content writers have their fair share of demands. If you have skill in formulating a well-structured story or article, this startup is for you.One can write content for a variety of things like Web content, Blogging, Social media, ad and sales copy, Expert, or industry writing, Journalistic/news writing, Creative writing, etc. An experienced content writer can earn up to $1000 to $5000 a month.If you already made up your mind to start a small business, that’s great! Don’t make a delay, pick up one from 10 small business ideas of 2020 above, and get prepared for a jump in the big space of business!

Best in Class Finance Functions For Police Forces

Background

Police funding has risen by £4.8 billion and 77 per cent (39 per cent in real terms) since 1997. However the days where forces have enjoyed such levels of funding are over.

Chief Constables and senior management recognize that the annual cycle of looking for efficiencies year-on-year is not sustainable, and will not address the cash shortfall in years to come.
Facing slower funding growth and real cash deficits in their budgets, the Police Service must adopt innovative strategies which generate the productivity and efficiency gains needed to deliver high quality policing to the public.

The step-change in performance required to meet this challenge will only be achieved if the police service fully embraces effective resource management and makes efficient and productive use of its technology, partnerships and people.

The finance function has an essential role to play in addressing these challenges and supporting Forces’ objectives economically and efficiently.

Challenge

Police Forces tend to nurture a divisional and departmental culture rather than a corporate one, with individual procurement activities that do not exploit economies of scale. This is in part the result of over a decade of devolving functions from the center to the.divisions.

In order to reduce costs, improve efficiency and mitigate against the threat of “top down” mandatory, centrally-driven initiatives, Police Forces need to set up a corporate back office and induce behavioral change. This change must involve compliance with a corporate culture rather than a series of silos running through the organization.

Developing a Best in Class Finance Function

Traditionally finance functions within Police Forces have focused on transactional processing with only limited support for management information and business decision support. With a renewed focus on efficiencies, there is now a pressing need for finance departments to transform in order to add greater value to the force but with minimal costs.

1) Aligning to Force Strategy

As Police Forces need finance to function, it is imperative that finance and operations are closely aligned. This collaboration can be very powerful and help deliver significant improvements to a Force, but in order to achieve this model, there are many barriers to overcome. Finance Directors must look at whether their Force is ready for this collaboration, but more importantly, they must consider whether the Force itself can survive without it.

Finance requires a clear vision that centers around its role as a balanced business partner. However to achieve this vision a huge effort is required from the bottom up to understand the significant complexity in underlying systems and processes and to devise a way forward that can work for that particular organization.

The success of any change management program is dependent on its execution. Change is difficult and costly to execute correctly, and often, Police Forces lack the relevant experience to achieve such change. Although finance directors are required to hold appropriate professional qualifications (as opposed to being former police officers as was the case a few years ago) many have progressed within the Public Sector with limited opportunities for learning from and interaction with best in class methodologies. In addition cultural issues around self-preservation can present barriers to change.

Whilst it is relatively easy to get the message of finance transformation across, securing commitment to embark on bold change can be tough. Business cases often lack the quality required to drive through change and even where they are of exceptional quality senior police officers often lack the commercial awareness to trust them.

2) Supporting Force Decisions

Many Finance Directors are keen to develop their finance functions. The challenge they face is convincing the rest of the Force that the finance function can add value – by devoting more time and effort to financial analysis and providing senior management with the tools to understand the financial implications of major strategic decisions.

Maintaining Financial Controls and Managing Risk

Sarbanes Oxley, International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), Basel II and Individual Capital Assessments (ICA) have all put financial controls and reporting under the spotlight in the private sector. This in turn is increasing the spotlight on financial controls in the public sector.

A ‘Best in Class’ Police Force finance function will not just have the minimum controls to meet the regulatory requirements but will evaluate how the legislation and regulations that the finance function are required to comply with, can be leveraged to provide value to the organization. Providing strategic information that will enable the force to meet its objectives is a key task for a leading finance function.

3) Value to the Force

The drive for development over the last decade or so, has moved decision making to the Divisions and has led to an increase in costs in the finance function. Through utilizing a number of initiatives in a program of transformation, a Force can leverage up to 40% of savings on the cost of finance together with improving the responsiveness of finance teams and the quality of financial information. These initiatives include:

Centralization

By centralizing the finance function, a Police Force can create centers of excellence where industry best practice can be developed and shared. This will not only re-empower the department, creating greater independence and objectivity in assessing projects and performance, but also lead to more consistent management information and a higher degree of control. A Police Force can also develop a business partner group to act as strategic liaisons to departments and divisions. The business partners would, for example, advise on how the departmental and divisional commanders can meet the budget in future months instead of merely advising that the budget has been missed for the previous month.

With the mundane number crunching being performed in a shared service center, finance professionals will find they now have time to act as business partners to divisions and departments and focus on the strategic issues.

The cultural impact on the departments and divisional commanders should not be underestimated. Commanders will be concerned that:

o Their budgets will be centralized
o Workloads would increase
o There will be limited access to finance individuals
o There will not be on site support

However, if the centralized shared service center is designed appropriately none of the above should apply. In fact from centralization under a best practice model, leaders should accrue the following benefits:

o Strategic advice provided by business partners
o Increased flexibility
o Improved management information
o Faster transactions
o Reduced number of unresolved queries
o Greater clarity on service and cost of provision
o Forum for finance to be strategically aligned to the needs of the Force

A Force that moves from a de-centralized to a centralized system should try and ensure that the finance function does not lose touch with the Chief Constable and Divisional Commanders. Forces need to have a robust business case for finance transformation combined with a governance structure that spans operational, tactical and strategic requirements. There is a risk that potential benefits of implementing such a change may not be realized if the program is not carefully managed. Investment is needed to create a successful centralized finance function. Typically the future potential benefits of greater visibility and control, consistent processes, standardized management information, economies of scale, long-term cost savings and an empowered group of proud finance professionals, should outweigh those initial costs.

To reduce the commercial, operational and capability risks, the finance functions can be completely outsourced or partially outsourced to third parties. This will provide guaranteed cost benefits and may provide the opportunity to leverage relationships with vendors that provide best practice processes.

Process Efficiencies

Typically for Police Forces the focus on development has developed a silo based culture with disparate processes. As a result significant opportunities exist for standardization and simplification of processes which provide scalability, reduce manual effort and deliver business benefit. From simply rationalizing processes, a force can typically accrue a 40% reduction in the number of processes. An example of this is the use of electronic bank statements instead of using the manual bank statement for bank reconciliation and accounts receivable processes. This would save considerable effort that is involved in analyzing the data, moving the data onto different spreadsheet and inputting the data into the financial systems.

Organizations that possess a silo operating model tend to have significant inefficiencies and duplication in their processes, for example in HR and Payroll. This is largely due to the teams involved meeting their own goals but not aligning to the corporate objectives of an organization. Police Forces have a number of independent teams that are reliant on one another for data with finance in departments, divisions and headquarters sending and receiving information from each other as well as from the rest of the Force. The silo model leads to ineffective data being received by the teams that then have to carry out additional work to obtain the information required.

Whilst the argument for development has been well made in the context of moving decision making closer to operational service delivery, the added cost in terms of resources, duplication and misaligned processes has rarely featured in the debate. In the current financial climate these costs need to be recognized.

Culture

Within transactional processes, a leading finance function will set up targets for staff members on a daily basis. This target setting is an element of the metric based culture that leading finance functions develop. If the appropriate metrics of productivity and quality are applied and when these targets are challenging but not impossible, this is proven to result in improvements to productivity and quality.

A ‘Best in Class’ finance function in Police Forces will have a service focused culture, with the primary objectives of providing a high level of satisfaction for its customers (departments, divisions, employees & suppliers). A ‘Best in Class’ finance function will measure customer satisfaction on a timely basis through a metric based approach. This will be combined with a team wide focus on process improvement, with process owners, that will not necessarily be the team leads, owning force-wide improvement to each of the finance processes.

Organizational Improvements

Organizational structures within Police Forces are typically made up of supervisors leading teams of one to four team members. Through centralizing and consolidating the finance function, an opportunity exists to increase the span of control to best practice levels of 6 to 8 team members to one team lead / supervisor. By adjusting the organizational structure and increasing the span of control, Police Forces can accrue significant cashable benefit from a reduction in the number of team leads and team leads can accrue better management experience from managing larger teams.

Technology Enabled Improvements

There are a significant number of technology improvements that a Police Force could implement to help develop a ‘Best in Class’ finance function.

These include:

A) Scanning and workflow

Through adopting a scanning and workflow solution to replace manual processes, improved visibility, transparency and efficiencies can be reaped.

B) Call logging, tracking and workflow tool

Police Forces generally have a number of individuals responding to internal and supplier queries. These queries are neither logged nor tracked. The consequence of this is dual:

o Queries consume considerable effort within a particular finance team. There is a high risk of duplicated effort from the lack of logging of queries. For example, a query could be responded to for 30 minutes by person A in the finance team. Due to this query not being logged, if the individual that raised the query called up again and spoke to a different person then just for one additional question, this could take up to 20 minutes to ensure that the background was appropriately explained.

o Queries can have numerous interfaces with the business. An unresolved query can be responded against by up to four separate teams with considerable delay in providing a clear answer for the supplier.

The implementation of a call logging, tracking and workflow tool to document, measure and close internal and supplier queries combined with the set up of a central queries team, would significantly reduce the effort involved in responding to queries within the finance departments and divisions, as well as within the actual divisions and departments, and procurement.

C) Database solution

Throughout finance departments there are a significant number of spreadsheets utilized prior to input into the financial system. There is a tendency to transfer information manually from one spreadsheet to another to meet the needs of different teams.

Replacing the spreadsheets with a database solution would rationalize the number of inputs and lead to effort savings for the front line Police Officers as well as Police Staff.

D) Customize reports

In obtaining management information from the financial systems, police staff run a series of reports, import these into excel, use lookups to match the data and implement pivots to illustrate the data as required. There is significant manual effort that is involved in carrying out this work. Through customizing reports the outputs from the financial system can be set up to provide the data in the formats required through the click of a button. This would have the benefit of reduced effort and improved motivation for team members that previously carried out these mundane tasks.

In designing, procuring and implementing new technology enabling tools, a Police Force will face a number of challenges including investment approval; IT capacity; capability; and procurement.

These challenges can be mitigated through partnering with a third party service company with whom the investment can be shared, the skills can be provided and the procurement cycle can be minimized.

Conclusion

It is clear that cultural, process and technology change is required if police forces are to deliver both sustainable efficiencies and high quality services. In an environment where for the first time forces face real cash deficits and face having to reduce police officer and support staff numbers whilst maintaining current performance levels the current finance delivery models requires new thinking.

While there a number of barriers to be overcome in achieving a best in class finance function, it won’t be long before such a decision becomes mandatory. Those who are ahead of the curve will inevitably find themselves in a stronger position.

Finding the Best SEO Company Online

If you wanted to find a top-quality (SEO) partner, either an agency, a contractor, a consultant, or someone to handle your SEO needs, where are you going to start from? Finding the best SEO services is not a simple task, and do not put your website in danger because of poor decision making when selecting the best SEO company.Beyond the essentials of getting the best company, what about getting best SEO services that are a cut above any norm, that are done by an experienced SEO partner who is someone you will trust?Scammers manyIt must be noted that SEO is just riddled with low-quality expert providers, fakers, and scammers. As an open field (on the open net, no less) SEO is part of the untamed west. You will not at one time get sanctioning firms, and third-party companies that can vet when it comes to offering SEO services. This is the simple reasons just why anyone can get out and do SEO without knowing what works and what does not work, because you do not need a license (or even more sadly, without knowledge), the SEO industry is widespread with, honestly, crap.Tied with this reality is the truth that SEO is a blend of art and science. This makes its practitioners to a kind of hard-to-define intuitive and artful understanding of the search engines, with the hard information of analytics and metrics, semantic markup and log file parsers.SEO is based on information, on delving through the technical problem and issue solving. But its top greatest opportunities are achieved from combining its analytical side with an artful understanding of users as well as the search engines, and then making use of experienced hunches in order to gain a competitive edge.SEO is in demandProfessional SEO is in great demand. There are huge sums of money at stake, as well. Ranking and traffic improvements really mean millions of dollars for any firm’s bottom-line spending.This is what has made a market of SEO providers who are skillful when it comes to selling search engine optimization services, but then, less skilled when it comes to carrying delivering the results. Many SEO services do just little to move the bottom line of the company.How to select a quality SEO partner?
Nevertheless, it’s not really as bad as it seems to be. There are bright spots on the SEO field as well. Here are some of the tips to help you get the best SEO partner.Know what you wantIn everything that you are looking for, you should know that there are specialists as well as talents, and SEO is no different. If your website is a publisher that is need of traffic increases, you will have different requirements than when it comes to an e-commerce website that is looking for better product-level conversions. Do you need the best link building services, technical knowledge, and a premeditated partner for SEO growth? Defining what your site really needs is the very first step toward getting the best SEO partner.Ask aroundThere are chances that somebody you know has an opinion when it comes to an SEO consultant or company. Ask them. Make use of your social connections such as LinkedIn and Twitter to influence your trusted network, as well. Note that the best leads will be though the word-of-mouth and referrals from people you trust.Dip a toe in the waterDo not get afraid when it comes to asking for a pilot or a test for a specific SEO plan. This offers you an opportunity to see what will be the best SEO Company, which will bring the best on the table, and as a result, saves you up from just committing to anything while you are still unsure.