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Security is of utmost importance for any business, big or small. You can have the most beautiful website in the world, but if it’s not secure, you’re at risk of losing everything. In this comprehensive guide, we will discuss security testing and its importance. We will also take a look at various security testing software tools and approaches. So whether you’re a business owner who wants to ensure the security of their website, or a developer who wants to learn more about security testing, this guide has you covered!

What is Security Testing & Why Is It Necessary?

The term “security testing” refers to the practice of evaluating the security of a website, app, or system. It aids in the identification of possible assaults. Security testing may be completed manually or using automated tools.

As we’ve mentioned, security is of paramount importance for any business. Data loss, funds, and clients can all be caused by a security problem. It may also damage your reputation and make it more difficult to recover from the assault. That’s why security testing is so vital! It aids in the detection and repair of threats before they can be exploited by hackers.

Types of Security Testing Software

Penetration Testing

Penetration testing is an essential test technique that every organization must implement. It involves utilizing seasoned hackers to execute a variety of attack methods. Penetration testing is also referred to as security testing. It is utilized to assess the system’s security by putting it through its paces in real-time.

Vulnerability Scanning

Vulnerability scanning is the practice of identifying and correcting significant flaws in an information system. Vulnerability scanning is usually done by a program that compares the system to known vulnerability signatures automated tool. A scan report is produced from the scan’s results, which are usually recorded as a vulnerability scanning report.

Risk Assessment

Security risk assessment is the process of detecting and avoiding potential hazards and flaws in an information system before they become a problem. It aids in determining the status of information security within a company, as well as identifying areas of risk. It’s a systematic, analytical approach for examining an information system’s safety and identifying potential security risks that could be used to inflict damage or harm to a business.

Security Auditing

Security auditing is an element of the security assessment process. It involves reviewing computer-based systems, networks, or software to ensure that security precautions are working properly. It’s commonly completed as part of a security audit service by a third-party service provider. The report should assist in assessing an organization’s security readiness and identifying areas where it may be vulnerable to various threats.

Source Code Review

Reviewing the full source code of an application for potential security concerns is known as source code review. A third-party security firm can analyze the source code of the software to detect any security flaws that the developer may have overlooked. The goal of source code examination is to look at applications with new eyes for possible security concerns.

Security Testing Software Approaches

Security testing software is the process of testing software for security flaws and inadequacies. Three distinct methods are used in security testing software. Let’s look at each approach separately.

Black Box Testing

The black box testing approach (also known as opaque testing) is a kind of software security assessment. The test engineer in a black-box security test has no insight into the software’s or system’s internal workings.

The test engineer must rely on previous documentation, past experiences, and feedback from the software’s creators and users to create tests. The test engineer is unfamiliar with the system’s inner workings or application being tested.

White Box Testing

During white box testing, also known as glass box testing, the tester has access to not only the system’s internal state but also its code structure. Because of this, white box testing is sometimes called glass box examination.

Gray Box Testing

A gray box security test is a hybrid form of testing that combines both expertise and skill. This is a combination of white-box and black-box testing. The gray box test consists of portions of the two tests, with the tester having some knowledge but not all of it. Testers can find what they’re searching for without knowing where it originated using this method.

Software Security Testing Tools:

Astra Security

Astra’s Network Security Solution is a one-of-a-kind product from Astra Security, which can help you discover and address network security vulnerabilities. Astra’s solution aids in the identification of network security flaws as well as the plugging of gaps.

The solution examines and assesses your network to identify network devices, ports, and protocols that may be vulnerable, in order to help you address any issues promptly.

OpenVAS

OpenVAS is a network security tool that may perform a thorough vulnerability assessment. OpenVAS is a worldwide initiative with organizations from many countries using it. It’s available for no cost and may be used with commercial software.

The OpenVAS tool is produced by Greenbone, and the paid version is known as Greenbone Security feed. The free one, on the other hand, is called Greenbone Community feed.

Metasploit

Metasploit is a computer security project that focuses on penetration testing and IDS signature creation. It’s free, open-source, and accessible to everyone.

The goal of the project is to teach network administrators and penetration testers about security flaws that have been used by penetration testers during security audits, as well as ways to use them in order to maintain a secure network configuration.

Conclusion

Security testing is important because it can help you find and fix security vulnerabilities in your software before they are exploited by attackers. There are three main approaches to security testing: black box, white box, and gray box. There are several distinct types of penetration testing, each with its own set of advantages and disadvantages. It’s critical to select the appropriate one for your needs, so understanding what they all have to offer is important. There are a number of security testing tools to choose from; some of the most popular ones include Astra Security, OpenVAS, and Metasploit.

Regardless of the tool you employ, ensuring that your software is secure is a necessary step in the development process. You may ensure that your program is as safe as possible by performing security testing on a regular basis and early.

The post A Comprehensive Guide to Security Testing appeared first on noupe.

Web scraping is a great solution for those looking to access structured web data from websites containing large amounts of invaluable information.

Also known as web extraction, web scraping is a tool that helps you to gain information on products, contacts, and a lot more, even when a website doesn’t have an API (application programming interface), or grants limited access to its data.

 Web scraping offers a faster, more practical solution for extracting data from a website, instead of having to use the same format as the website in question, or even just copying and pasting information manually.

What is web scraping?

Web scraping is the process of gathering structured data into a spreadsheet or other file, but in an automated way. In the same way that a person can manually copy and paste information from a website into a document, web scraping performs the same function, just on a different scale. Web scraping also performs this task incredibly efficiently, extracting up to billions of data points through intelligent automation.

It is often used by businesses and individuals looking to make use of the huge amounts of information available on the web, implementing web scraping into their data management scheme. This information can be mined to help a company to make smarter, better, informed decisions. 

Data scraping is particularly valuable, in fact, for companies looking to gather data on specific, niche topics. This data can then be utilized in your marketing strategy, where you might be considering the best niches for affiliate marketing.

Web scraping can be used for more than business intelligence however, as it can reveal insights into pricing and price comparison sites, Google Shopping related metrics where product data from an e-commerce site is sent to another online vendor, and can even help find sales leads and conduct market research. It has many benefits and many uses, though it is not necessarily always a simple task.

This is because websites can often be very diverse, coming in several different formats, shapes and sizes. As a result, you will find multiple different kinds of web scrapers, which all offer different functions and features. This is similar to the way in which there are multiple different kinds of mobile data collection apps to pick from.

Is web scraping a crime?

Web scraping is not illegal when it is used to mine public web data. However, it is important that you follow the prescribed rules, and avoid scraping information that is not available to the public. Scraping this data is illegal, and has become a rising crime with multiple recent cases of illegal web extraction occurring.

Though web scraping is a tool with many valuable features, it can be abused. A very common abuse of web scraping is through email harvesting. Scraping data from websites and social media can enable a person to harvest people’s email addresses, which can then be sold on to third parties and spammers for a sum. Harvesting data with commercial intent is illegal. 

It is important that you remain aware of the darker side of web scraping and the importance of only harvesting data, or even emails acquired through an email finder, that is publicly available.

This also helps demonstrate why webpage defacement monitoring on your own company websites and personal blogs is so important.

How do web scrapers work?

Whether you want to learn to perform data scraping yourself, or are looking to learn more about it before you outsource the job to a data extraction specialist, it’s really important that you understand how it works, and the difference between web crawling and web scraping.

Web scraping works by first choosing the URLs you want to load before you begin scraping. You need to load the whole HTML code of that page in order to continue. If you outsource to a specialist or learn to do it yourself, you can go as far as loading the entire website, including all the Javascript and CSS. However, this isn’t necessary to perform web scraping, so don’t worry about it too much, especially if you are a beginner.

Then, the scraper extracts all the data on the page. However, you can choose what specific data you want to extract. This is performed when you only need specific information, and aren’t interested in the rest of the data on the page you are scraping. 

Then, all the data is outputted. This is done using the format that the web scraper has chosen, depending on what format will be most useful to the individual. Usually, data is output as an Excel spreadsheet or a CSV file, but more advanced web scrapers are also able to output data in other formats such as an API or JSON file. 

For more on learning to manage and organize your data: DataBricks Apache Hive articles.

What about web crawling?

Web scraping and web crawling go hand in hand. Web crawling comes before web scraping, and involves artificial intelligence that searches the internet to look for content, indexing it. 

This process finds the relevant websites and URLs that are then passed onto the web scraper, who uses them to mine information.

Web scrapers are specialized tools, designed to extract data from websites. There are four main types of scrapers, and they differ widely from one another.

Types of web scrapers

Broadly speaking, web scrapers can be distinguished by placing them into four categories:

Category One: browser extension vs software

Generally speaking, web scrapers come in one of two forms, browser extensions and computer software. Browser extensions are simpler to run and are integrated directly into your browser. Like apps, they are programs that can be added to your browser (such as Firefox or Google Chrome). Some of the other best chrome extensions also include messaging extensions and ad blockers. 

However, these extensions are limited in that they ‘live’ inside of your browser. This means that advanced features are usually impossible to implement. On the other hand, scraping software can be installed onto your computer with a simple download. They enable more advanced features (not limited by what your browser can do), making up for the fact that they are a bit less convenient than browser extensions. 

Category two: self-built vs pre-built

Anyone can build their own web scraper. However, even in the implementation of tools that help you build a web scraper, there is a certain amount of coding knowledge needed. The more features you want to add to your scraper, the more knowledge you will need to have, as complexity increases accordingly.
On the other hand, you might want to opt for a pre-built web scraper that you can download and start using straight away. Some will offer advanced features (already built-in) such as Google Sheets Exports and more. This is a good option for those who have little familiarity with coding. If this seems enticing, consider learning more from databricks’ Introduction of hadoop to get you started.

Category three: User Interface

A user interface (UI) can vary depending on the web scraper. Some web scrapers have a full on UI, with a fully rendered website that users can click on and scrape. If you have little technical knowledge of coding and how scraping works, then this is a good place to begin.

The alternative – a user interface with a minimalistic UI and command line – might feel less intuitive and more confusing to a beginner, and might be worth avoiding if you are only just starting out.

Category four: Local vs Cloud

This is all about where your web scraper is doing its job from. 

A local scraper runs using resources from your own computer and the internet. This can result in your computer becoming quite slow whilst it is scraping data, especially if it has a high usage of CPU or RAM. This can make your computer pretty much useless for other tasks whilst it is being used to scrape.

On the other hand, cloud-based web scrapers run using off-site servers provided by companies that develop scrapers. This gives you the ability to use your computer freely as its resources are not taken up by web scraping. You simply get notified when the data harvesting has completed.

How to do web scraping

Although the process, in itself, is fairly straightforward, it becomes complicated the minute your project grows to any significant size. As a result, it is often easier to outsource the job to a company of professional web scrapers. However, it is still interesting to understand the process of DIY web scraping, alongside learning about other forms of data collection.

Firstly, you need to identify the target website you are interested in scraping (a web crawler can help you do this). Let’s take websites for free stock videos as an example.

Then, collect all the URLs of the pages that hold the data you are looking to extract, namely on visual stock content.

Once you’ve done that, send a request to these URLs asking to be granted access to the HTML of the pages in question.

Then, once this is completed, use locators to find the data within the HTML.

Lastly, save said data in a CSV or JSON file, or in any other form of structured format that suits you. And just like that, you have a large amount of data on stock videos, all saved in one place.

If this seems like a tricky task, then an open-source web scraping data tool might be the right step forward for you. Or at the very least, a HDFS file system (what is HDFS in hadoop).

Conclusions 

Whether or not you plan to implement data scraping yourself or outsource to a specialist, it is important that you understand the process – it’s only going to grow in importance and popularity as more companies seek to make the most of the data that is available on the internet.
Without this valuable data, a company can never hope to make sense of a customer’s ecommerce journey, thus serving a vital purpose within a retailer’s repertoire of tools.

The post An Introductory Guide On How To Do Web Scraping: Extracting Data From Your Website appeared first on noupe.

Businesses try a lot of different things like offering free shipping, sale, loyalty discounts, and many more things to attract customers. But sometimes, they overlook that the website design can make a huge difference in attracting customers.

Website optimization helps in improving website performance. It includes page responsiveness, page speed, navigation, SEO friendliness, etc. Because if you lack in any of the above factors, you might lose a lot of user traffic.

For Shopify store owners, it becomes easy to optimize the website as it is a flexible platform. All they have to understand is how to do it. This article explains the ways you can use to improve the efficiency of your ecommerce stores.

1. Adding Good-quality Plugins

To build traffic and increase sales conversion, it is inevitable to optimize website performance regularly. And the best way to optimize the store is by adding plugins. Adding any plugin can slow down your store or complicate the user interface.

High-quality plugins would improve your website’s functionality and benefit your business tremendously. But try avoiding unnecessary plugins with features that would not make much difference to your store. You should also avoid plugins with complex assets, operations, and content strips.

2. Improve Website Speed

Customers are used to fast-loading websites. Customers don’t have patience; while your home page is loading, the customer would just switch to another website. If the pages do not load faster, it can affect the customer experience and conversion rates.

There is research that shows websites taking more than 5 seconds to load, fail to engage visitors, and they might not revisit the website in the future. In Google’s SERP performance, a page load time of 10 seconds is acceptable. But if your website takes more than 10 seconds to load, the visitors would be frustrated, and chances are they would leave the website. The point is that web visitors would not spend excessive time on such slower websites. 

3. Mobile Compatibility

Smartphones are the preferred choice over laptops of most of customers. Because it is more convenient to use. Ecommerce owners understood this inclination towards mobile phones and started optimizing their website by making it mobile responsive. 

If your website pages are not mobile responsive, if they take longer to load, or the UI gets scattered, then it is high time you optimize your website. Or else your customers would probably start looking for mobile responsive websites. If you have no idea whether your website is mobile-friendly or not, you can also check it on Google Search Console.

4. Image Optimization

Image Optimization can improve your website’s performance to a great extent. All websites use images in one or the other way as image helps in conveying the message more effectively. If you are using the images, selecting the file format is important so that you have high-quality images is important. For a web page to load faster, keeping the file image between 1 to 2 MB is ideal. But high-quality images of any format, PNG, JPEG, or GIF, do not fall in the 1 to 2 MB range.

There are tools available in the market that can help you reduce the size of an image without compromising on image quality. These tools help you reduce the size of images and enhance website performance. It will help improve the speed of the website.

5. SEO Optimization

For any website to rank and appear in search results, it should follow the search engine guidelines to bring more potential customers. And so SEO strategy becomes a crucial part of the success of any website. 

You can do some research on websites with more traffic and conversions. Analytical tools kike Google Analytics, Google Search Control, and many others help you give clear insights on bounce rates, behavior reports, and many more.

Optimizing a website with the right SEO keywords can help a website rank on the first pages. Focus on details like headlines, meta tags, URL slugs, etc. Find long and short-tail keywords and frame them in your website content. Additionally, you can also do off-page optimization by doing social media activities, guest blogging, influencer marketing, and many more things to improve your website performance.

6. Checkout Process

Complex checkouts can take away the joy of a seamless customer experience. A huge setback if a visitor enjoyed your website, selected the product, and changed their mind before payments due to complex checkout.

There can be many reasons your customers are abandoning the cart. You have to figure out those reasons and optimize your website accordingly. For instance, to simplify the checkout process, you can introduce single-page checkout to make it easier for buyers. Allow them to checkout as a guest user, rather than making the sign-up process compulsory.

Many plugins can help reduce cart abandonment rates. For example, you can use sticky carts or quick buy buttons on your website to remind users of the products in their cart. You can use sale timers to encourage quick checkout. To optimize the details, you can also edit the product details in bulk with the Shopify bulk editor.

7. Website Audit

If you do not keep an eye on your website’s performance, how would you optimize it? An underperforming website can make visitors feel you are incapable of offering a good user experience.

You can use tools like Lighthouse, Google Page Speed, etc., to audit your website performance. It shows detailed reports on what factors need improvement. They suggest steps for you to adopt to optimize those parts of your websites.

Conclusion

Now that you know how to improve the website, it is time to implement it. Shopify users can easily find high-quality plugins that help them optimize the site. To increase your website speed, you must use image optimizers that compress all the images and increase the website’s speed. All the product details must be optimized with uniformity by using the Shopify bulk editor plugin for bulk edits. You should all use the plugin wisely, so it does not slow down the website. Together, these would help you improve the website’s performance and increase traffic and conversion.

The post 7 Ways to Improve Efficiency of Your eCommerce Store appeared first on noupe.

Have you ever met an employee or manager that looks forward to reoccurring meetings? That leaves back-to-back meetings to feel productive, clear-headed and equipped for the next steps. Most people have not, as meetings have been painted as this draining activity that is overwhelming, time-consuming, and used less. For the rare person who has encountered someone that loves attending meetings, it is generally because their organization has a positive meeting culture.

Meetings do not need to be a draining activity. When a company invests in their meeting productivity and culture, meetings can become an energizing and efficient activity that provides clarity and helps you develop professionally. For example, one-on-one meetings between a manager and their direct report should not be an anxiety-ridden conversation with unclear expectations and an unpredictable outcome. By simply setting a clear meeting agenda with both attendees talking points and action items, the direct report can be empowered to use the set time to discuss roadblocks and gain clarity on their progress.

Many organizations do not see the benefits of investing in their meeting culture. Some are even more aware that their companywide inefficiency or lack of motivation could be related to a meeting problem. Not considering how effective and productive your company meetings are is an expensive mistake. The meeting problem costs US companies $37 billion annually.

The first step in addressing an inefficient or lacking meeting culture is bringing awareness to the cost of your meetings. When employees and managers quantify the price of a forum, they become more mindful of the meeting inefficiencies. This blog post will discuss calculating the cost of your meetings and four tips to optimize your meetings and improve your meeting culture.

Why calculate the cost of your meetings?

Before explaining how to calculate the cost of your meeting, it is essential to understand why this is an important metric to qualify. As mentioned above, many organizations are not aware of their meeting problem. It can be challenging to pinpoint the issue as it can be disguised. For example, an unsuccessful marketing campaign where the target audience was not accurately defined could be because the team did not have an initial planning meeting and there was no alignment in the project.

Calculating the cost of your meetings is the first step in addressing an organization’s meeting problem. As this post will later discuss, changing a meeting culture will require leadership buy-in; when the cost of a meeting is quantified, it will be easier for the leadership team to understand the depth and urgency of the problem. Ultimately, calculating the cost of your meetings will allow:

Increase meeting productivity

We have all been in meetings that take a lot of time with no visible breakthrough. Once you know how much it costs for someone to attend a meeting, you become more aware of everyone’s cost of the meeting. With these numbers, it’s easy for you to judge whether each attendee’s presence is vital to the agenda. That way, your meetings become smaller in number and more productive.

Visualize the value of your team’s time

Time is the most crucial thing in a business, and visualizing/quantifying your team’s time dramatically improves productivity. With the cost, you will also know how much time is wasted during every meeting, giving you a chance to adjust accordingly.

Find alternate meeting strategies, such as asynchronous meetings

An asynchronous meeting discusses a topic that doesn’t happen in real-time. Participants share their views through recorded videos, voice messages and text before the deadline. This can include meeting through a shared agenda software, recorded videos, voice messages, etc. It is essentially an alternate method to facilitate communication between employees. Knowing your meeting cost makes it easier to consider moving to asynchronous meetings. The benefits of asynchronous meetings include more flexibility in distributed teams around meeting time, increased documentation habits and greater meeting productivity.

What factors into the cost of a meeting?

There are different ways to calculate the cost of a meeting. The fastest is to use a meeting cost calculator. This tool will consider the following factors in providing the total cost of your meeting:

Participants

This is the number of people who will attend the meeting. You need to have the exact number of attendees for you to know how much it costs for you to hold their meeting every year.

Average salary

What is the average salary of the participants? If the attendees are from different pay brackets (often the case), you need to calculate their average annual wage for the best results.

Duration

How long are the meetings? You must account for the duration of the meetings to know how much time and money you spend each year of the specific meetings.

Cadence

How often do you hold the meetings? Is it weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually? The frequency of the meetings is one of the things to consider when calculating the cost of the meetings.

Tips to Optimize Your Meetings

After calculating the cost of your meetings, you are probably wondering how you can optimize your meetings for more efficiency. Below are four tips to help increase your meeting productivity.

Use the right tech stack

It is important to leverage tools and workflows for your meetings to run smoothly. These tools include a video conferencing app, note-taking software and a calendar app to schedule the meeting. These three tools are the baseline, some teams will choose to add additional tools such as scheduling apps or meeting transcription tools.

Prepare an agenda  

An unprepared meeting, or a meeting without an agenda, is not worth attending as it will not be productive. Companies should strive to instill this messaging within their meeting culture. Different types of meetings include different agendas. For example, a project kick-off meeting will not discuss the same talking points as a leadership one-on-one meeting. Consulting different meeting agenda examples can help the meeting organizer identify which topics are relevant to cover in the meeting.

Get leadership buy-in

Organizational change is rarely effective without a push from leadership. A top-down approach to changing organizations will help form different habits and workflows among employees.

Gather feedback

As habits, routines and workflows change, it is crucial to continuously gather feedback from different teams to understand how they adapt and appreciate the change. This will help inform if the desired impact is happening and its benefits.

The post The Cost of Inefficient Meetings and How to Overcome Them? appeared first on noupe.

Recession. 

It’s the word businesses dread because it means layoffs, a decline in sales and profit – and for many, bankruptcy.

However, the world has already weathered a great number of recessions, and businesses have been finding ways to thrive even in the direst conditions. 

That means you can do it too, and this article provides you with actionable ways in which you can ensure your business runs smoothly in turbulent times. 

1. Assess the impact of the crisis on different aspects of your business

The way your business operates, how it generates revenue, who your customers are, and what your products are like determine how you can attract and retain new investors and talent.

If you want an overview of how these things work, an activity map or a flowchart can tell you whether the way you’re currently operating makes it possible for you to meet your business objectives.

However, when the recession hits and when the resources of your consumers get scarce, your business will likely show certain shortcomings when attempting to meet those objectives. 

As it gets increasingly hard to get money out of people’s pockets, you’ll need to adapt and figure out how to address your customers’ problems in a cheap way for them but still profitable for your business. 

How? By figuring out how each aspect of your business is affected by turbulent times. 

To get this sort of insight, you need to talk to your stakeholders. 

Talk to your suppliers. Take a look at how your consumers are behaving – how their needs and the overall market are changing. 

Ask yourself: Where do my products and services fit in now? 

Anticipate the issues that may arise and analyze how the successful business models of your competitors have tackled similar issues in the past. 

Then, borrow from their experience and remain positive. Recessions tend to last up to 12 months, so you just need to keep your head above water for a couple of months. 

2. Consider your payroll

History has shown that recession proof businesses and employment loss are synonymous in people’s minds.

Unstable times often lead to layoffs, which is something that both businesses and their employees fear.

Juggling layoffs, protecting your business from legal liability, fighting the fear of your remaining top employees, and trying to keep them motivated is no easy feat, but someone has to do it.

If you come to a point where you have to lay people off, you want to make sure that the decisions you’re making will keep your business running smoothly until the tough times are behind you. 

The way you can do that? By hiring and keeping the right people.

You need to figure out which employees are confident that you can pull it through and can back it up by getting the job done. Identify those who can handle extra tasks, work in a team, bring hope into the corporate environment, and focus on the bottom line.

Sounds like a lot to ask of very few people? That’s because it is. 

And that means that, if you want to keep top players on your side, you need to keep them motivated.

The best way to find out what motivates your employees is to talk to them, not just when hiring them, but also every now and then once they join the company. It might also be a good idea to interview those who have been laid off to understand what they were dissatisfied with. 

In either case, you can’t go wrong with compensating your employees properly for their work.

While it may be tempting to underpay your staff when the recession hits, it’s always better to make cuts elsewhere and invest in what’s essential – and that’s your human resources. 

(Even if that means taking a pay cut yourself.)

3. Delegate tasks, create functional teams, and develop a sense of belonging in the workplace

Now that you’ve got the right people on your side, you need to get them working on the right tasks.

Task delegation is essential if you want to save resources and have your employees perform efficiently in teams. 

And that’s the other thing – with turbulent times ahead, teams that work well are what will keep you afloat.  

What we mean by that is that having a functioning team, as opposed to one where people aren’t actively collaborating, is what can make or break a business during a recession.

Why? 

Because if you’ve made layoffs and you’re left with very few people where each of them is handling large chunks of workload – if just one of them leaves, you’re left in a tough position where you can’t quickly replace them and no one else can pick up where they’ve left off.

Having a functional team means providing training to all of them, all while ensuring that they’re sharing skills and knowledge among themselves. 

Just be wary of creating a sense that everyone is replaceable just because anyone in the office can do their job. 

Let your employees know how valuable they are, promote positive relationships between colleagues, and work on creating a sense of belonging in the workplace. 

That’s how you boost the share of ideas, the morale, and that’s how you meet your common objectives.  

4. Have liquid assets to cover your business in emergencies

Think about the predictable, short-term expenses that your business might have. When turbulent times arrive, you want to cover those first.

To ensure that you’ve got the means to handle these expenses, you’ll want to have enough cash on hand.

Get a loan early, before the rates skyrocket. 

Look into short-term financing options, such as invoice factoring, to speed up the payments. 

Secure a line of credit.

If you’ve got savings, tap into them. If you’ve got stock holdings, liquidate them. 

Borrowing money can help your business survive the tough times, but be mindful of the losses you could face if you default on payments. 

5. Cut costs where you can

Turbulent times are the perfect opportunity to take a look at your company’s income statement and identify the recurring expenses that are putting a dent in your budget.

The most important recurring expenses you should focus on are the smaller ones, as they tend to be overlooked when times are good, but can quickly add up.

For example, consider the equipment and office supply costs. 

Ask yourself questions like:

• Does your office really need a revamp now? 
• Can the branded products that you use be replaced with generic ones? 
• Are any of your supplies recyclable?
• Can you reduce the amount of paper that you use?

Monitor which of the supplies are used the most by your staff and which get wasted. Ask your employees for feedback and suggestions regarding cost control. 

Another area in which you can make cuts is in the supplies used to make your products. 

However, you want to be mindful of the impact these cuts may have on the quality of the finished product, as that is something you want to avoid. 

One thing you could do is to keep the same supplies, but use fewer of them per piece of product. Then, you can sell that product at reduced size or quantity, at the same price. That’s shrinkflation, for you! 

6. Go remote 

While we’re on the topic of cutting recurring expenses, here’s a larger cut that you could make and completely transform your business.

Go remote.

China’s largest travel agency, Ctrip, has managed to reduce office costs by $1,250 annually per employee by introducing telework. 

Remote work, in certain industries, is even seen as a determining factor in employees choosing whether they want to work for a certain company. This shift is most notable in the IT sector.

Still, going fully digital requires quite a few changes in your business model. 

For starters, if you’re a retailer relying on customers who physically visit your stores, you’ll want to set up an e-commerce store with an online order system. 

Then, you’ll want to communicate this change, along with your brand’s values, to your consumer base. This means building a presence online, including on social media platforms. 

You’ll also want to consider the infrastructure of your remote work, to ensure that:

• Your staff has the necessary equipment, tools, and training to work from home
• Your key data is secure
• Your team members can communicate effectively with one another
• Your company culture remains positive

7. Reconsider your business offer 

Historically, consumers in a recession tend to spend most of their money on essentials while seeking out bargains and cheaper alternatives to branded products.

If you aren’t selling things that people can’t live without, expect to be hit harder by the recession. 

Sure, you could give discounts, but this will only get you so far if people don’t have money to spend on luxuries. 

So, what can you do?

Well, you can adapt. 

And by adapt, we mean to change your business offer. 

Look at that inventory of yours. Look at the supplies used to make your product.

What else can you use them for? How can you repurpose them to make something useful for your customers?

Remember: tough times don’t last forever. If you find a way to help your community survive the tough times, they’ll remember it and reward you with loyalty once the crisis ends. 

Conclusion

When things get hard, it’s important to remain positive. 

Remember that there isn’t just one, but many solutions that can keep your business running. However, if you lose your cool, you’ll blink and miss them.

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