Business Metrics Every Startup Should Watch

While modern marketing methods have evolved over the last 20 years, there are still some tried and true business metrics that still work just as well as ever. If you’re not using them, you’re missing the boat.

Customer Acquisition Cost

Customer acquisition cost is the metric that matters the most if you’re a young startup. It refers to how much money you’re spending to acquire a customer. To calculate your cost, divide your sales and marketing costs (including overhead expenses) for a given period by the number of new customers you brought on board during that same time.

A high customer acquisition cost means you’re spending too much money to get those customers. You need to lower those costs to improve profits and, ultimately, create a sustainable business.

If you’re using something like this lead management software, measuring and monitoring acquisition costs should be pretty straightforward and simple.

Retention

Retention is something that usually gets thrown to the wayside because most businesses are obsessed with controlling customer acquisition that they start looking for any way to cut costs associated with customers – including retention.

But, this metric is important in and of itself. It tells you a lot about how much it costs to keep customers as opposed to getting new ones.

Some businesses spend 7 to 10 times more to acquire a new customer vs keeping existing customers.

These costs are calculated similarly to the way you calculate new business except that you use existing customers when you do the math.

Focus on current customers and what you can do to make them more satisfied. Next, work on customers who have stopped using your product or slowed their use of it. Ask them why they no longer do business with you. You may be surprised by the answer they give.

Attrition

Attrition is a metric that tells you how many people stop using your product. You want this number as low as possible. Most startups measure churn at 30 days. Some measure it every 90 days.

You will lose customers, and for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of your product. It just happens. What you should focus on is what a profitable level of loss is for your company.

Lifetime Customer Value

The lifetime value of a customer is another important metric as it clues you in to the long-term profit potential of your business. How long do you expect customers to do business with you? Take that number and multiply it by the monthly revenue you expect to receive from that customer. That’s your customer’s Lifetime Value.

If your customer acquisition cost is higher than the customer’s lifetime value, well then you have an unsustainable business model and you will fail.

Referral Business

This metric measures how many referrals your company is getting. It also tells you whether your business survives on pushing its message out to the marketplace or whether it pulls business in of its own “gravity.”

Most companies will tell you that marketing is expensive, and if you stop, the traffic stops. Having referral-driven business makes it so much easier because the leads just keep coming in regardless of what you do.

So, don’t forget to measure this metric and try to improve it over time. When this metric improves, you’ll notice your costs going down and customer satisfaction scores improving.

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Queens University: Dragons Den

Lights, Camera, Action…..Queens University: Dragons Den

Head of Mid-Ulster and Fermanagh Business Centre Shauna Burns recounts her recent experience as a judge on Queen’s University’s Dragons Den, where enterprising local students faced a grilling as they pitched for new investment…

IT bench marking for the agriculture sector; concierge for the nomadic digital community; medical diagnostic devices ; chargers for electric cars – these were just a few of the ideas from Northern Irelands brightest young students at the final of QUB Dragons Den last week.

The basement of Elmwood Hall was transformed into a film set just like the real Dragons Den, with the 11 final businesses pitching for £5,000 investment. Myself and the other Dragons, Philip Bain (Director, Shredbank), Nancy Brown (business consultant and entrepreneur), John McKee (Chief Executive, Linkubator),and David Bradshaw (Client Executive, Invest Northern Ireland) were given an insight to the future. We saw not just students with ideas but with ambition and with products that were ready for the market.

It was truly inspiring to see that the future of Northern Ireland economic growth is in the hands of people with such diverse and innovative ideas. I believe that all of them will become leading entrepreneurial figures and business people of the future.

Winner: SleepState Labs

As judges we faced a tough decision as the standard was so high but ultimately we decided on one winner – SleepState Labs who won the full £5k investment for their sleep detecting mobile application. Each finalist also received 12 months business accommodation at QUB, which will hopefully enable them to evolve their businesses..

Across Northern Ireland, Ulster Bank encounters many new and exciting business ideas and one of the refreshing challenges I find is helping turn those ideas into reality. Our dedicated start-up proposition is a great tool to help us do this, and this has given me even more motivation to get out and support local enterprise.

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Ultimate Human Performance; Using Flow as a Business Tool

In this post we’ll investigate how using flow (ultimate focus) can be useful in business and how it can lead to the ultimate human performance.

We have always had an interest in the power of the human mind. Which goes beyond being mindful, but moves also into the paranormal, spirituality, neuroscience, hypnosis, auras, chakras, Tao, physics., science fiction, gaming and more relevant to business, performance, decision making and strategy.

Vision and decision making

Core elements in business are always visioning (=strategy) and first, second and maybe third stage thinking (=decision making). Both impact on performance. Inspired by Jack Black’s “Mindstore” and after reading “Bold”, I decided to pick up “The rise of superman”.

Flow

Which is all about finding Csikszentmihalyi’s flow. In flow, we are so focused on the task at hand that everything else falls away. Action and awareness merge. Time flies. Self vanishes. Performance goes through the roof.

The advertisement for flow

Flow naturally transforms a weakling into a muscleman, a sketcher into an artist, a dancer into a ballerina, a plodder into a sprinter, an ordinary person into someone extraordinary. Everything you do, you do better in flow, from baking a chocolate cake to planning a vacation to solving a differential equation to writing a business plan to playing tennis to making love. Flow is the doorway to the ‘more’ most of us seek.

More advertisement for flow

From a quality-of-life perspective, psychologists have found that the people who have the most flow in their lives are the happiest people on earth.Flow directly correlates to happiness at work and happiness at work directly correlates to success. A decade of research in the business world proves happiness raises nearly every business and educational outcome: raising sales by 37 percent, productivity by 31 percent, and accuracy on tasks by 19 percent, as well as a myriad of health and quality-of-life improvements.

Extreme athletes and flow

Yep, it is an advertisement for flow. Steven Kotler uses the extreme athletes as the medium to tell the story of flow and what we can learn. In their case it is very simple. Extreme athletes take huge risks. Risk narrows the focus very rapidly. It’s flow or die. Literally. But what these athletes do, is showing what flow can do. Performance goes through the roof and it is iterative. One builds on the other. In between a lot of those athletes die. But they don’t care. Because they live life by the fullest. A fantastic quote from the book; “It is not often that Death is told so clearly to fuck off.”

You don’t have to be an extreme athlete

You don’t have to risk life and limb to achieve the same. The book itself is a rush. And you can learn how to get in your own flow. Like being mindful, flow is another route to happiness. Csikszentmihalyi discovered that the happiest people on earth, the ones who felt their lives had the most meaning, were those who had the most peak experiences.

Getting into the flow

So what do you need. You need risk, you need a rich environment, you need novelty and unpredictability, you need self knowledge, you need purpose, you need a challenge, you need skills, you need clear goals and you need action. Which where flow is different from meditation. You can only get into flow by doing something. It works on individual as well as collective level. This leads to focussed activity. Focused activity produced a significant reward: it alters consciousness, creating experiences very similar to “mystical.”

Goals

Goals are particularly important. When the brain is charged with a clear goal, focus narrows considerably, the unimportant is disregarded, and the now is all that’s left. Just as important, in the now, there’s no past or future and a lot less room for self — which are the three intruders most likely to yank us to the then.When goals are clear, metacognition is replaced by in-the-moment cognition, and the self stays out of the picture Applying this idea in our daily life means breaking tasks into bite-size chunks and setting goals accordingly.

Groups

In a group setting these goals need to be shared. You need familiarity, blending egos, a sense of control, close listening and an always say yes rule, our final trigger, means interactions should be additive more than argumentative.

Group flow

Group flow is a social unifier and social leveler, creating what cultural anthropologists call “communitas” — that deep solidarity and togetherness that results from shared transcendent experiences. That’s why people who seek out group flow often join startups or work for themselves. Serial entrepreneurs keep starting new business as much for the flow experience, as for the additional success

What happens in flow

You develop a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness: The merging of action and awareness. From the explicit brain system to the implicit brain system. Extremely fluid brain control. Gamma brain waves. The appearance of the Voice, the voice of intuition — the center of the zone’s mystery. Carl Jung defined intuition as “perception via the unconscious” and the Voice is the end result of that perception — the unconscious mind broadcasting its perceptions to the conscious mind.

The amygdala (fight, freeze or flight) switched off. Transient hypofrontality and quieting of doubt. The unstuck in time. Ultimate focus. This is also why the Voice comes through so clearly in a flow state. With self, time, and space erased from the picture, all explicit complexity is edited out. It’s not that the Voice is turned up louder in the zone, it’s that everything that stands between us and the message is removed from the picture. The ultimate experience and in some way connected to “Infinite possibilities”, which is all about creating the ultimate experience.

Dopamine, norepinephrine, endorphins, anandamide and serotoninThese five chemicals are flow’s mighty cocktail. The same cocktail mentioned in “Out of our minds” and the cocktail created by immersive games. Video-game players get into flow so frequently that Csikszentmihalyi’s ideas have become the most widely accepted theoretical framework for explaining the lure of the joystick. Studies have shown that the amount of flow generated by a video game directly correlates to everything from player engagement to overall product success.

The business case for flow

“Because flow involves meeting challenges and developing skills,” explains Csikszentmihalyi “it leads to growth. In the state, we are aligned with our core passion and, because of flow’s incredible impact on performance, expressing that passion to our utmost”. In 2007, South Korean researchers looking at e-learning (electronic games, Web-based learning tools, and electronic tutoring) discovered significant correlation between flow and positive learning attitudes and outcomes.

Neuroelectrically, flow’s baseline brain-wave pattern of low alpha/high theta also boosts creativity, which is the essential skill for CEOs. McKinsey established that executives in flow are five times more effective than their steady-state peers.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University have found that from the marketing side of this coin, online flow experiences attract customers, mitigate price sensitivity, and positively influence subsequent buying behaviours.

Creativity and cooperation are so amplified that Greylock partner venture capitalist James Slavet, in a recent article for Forbes.com, called “flow state percentage” — defined as the amount of time employees spend in flow — the “most important management metric for building great innovation teams.” Because flow is the hallmark of high performance. When we watch a live concert or a traditional sports event, we’re essentially paying to watch people in a flow state.

When performance peaks in groups there is a collective merger of action and awareness, a group flow. As a result, in group flow, spontaneity, cooperation, communication, creativity, productivity, and overall performance all go through the roof

Time-based accounting (paying people for hours worked) needs to be replaced by flow-based accounting (paying people for the amount of time they spend in flow at work). What matters is not the amount of time you’re present, but the amount of time that you’re working at your full potential.

The ultimate reason

Flow helps you learn faster. And the ability to learn faster than your competitors is the only sustainable competitive advantage.”

Bookbuzz

From a Bookbuzz perspective reading “Thinking fast and slow”, “The future of the mind”, “Coherence”, “Carrots and sticks don’t work”, “The shallows”, “Out of our minds”, “Bioteams”, “Reinventing organisations” and many, many other books, it seems that it is all coming together.

Flow will become the ultimate motivator. It captures everything. Purpose, meaning, learning, happiness, productivity, creativity, speed, left brain, right brain, product and service design and ultimately business success. Companies will not only get Klout scores, they will get flow scores. Helping and training to achieve and apply flow. Very happy companies, with very happy staff with very happy customers.

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Let the Experts Keep your Payroll Up to Date

It is hard for employers to keep up to date with budget changes. By outsourcing your payroll to Tailored Payroll you don’t have to worry about how to implement or explain changes in Tax to your employees. Here at Tailored Payroll we ensure your payroll is processed accurately and on-time while ensuring compliance with Revenue, Department of Social Protection and NEARA.

One of the main changes for 2015 is the change in USC rates and thresholds on PAYE Income.

2015 Rates:

On the first €12,012    1.50%
On the next €5,564     3.50%
On the next €52,468     7%
On the balance    8%

Any individual who believes their income for USC purposes will not exceed €12,012 in 2015 can apply to Revenue for a USC exemption before the new tax year begins.

Contact Tailored Payroll today for a competitive price. Our flexible service includes:
•    PAYE,PRSI and USC Calculations
•    Registration of Employer with Revenue
•    All employer  Revenue submissions to include: P30’s,P45’s, P35, P60’s and registration of
new employees
•    We provide email Payslips and  P60s to employees
•    Creation of Bank file for payment to employees
•    No hidden costs

For more information about this business visit their website or email to payroll@tailoredpayroll.ie. Tailored Payroll is part of Use SBC as a channel initiative. If you want your business to be featured, click here.

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Let the Experts Keep your Payroll Up to Date

It is hard for employers to keep up to date with budget changes. By outsourcing your payroll to Tailored Payroll you don’t have to worry about how to implement or explain changes in Tax to your employees. Here at Tailored Payroll we ensure your payroll is processed accurately and on-time while ensuring compliance with Revenue, Department of Social Protection and NEARA.

One of the main changes for 2015 is the change in USC rates and thresholds on PAYE Income.

2015 Rates:

On the first €12,012    1.50%
On the next €5,564     3.50%
On the next €52,468     7%
On the balance    8%

Any individual who believes their income for USC purposes will not exceed €12,012 in 2015 can apply to Revenue for a USC exemption before the new tax year begins.

Contact Tailored Payroll today for a competitive price. Our flexible service includes:
•    PAYE,PRSI and USC Calculations
•    Registration of Employer with Revenue
•    All employer  Revenue submissions to include: P30’s,P45’s, P35, P60’s and registration of
new employees
•    We provide email Payslips and  P60s to employees
•    Creation of Bank file for payment to employees
•    No hidden costs

For more information about this business visit their website or email to payroll@tailoredpayroll.ie. Tailored Payroll is part of Use SBC as a channel initiative. If you want your business to be featured, click here.

The post Let the Experts Keep your Payroll Up to Date appeared first on Small Business Can.

Lead Generation with Marketing Automation

Are you spending too much time and money chasing your big lead instead of focusing on the fundamentals? Well! The majority of the marketers fail to focus on the basic practices that ensure success. As businesses gain access to a larger amount of customer data and customers have more options for services and products, marketing strategies have become more complex. However, technology driven marketing plan can certainly increase your lead generation.

One such technology that is transforming the marketing realm is the use of marketing automation.  According to Salesforce, 2015, marketing automation will be one of the most piloted marketing technologies. The solution helps you to focus on your customers and better understand which marketing programs actually work and which does not. In short, marketing automation helps your business manages your lead base.

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is software and tactics to nurture prospects, convert them into customers and finally turn these regulars into delighted customers through personalised and behaviour-trigger content. The strategy typically generates significant revenue for the companies and ultimately provides an excellent return on investment.

Why marketing Automation for your Business?

Track Consumers Interaction with Brand

Marketing automation platform enables you to track how the prospective interact with your brand. It could be in the forms of email clicks, content downloads or website clicks. These digital indications give you supreme insights into your prospect’s readiness to buy so that you are ready to deliver timely marketing message to accelerate the buyer’s decision making process.

Accelerate your Sales Funnel

As you can track engagement and behaviour of the visitors through pre-and-post buying process, you can prepare your campaign accordingly that can build trust and minimise sales resistance.

Build Stronger Relationships with your Audience

Marketing automation helps to accumulate data that can make each communication personal. It also provides deployment tools to reach your prospects in every major channel.

What are the Fundamental Elements that Drive Results?

Marketing automation program can help your company produce enormous leads and boost revenue. It lets you know when your leads are ready for a call from sales… you can know what else your system needs to be able to do. Here’s how the fundamental elements help to accomplish all your goals…

Email Marketing

60 percent of consumers read marketing emails. It has been observed that email can promote a purchase 3x times more than any social media. However, you need a strong marketing strategy to make the most of it.

  • List Segmentation

Segmenting your audience will make the impact of delivering the right message to the right person stronger.

  • Designing the Email Campaign

A professional looking email campaign including custom email authentication, SPAM analysis, and automated CAN-SPAM compliance enables you to make the most of your email marketing efforts.

  • Personalised Content

Making messages relevant to the unique needs of each recipient is key to effective content marketing and lead nurturing strategy.

Landing Page

An optimized email campaign send leads to landing page where they provide contact information in exchange for valuable and relevant content.

  • Page Design

Build and activate professional and attractive forms in minutes.

  • Profiling

Allow your visitors to bypass the fields they had to fill in the past and provide you with valuable additional information. This increases the conversion rates and helps you to learn more about your prospects.

  • Routing and Automation

Make your leads automatically move through sales cycle and into nurture automated workflow by creating rules and dependencies.

Website Tracking

Buyers are almost 70% through their buying process before they engage with a sales representative. You need to know what additional you can offer to add value to your conversation

  • Visitors Activity Tracking

Track your visitors activities including when they visit your site and what do they download. Make a comprehensive report of email response, website visits, and registration or form impressions.

  • Identification of Anonymous Visitors

Discover the companies of unidentified site visitors and expose potential leads.

  • Tracking Custom Link

Website activity sourced from specific efforts and related to third-party websites can be tracked by creating custom links. The activities include pay-per click programs, shared links or social media efforts.

Lead Scoring

At this stage you have to determine lead quality and prioritise them according to their interests in your products and demographic characteristics.

  • Develop Scoring Model

Scoring model is required to automatically score prospects based on their behaviour and demographic characteristics in response to marketing plan and online activities.

Increase Visibility

Connect the lead score model with the CRM. This will provide the sales team with activity score to report on engaged prospects.

A Few More Activities to Follow

Incorporation of CRM

Assimilation of marketing automation and CRM platform is important in delivering sales intelligence the sales representatives require to improve their conversations and follow-up work.

Integrate Web Events Platforms

Showcase your expertise, engage your audience and generate more quality leads with online events.

A/B Testing

Knowing what resonates with your target audience beforehand can ensure your emails; landing pages and forms are optimised for conversions.

Social Media Marketing

As the majority of the current and prospective customers spend a lot of time on social media, it is easy to educate and engage them. Share your messages, discover new audience, generate leads and increase sales through social media tools.

According to Nucleus Research, 2014, marketing automation drives 14.5 percent increase in sales productivity and 12.2 percent reduction in marketing overhead. The biggest benefit of marketing automation is its ability to generate more and better quality leads.

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12 Tips Every Budding Entrepreneur Needs To Know

The world has seen a lot of entrepreneurial activity over the last two decade. Start-ups have turned into billion dollar enterprises and this can be attributed to new technology and funding from angel investors. If you have the right idea and a strong business plan, it is worth taking the risk and walking the entrepreneurial path.  While most entrepreneurs walk the less walked path, it is important to follow a few basics of the game. Here in this brief write-up we shall discuss 12 tips that every budding entrepreneur needs to know.

1. Do Not Expect Overnight Success – Most entrepreneurs start off with big expectations and when results don’t come by in quick time they lose the zeal to succeed. There is no time frame for success in business and what you should initially focus on is incremental growth. Monetary success isn’t easy to come by and you need to wait for your time.

2. Take Risks – Ability to take risks is a part of being an entrepreneur and this is what takes small start-ups on a long journey towards success. It is a thrilling experience when one of your decisions pays off well. However you need to make well-calculated moves combine them with your instincts.

3. Learning Never Stops – As an entrepreneur you need to learn every day. You need to constantly keep updated with the latest trends in the market and know customer expectations. Most of your knowledge would come during hours of crisis. Also knowledge often comes from unexpected quarters and you should never shut your eyes and ears to even the weirdest of suggestion.

4. Brand Yourself – One of your initially goals is to create a strong brand for yourself. You need to work towards drawing a line between you and your competitors. In the initial days brand image is all that should focus on. A strong brand image allows you to earn customer loyalty.

5. Pick Up Emailing Skills – You would have to write dozens of emails while starting your business and you need to pick up the skill of writing an email. Keep it short and sweet as a potential investor may not have the time to read your complete story.

6. Be Willing To Innovate – Don’t spend your time reinventing the wheel. As an entrepreneur you should strive to introduce new products and solutions in the market. Always be willing to look beyond the obvious.

7. Develop Business Plan – It is famously said “It’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen.” Having a mere idea won’t take you the distance. You need to develop a strong business plant around the idea to attract investment.

8. Network Constantly – In today’s world of business networking is as important as doing business. You need to network in all directions upwards with people who have achieved success; downwards with the green horns and horizontally with your peers.

9. Use Social Media – There is no better way to network and promote your business than the social media. LinkedIn is a must for every entrepreneur to network within the industry. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc. allow you to reach out to your potential customers.

10. Learn To Disconnect – Most budding entrepreneurs start with a flash and then burn out. You need to learn the art of disconnecting from work. Your brain needs rest and only a relaxed brain can afford to think.

11. Listen To Others – You may be passionate about your ideas but never let your emotions take charge of decision making. Listen to what your friends, employees and others have to say before taking a decision.

12. And Don’t Listen – You would be flooded with advice, many of them unsolicited. Don’t let everything you hear influence your decision. Analyze the pros and cons of your decision and learn to trust your gut.

These tips would help you scale your way up the ladder and turn your small business into a brand. It is however very important for you to enjoy what you are doing and always listen to your heart. And most importantly put all efforts into the business and leave no room for complacency. “Do. Or do not. There is no try.” Want to read more such 10 or 12 awesome list of things? Then check out top 10 hq.

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How to Spice Up Monthly Company Meetings

Employers often look for ways to spice up company meetings. Making these regular business sessions more interesting and engaging for participants can inspire creative new ideas. The level of enthusiasm an office demonstrates also contributes to morale.

Below are seven ways to generate more productive meetings every month.

  1. Begin with a smile

While employees wait for everyone to arrive at the meeting, don’t waste potentially useful time. The person opening the monthly meeting should go around the room and ask each person already in attendance to share a clean humorous story or joke with the group. The person who comes up with the most, i.e. drops out of this game last, receives a surprise employee recognition certificate for a free meal or other small gift at the end of the meeting.

This type of informal exercise holds value because (1) it places everyone in a better mindset at the beginning of the meeting, and (2) the process of laughter relieves tension in the room and produces a physical state of greater relaxation and awareness, mixed with camaraderie. Although these benefits seem rather subtle, they may lend surprising strengths to a subsequent discussion.

  1. Stop for brief physical activity

If the speaker notices energy flagging among those in attendance during the meeting, or eyelids sagging, allow the speaker to call a brief spontaneous two minute halt to the proceedings to lead a simply physical activity session. This can be as simple as standing and stretching upwards or involve something more complex, such as a brief follow-the-leader session or a participatory Tai Chi exercise demonstration. No one should suffer criticism for their wandering attention; keep things upbeat.

People in a company maintain different “biological clocks.” Some employees find themselves operating at peak efficiency later in the day while others maintain naturally higher levels of energy in the morning. The goal of this strategy remains simple: bring everybody’s attention back to what is going on around them in their immediate environment. When all group members focus again on the subject at hand, resume the meeting.

  1. Try to keep meetings under an hour

Although not always possible, it makes sense to try and limit the duration of regular monthly company meetings to as brief a period of time as possible. An ideal time may be 45 minutes, if regular meetings occur between some of those in attendance on other days. A brief, highly productive session trumps a drawn-out proceeding any time.

  1. A standing leader

For the same reason that elementary school teachers usually stand when addressing young children, it makes sense for the person leading the discussion to adopt a standing position. This posture infuses more energy into the group than a sitting leader offers. Additionally, by standing, the speaker usually obtains better eye contact with everyone in the room.

  1. Try to elicit full participation

In order to maximize contributions at the meeting, the person leading the discussion should set a goal of achieving full participation. Some employees may feel shy about addressing the group; the leader of the discussion should gently seek to draw out their opinions and views, also. Remote employees should still be able to participate fully through tools like video conferencing. By encouraging full participation, the meeting’s organizer can enhance a sense of company inclusion and joint commitment.

  1. Provide snacks and beverages

A regular monthly meeting will proceed better when the employer makes certain that participants can munch on snacks and beverages during the session. The presence of these items may offer extra comfort to some employees, for instance by preventing anyone from becoming thirsty. However, the sharing of these items also denotes a welcoming environment; on a subconscious level, it lets employees know the company appreciates them.

  1. Switch seats after breaks

Some experts also suggest that if a meeting proceeds long enough for breaks to be conducted, then everyone should receive encouragement to switch seats upon returning to business. The simple act of physically moving from one position to another in a room can place participants in the mode of viewing events from a fresh perspective. This process may assist the course of the meeting. It can also offer new, unexpected insights.

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Protect Your Data: Could it Be Your Most Valuable Asset?

In 2015 Uber, the world’s largest taxi company owns no vehicles, Facebook the world’s most popular media owner creates no content, Alibaba the most valuable retailer has no inventory and Airbnb the world’s largest accommodation provider owns no real estate. This statement made me think about these companies and what, in the absence of tangible assets could their most valuable asset be? It’s simple; it’s in the millions of data records which each of these companies holds.

Reports of data breaches are all too common these days hitting some of the biggest names in business such as Sony, Target and Home Depot. Whilst the big brand names occupy the media headlines, business owners should no longer be complacent towards the value of the data within their business. It is no longer a case of if but when a business will suffer a security breach. It’s time for every business to start treating data as an asset. To today’s cyber criminal, data is the new cash!

Cyber Criminal Activity

Findings from the 2014 Gemalto Breach Level Index found that over 1 billion records were successfully intercepted by cyber criminals earning 2014 its name as the “Year of the Hack”. In comparison to 2013, this represented a 78% increase in the number of breach incidents. That equals 2.8 million records stolen every single day!!
As large corporate companies sit up and take note of the increasing threat, cyber criminals are recognising that small to medium sized enterprises are easier targets where online security tends to be weaker due to a lack of trained resource and robust security policies.

Recently Bitglass undertook an experiment geared towards understanding what happens to sensitive data once it has been stolen. In the experiment, a fake list of 1500 employees which included social security numbers, credit card numbers, addresses and phone numbers travelled the globe, landing in five different continents and 22 countries within two weeks.

The experiment offers insight into how stolen records from data breaches are shared, bought and then sold on the black market. The falsified data was placed on Dropbox as well as on seven Dark Web sites believed to be frequented by cyber criminals.

The result of the experiment found that within 12 days the data was:

  • Accessed from five continents – North America, Asia, Europe, Africa and South America
  • Accessed from 22 countries – United States, Brazil, Belgium, Nigeria, Hong Kong, Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Finland, the Maldives,
  • New Zealand, Canada, Norway, the Russian Federation, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Italy, Turkey
  • Accessed most often from Nigeria, Russia and Brazil
  • Viewed 1,081 times, with 47 unique downloads.

Treat every record within your business as if it has commercial value. It may look like a list of names and addresses but the underground hacker markets are thriving with counterfeit documents to further enable cyber criminals to then utilise the compromised data to commit online fraud and identity theft.

Protect Your Data

Simple Steps to Protect Your Data:

  • Manage email security and validate potential threats.
  • Enforce strict password policies and ensure that passwords change on a regular basis.
  • Manage privileged user accounts.
  • People can often be the weakest link. Invest in your people and train your employees.
  • Ensure that your software is up to date and that security patches are set up to automatically update.
  • Implement a robust records management policy and only store data for as long as it is required.

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