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ADP Workforce and Square Payroll are both HR management tools that wrap several functions into a single software package. Both are highly-rated with large, established userbases, and they do more or less the same thing.

However, while they share much of the same functionality, that doesn’t mean that each is right for every business. Depending on how features are implemented, the size of an organization and its software budget, one package may be a better fit than the other.

This article will compare their relative merits to help you determine which is right for you.

Features

Each package supports many of the same functions, but these are implemented differently to cater to their intended market.

Square Payroll

Square Payroll is designed for small businesses, those with less than 50 employees. As a result, it isn’t quite as robust as Workforce. Implementations are simplified to speed workflows for smaller operations. This can be a boon for small companies that don’t need access to some of Workforce’s extended options.

Users will find all of the functionality they need to run successful HR departments. As the name suggests, Payroll makes payroll easy to process. A streamlined interface makes entering data and updating fields a breeze. Payrolls can be run on desktop machines or mobile devices.

Because the package integrates with every other Square tool, hours can be imported instantly from the Square POS or Team app. QuickBooks Online and other third-party integrations are also available.

Payroll taxes are generated automatically and filed electronically from within the software. The package also allows worker’s comp insurance to be synced with payroll on a pay-as-you-go basis. In fact, most employee benefits, like retirement and healthcare, will sync automatically.

The only real caveat is that large enterprises may find Payroll’s offerings to be a bit meager for their needs. ADP Workforce could be the better choice for them.

ADP Workforce

Workforce is built with larger organizations in mind. It’s built to scale well, providing convenient HR management to companies of any size.

You’ll find all of the core features available in Payroll, including payroll and tax compliance. Both are cloud-based, meaning your data is accessible wherever you are. Workforce also offers automated timekeeping, attendance tracking, and scheduling. Reports are easier to generate within Workforce, and are generally more robust.

The software supports custom workflows and self-service functions that give employees access to critical HR data from a convenient web portal. Square Payroll also allows users to input their information, but Workforce offers speed enhancements that Payroll doesn’t.

The software integrates with a wider set of third-party products and embeds access to ZipRecruiter, making it easier to fill positions quickly. HR professionals can also leverage the software to create pay-for-performance opportunities within the organization and track employee progress toward specific goals.

In general, more options are available within Workforce, and configurations run deeper, allowing a more comprehensive range of businesses to design systems that work for them.

Plans

Workforce offers four packages, scaled to meet the needs of various-sized organizations.

Payroll Essentials is perfect for businesses that only want access to payroll and tax components. The add-ons Workforce Management and HR Assist are also included.

HR Plus adds enhanced HR tools, onboarding functions, and robust digital record keeping options. Two other add-ons, Benefits Administration and Enhanced Analytics are also included.

Hiring Advantage is designed for companies interested in improving their recruitment processes to help attract top talent. Users will have access to ZipRecuiter and thousands of other job boards, along with advanced onboarding tools.

Performance Plus is the most expensive package, intended for enterprise-level organizations that need to manage high-performing teams. A full suite of performance and compensation management tools are added to provide the most powerful solution ADP offers.

Square Payroll’s plans are significantly simpler. They only offer two, and the difference comes down to who you’re looking to pay.

Their standard plan includes all the functionality you’ll need to pay employees and contractors — that is to say, all the functionality the software offers. The second plan strips out features that are specific to employees, and provides a streamlined experience for companies that only need to pay contractors.

Pricing

This is one area where Payroll has a leg up. Square offers a simple, upfront payment scheme that’s consistent from customer to customer.

For their standard plan you’ll pay a $29 monthly fee and an additional $5 per month for every person on your payroll. If you only need contractor support, the monthly fee is removed. You’ll pay $5 per month for each contractor you pay.

There’s no commitment with either plan, and you can cancel at any time.

Pricing for Workforce isn’t standardized, and depends on a number of factors. Companies interested in purchasing one of their four plans must contact the company to get individualized pricing.

So which is right for you? If you’re a small company or work exclusively with contractors, Square Payroll is probably your best option. However, if you need a more full-featured HR tool, or if you’re a large company, Workforce may be the better option.

Official figures worldwide show that the number of businesses starting up is constantly rising. More and more people are turning to entrepreneurship, and business chiefs are predicting that small businesses are going to play a vital role in the future economy. According to the Small Business Administration (SBA) there are 30.7 million small businesses in the U.S. which account for 99.9 percent of all U.S. businesses.

There has been an enormous upheaval in the way we work in recent years, and this has sparked a surge of innovation in the technology sector to support the needs of new businesses, as the sector finds opportunities to develop new tools and services and expand their markets for existing products.

So, what are these technology tools that are changing the small business sector?

Tools for Market Research

One of the first steps in small business creation is conducting market research. Any business that wants to have an impact, whether a medical clinic, a small retail store or even a debt collection agency, will need to deeply understand their industry to find precisely who their market is. New software tools are constantly being developed to collect market research data, which in turn has led to a massive sophistication in tools to analyze this data. This market can be quite overwhelming for someone who has little expertise in software, so many tech companies have developed user-friendly tools at a range of prices that do not require much programming experience, if any.

Oracle is one of the most popular data analytics platforms – it is a cloud-based tool that runs on its proprietary database. This is ideal for those looking for a tool to take care of the analysis work, but such convenience has a high cost – prices do not start below $2,000. Other high-performance tools include Apache Spark, RapidMiner and SAS Visual Text Analysis – but the use of these tools requires some digital skills, and some carry a hefty price tag.

For those not looking to invest big money and who need to keep things simple, Google proposes its data analysis tool for free – over half of businesses use Google Analytics (GA) for their market research. Feedback shows that businesses choosing GA appreciate the platform’s user-friendly interface and rate it as a powerful tool that provides valuable insights about how customers interact with their business. Trade associations, industry groups and agencies, university publications and libraries or government websites offer a wealth of free statistical data from reliable, real-time or recent sources.

Tools for Online Marketing

Social media sites have truly transformed the market research landscape. For anyone wishing to reach out to potential clients, the fact that 77 percent of U.S. Americans have a social media profile cannot be ignored. Many businesses will need an online presence through social media if they want to connect with individual clients today, either as readers of content or participants in a public discussion thread or private chat. However, while these platforms allow businesses to reach large audiences, they can require a lot of time and energy to maintain, and any social media marketing campaign, however carefully cultivated, usually takes some time to deliver results.

Another area of essential online presence for businesses is owning a compelling, useful website. This is an area of software that rapidly expanded in recent years, where website tools have been created for a wide array of user skills and price tags. While you can outsource the task of designing and creating a website to a professional, some smaller businesses choose to take on the task themselves, and many tools are designed to be, above all, user-friendly. Ghost.org and Publii have become go-to options for many entrepreneurs who want static sites to showcase compelling content, such as blogs, and product offerings.

Google Web Designer is one of the most popular tools for creating flashy online advertisements and other marketing materials. It is free to download and users rate it as ‘easy to navigate and use’. Users looking for no-code design tools also go to Adobe XD, which allows the collaborative design of intuitive web pages and apps, but after a free starter plan it requires investment, with pricing starting at $9.99 per month.

For businesses that want to offer online shopping, website building tools like Weebly or Squarespace come highly recommended to create user-friendly, yet stylishly designed, drag-and-drop websites. These platforms often offer free trials for starters, but plans can quickly move up from approximately $10 per month.

Online Payment Solutions have also developed rapidly in recent years, and while PayPal remains the number one tool, some competitors have broken into the market by offering reduced fee rates, and faster transaction speeds. One rapidly expanding platform is Apple Pay, which uses advanced touch ID confirmation technology.

Tools for Financial Tracking

Any business owner looking to run a successful and profitable enterprise needs to plan their finances from the very beginning. This is easier in recent years, given current financial tracking tools. Small business accounting software platforms that come recommended are Sage and QuickBooks. Sage is an all-in-one solution that integrates with Microsoft software, offering a wide array of financial tools. Even though it is quite comprehensive it’s also a small and light desktop accounting application. On the downside, it does not yet feature a mobile app solution.

QuickBooks is rated on many sites as a popular choice for those looking for a more user-friendly interface, but it is also quite a costly tool that would require some investment. Keeping on top of finances can seem daunting at the beginning of any start-up enterprise, and very often even just the basic bookkeeping and tracking income and expenses already requires much time and effort —but efficiently and accurately tackling that work is necessary to have the data to analyze and answer high-level questions about profit, budget predictions, and the ability to expand and grow. Then there are free services like Nexacollect that help you to connect with a good collection agency to recover from your past-due invoices and improve cash flow.

Tools for Database Solutions

Small businesses and startups often don’t have the technical and financial means to manage database solutions. The good news is that they don’t have to.

Cloud-based databases offer a low-cost entry point. A small company entering the market can get a database and start storing their application data in it for the price of a lunch per month. Yes, you can get a database for less than $10 a month, with no strings attached!

Nowadays, businesses don’t need to worry about database servers. Backups, software updates, and security patches are all taken care of. Even with clients in Europe, America and Asia, a business benefits from geo-replication which keeps data close to its clients. That results in the application response time not being affected by distance and the laws of physics.

Adding database features obviously starts affecting that monthly payment, but businesses only pay if they need them. What’s more, they can manage all that via user-friendly web portals. No coding or scripting is required to manage access, users, or the creation and deletion of databases from their browser.

One of the best features of cloud-based applications is that small-companies don’t have to hire a database developer who knows the SQL database language. NoSQL databases, such as Google CloudFirestore, offer schema-free, scalable, document-centric models that are ideal for any application.

Regardless of whether you own a pet store, a sandwich shop or a smart building technology firm, NoSQL databases offer flexible and high-performance database models to cater your needs.

Escaping reliance on spreadsheets is easy with no-code app-building tools like Tadabase and Appy Pie. A business can quickly create forms, tables, and other UI designs customized to its needs, where employees or customers enter data in a pleasant, user-friendly way, and the validated data goes directly into an organized database.

Finally, with the advent of personal robot assistants (“bots), there is increased anticipation of how far the office bot assistant will take over tasks normally reserved for human assistants. There are many experiments underway to develop basic and complex assistants. One such project built a smart office assistant to deliver food and documents to employees, map and navigate the office and even have a chatting interface. The price tag for these is currently way too high but the aim is to develop more efficient and less expensive bots in the near future.

Technology is now intricately linked to any modern business development. Anyone looking to start their small business in 2020/21 will without a doubt search for what technology tools and software will most help them along the way.

Theodore Roosevelt once said: “In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing”.

Making decisions is essential in everyday life and the business world, and we can learn from those who have done it better. Good strategic thinkers tend to be not only good analysts but to be able to maintain a critical and fair attitude about their goals and the elements or factors needed to achieve them.

In business, one of the most effective ways to structure the decision-making process is called a SWOT analysis. It combines micro and macro factors to guide the company’s leadership into strategic planning and action based on a realistic, more precise understanding of the company’s current position rather than a gut feeling or a disorganized, superficial approximation.

The components of a SWOT analysis are: Strengths (S), Weaknesses (W), Opportunities (O), and Threats (T).

This analysis is used with a specific goal or project in mind, and is appropriate across industries, for all kinds of business ventures. A business owner with a good understanding of its principles can use the simplest model of a SWOT analysis, which is essentially a list of pros and cons, weaknesses and strengths, opportunities and threats. The result is a conclusion that will influence a future decision.

Strengths and weaknesses are micro-factors of the analysis because they depend on the micro environment of a business, its internal environment.

Opportunities and threats are macro-factors because they depend on the external environment: favorable conditions in the marketplace (opportunities) or unfavorable conditions (threats).

The table below shows some examples of each of these categories.

Strengths: ·       Company culture ·       Market share ·       Staff (skills, experience, performance) ·       Cash flow (high AR turnover ratio) ·       Brand strength ·       Customer base (demographics, loyalty, purchasing power)

Weaknesses look at the flip side: ·       Limitations in company culture don’t allow for growth and innovation ·       Low/precarious market share ·       Untrained, demotivated, overworked staff or bad management ·       Low cash flow (low AR turnover ratio) ·       Weak brand (low recognition and consumer loyalty) ·       Limited number of new customer acquisition ·       Obsolete inventory/services

Opportunities: ·       Finding new markets ·       Revitalizing the brand through marketing ·       Using new technology ·       Offering extras to your clients ·       Deregulation ·       Globalization ·       E-commerce

Threats: ·       New competition ·       Decrease in market share ·       Customers using different products ·       Regulations (such as licensing) ·       E-commerce and globalization ·       Socio-cultural perceptions ·       Insurance requirements (health care, auto makers, etc)

The components of SWOT interrelate in a network of beneficial dependencies and relational risks. For example, when is a threat disguised as an opportunity because your company’s main weakness will prevent you from taking advantage of it? When could taking an opportunity even damage some of your company’s strengths, such as its stability or loyal customer base?

The context within which you operate on a macro level often determines your micro-level status: the strengths and weaknesses of your business. Social, economic, political and legal factors influence not only your perceptions of the four components of SWOT but how others externally assess your company for those same factors. A bank may analyze the opportunities you’re not taking advantage of or that you missed (such as a cancelled merger) or your reactions to an economic downturn, and then decide whether to extend you a loan or not.

At any given time, the focus must be on balancing strengths and weaknesses, on optimizing the former and minimizing the latter. Actions such as fulfilling your KPIs, ensuring your staff recognizes and is prepared to respond to risk, boosting competencies, and making changes based on knowledge and skill, will ripple further, to enhance your opportunities, reduce limitations, and help you cope with threats.

The analysis of any one combination of these 4 elements can apply to virtually any situation, even in our personal lives. When you’re already weakened by an event and a new threat appears, your strategy should be of survival. Introduce a strength, and you may acquire enough leverage to make adjustments that may garner some benefits in the long run.

Flexibility is a necessary skill, along with clear, critical thinking. If your competitor changes its operations by introducing a new product, you can do a SWOT analysis to see what gives you or them a competitive edge. Just because they have a new product doesn’t mean they’ll be successful. Your analysis may conclude that, given all their known threats and weaknesses, this change will be detrimental to their business. At that point, you may decide to come up with a better or complementary product yourself, which will fill the gap left by their failing product in the future.

One of the best ways to conduct a comprehensive, informed SWOT analysis is to ask for feedback and honest opinions from staff and clients. A medical practice that receives constant complaints about its scheduling practices or public staff confrontations should take them very seriously. They may signal not only a clinical team whose members can’t get along and work efficiently, but failing management or internal oversight, customer dissatisfaction, weakening brand, low patient loyalty, all of which are not only weaknesses but threats as well. In that case, measures must be taken immediately, and a monitoring process set up to detect and prevent such things from happening in the future.

Staff feedback is also important. It may point out weaknesses and threats, or open the door to new opportunities. It may inadvertently identify contributors and key players in all of these categories. For instance, many good employees are able to detect inefficient processes and might have ideas to improve the workflow, increase receivables, acquire new clients or become more compliant with regulations. Your company could conduct an anonymous survey every few months, which would allow staff to express their opinions about how the company is doing and the direction it’s going.

Some companies put themselves through SWOT tests. They imagine different scenarios and determine if they have the capability to overcome tough situations or to recognize a competitive advantage. What will it cost your company to overcome a threat? Is it capable of improvising? Would it have the support it needs from investors and other business partners?

A long time ago, Sophocles wrote: ‘I have no desire to suffer twice, in reality and then in retrospect’. Planning and organizing should not be actions we wish we had taken in hindsight. The tools are at our fingertips, to help us reflect, learn, apply old and new tactics, and compete at our highest possible level while moving forward and growing.

Customer Success is an increasingly popular business buzzword. But, it’s much more than just a more creative way to say, “customer satisfaction” or “customer service“. Customer Success incorporates customer and user experience, but it goes far beyond making a product or service easy to use. It’s a powerful concept that can transform every aspect of your business because it focuses on results. Customer success is rooted in a relatively universal and straightforward goal: to earn repeat business from customers. It can form a strong foundation for new customer outreach since referrals earned from success stories lead to higher close and retention rates, and it’s not a flimsy concept – it can deliver an immediate impact on cash flow.

Looking for some proof that Customer Success initiatives work?

•    Existing customers that are happy with results are 14 times more likely to buy than a new customer
•    80% of customers say customer experience is as essential as the quality of products and services provided
•    Nearly 85% of buyers will pay more for a great customer experience that delivers results
•    By the end of 2020, customer success initiatives will become more crucial than price and product features

Understanding Customer Success Basics

So then, what exactly is Customer Success? While it can be a complicated concept with many factors considered, Customer Success at its most basic is a system of practices and steps that aim to ensure that consumers of a company’s products or services get what they want from those products or services. It’s all about goals and results, and because those can change over time, Customer Success also requires strong relationship building between vendor and customer.

The Origins of Customer Success

Initially, Customer Success methodologies arose to support the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. With SaaS, instead of buying a software license and hosting an application on-premises, a software customer subscribes to a cloud-based service. SaaS vendors rely on continued business from subscribers. Customer Success programs for these businesses aim to reduce customer churn, the rate at which customers cancel.

Think of an Office 365 subscription. Microsoft wants its subscribers to continue paying monthly, but if users do not experience value from Office 365, they will likely not renew. So, Microsoft uses a variety of means to measure and communicate Customer Success to avoid churn.

But, churn is not limited to software users, and Customer Success activities are valuable for any business that hopes to engage in repeat business with customers, which includes almost every business imaginable.

Customer Success is not Customer Satisfaction

At first, it may seem like we are just talking about a system of making sure customers are happy, but there is a big difference between satisfaction and success.

First, just because a customer is happy, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they are experiencing success. Or, they may be happy, love the experience of working with your product or service, but still not achieving optimal success. Others may seem happy and content, but may not know if they are reaching their goals.

Also, just because a customer is unhappy, it doesn’t mean that they are necessarily unsuccessful. Customer Success initiatives provide data to show precisely where a customer is on their journey towards their goals. The customer may have unreasonable expectations beyond identified success goals; Customer Success metrics can ground expectations in reality and alert a vendor to their products’ or services’ limitations. For example, a customer may cancel their service agreement simply because they’ve achieved success with the product and no longer need to use it.

Getting Direct Results from Customer Success

Customer Success is more than a “feel-good, sound-good” concept that is difficult to pinpoint – it directly impacts your bottom line. Contrast this with the vague idea of “customer satisfaction” – can a happy customer achieve more with the product, and is an unhappy customer actually experiencing great success? Customer Success goes beyond sentiment to take the customer’s pulse based on results, value, and goal achievement. And, Customer Success can provide that value – to both the customer and the vendor – much more quickly than you might expect.

5 Ways to immediately tap into the value of Customer Success

Customer Success Leads to Customer Retention

Customer Success programs’ most direct impact is to mitigate churn and keep your customers paying for your product or services. Whether you are a SaaS provider, or your business simply provides any product or service that can invite repeat business, Customer Success can help sustain your active customers and improve cash flow.

Customer Success helps businesses identify customer goals and show results. It begins before a customer signs up by identifying pain points and developing a plan to address those concerns. It powers efficient and effective onboarding so customers can easily use your product or service and start getting the most out of it. Then, once these initial goals are set into place, Customer Success keeps customers engaged and invested in leveraging your business for their success.

Referrals – the Cheapest and Easiest Business Source

Customers that experience real and measurable value are more likely to recommend your product or service. Referral business is the best type of business because it’s earned on the merits. Delivering a compelling marketing message is relatively easy. Demonstrating results is more challenging, but when a prospect gets referred to a business by a successful customer, the line from qualified leads to paying customers is shortened.

Customer Success initiatives can help identify if your customers would refer to others. It’s an essential aspect of Customer Success and is measured by Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS is a satisfaction benchmark that doesn’t focus on satisfaction but rather directly asks about the likelihood of referring to other customers, and provides valuable insight into the reasons behind this likelihood. Businesses collect NPS through simple surveys folded into customer experience and can be part of operationalizing customer success.

Effective Employees are Happy Employees

While NPS is usually focused on customers, the same underlying concept can gauge employee satisfaction. But, more importantly, Customer Success initiatives can make an employee’s job easier. When employees can see whether or not their customers are achieving success, employees feel success themselves. This leads to happier employees that are more productive and less likely to want to work elsewhere.

Measurable goals motivate and visibility can help engage employees along the customer journey. The result is a stronger relationship between workers and customers and between employees and managers.

Customer Success Builds Efficient Systems

The metrics that power Customer Success can also help your business achieve success. Instead of being reactive to customer cancellations, you can learn what components of your product or service are working and which ones need tweaking. An agile and proactive approach where you are always seeking to optimize customer success will lead to a progressive improvement of products and services.

Through these metrics, you can identify “quick wins” that show value to the customer shortly after earning their business. And, as customer needs evolve, Customer Success metrics can change too, resulting in other efficiencies that can be passed on to the customer.

Better Collections Practices

Customer Success grew out of necessity for SaaS sellers, and in that application, accounts receivables and collections aren’t much of a concern. If a customer cancels their subscription, there’s no balance to chase after. Other business models can benefit from Customer Success initiatives, and some of these models may involve collecting amounts due.

Customer Success can bolster collections in two ways. First, customers who achieve measurable success meet their goals and may be less likely to experience financial struggles. When a business focuses on delivering customer success, the collections dynamic can change, so the focus is on hitting goals that lead to success. Customer Success requires a strong relationship between the customer and seller, so many of the typical reasons for past due amounts can be avoided.

And while there are key differences between Customer Success and customer experience, businesses should ensure that customers receive a consistent experience, from sales to collections. Customer Success also does not need to be constrained to your direct team. If you use any service providers yourself, they should follow your customer-centric approach. Even if you outsource your accounts receivable to a collection agency, they should remember to treat your customers with dignity and respect. Your collection agency must ensure that their resolution strategies preserve your relationship with your customers. A business collection agency can incorporate your Customer Success program into their practices, ensuring consistent, proactive, and goal-oriented resolution.

Customer Success is not only for software companies. It is not only valuable for businesses selling under a subscription model. It is a proven method of increasing customer retention by identifying goals, pursuing results, and delivering value. It builds strong customer relationships, cultivates engaging customer experiences, and keeps customers and sellers on the same page – success.

Trusting someone can be as difficult and risky in business as it is in our personal lives. Businesses thrive not only because they do the right things at the right time, but because they associate themselves with distributors, vendors, investors, contractors and affiliates that respect their goals, share their work ethic, are experienced and financially stable, and fulfill the businesses’ needs with reliable execution.

Regrettably, overreliance on others without a system of checks and balances may lead a business to fail in spite of good intentions. A business owner must constantly monitor and review business relationships to identify and minimize risks to the company without alienating these third parties.

Why is managing third party relationships important?

Because reliance on others has many benefits: delegation, additional revenue, innovation and invention, collaboration, risk sharing, B2B reciprocity marketing, and more. These benefits often outweigh the multiple risks that accompany business relationships: premature growth which leads to an inability to fulfill obligations, holding onto too much inventory, slow cash flow which increases AR, competition from globalization, data breaches, lack of mutual vision and rewards, talent poaching, design and patent theft, etc.

What are the best ways to manage third party relationships?

1. Have a risk management plan: what can happen, who will be in charge of what, how long the initial response takes, who needs to be informed. Next, establish a long-term monitoring process with specific goalposts. Don’t forget, a plan needs to contain a way to identify the risk, analyze and treat it, then monitor and review it.
2. Always do a background check on your partners: check their business credit score (for more information, check out our article on business credit scores), read news about them, verify that they have no lawsuits or pending lawsuits against them, or even hire a private financial investigator. Always check the Secretary of State’s website in your state to verify that your future business partner is incorporated and they are in good standing. If they’re not listed in that state, make a second search on the website of the Delaware Secretary of State. Many businesses choose to incorporate in Delaware because of a solid, reliable corporate law environment with a business-friendly attitude and streamlined processes.
3. Make sure you understand the contract fully and that it contains clear, enforceable provisions. You don’t want to find yourself in a financial bind where you provided a service but your business buyer has failed to pay because the contract doesn’t clearly state payment terms and cycles. What’s more, establish and insert a termination clause that would delineate how the termination of the relationship will be managed.
4. Make sure your employees understand the risks associated with various vendors, that they know the rules and regulations applicable to your business profile and follow internal policies and procedures to the letter.  Don’t keep your staff in the dark, they’re your eyes and ears on the job. Make sure they can recognize risk, know what the plan is, and how and when they need to act to mitigate problems if you’re not around.
5. Conform to all rules and regulations and ensure that your partners do, too. Hire an experienced lawyer to look at your contract or help you draft one, to explain tax laws and assist you in creating a comprehensive compliance plan. You can also create a compliance department or entrust this duty to someone you trust and create a compliance officer position, if you can afford it. If that’s not the case, then having periodic internal audits will keep your employees informed and alert and help you identify where you or interactions with business partners need to improve in order to minimize risks.
6. Be consistent and try to implement a transparent and well organized system for all third parties you deal with, in order to have an efficient, reliable workflow where it’s easy to detect errors and inconsistencies. Your business identity and path don’t have to, and shouldn’t, completely merge with that of your business associate. In order to be able to control the various business relationships, you must be able to demonstrably separate the agreements, activities and overall relationship.
7. Understand how the risks may evolve with each and every one of your vendors and adjust your plan accordingly. Companies change over time in order to adapt and survive. Having an overall plan is good, but each vendor needs some personalized attention with their specific risk management lifecycle. Be prepared to deal with leadership changes, brand reinvention, changes in legal structure (from an LLC to a corporation or vice versa, for example), and more. Assign an account or relationship manager for each of your business associates, if you can afford it.
8. Don’t ignore the social media of your business partners. You must check that they behave ethically, don’t divulge company secrets, and that their public image is beneficial for your brand, not detrimental. Imagine a socially irresponsible tweet or Facebook post that, even though deleted, has already made the rounds and been shared by thousands of people. Something like that can have a negative impact on your reputation long after it’s gone, if you are a known associate of that business.
9. Have periodic check-ins with your third-parties. Attending industry conferences, seminars, workshops or having a shared company outing may give you the insight you need to decide whether you want to continue the relationship, start a future collaboration or reach a terminus point in the business relationship.
10. Make sure your data security and software programs are protected.  Consider vulnerabilities and security along the full chain between the cloud services you use, the point internet traffic enters and leaves your building, office, wifi router, and personal computers.  Ensure all of these systems have strong, unique passwords in place that are themselves securely stored. Install and configure internet firewall and anti-virus/anti-malware software.  Consider which electronic documents (and computer hard drives) should be encrypted.  Adopt strict, written, need-to-know standards and policies for the flow of information and documents within your company and outside it, elevating privileges for specific parties as necessary and communicating such changes clearly. Don’t share your passwords and proprietary information outside of your company no matter how friendly your contractors are. Decide what your employees can share with investors and affiliates, and have controlled, customized access to data by employees company-wide.

If you know or learn when to be self-reliant and when to rely on others, how to reinforce mutual contribution and minimize liability, and how to trust safely, you have better chances of not only growing your business but also forming long-lasting business relationships and even personal friendships. By associating with the right people and enterprises, you can create an honest, reliable sub-network of support and shared profitability that can help you survive the worst of economic times.