Business
How small businesses can overcome their supply chain challenges
Here are six tips to help your small business overcome its supply chain woes. Staying in control with effective supply chain management.

Managing a supply chain is difficult for every business. Small businesses may have fewer supply chain requirements, but they also don’t have the financial clout of big operations, which suppliers are understandably willing to move mountains for.
Smaller businesses need to use their size to their advantage when dealing with supply chain challenges. While big companies are locked into mega orders and negotiating long-term partnerships, small operations can be nimble in the face of a dynamic market.
Here are six tips to help your small business overcome its supply chain woes.
Table of Contents
1. Always pay on time
It may be obvious, but the first tip is always to pay your vendors in full and on time. Small businesses have enough supply chain issues to deal with. You don’t need to make new ones for yourself.
Manage your cash flow efficiently and keep track of all your payments. This way, you’ll ensure you don’t come into conflict with suppliers and end up paying interest or even potentially ruining business relationships and reducing your options moving forward.
Plenty of payment methods are available for small businesses to better organize accounts payable, including Automated Clearing House (ACH) payments that completely remove the need for cash or checks. Other benefits of ACH payments for your small business include scheduling payment dates and recurring payments, effective cash management so you can hold onto funds for longer, and reduced transaction fees.
2. Identify risk areas
Supply chains are often complex, containing a series of components critical to business operations. Make sure your small business has a clear and comprehensive list of everything it needs, along with multiple suppliers capable of sourcing each piece. Identify any potential risks in your supply where you may only have one or two viable sources.
It’s easy for small businesses to fall into the trap of finding a single supplier that handles everything they need and leave it at that. Unfortunately, this puts the fate of your business in the hands of one vendor. Any problems they have delivering their products is now your problem. There is no reason to introduce this level of risk to your operations, and a much healthier way to run your business is to always give yourself multiple supply chain options.
You never know if a specific product might become unavailable at short notice. However, as a smaller business needing lower quantities, you can use your agility and develop relationships with multiple suppliers. Try to find entirely separate vendors in different locations that do not work with the same manufacturers.
3. Stock management
Keeping track of your existing stock is critical regardless of the size of the business. You need precise numbers for everything you currently have in stock and estimates for current usage in order to restock in time and never is left short. Accurately forecasting demand is critical for businesses to effectively manage their stock and protect themselves from unplanned product shortages.
While it’s not always possible due to budgetary constraints or storage capacities, if you have a volatile supply chain, there are benefits in trying to increase your inventory levels. In particular, this applies to critical components that are harder to come by. You can do this by bulk buying when you have the opportunity or seeking financing options to invest more into your inventory.
4. Simplifying your supply chain
While it can help to offer a wide range of products, this places additional strain on your supply chain. More products mean expanding your supply chain, dealing with more vendors, and more complicated logistics. Where possible, remove or combine products to simplify your supply chain and save yourself time and headaches. Even larger companies are streamlining the products they offer, consolidating operations, and building supply chain resilience to limit future disruptions.
5. Managing logistics
Even once you source everything you need, you still have the logistical challenge and costs associated with getting it all delivered. With rising fuel prices, logistics costs are snowballing, and small businesses need to work hard to rein in the cost of moving their supply chain products. This may mean making larger orders from fewer suppliers to save money along the way.
6. Use supply chain tools
A range of supply chain tools can help businesses stay on top of their operations. While it may seem like overkill for your small business, Supply Chain Management (SCM) software can help you track inventory, manage logistics, and create a comprehensive real-time database of all your supply chain information.
Staying in control with effective supply chain management
Having steady, reliable, and fast access to everything your business needs is one of the most challenging parts of running a business. Unfortunately, even the biggest and most well-equipped companies in the world have supply chain struggles. But, by using your size to your advantage and identifying multiple sources for each type of inventory, you can remain in control even when inevitable supply chain mishaps occur.
Business
5 Mistakes To Avoid If You Are Going To Self-publish Your Book
To help you address any potential questions you may have, we’ve put together a list of 5 mistakes to avoid if you’re going to self-publish your book.

Self-publishing your book essentially means being your own editor, designer, proofreader, and marketer, not to mention the fact that you also have to write your book. There are many tasks and it will be the first time you face any of them.
For many first-time authors, this process can seem a little overwhelming. After all, how can you be sure you’re on the right track to making your book a success? To help you address any potential questions you may have, we’ve put together a list of 5 mistakes to avoid if you’re going to self-publish your book.
Table of Contents
1. “What matters is the inside”
Well, you’re not wrong. Content is king, and it will be what determines the long-term success of your book. However, we often see that authors who make this their mantra end up severely neglecting the more superficial but vitally important elements such as book writing service, formatting, and well-written descriptions. The irony is that if you don’t put effort into the outside of your book, people will never see the inside. It’s really a bit like going on a date, what’s important is the inside, but you have to fix the outside so that people are curious about the important things.
You may not have all the necessary skills in your pipeline, but it is definitely possible to self-publish a professional-quality book (both in terms of content and exterior) without necessarily having any experience. We’ll tell you more throughout this article, and of course, you can always browse our Help Center and blog for more tips, tricks, and guides for self-publishing your book.
2. Ignore criticism and/or comments
One of the best things about self-publishing your book is that you have the freedom to write about topics that tend not to have been explored in mainstream literature. Many publishers do not dare to touch on these topics for fear of not getting a return on investment or because they are niche genres with few but very passionate fans. This can sometimes lead authors to be a little overprotective of their ideas and dismiss any criticism or comments, constructive or otherwise, usually to the detriment of the final product.
Don’t get us wrong here: we’re not saying you should sell out or compromise your creative identity. If you’re not happy with the book, there’s no point in writing it in the first place. However, self-publishing also means self-publishing (for the most part), and that requires a certain objective perspective. That’s why we always recommend that at least two people you trust to read and comment on your work before publishing it.
This is especially true if you want to sell your books once you’ve published them. Getting a couple of people to read and review your book before publication can help eliminate some of the errors you may have missed, plot holes, or undesirable story elements.
3. “My target audience is everyone”
We hear this a lot. There seems to be some widespread misunderstanding about the topic of the target audience, what it is for, and why it is important.
First, let’s eliminate the most common misconception: having a target audience does not mean that said audience is the only one who will buy your book. If you define your target audience as young adults between the ages of 15 and 20, it doesn’t mean you’re actively discouraging people outside that age range from buying your book.
All it means is that you are adapting your writing, your themes, and the aesthetics of your book to make it more appealing to your chosen demographic. It is to ensure thematic focus and aesthetic coherence in your work. This is important because it gives your book its identity.
4. Thinking that you don’t need marketing to self-publish your book
Marketing is usually one of the topics that authors who are going to self-publish their book have the most problems with. After all, most writers don’t want to become authors for the love of marketing. However, it is one of the essential components to the success of a self-published author.
Unfortunately, we often see writers who only make a token effort to promote their books, or worse, ignore it completely and think that interested readers will find it. While that may be the case for some of them, the vast majority of your potential readers won’t be able to find your book amid all the noise on the Internet these days. Plus, even if interested readers found your book on their own, do you really want to waste the opportunity to sell hundreds of copies with a well-designed marketing campaign?
If you don’t know anything about book marketing, we suggest you check out our guide on how to promote your book. We also have an article on our blog memoir ghostwriting services dedicated to book marketing on social media that you might also be interested in.
Don’t waste time and start promoting your book before its publication! Do some research on your target audience and choose communication channels accordingly. There are several different approaches you can take depending on the context, but the three articles mentioned above will help you get off on the right foot.
5. Assume that people don’t like your book
Sometimes, even if you have put all your soul and love into self-publishing your book, the sales of your works may not go as fast as you expected. Many writers mistakenly interpret this slow start as an indication that their book is a failure, universally hated by everyone, and then give up on writing.
It’s a shame when this happens because most of the time it takes very little to see almost instant improvements in sales numbers. So don’t give up! We are here to tell you that this is perfectly normal and that you should not feel defeated by it. Your book, in all likelihood, is not the problem here. Instead, the problem is often that people simply don’t know your book exists. If you read the previous points we covered in this article, you should already have a pretty good idea of what may have happened and what you can do to fix it.
Usually, the answer is that you need to spend more time and effort on marketing. However, it might be worth asking more people to give you feedback on your book, both in terms of the content and the cover, to see if there is anything you can change to make it more appealing to a wider audience. However, it’s not going to happen overnight, so don’t be discouraged by a slow start. Keep up the good work and spread the word!
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