By Esperanza Denise

Are you suited to be an entrepreneur? Too often, people start businesses not aware they do not have the right entrepreneurial skill-set—they may be too complacent, laid-back, or cautious to take up on the multifaceted role of entrepreneur—which can lead to the failure of their ventures.

Being aware of your entrepreneurial style before launching a startup can help you determine if you’re suited for entrepreneurship.

1. You Are an Innovator

Do you love experimenting with new ideas? If yes, then you are probably a creative soul who loves original ideas. This type of entrepreneur has a knack for blue-sky thinking which often results in creating or inventing revolutionary products. Steve Jobs is one example of an entrepreneur who changed the face of computing with his out-of-the-box approach of thinking.

2. You Are a Risk-Taker

This type of entrepreneur is not afraid to make bold decisions in their business. They take risks as a way to challenge their own methodologies or strategies, and to grow as an individual. With their courageous mindset, they are able to successfully grow their businesses and stay ahead in the game. If you have the ability to face challenges, this may describe you.

3. You Are a Wanna-Be Entrepreneur

You desperately want to be a successful entrepreneur but you seriously lack the talent and abilities to become one. You live in a fantasy world of one day having your own business, but you don’t do anything to get started. You are happy reading success stories about entrepreneurs or watching shows about successful business people and visualizing yourself in the same role. If you identify with this type of entrepreneur, then it’s time to wake up.

4. You Are a Slow Starter

You are serious about starting a business, but you want to be absolutely ready before you take the plunge. It’s important to you that everything is in order, and you want to make sure that the process goes as planned. Much of your time is spent in research and planning, and you’re constantly seeking validation from the people around you. Your constant search for information and second opinions keep delaying from getting started, and in the end you never launch your dream business.

5. You Are a Day Dreamer

Day dreamers are the kind of entrepreneurs who are only seduced by the glamour of entrepreneurship. They don’t want to be bothered with the laborious parts of launching a startup and only want to dwell on what it feels like to be their own boss. They have mental images of fancy offices and luxurious private jets. But they do not do any real work to convert their dreams into a living reality.

6. You Are an Opportunity Seeker

These entrepreneurs are always searching for new opportunities for starting businesses. They do not build castles in the air, but they instead look for opportunities to build their business. They will also keep in touch with influential people in their industry to get help, even if it comes in the form of financial help or volunteering.

7. You Are Resilient

This hardy type of entrepreneur belongs to group of strong-willed people who never give up, no matter how difficult the circumstances are. Even if finances are a problem, they never lose sight of their vision and keep progressing towards their goals. Through their determination and resilience, they manage to find solutions.

8. You Are Dependent on Others

There are entrepreneurs who are dependent on others to make their entrepreneurial dreams a reality. They are not willing to launch their businesses until they can find the right partners to work with. Therefore, they oftentimes keep delaying their ventures and sometimes end up giving up in the end.

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School’s back in session and a new season of learning has begun. But for entrepreneurs, the learning never ends. And it starts from the very beginning when you’re faced with choosing the legal structure for your business.

Selecting the right legal structure—sole proprietor, LLC (Limited Liability Company), S-Corporation, or C-Corporation—affects multiple aspects of your business. From liability protection to taxes to ongoing compliance requirements, you need to study up on the options so you’ll know enough to make the right choice.

For many small businesses, the LLC structure offers a lot of advantages. So I’m going to give you a head start on your homework and share more about it here.

What to Love About the LLC Structure

Protection of personal assets – Because the LLC is a legitimate corporate entity, it provides a degree of separation between your personal assets and those of your business. In the event of legal action against your company, your home, family car, your kids’ college funds, and other personal property will be protected. This is a big advantage over running your business as a sole proprietorship.

Easy breezy – With an LLC, you’ll have less formation paperwork and ongoing compliance requirements to haggle with than you would with an S-Corporation or C-Corporation. You don’t have to create a board of directors, create annual reports, hold annual shareholders meetings, or deal with the other formalities that come with incorporating your business. Got an aversion to complexity? Then the LLC may be the right choice for you.

Taxation flexibility – As an LLC, you may opt to have your taxes treated as though you’re an S-Corporation or have your business profits pass through to your personal federal income tax return.

With S-Corporation tax treatment, self-employment taxes (FICA and Medicare) are only applied to salaries and wages, not distributions paid to you or other LLC members. If you choose pass-through tax treatment, your business’s profits and losses get passed to your members’ personal tax returns. So if your business isn’t profitable, you’ll lower your personal income tax obligation.

Professional Cred – With “LLC” following your company name, you have some added credibility in the eyes of customers, prospects, vendors, and the business community. Not that you wouldn’t be taken seriously as a sole proprietor, but forming an LLC can help instill confidence and trust.

Potential Disadvantages of the LLC

While there aren’t many downsides to operating as an LLC, the structure isn’t right for everyone.

Possible confusion over roles and responsibilities – If your LLC has multiple members, you may clash over who should be doing what and who is authorized to make certain decisions. Unlike the S-Corporation and C-Corporation, roles aren’t specifically defined. With an Operating Agreement, however, you can avoid the shades of gray and clearly define roles and responsibilities.

Sting of self-employment tax – While pass-through tax treatment may benefit you, it could instead work against you. If you don’t select S-Corporation tax treatment, all profits will flow to your personal income tax return and get hit with the social security and Medicare taxes. Depending on your situation, that could result in more tax than if you’d be taxed as a corporation.

Challenge to grow – Unlike with S-Corporations and C-Corporations, LLCs don’t sell stock. With no shareholders as a source for generating funds, you may find it challenging to grow your business as quickly or to the degree you’d like.

As you can see, forming an LLC offers a number of upsides, but don’t ignore the downsides. Choosing the legal structure for your company will be one of the key decisions you’ll make when starting a business. I recommend learning all you can about the options before you select which one is right for you. So study up! And ask both legal and accounting professionals for guidance in the process to ensure you’ve done all the homework necessary to decide what’s best for your business.

RELATED: 6 Easy Steps to Incorporating Your Business

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By Grier Allen

Eight years ago, nine of us were working out of a cramped office attempting to create a revolutionary product for the real estate industry. Fast forward to the present, and we now have over 200 employees with 20,000+ product users.

And the secret to our growth is simple: We learned as a team to operationalize our culture. Culture wasn’t a “thing” when we started out. But when any business begins to hire aggressively and also tries to maintain the startup vibe at the same time, there needs to be a system in place.

Experiencing exponential growth will make anyone realize culture simply does not just happen. You have to put pen to paper and operationalize your company experience. Here’s how you do it:

1. Create the Anchors of Business Expansion

Begin with the team that built your company. Together, put pen to paper and decipher what culture means in your business. Zappos’ Tony Hsieh’s “mountains and valleys” exercise is an excellent place to start for this.

Our experience with this exercise resulted in the eight “core values” below:

• Create amazing experiences.
• Communicate openly and honestly.
• Do the right thing.
• Spread some laughter and have fun.
• Go for it.
• Do more with less.
• Stay humble.
• Seek and share knowledge.

Much like a great idea, it’s easy to become excited and want to open the floodgates to release your newly minted cultural tenants. But when it comes to instituting company culture, be intentional.

2. Hire With Culture in Mind

Culture starts with your company’s leadership team. When you need more people to fuel success, your leadership has to prioritize core values on an equal playing field with experience.

Consider doing so by adding culture interviews to your interview process. These interviews serve as a hangout session of sorts for the interviewee to get a feel for your company, and visa versa.

And after a new hire joins your team, don’t stop there. Amazing experiences are harder to maintain when a business is broken off into silos of people who don’t communicate. To avoid this, make sure every new addition to the team is well versed in the operations of each team and department. This can be easily done in a new hire “onboarding” process. Weave informational sessions into the process where new hires are able to meet, greet, and learn about the people and processes surrounding your business.

3. Implement Culture Into Daily Operations

The next step to operationalizing culture is working to have an organic culture. A business culture shouldn’t feel forced or awkward if it comes from the people who built and branded your particular breed of company culture.

It is much easier to overcome obstacles if everyone in the company is aware and working toward success together. But to do so, people must stay informed. Share successes, failures, obstacles, and mistakes with everyone. This can be easily done through monthly company-wide emails and quarterly all-inclusive gatherings.

Another way to keep an organic culture will come from how you conduct meetings. When differing opinions or approaches take center stage, time can easily get away from you. Instead of allowing disagreements to derail the train of progress, bring up a company core value such as “communicate openly and honestly” to get it back on track. Mentioning a core value in the middle of a meeting may sound corny, but it will instantly diffuse emotion and bring everyone back to the meeting’s focus.

4. Measure the ROI of Company Culture

How do you tabulate cultural contributions to overall ROI? Company culture cannot be bottled and sold, and it is not interpreted by every person the same way. What you can prove is how it serves as a release valve for a growing operation.

An unfortunate side effect of expansion is more pressure: the pressure to get things done, the pressure to fund your growing venture, the pressure to track and measure success. When you lessen the pressures of your growing company, team members will automatically generate more amazing experiences. In other words, culture creates quality from people wanting to create great work. If you want to measure the return on your culture investment, look no further than the time your business saves when people actually want to get work done.

In a booming industry like real estate technology, nothing is more valuable than time and talent. The ability to efficiently solve problems, reach conclusions, and move on to the next big thing is invaluable. Whether it is brainstorming an email marketing campaign, formulating a product development road map, or helping a client adapt to a new website, operationalizing culture empowers employees to go for it with gusto. When your mission aligns with the goals of everyone in the company, you get results.

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By Aaron Agius

In the 2003 film Paycheck, Ben Affleck’s character is paid a huge sum of money to be locked in a clean room where he reverse engineers products, breaking them down into individual components to determine how they were made. He not only replicates processes, but he also discovers ways to create newer, better products.

You can utilize the same approach with some of the most successful marketing campaigns, minus the conspiracy, gun play, and Hollywood special effects.

Fortune 500 campaigns aren’t successful just because of the messaging or images, or because they have millions of dollars behind campaigns that are produced by agencies like Grey or Ogilvy & Mather. It’s the individual components of those campaigns that come together to create a high return. When you break those campaigns down, you can examine the separate components to see how your startup might benefit from similar strategies.

Here’s what you should pay attention to:

1. Get the messaging right. It doesn’t matter how much money you throw at a marketing campaign. If the messaging is wrong, you’re going to severely limit your chances of succeeding.

I don’t want you to think that it’s just black and white, though. It’s a lot more like Skee-Ball. Sink the ball in just the right place and score big. Miss it by just a bit, and you still get some points. Miss the mark by a long shot and you don’t get squat.

Another important factor is the scale of the message. Some of the most effective campaigns from major companies say more with a single sentence or word–or even just an image–than with content-heavy ads. It’s not really what they say, it’s how they say it. The picture the messaging creates, or the story behind it and the emotional connection it makes, likely contributes to the success of these campaigns.

Focus on painting a big picture around the value proposition to get your messaging on point.

2. The role of distribution. Not all of the best and biggest Fortune 500 campaigns were rolled out in traditional marketing channels like TV, radio, and print. Old Spice’s most successful marketing campaign, in fact, was done with online video.

Look at how Fortune 500 companies distribute their content, and you’ll begin to see patterns in how they focus on specific channels. Some target video, others leverage written content, and while many have a diverse network of channels, they might not use all of them.

The channels and distribution tools they use aren’t arbitrary; they’re based on research. Fortune 500s know where the majority of their audience can be found, and they know what types of content are most likely to get the most engagement.

Instead of trying to replicate the success of Fortune 500s, take a cue from their research and find out where your audience is spending their time. Look for missed opportunities and watch for untapped channels where audience segments may be hiding.

3. How the campaign is promoted and carried. The process through which content is promoted and carried is one aspect that you can try to replicate with your own marketing, especially if larger brands are in a similar industry. When big campaigns take off, pay close attention to how the content is being carried and promoted across the web. Whether it’s a landing page, a video, a blog, or a social post, you can follow the conversations throughout social media to see how fans share it with one another.

Likewise, trace the backlinks on campaigns to find out who is talking about them in articles and blogs. When you run your own campaigns and start publishing content, you should contact these sources to try and boost the signal.

4. Perfecting the timing. There are two aspects to consider with timing when you’re trying to reverse engineer marketing success.

The first has to do with the timing of an event. Some campaigns are time-sensitive and play off of trending topics, fads, one-off or annual events that would be nearly impossible to replicate once the campaign is live.

For Mother’s Day in 2012, P&G launched a “Thank You, Mom” campaign that featured athletes training from a young age to become Olympic athletes. The video emphasized the impact mothers had on their children as they struggled, overcame obstacles, and went on to become winners.

It was a step outside of P&G’s norm since the company’s products don’t really relate to sporting goods, but according to Hubspot, each of the “Raising an Olympian” videos received close to a million views, and the main “Thank You, Mom” video received nearly 53 million views, resulting in more coverage than Nike. The campaign was immensely successful thanks to a combination of timing and understanding the lifestyle of the audience.

Another aspect of timing comes in when content gets released. Buffer published research about the best times to post content through various channels, painting a clear picture about the rise and fall of engagement based on time of day and day of the week.

Look at the most successful campaigns from major companies and you’ll begin to see patterns in the timing and frequency of content publishing.

5. The audience is key. There’s a recurring theme through each of the above points: the audience. When you reverse engineer any successful marketing campaign, whether it’s for a Fortune 500 company or a small startup, it’s always going to end with the audience.

Audience research is critical for any campaign and it provides you with a road map for moving forward including:

• What they want or need to hear
• Their pain points
• How they like to consume content
• Where they gather online
• How they socialize and share content
• When they’re most active

Break down any successful campaign into those components and search for opportunities to do it better, especially in how the audience is targeted. By doing so, you’ll see tremendous growth in your startup’s marketing campaigns.

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By David Turetsky

It seems HR leaders are consumed with Big Data these days—how to gather it, organize it, and effectively use it to contribute to an organization’s success. There’s no doubt that there’s immense pressure on CHROs to glean meaningful insight from the reams of HR data they deal with daily. But in their zeal to extract big-HR-picture trends, they may be overlooking the value of smaller data that’s right in front of them.

It’s like opening the lid of a treasure chest and being so awed by the collective wealth before you that you’re blinded to the individual beauty of each jewel inside. Small data is the separate, discreet jewels that comprise the HR Big Data treasure.

All companies manage an ocean of information, which often gets created as pockets of independent data sets. Small data is that Excel spreadsheet of competitive pricing analysis saved on an employee’s desktop, or that Word document containing an individual’s performance review. Both of these work products contain invaluable data and takeaways that, when centrally aggregated and analyzed, can provide actionable business insights. Those insights can be on almost anything: The state of a company’s workforce conditions, productivity, talent management, retention levels, and even potential flight risks.

Ultimately, small data represents individual work products or processes that employees or groups create to do their jobs better. It’s imperative to make these disparate work products or processes accessible on a shared drive or through a project management system in a secure environment. That way, they can be leveraged across multiple users and enable business leaders to deliver value to a broader community of users.

Better access to data and analytics can help executives and their HR teams address bubbling issues and implement organizational changes. But to begin this process, senior leaders need to understand where the data exists, establish a standard process for collecting the information, and have an end-goal in mind so there’s structured progress.

Organizations need to ask questions like: What is HR trying to achieve by using analytics? What are the short-term and long-term goals for its use? Is the company trying to find ways to reduce overhead costs, or improve recruiting and hiring practices?

The fundamental goal is to bring all of the information together in a central inventory and use it to derive key insights and plan strategies to tackle specific business challenges. Four ways senior leaders and HR practitioners can do this are:

1. Build awareness. Work with other senior leaders to build awareness of the importance and value of your company’s small data sources. Find all of the pockets of small data so they can be saved in a central repository, analyzed and shared. Consider launching an internal communications campaign to increase awareness among employees about the importance of finding and leveraging small data to make more informed business decisions and improve outcomes.

2. Standardize data collection. Given the independent nature of small data, it’s crucial to establish best practices for gathering and saving data so it eventually can be used in an apples-to-apples comparison among data sets. Simply offering better access to data doesn’t lead to better outcomes; the right tools and a structured system and protocol are necessary to enable employees to mine small data for successful outcomes.

3. Clarify goals. Whether you’re searching for cost savings or striving to improve your company’s talent management process, set clear goals—short-term and long-term—to establish benchmarks for your small data analytics program. Identify those “low-hanging-fruit” goals first. This will help your organization achieve a few early wins and encourage momentum as you tackle larger, more complex projects requiring more time and patience.

4. Create a data culture. Whether the focus is on small data or Big Data, your organization’s primary goal should be to build data acumen, intelligence and, over time, confidence among senior leadership and your entire staff. Help employees who are typically not involved in using HR data analytics see their role in creating and capturing small data sets in their day-to-day activities.

The future of data analytics will include personalized, understandable insights that allow workers to do their jobs and, ultimately, live their lives better—and, of course, insights that contribute to business success! So don’t neglect the smaller jewels in your HR data treasure chest. Those assets can help drive insights into business decisions large and small.

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I recently read The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun. What struck me after reading this book is that the same myths that apply to innovation also apply to sales. So what’s the sales lesson here? Don’t get caught up in the myths of sales because they can fool you into being less successful.

Eureka doesn’t work for innovation and it doesn’t work for sales.

The innovation myth is that great ideas come in a flash in an epiphany. You may remember the myth about Archimedes who ran from his bathtub yelling, “Eureka!” through the streets after realizing that he could use water displacement to distinguish between the density of gold and false gold. Except that myth is not true.

Innovation progress doesn’t occur in a straight timeline and it involves a long sequence of experimentation and discovery that can take years to reach fruition. Archimedes worked on his problem long before that productive bath.

What’s that mean for your sales success? Too many salespeople think that it will take only one sales call and their customers will miraculously understand why they should buy. Eureka moments, however, don’t often happen in sales. Customers realize they should buy after you work your sales process which includes building rapport, doing skillful questioning, and demonstrating proof of performance.

The lone inventor is a myth.

When you think of air flight innovation, you think of the Wright brothers. Thomas Edison comes to mind when you think of electric lighting. Henry Ford is the inventor of the automobile, right? Wrong. And that’s the myth that there is a lone inventor.

Back in the 15th century, Leonardo da Vinci was creating designs and models for transport vehicles. Karl Benz from Germany then created the first true automobile in 1885. Ford therefore built on previous knowledge; he’s just easier to remember.

What you have are multiple people innovating. It starts with the person who came up with the initial idea for an item. Then there’s the first person to build a working model. Last, it’s the first person to successfully commercialize the invention.

Sound like sales? It’s a myth when salespeople believe that the sales process revolves around them. It’s at your peril when you forget about the other people who work to make your selling successful.

How could you sell without people in credit, operations, delivery, tech service, manufacturing, and customer service? That’s a scary thought. Your sales success depends on your working with so many other people doing their jobs well so you can deliver your sales promises. You may be the one with the sales quota, but you don’t sell by yourself.

Looking for a path to innovation is a mistake.

All too often, there are those who think there’s a clear map that will guide someone to produce innovation—there isn’t. Instead, one’s attitude is important to foster innovation because so many innovators’ ideas are initially rejected because they make people feel uncomfortable and force them to deal with change.

What kind of attitude helps? It’s the ability to deal with failure and be persuasive.

Galileo’s sun-centered solar system was opposed by the Catholic Church. Did you know that Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone was rejected by Western Union? Even Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were turned down by AltaVista and Yahoo, the dominant search companies of the day. How did they prevail? They had the right attitude. They were persistent in the face of failure and they were persuasive.

Salespeople without that attitude are destined to be much less successful in sales. They have to find other ways to make the sale when their customers say no. Most successful salespeople believe that a “no” is simply a no for now. Being persuasive is not about strong-arm tactics either; it’s ethical persuasion where a great idea is communicated effectively so that the other person wants the solution.

Scott Berkun says that innovation is complex, has many meanings and factors, and can’t be captured in the pithy quotes that make for good myths. Sales is also complex and depends on many factors. That’s why the same myths apply to both.

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Small businesses have had an important decision to make over the past decade. In the words of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “To add an e-commerce channel to your business model, or not to add one, that is the question.” Okay, Hamlet didn’t actually say that, but you get the picture.

As a small business owner, it’s very important to consider the value of taking your business online in a 21st century economy that loves the convenience of online shopping.

Tips to Successfully Add an E-Commerce Channel

The benefits of adding an e-commerce channel to your existing business are numerous. For starters, you’ll increase your availability to 24/7/365. Whereas your brick-and-mortar stores likely closes at a certain hour, your e-commerce website stays open.

Furthermore, with very few barriers to entry, there are very few reasons to not go online. “Starting out online means very low startup costs,” online business expert Brian Haines notes. “You have no buildings to construct, no vehicles to buy, and few (if any) staff to hire. Simply build your site and start selling.”

Haines is obviously simplifying things a bit, but he’s right on the money. In just a few days, you can have an e-commerce site up and running. Here are a few things to think about:

1. Understand the costs. The first thing to think about is cost. Building an e-commerce site is going to require an upfront investment, and it’s best that you estimate this dollar amount as accurately as possible before getting started.

For what it’s worth, most e-commerce sites cost between $5,000 and $10,000 to develop, design, and launch. But you certainly don’t have to spend that much. Thanks to site builders like Shopify, you can get started for free and realistically develop a basic site for less than $1,000. However, if you plan on really investing in e-commerce, expect to spend $5,000 or more in the long haul.

2. Launch a site. Actually taking action and launching a site is the hardest part. But once you get started, you’ll realize that it’s fairly easy—especially if you use a site-building platform.

During this phase, focus less on the aesthetics of your site and more on the user experience. You can always come back later and change things like color schemes, images, and graphics, but it’s much harder to make adjustments to things like navigation.

If you’re unsure of what you’re doing–even with a site builder—it’s best to pay for a professional developer. This is not the place to cut corners or save money.

3. Make mobile a priority. When moving online, your goal shouldn’t be to follow the status quo. In order to make your presence known, you need to do things differently. One key area where you can stand out is with mobile. Roughly 30 percent of all mobile shopping is now done on smartphones and tablets, yet few sites are properly optimized.

“Steps can still be taken to enhance the mobile shopping experience, and help give consumers the extra push to complete their purchase before losing interest,” supply chain expert Paul Trujillo points out. “The impulse buy is a major source of revenue for many companies, and it’s important to capitalize on that urge when you have the customer’s attention.”

4. Figure out inventory logistics. When an online channel is added to your business model, you obviously have to make changes to your supply chain and inventory practices. Specifically, you’ll need to answer questions like these:

• Where will inventory be stored?
• How will orders be processed?
• Who will pick and ship orders?
• What will online demand for specific products look like?

There’s a lot to think about and you want to make sure you aren’t assuming anything. If you aren’t careful, you could overwhelm your supply chain, and ultimately compromise both channels of your business.

5. Don’t forget about brick-and-mortar. When adding an e-commerce channel, it’s easy to forget about your existing brick-and-mortar channel. Be aware of this and make a point of not compromising your current business model. The goal is not to cannibalize your existing sales, but to instead increase sales via another channel. If you have the resources, consider hiring someone to head up your e-commerce division, so that you can focus on the core business.

What Will You Do?

There may be certain businesses that have little to gain from moving online, but the majority of brick-and-mortar small businesses can increase sales and grow revenue by venturing online.

As you can see, it’s not as difficult as you may have previously thought.

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All businesses need to keep track of an online reputation. It only takes a couple hours for a bad customer experience to go viral and impact your bottom line. It’s even worse if you don’t know it’s happening and you don’t get on top of the situation.

Here’s what you can do to improve your online reputation management:

1. Know What’s Going On with Your Brand

The first step to effective online reputation management is understanding what is being said about your brand. You need to be aware of what is happening with your brand, and what others are saying. There are brand monitoring tools like Mention that can help you holistically manage your brand and keep on top of your reputation. Another good idea is to set up Google Alerts about your brand so you can see when others post about you.

Once you know what’s going on, you can move forward.

2. Keep Your Site and Social Updated

You need to remain relevant if you want to show up higher in search results than unofficial sources. Keep your site and social updated so that you are relevant. This means you need to keep your content fresh and pay attention to your social media strategy.

It’s possible to hire others to help with your content creation so that you can focus on other aspects of your business. Just make sure you are putting out the freshest, most relevant info so that it pushes the other stuff down in the search results.

3. Don’t Respond Immediately to Bad Press

The gut reaction when you are facing a potential PR disaster is to respond immediately. Sometimes, though, it makes sense to step back and wait. While you might need to say something like, “we are looking into this,” it’s important that you don’t get negative, attack your detractors, or in any way melt down. You also need to avoid a cover up.

Gather more information before you start responding. Do it quickly, and be ready to respond as soon as possible, but don’t respond immediately, and try not to go negative.

4. Admit Mistakes and Commit to Fix Them

Your next move is to admit to mistakes and do your best to fix them. In many cases, people like to give second chances. This means you can redeem yourself. Be frank about the mistake, even if you don’t go into detail. Apologize, and describe the steps you are taking to fix it. Digging in and denying the problem won’t help; it will only make things worse. You can overcome a poor online reputation, but you need to start by projecting openness and regret and working to win back trust.

5. Keep Building Relationships with Your Audience

It’s important to continue building relationships with your audience. Online reputation management has a lot to do with how many people actually believe what is being said about you. Create a brand that people love, and you can weather most storms. Reach out to your fans, and let them do the fighting for you. You might be surprised at how you can better manage your reputation when others feel connected to you and feel the need to defend you.

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Do you ever feel like you have to leave work to get any actual work done? Between interruptions, meetings and distractions, sometimes the office seems like the least productive place on earth. You’re not the only one who feels this way: Many employees say they get more done when working outside than inside the office. Is sending them home or to Starbucks the only way to make your employees more productive?

Not necessarily. A recent study by Oxford Economics reports that, although employees want to be productive at work, open-plan offices, constant conductivity and technology hiccups are all standing in the way. But there are solutions. Here’s a closer look.

When asked what attributes are most important in the work environment, being able to focus at work without interruptions ranked number one. In fact, employees care more about being able to concentrate than having their own offices, subsidized child care or free food at work. In other words, as the survey puts it, it’s not about “beanbag chairs and free burritos.”

What’s hampering productivity? The study found three key elements:

1. Noise Level

Open-plan offices fit well with today’s emphasis on collaborative work, and being able to collaborate is one thing that employees value. However, open spaces can be noisy, especially if workers are squeezed close together as they may be if a small business is trying to save on space. In addition to distracting workers, noise can make talking on the phone to customers or clients more difficult as people on both ends of the call strain to hear. Filtering out background noise is mentally tiring, sapping employees’ productivity. Somewhat surprisingly, Millennial employees are more likely than other age groups to be distracted by noise, and find it more annoying than other demographics.

Solution: Take steps to minimize noise. Carpeting hard floors or putting down rugs will help absorb noise, as will window coverings, plants, sound-absorbing ceiling tiles and even wall decor. Basically, the more hard surfaces in your location, the noisier it will be; adding softer elements will bring the noise level down. Also be sure you provide quiet spaces where employees can hold meetings without disrupting others. Employees who need to be on the phone constantly, such as sales reps or customer service staff, should be concentrated in a space away from others who need quiet. Noise-canceling headphones, white noise machines or smartphone apps, and even earplugs can help, too.

2. Tech Tools

While technology has made our jobs a lot easier in some ways, the study finds it’s still got a long way to go. Just 38 percent of employees in the survey say they have all the tools they need to do their jobs, and only 36 percent say the devices they use when away from the office work seamlessly with workplace technology. This adds to frustration over distractions: Employees may try to get work done in a coffee shop or at home because the office is too noisy, but find that they lack the tools to work effectively anywhere else.

Solution: Make sure your employees have the proper tech tools they need to get their jobs done wherever they are. If your employees work remotely, for example, or travel frequently on business, provide them with technology to use on the go. If employees prefer to use their own devices, as many do, try to find apps that work with multiple platforms or with the platforms that most employees use. This will help ensure that the devices your team uses in the office, at home and on the road all integrate smoothly, meaning greater productivity.

3. Constant Connectivity

Constant connection via devices and technology is another factor contributing to distraction. Higher-level employees are more likely to feel the pressure to be constantly “on.” Collaboration technologies that indicate when people are on a social network or chat app can contribute to the belief that people are always available to be interrupted. There’s also a gap between expectations and reality: While only one-fourth of executives say they frequently expect employees to be available after hours, nearly half of employees think their supervisors expect this kind of responsiveness. More than one-third of respondents in the survey say they feel compelled to check their devices frequently due to social pressure and fear of missing something.

Solution: Set limits on connectivity. Try actually getting up and talking to each other instead of conducting every communication via electronic device. Make sure employees know what is and isn’t expected of them regarding responsiveness. If you don’t expect your team to respond to your emails on weekends, tell them so! That may be the only time you can get around to sifting through your emails, but they may feel pressure to respond. Some companies try email-free days or eliminate emails on Friday afternoon; others set rules such as no emails before 7 a.m. or after 8 p.m. See what works for you and your employees.

The bottom line in improving productivity by eliminating distractions: It’s all about clearly communicating with your team regarding their needs, your expectations and how the two can meet.

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