Articles by Taylor Record

Before agile methodology, most teams took a pretty linear approach to project management. Gather resources. Design. Build. Test. Deliver. However, one major problem with traditional project management is that without regular iterations, the final product is built without user feedback. In agile methodology, a user story sets out to solve this. But what happens when …

Continue reading “Let’s talk about agile spikes – what they are and how you can use them to make better project decisions.”

What’s the difference between telework and remote work? Until recently, “remote work” sounded like something digital nomads did. Picture someone working poolside or with a beach in the background, from a coworking space in Bali or an apartment in Amsterdam. Free from the dreaded cubicle, it made most of us ask – “So, do you …

Continue reading “Telework or Remote Work? Explaining the differences and what’s best for your team.”

Entrepreneurs need a whole range of skills to be successful. Project management. Leadership. Confidence. Flexibility. Decision-making skills. Creativity. We could go on. But that’s not to say that every entrepreneur steps into the job with all the skills they need. There’s a time for learning on the fly and a time when having some trusted …

Continue reading “19 Books Every Entrepreneur Should Read in 2023”

Imagine this – a customer books a product demo on your website. They automatically get a confirmation email from a sales rep with what they need to do before a call. After the call, they enter a new automation sequence that sends them follow-up emails every few days, offering new features and answering frequently asked …

Continue reading “11 Easy Marketing Automation Examples for Lead-Generation on Autopilot”

No one likes a micromanager. But unpleasantness isn’t the worst of it! Micromanagement has been shown to lead to decreased productivity, low morale, and less innovation. One study even shows it’s among the top three reasons employees resign. On the other side of micromanagement is the concept of autonomous teams. An autonomous work team is …

Continue reading “Micromanager? Here are Some Benefits to Running a More Autonomous Team”

You show up for a scheduled call. Five minutes go by. After ten, you can decide to call it. Whoever you’re waiting for has probably missed the meeting. Ugh. Whether it’s an employee, colleague, manager, client, or potential client, this can be a frustrating roadblock, especially if it’s recurring. When someone misses a meeting, not …

Continue reading “No Show? Here’s How to Politely & Impactfully Email Someone Who Missed a Meeting.”

In the early days of running your ecommerce business, your manual processes might go just fine! You keep track of orders as they arrive. Package and ship them. Notify customers when their orders are on the way. Respond to inquiries. Keep track of all that inventory. Yet as soon as demand picks up, most ecommerce …

Continue reading “How You Can Use Ecommerce Automation to Put Repetitive Tasks on Autopilot”

“Just be more confident” is probably some of the best and most frustrating professional advice you’ll ever get. If only it were that easy! Yet an authentic and healthy sense of self-confidence can be the driver of many things we aspire to at work. Speaking up in meetings. Getting picked for interesting projects. Getting leadership …

Continue reading “Want to be more confident at work? Here’s how.”

Do you ever worry that your website is losing you business? It could be that your website is hard to navigate, outdated, or you don’t have one. Maybe you got a new website a few years back, but it no longer reflects your entire range of services, or you’re missing some key features you desperately …

Continue reading “Bad website? Here are 5 easy steps to hiring a web developer to fix it.”

Have you ever heard the expression “content is king”? It originated from a 1996 article published by Bill Gates. It was written when the internet was still in its infancy. Still, the central premise was this: content – broadly defined as material informational or entertaining – will become the primary driver of the internet. And …

Continue reading “9 Ways to Repurpose Your Blog Content & Supercharge Your Top Performing Posts”

There are many reasons a digital initiative doesn’t go as planned. Sometimes a project runs out of budget before it’s been fully implemented. There could be challenges integrating it within your organization’s existing systems. Perhaps there are technical issues you didn’t anticipate going into it. But the biggest reason that your digital initiative might fail? …

Continue reading “Why Digital Dexterity is the Overlooked Skill Every Team Needs”

Feeling tired? A bit short on patience? Maybe you suddenly notice you haven’t done your hobbies in a while or find your overall attitude a bit less cheerful than it used to be. Or perhaps it’s just that every time you enter a room, you forget what the heck you came for in the first …

Continue reading “6 Signs of Being Overworked + What You Can Do About It”

Let’s talk about networking. It’s something most entrepreneurs dread in its best form – at a startup office somewhere, light on snacks and heavy on small talk. But networking is an essential part of the process when you’re trying to kick off or grow your business! As the saying goes: it’s not about what you …

Continue reading “7 Remote Networking Ideas to Build Your Professional Network from Anywhere”

Remote work is something we spent a lot of time thinking about at Teamly! Perhaps it’s something your team tried out during the pandemic, or maybe you’ve been doing it for years. Either way, if you’ve experimented with remote work, you’ve probably noticed it’s far from a one-size-fits-all model. Some remote teams thrive across time …

Continue reading “Going Remote? Here’s Why a Hybrid Work Schedule Might be the Right Choice for Your Team”

We’ve all had one. We’ve all struggled with one. And yet maybe you’re here, realizing you’ve become one yourself. We’re talking about micromanagement. No one sets out to be a micromanager – but it’s a lot more common and easier to do than we might expect! So how can you stop micromanaging? Like any personal …

Continue reading “How to Stop Micromanaging & Become a More Effective Manager”

What do project managers and entrepreneurs have in common? It sounds like a setup for a business professor’s joke – but in seriousness, there’s a lot that both disciplines can learn from the other! Building a business is really just a series of small projects, all of which stand to benefit from the structure project …

Continue reading “Project Management 101: A Guide for Entrepreneurs”

Business owners know that a lot more goes into running a healthy business than having a great product or service. Perhaps one of the highest-impact of them all? Business processes. These day-to-day parts of running a business – onboarding, invoicing, contract management, inventory management, etc. – can completely transform your company’s operations. When done well, …

Continue reading “Want better workflows? Here’s how Business Process Design makes operations easy.”

How important is your brand, really? You could associate branding with little more than a logo and a slogan. Something that can come later. Something that’s only really essential for more prominent companies. But we’re here to tell you that any business of any size can benefit from having a solid brand! And with your …

Continue reading “What is Strategic Brand Management? + 6 Steps to Do It in Your Business”

When it comes to products and services, customers have more options today than ever before. Online shopping, digital marketing, and globalization are just some of the factors that have completely transformed how people make purchase decisions. As a result, customers can find something with different features, higher quality, cheaper, etc., with a simple search. But …

Continue reading “How to Get an Edge on the Competition with Positioning in Marketing”

Every growing business has a way they do things – their business processes. While these processes might not be official, you can consider them the standard way repetitive tasks are completed. Whether it’s how you onboard new employees, manage your inventory, or create backups of important data, how you standardize and automate business processes gets …

Continue reading “How to strategically automate your business processes to grow your business”

Anyone who’s worked in sales understands – making the sale is all about building a relationship. And just like any relationship, the best way is to start slowly and build trust over time. That’s where the value ladder comes in. Want to understand more about value ladder marketing and how you can use the concept …

Continue reading “What is a value ladder? A super powerful sales tool, explained.”

Marketing used to be about billboards, TV ads, and cold calls. That is, until the 1990s, when marketing methods became more digital. And with a shift to digital has come a drastic transformation in how businesses market to potential clients. Rather than marketers having to reach a broad and non-targeted audience with their outbound marketing …

Continue reading “A Smart Marketer’s Guide to Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing”

Almost every small business has gotten the advice. “Start a blog!” or “Just post more on social media!” And so they do just that. Create a couple of blog posts. Post a few times on Instagram and wait for the traffic to roll in. What happens next? Well, usually, not much. Resources that took a …

Continue reading “On the Right Track: A Guide to the Content Marketing Metrics You Should be Tracking”

Small business owners know being an entrepreneur is a journey of highs and lows. When you’re closing a funding round or launching something your team has spent countless hours on, being an entrepreneur can feel like the best job in the world. But there are other times when you feel the hard parts of entrepreneurship. …

Continue reading “10 Super Effective Strategies for Managing Cash Flow in your Small Business”

When starting out as a business, organizational hierarchy can be straightforward. Things like who’s reporting to who, team responsibilities, and the division of tasks are usually quite straightforward for a small team! But as a team grows and becomes more specialized, creating an organizational structure can be the thing that keeps growing teams aligned and …

Continue reading “How to Design a Marketing Organization Structure for More Effective Teams”

Managing a project from start to finish is a big undertaking for a project manager. One of the biggest challenges? Budgeting and forecasting! The uncertainty of costs and multiple variables can make budgeting for a project almost impossible. And that’s where Estimate at Completion (EAC) in project management comes in. EAC is an Earned Value …

Continue reading “A Guide to Better Budgeting & Forecasting Using Estimate at Completion (EAC) in Project Management”

Your website is one of the most critical assets your business can have. It’s your home on the internet. An opportunity to brand your business. And when done correctly, it can help your business establish and nurture relationships with their clients long before you ever work together. At the same time, making a website is …

Continue reading “How to Ace your Next Website Project with Website Project Management”

Does your team keep running into the same challenges over and over again? Maybe it’s a struggle to come up with fresh ideas or think outside the box on your current project. That’s where ideation techniques come in. Ideation is the third step in the design-thinking process, where the main focus is to generate new …

Continue reading “11 Ideation Techniques that Go Beyond Brainstorming”

Project managers are used to having a lot on their plates. Planning the project. Organizing tasks. Leading a team. Overseeing the time. Monitoring progress. Communicating. Managing risks. Are you tired yet? Learning new methodologies and managing documentation can become yet another thing on a project manager’s long list of responsibilities. It’s up to the manager …

Continue reading “The Ultimate Guide to RAID in Project Management”

There are plenty of benefits to going remote. That said, remote work also presents unique challenges! One of the biggest is maintaining cohesion and working towards shared goals – when the team is physically dispersed, this can become a bigger task. Goals can be critical to ensure your team is working towards shared objectives. That’s …

Continue reading “How to Use Goal-Tracking Apps to Supercharge your Remote Team”

Project management can make tasks of any scale more streamlined and efficient. But as a project grows in size and complexity – or perhaps you have multiple projects to schedule? – a visual tool to help you understand the dependencies between tasks becomes more important. That’s where Precedence Diagramming Method (PDM) comes in. PDM is …

Continue reading “Need help scheduling your project? Try the Precedence Diagramming Method.”

Deadlines. Milestones. Resources. Dependencies. There are so many factors that go into planning a successful project. But how to organize all of these things into one comprehensive view? That’s where project management calendars come in. A project management calendar is a tool that can help project managers plan and schedule any events related to a …

Continue reading “How to Create an Organized Project Management Calendar for your Projects”

Have you ever attended an event and wondered how it all came together so perfectly? The answer is event project management. When we talk about project management for event planning, we’re talking about the process of planning, maintaining and organizing a successful event. This includes everything from managing the team, planning logistics, and communicating with …

Continue reading “A No-Stress Guide to Event Project Management + Checklist”

Let’s talk about the entrepreneur’s greatest rival. Whether scratched into a notebook or ticked off with a task management tool, almost all of us face the same problem: the to-do list that never ends. That’s because there are always new ideas for an entrepreneur or business owner! Processes that could be improved. Automations that would …

Continue reading “Scary to-do list? Here’s how to prioritize tasks at work.”

The last years have brought a radical shift in the way we work. Even with the ease of social distancing and COVID-19 guidelines, it’s become clear that the changes we thought temporary are here to stay. Major companies making their remote work policies official or selling off their offices in favor of a dispersed working …

Continue reading ““What time is it there?” Asynchronous work, explained.”

Everyone knows that being an entrepreneur or running a small business is hard work. This is especially true when it comes to getting leads, moving them through your funnel, and closing deals. It can feel like a cycle that never ends! But what if we told you there’s something you might be missing that will …

Continue reading “How to set up your client onboarding process for easier projects on repeat.”

Remote work – once saved for freelancers and entrepreneurs – has officially gone mainstream. And even as we move back towards the large gatherings and social connections we enjoyed before the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems like remote work is here to stay. So much so that according to one survey conducted by Buffer – “2021 …

Continue reading “Going Remote? Here’s How to Engage Remote Employees.”