Mohit Tater's Blog, page 531

Q&A with Danny Haber of oWOW

Full Interview with CEO and Co-Founder of oWOW – Danny Haber

Source: CEO World Biz Danny Haber 

Danny Haber is the CEO and co-founder of oWOW, an innovative, vertically-integrated company with a unique approach to property development in the Bay Area. Haber’s company invests in the net new housing on vacant land and empty buildings and brings beautiful new apartments to market well below market price. We sat down with Danny for a full interview, and this is what he had to say:

Q: There are so many real estate developers in the Bay Area – what makes your brand so different?

A: Thanks for the opportunity to sit down with you and explain a little more about the inner mechanics of oWOW. You are 100% correct: the real estate market in the greater Bay Area is saturated with developers. Most of them however are focused on the high-end of the market; the clientele with top dollar who can afford to pay astronomical rentals, or purchase prices. oWOW  is different. We don’t cut corners when it comes to providing maximum luxury for our tenants; we do cut costs however. Our vertically-integrated company is comprised of a small team of expert developers, designers, and real estate professionals. We know what we’re doing, but more importantly, we are aiming to solve an exigent problem in society. 

The housing crisis in this part of California is extreme; there is rampant homelessness, and a mass migration out of the city. We want to turn things around by bringing affordability back to the equation, without sacrificing on quality or luxury. oWOW has already made tremendous inroads in this arena by catering to a niche market. We don’t focus on the upper echelons; we focus on middle-income earners who are genuinely looking to make San Francisco, Oakland, and other communities in the Bay Area their home. We have several big projects to our credit, including 960 Howard Street, 674 23rd Street, and 316, 12 Street, among others. We are proud of what we have done and what we are doing to help alleviate the housing crisis, one project at a time.

Q: What are you doing that is so different to what others are doing?

A: we are building infrastructure to massively lower the price to build space for businesses and housing and decrease the schedule. These seemingly opposing objectives are quite possible with the model that we have developed. Our company has effectively reinvented design. We use repeatable designs and structures which are built and assembled off-site and then shipped to location for rapid deployment. This cuts project time down considerably, and reduces costs for everyone. We can use our MacroUnits with a flexible walls system known as Magic Walls to bring our products to market quickly and cost effectively. Imagine an apartment with 800 ft.² of space with a single bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen being transformed into a multi-bedroom, multi-bathroom apartment with luxury trappings. That’s what we do for our customers.

Q: Why is the Bay Area property markets so convoluted and so expensive?

A: It’s a tricky question to answer – no doubt. There are many factors at play, some of which tend to preponderate the current situation such as Proposition 13, excess demand for real estate, and the slow pace of change, and yet there are other factors working in the opposite direction to change the status quo. These factors include unprecedented investment by leading tech titans Google, Facebook, Apple, and the state of California. Is the change happening fast enough? Absolutely not! Let’s take a look at things like employment numbers in Silicon Valley since 2008/2009 for a start. I recall reading an article in the Mercury News, and many other periodicals and newspapers about the explosive growth in the Silicon Valley job market over time. In 2009, there was a -6.3% decline in jobs in Silicon Valley, for obvious reasons. In 2010, job losses continued, but at a much slower rate at -1.3%. Since 2011 however, there have been dramatic increases in the number of jobs in Silicon Valley, with the strongest years on record being 2013, 2014, and 2015. 

In 2018 for example, Silicon Valley companies added 35,600 jobs, down slightly from 47,300 jobs in 2017. These numbers are important insofar as they determine how much housing is needed. Unfortunately, the current construction of new homes in communities around Silicon Valley is insufficient to keep pace with job creation. This has resulted in an exodus of people from the region, particularly in 2018 where the outflow of migration numbered 22,300 people. Of course, we don’t want this situation because it will destroy the entire ecosystem. If only the wealthy remain, we won’t have anyone available to teach the kids at school, tend to the sick and elderly, wait on us at hotels and restaurants, provide basic community and social services, et cetera. We have to reverse the trends for the San Francisco Bay Area to be successful.

Q: What type of investments have already been made in the Bay Area, and how will your business continue to contribute towards the change that is needed?

A: Bay Area technology companies realize the seriousness of the situation. They have the means to make a difference, even if they cannot fix the problem overnight, their financial investments will facilitate change. Facebook decided to pledge $1 billion for the construction of 20,000 homes regionally, Google also pledged to construct 20,000 homes in the Bay Area by 2030 (estimated value of $1 billion). To this end, Google is building 2000 homes annually, and this will greatly benefit Santa Clara County, and Alameda County. Microsoft pledged $500 million in loans for affordable housing development for homeless people. 

Apple is also jumping in on the action. With its affordable housing fund of $1 billion, which is part of a much greater fund of $2.5 billion. Apple has gone the extra mile with a mortgage assistance program for new homebuyers. When so many companies are investing heavily in the housing market, this is good news for everyone. My company will continue to do what it does best – serve local community by creating a beautiful, work/life living system which accommodates young professionals, teachers, entrepreneurs, artisans, and artists from across the board. We want to rejuvenate communities and provide affordable luxury living. We are happy to take on this challenge!

You can connect with Danny Haber through Twitter and LinkedIn , or the Danny Haber Crunchbase profile , 

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Four SEO Tips to Help Boost Your Business Local Rankings

For local business owners, there are plenty of benefits for focusing on having a high-ranking position in popular search engines (Google, Yahoo Search, and Bing). When it comes to local businesses, Google does not shy away from noticing the importance of them. Google is a powerful searching tool that can connect potential users and consumers to nearby companies. This feature can eliminate any worries related to how your business will perform against other companies. Below are tips on how to boost your rankings using SEO.

#1 – Promoting your local business on Google Local

Google Local’s primary purpose is to provide results for local businesses for potential users. On this site, users can view suggestions, provide feedback, and publish their photos as well. Additionally, Google Local allows local businesses to connect with potential consumers with ease. These businesses can benefit from this communicating bridge because they can connect their customers directly by sharing the following information: phone number, business hours, etc. Local businesses can create pages on this site to generate visitors, which will convert to potential sales and attract more customers. Google Local includes ways for companies to answer questions, provide news and updates related to their business, and address any possible issues.

#2 Use keywords wisely

SEO keywords include the phrases and keywords relates to your brand, sites, or blog that helps with how users discover it on popular search engines. By using popular phrases or keywords used often by consumers, it will help your site connect with them. It is essential to use a list of keywords that will help potential customers come upon your website. A great example, if you have a clothing store in Princeton, New Jersey, most likely “Princeton clothing stores” or “clothing stores in Princeton” will be the best option for this business. Another example is if you have a local job office in Los Angeles, CA, it would be great to include “job offices in LA” as a phrase.

Most SEO experts suggest creating a list of keywords and placing them in an Excel spreadsheet for organizing purposes. Local businesses can experiment with using single keywords as well as long-tail keywords (phrases) too. Google continues to evolve and improve by connecting keyword terms well. For example, Google will comprehend that “The Bronx community colleges” is similar to “community colleges in The Bronx area.” It is important to remember that local businesses should concentrate on how users and customers communicate and common phrases that are commonly used.

#3 – Focus on content marketing

Content marketing and SEO work well and go hand in hand. Experts believe that successful local businesses usually benefit from including content marketing activities in the overall SEO plan. Content marketing and SEO are a vital part of building a brand identity for every business, both small and large. This form of marketing focuses on reaching a particular audience by developing and publishing digital content to create a brand.

Creating and publishing content plays a significant role in marketing and SEO. All popular search engines like Google and Bing focuses mainly on text. The text will determine where and how you rank in the search engines. When it comes to successful content marketing, using the same keywords and phrases that are used often by consumers will only benefit your local business. By doing this, a company’s website will be ranked high in search engines, which will generate more traffic. Local companies that have a blog site and post often will quickly see the benefits of content marketing. Content marketing helps with making both web traffic and eventually sales too. The main focus is to attract new visitors and ultimately convert those visits to profit.

#4 – Request reviews from actual customers

There are many benefits of asking and post actual reviews from either clients or customers. Never use fake reviews because it will tarnish your local business’s reputation and ruin its brand. Additionally, using fake reviews will make it difficult for potential visitors to come across your local business’ website on popular search engines.

A great approach is to ask previous customers to post a review either on Yelp, Google, Amazon, and Facebook, to name a few. Local businesses should mention that their customers’ reviews matter and if they could kindly post at least one. Yelp, Google+, and Facebook are available websites for customers to post reviews because most likely, already have an account. Although it is recommended to ask customers to post at least one review, it doesn’t hurt to provide multiple options and ask them also to post other available sites. The more actual reviews published from customers, the better for any companies.

It is essential for local businesses never to ask customers to post only good reviews because it can ruin a brand. A company can only improve or maintain their brand with actual reviews. Actual reviews from real customers are typically seen more on these sites. With the tips above, it can boost your local business’ rankings on popular websites and generating visitors, which will lead to sales.

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What is the Best Way to Build an Email List for Your Start-Up?

When you’re a start-up founder there are a lot of pressures on you to grow your company. This results in you looking for both short and long term ways to generate more customers and more revenue. One of the best ways to market to customers is to build an email list. Why? Because with email marketing you are able to continue marketing to your customers, vs having one opportunity to do so. This lets you approach them as many times as you want, and see what they respond to and what they don’t so that you can fine-tune your efforts and your lists. In short, it provides a valuable set of customer data. 

What is the Best Way and Why? 

Knowing all that, you may be wondering what is the best way to build a list. Over the years I’ve been able to fine-tune that process and talk to many business owners who are doing the same. The best and most sustainable way to build a list for your startup is SEO, this isn’t just our advice, it’s based on the feedback of the experts at Frootful Marketing. This is because it provides a constant flow of traffic that is virtually free after the initial investment. This creates a marketers paradise for list building.

Let’s talk about how to do SEO and how to build that list. 

List Building Through SEO 

SEO is a lucrative channel when done right, let’s talk about building your list through organic search. Let’s dive in.

Pick Your Targets 

Before you start, the most important thing to do is keyword research. This is because you don’t just want traffic coming your way, you want traffic that will turn into revenue. You want people to actually convert to sign up for those lists and that will respond to those emails. Therefore, you want people who are in your niche. You don’t want to get caught up in the number of traffic, but rather the number of sign-ups and converted emails. 

Research the Opposition 

Next, you want to research everyone ranking for the content opportunities you spotted. Look for strengths and weaknesses across the first ten results ranking for that keyword. Then take all of that and expand on it. Make the content the best piece of content out there. This will help you with search engines and converting the people that will be reading it into list signups. 

Creating the Content 

When writing the content, you want to do a few things right. 

First, you want to make sure to only target one topic. Don’t try to stuff keywords but instead write about only one thing and dive into great depth about it. This is called the long tail approach and lets you zero in on your target rather than being vague and general. Search engines prefer specificity rather than broadness. 

You also want to make sure that you break up the content into optimized H1, H2, and H3 headings to make it easier for the bots and the visitors to scan your content.  

Link Outreach 

To get the content to rank, you will need to reach out to other websites and earn links. This is best done by pitching free content in exchange that you can place a link within it. This has two benefits. On one end you have the ability to step in front of their audience, while on the other end you have the ability to raise the ranking of all the content you created. 

Optimizing for Conversions 

Lastly, you want to make sure you are building the lists appropriately. You want to take advantage of the visitors and convert as many as you can. To do that is best to have an email sign up forms in the sidebar, as well as in a modal that popups at a certain point of them consuming the content. This will give them multiple opportunities to sign up. 

Build Your Traffic, Build Your List 

In order to build your list, you will have to build your traffic, and that is done best with SEO. Take these tips and run a content campaign. With time and effort, you will be sure to succeed in scaling your startup.

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Creating a Live Environment with Animation Technology

There is no need to mention about how technology has changed over the years. The animation is one of the significant factors that made it possible. The world has evolved from a black and white picture to the 2d, 3d, 4d, 5d, and even 7d animations. Have you ever imagined watching a movie in 7d with those special effects that made a live environment for us? Well, all credits go to people who work behind it and made it possible. If you are looking for companies or animation agency that will create those 2D or 3D videos, Animation Pictures, you can consult Austin Visuals anytime.

Today, digital animation has become a trend, and every business industry is looking forward to including such animated displays to promote them. Such videos not only limited to expand the business but also helpful for students to gain knowledge from live videos. Such videos are useful for educational training that helps them to follow step by step procedure. The digital animation market is very vast and has a massive impact on the business of all sizes.

Helps in raising your business-standard

Digital animation can make a significant difference in your marketing strategy, as well. With the help of animated videos, you can achieve many benefits, and it is an easy way to create a buzz online. Animated videos are attractive enough to catch public attention. If you are launching a new product and demonstrating it at any trade show, it will add value to your brand is displayed with an exciting VR experience. It will give the audience a real-time feel to use your product and increases the chances of high sales.

You can get your animated videos customized as per your requirements. With these 2d and 3d amazing effects, you will be able to engage your audience and create more awareness about your product. For these animated videos, you can quickly produce content with help from professional agencies. It will help you create a remark about your brand.

Animation made the educational system much easier

Animated videos are mostly used for an educational system that makes learning easy and exciting. It helps the student to grasp information quickly. Its usage is not only confined to the school educational system but is helpful in medical fields also. Today companies are making informational animated videos to make students aware of rare diseases.

Not only schools, but companies are also focusing on including such animated videos to explain their terms and policies that make their work easier. Animated videos not only save companies time because they are easy to understand but also save money as they can be re-used for other employees in the future. These animation videos with 2d or 3d effects will make it more entertaining and exciting to hold on the attention. So hire professionals today to transform your hectic presentations into a learning one.

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3 Things to consider before Buying a Period Property

Period properties bring charm and elegance that cannot be easily replicated. High ceilings and ornate cornices provide breath-taking character and features that many people dream of having in their home.  They usually don’t come without some drawbacks, however. Here are 3 things to consider before buying a period property.

Are there any hidden issues?

Whilst the property may look amazing, you can never tell what is lurking beyond the solid walls. A standard survey will provide details of any obvious issues but will not provide you with a detailed overview of the structure of the building. It is, therefore, a wise idea to have a structural survey carried out. Whilst these costs substantially more, they will give a detailed analysis of any issues you need to consider. You may have some comeback should any major issues arise that were not intimated to you within the survey.

Heating the property

A period property can look exceptionally welcoming. You imagine yourself relaxing by the log fire, listening to classical music with a hot chocolate and watching the world go by. The reality is, period properties can be cold, very cold. With no cavity wall insulation and original floors, heating the property can prove difficult, not the mention costly. Make sure you are aware of the running costs involved before you buy. Many period properties have very old boilers. Replacing a boiler could save you a huge amount of money both short and long terms. Many period properties have oil heating which can be pricier than gas. It’s a good idea to set up a service contract with a domestic oil supplier. That will ensure that you never run out of oil and you can more effectively budget. You should also be aware that if a property has been unoccupied for some time you may need to use a waste oil collection service. Sludge can form if the oil is left for long periods which could affect your tank and boiler. It may be that the whole tank needs to be replaced anyway but a professional can advise you on the best course of action.

Carefully plan your budget

A period property may mean that you need to spend a little bit more when upgrading certain things. If, for example, new windows are needed then the likelihood is that timber frame windows would be the most suitable replacement. They are not particularly cheap. Similarly, if installing a new bathroom suite in a 19th-century property, you may be more inclined to go for something more traditional which could come with a hefty price tag. Give careful consideration as to how much you might need to spend before you take the plunge. There is little point in buying a property that needs upgrading if you don’t have the financial means to have the works completed. Once you know that your dream property is a financially viable option, you will be one step closer to your purchase. 

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5 Realistic Ways to Fund Your Business

If you have taken the plunge and decided to launch your own business, it’s important that you work out your finances beforehand to ensure you have enough funds to turn your idea into a successful business venture. If you’re struggling for cash, there are various avenues that you can go down to get your idea off the ground. Here are five realistic ways to fund your business, helping you to raise the cash needed to launch your company.

Friends and Family

When it comes to running a business, many people turn to their friends and family to borrow money. While you may find it more difficult to convince banks or investors of the quality of your business idea, your friends and family are more likely to believe in your passion and dream. If you decide to go to your nearest and dearest for loans, it’s best to ensure that each of you receives useful legal advice.

Small Business Loans

There are some banks that provide loans to small companies, but banks tend to be careful about giving money to small businesses, so it’s important that you’re well prepared for the application process. Getting all your documents in order before applying should be your first port of call to ensure that the bank takes you seriously, which will increase the chances of you securing a loan. 

Business Line of Credit

Another route that you can go down is a business line of credit. Unlike a business loan that will provide you with a large amount of money upfront, a business line of credit from AdvancePoint Capital is much more flexible. They are comparable to a business credit card in the sense that you will have a pool of cash that you can dip into as and when you need it. If you are interested in a business line of credit, you need to be aware that your business will need to have been established for at least six months.

Bootstrapping

One of the most common ways to get a company off the ground is through bootstrapping. This means that you will use your own money to run your company. The funds may come from mortgages, credit cards, or personal savings. To help you know where you financially stand, you should get a free credit report card, which can help you work out the interest rate you will get on loans.

Crowdfunding

If you are passionate about your business idea and you’re great at social media, why not look into crowdfunding? There are several websites such as Kickstarter that you can use to spread awareness of your brand and let consumers know how much money you need and why you need it to get your business venture off the ground. 

When you have come up with a great business venture, it’s only natural that you will want your company to become the success you envisaged, however, if you don’t have the cash to back up your ideas, it’s likely that you won’t get past the first hurdle, therefore, taking all the tips listed on board can help you get the funds you need to run your business.

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Important Things To Remember When Designing Your Business Website

In this digital age, businesses must keep up with the times and invest in having a website made to promote their products and services. The primary advantage of an official site is that you can provide first-hand information on your merchandise to customers.

Another benefit that a website brings to your business is visibility. Your domain serves as your digital address in the vast world of the Internet. With the right search engine optimization tactics, you can reach your target audience no matter where they are physically located.

If you’re developing your business website, here are the important things you should remember when planning its design:

1. Optimize Key Areas with Relevant Keywords

It’s common knowledge that you should sprinkle in words associated with your brand on your blog posts, particularly in the title, meta description, and content. Keywords are used by customers to search for products, services, tutorials, and reviews online.

For instance, if your company sells ladies’ clothes and footwear, relevant keywords for your website would be “ladies blouses,” “ladies pants,” “ladies lingerie.” You can even make it more specific through long-tail keywords, such as “ladies shoes with heels.”

You can also add your location to ensure that your site pops up for relevant queries from people in your area. Meanwhile, your brand name is also an appropriate keyword, which is why you need to place it on all pages of your website.

These are other strategic areas where you should place relevant keywords:

Home Page – When people search for your brand on search engines, your link will direct them to this page. It should contain words associated with your brand to ensure that the customers understand what you’re trying to sell.Slider – The slider is a moving banner that’s usually placed above the fold, which is at the top of the page. This is the ideal place to put seasonal keywords for promos and such.Sidebar – This area typically contains archives or the latest posts. The titles of your articles should include relevant keywords.Footer – Your footer design must provide information on your business. It’s also for navigational purposes, which is why it includes shortcuts to other parts of your domain.



2. Lessen Visual Clutter with White Space

Some companies bombard web visitors with information in the hopes of increasing engagement or sales. However, visual clutter will only put off your customers and make them abandon your site.

Allow for the appropriate amount of white space on your website. These blank areas may seem useless, but they send break signals to the brain, which allow people to process the information that they read.

3. Use a Responsive Design

Responsive design is a web development approach that enhances the mobile-friendliness of your website. It stemmed from a need to cater to the preference of today’s consumers.

Most people browse and search for stuff on their phones. Online shopping has also boomed in popularity, with a significant portion of customers purchasing products through apps.

Again, businesses must keep up with the times and understand the buying habits of their target audience. If most of your clients are teens and young adults, you should ensure that you use responsive design when developing your website.

4. Make Navigation Intuitive

There’s a reason why most websites look the same. Most sites have the home, about, and contact pages as well as the blog portion.

In each of these areas, there’s the header that displays the navigation menu, which contains the links to other parts of the domain. You can also find the sidebar and the footer in every one of these pages.

Site structure is crucial when planning the design of your website. You have to map out each of the pages that you want to have for your domain. With this, you ensure that Google and your web visitors are directed to the right content when they click on a particular link.

5. Compress Web Elements

Page speed is another vital element that you should think about when designing your website. Users nowadays want instant results. They want to view your site immediately after clicking on your link.

Ride their interest by ensuring that you compress web elements, such as images and videos, to make your website load up quickly. You can also take advantage of caching, which temporarily saves web files to make it easier to retrieve once the user revisits your site.

Conclusion

A website is a valuable tool for your business. It allows you to reach your target audience no matter where they are in the world.

When designing one for your brand, you should ensure that you optimize strategic areas with relevant keywords, add white space, use responsive design, make navigation intuitive, and compress web elements to cater to the demands of your site visitors.

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A Preview Of Investment Banking

Investment Banking is one of the tougher industries to pursue and make it in.

Especially as most do as a first job.

It’s an incredibly competitive field often with thousands of applicants and few spots, that are usually reserved for people with connections.

The industry forces you to perform and act in a high pressure environment with a lot of different forces on you to produce a high quality of work.

The life of an investment banker is not an easy one.

You’ll find yourself spending a lot of nights at the office, weekends working, and coming in early with minimal sleep.

It’s a difficult grind for most, and requires you to sacrifice your lifestyle and well being for 12 to 24 months.

So what does an investment banking analyst do?

They create and assemble a lot of documents, presentations, and memo’s.

They are there to create the documents needed to win business or close a transaction.

It’s an important position because the deals, and projects depend upon the numbers accuracy, in order to correctly analyze and evaluate the question at hand.

A lot of it is inputting, editing, and formatting, but someone has to do it.

And as the new employee, without much experience, thats going to be you.
So if you’re looking to become an investment banking analyst, get ready to sit behind a computer for a while, play around in the Microsoft applications, and spend a lot of time in the office making projects ready to roll.

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How to Get Started with Data Analytics?

Data analytics are becoming quite important in an age where technology is taking over business operations in an immense way. For businesses, it is becoming a pivotal contributing factor to growth and progression. 

The way you manage data can impact how you achieve growth as a business and ensures that you apply principles that require less effort in meeting client needs. Data analytics allows getting an in-depth look into information like buying stats, spending habits and allows you to understand the data you already have. Data analytics simply allows you to generate information that accelerates business growth.

Understanding data analytics

Simply put, data analytics is studying the information your business processes to gain insights into certain information related to your business. Depending on your chosen platform, you gain access to highly accurate data which can immensely inform the future of your business. 

Data analytics allows analyzing how your customers are behaving, market trends and other business-related trends. This information can then inform major business decisions, marketing campaigns and the transformation of operations. 

How can a business use analytics?

Firstly, you need to find an automated system to streamline data processing, and the system should be able to pull data from your website to produce a report. These systems can be software like Hadoop or Spark, which are quite popular. 

So, what are the differences between Hadoop vs Spark? Spark offer in-memory data processing while Hadoop has read from and write information from a disk. The key difference between the software lies in speed. Despite whatever system you choose for your business, you should find software that allows you to automate the process.

Who can do the work? 

If you can afford an IT professional, you should hire one, but if that is not the case – you can simply take matters into your own hands. As with anything, practice makes perfect and you can add something new to your skillset. 

Most software is easy to navigate with training and a bit of research. Being able to take matters into your own hands is very important in ensuring that you have a grasp on important data related to your business. 

Why data analytics is good for business

Today’s business heavily relies on data, and data is only increasing in value and although the data is free, it is valuable for your business. Reliable data and metrics allow you to develop your business according to researched information and you could make discoveries along the way that will grow your business immensely. 

Data analytics also allows you to closely analyze your competitors to get you a step ahead. Data metric tools can tap into external information and also analyze how your clients respond to new marketing campaigns and ideas.

To sum up

It’s simple, data analytics allows you to use your resources wisely, analyze how you are interacting with marketing and add efficiency. Businesses are being transformed by big data and it is important to catch up and learn new ways to measure how your business is performing.

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What are the Advantages of the Hard Discounter Business Model?

Hard discount retailers have a competitive edge in the markets by dint of quality and cost. Since consumers are always on the hunt for high-quality items at cut-rate prices, hard discounter business models are always a popular option. In the retail sector, hard discounters are tasked with supplying their customers with essential goods at deeply discounted prices. 

This is done without compromising the quality of the products, or the standards customers have come to expect. The multi-pronged challenges in the hard discounter business model warrant careful consideration from market players. For starters, these retail giants typically run a tight ship with efficient operations, low-price/high-quality items, a limited variety of products, and a higher ratio of affordably-priced, private label products.

Hard discount retailers must focus on limiting their range of products. To this end, less is certainly more. By doing this, hard-discount model retailers can offer a much higher volume of basic products for streamlined operations. Each category of products that is offered is limited, thereby ensuring that the company can make large purchases of each item to keep costs low. 

Lidl and Aldi Lead the World as Hard Discount Retail Operators 

Source: Pixabay No Attribution Required 

There are many examples of successful hard-discount retailers operating all over the world, notably the European favorite, Lidl and Aldi (a German corporation with multinational operations today). These companies have perfected a business model that works well by limiting SKUs on offer, thereby assuring these companies of frequent purchases.

Since hard discounter business models are in the business of low-cost operations, it’s difficult for them to establish customer loyalty programs. They don’t do frills as a rule, and this can have an adverse effect on customer loyalty in today’s times, despite the financial costs. However, with so many companies competing in the hard discounter space, it may not be disingenuous to start offering customer rewards. 

Since customers are motivated by savings, deeper discounts can certainly resonate with hard discount store customers too. Loyal shoppers feel that they deserve to be treated with kid gloves, since they are the lifeblood of the business. As such, various  hard discounter businesses are starting to consider their options vis-à-vis personalization for hard discounters in the form of hidden promotions which don’t compete in a ‘price war’ style-scenario with other hard discounters. 

Limited Variety of Products – Maximum Bang for your Buck!

It is highly irregular for hard-discounter businesses to stock a majority of brand label products. Rather, you will likely see a minimal percentage of all products in-store being recognizable brands. These are known as private-label products. By opting for ‘no name brands’, the companies can keep costs much lower than competing supermarkets like Publix, Walmart, Costco, and the like. Perhaps the most popular US hard discounter is Aldi – a no-frills brand. 

There are many benefits to implementing the hard discounter business model, vis-a-vis quality over quantity, and private labels. By focusing on quality, the types of products that are stocked with private label brands take precedence. That’s why there is a limited product range. If the supplier does not meet the high standards of the hard discount retailer, the supplier will be replaced. Since suppliers are eager to lock in contracts with hard discount retailers, they will try to comply with the standards that have been set.

Cutting Costs to Remain Ahead of the Pack with Hard Discount Business Model

Source: Pixabay No Attribution Required 

Hard-discount retailers typically turn over their inventory on a regular basis. This is the key to their success. Reduced working capital and frequent deliveries ensure that this business model works. It is possible to optimize this type of business by way of logistics practices known as cross-docking. This eliminates storage costs. Once again, Aldi comes up trumps in this regard since 90% of its products are distributed in this way. 

Efficiency of operations is another feature of hard discounter businesses, particularly during the checkout process where there is no lingering. The absence of plastic bags, limited customer support, pay-to-use shopping carts, no-frills displays, and smaller store sizes are all geared towards reduced costs of operations. By doing away with all of these costs, these companies can offer cut-rate prices on their limited range of products.

It is rare for these types of businesses to have any type of marketing activity, since this raises the cost of operations. Rather than spending money on advertising, these companies tend to focus on high-quality and low-costs as their chief calling cards. In other words, the business sells itself!

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