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Coworking and its many advantages

With the advent of laptops and increasingly accessible and fast internet connections, working at home is a huge success. Many digital nomads take advantage of their freedom to change offices regularly. Some of these entrepreneurs choose coworking, the benefits of which are more numerous than one might think. This article will elaborate on coworking and office sharing experiences and their advantages.

Coworking saves money

Sharing offices often happens for economic reasons. Office rent can cost a lot of money per square metre, especially in big cities. Adding a few more workstations to the premises will allow you to optimize the work space, thus reducing the cost.

Similarly, there are many ways to diminish other fixed and variable costs associated with business management. These include the consumables related to the basic management of the company (coffee, electricity, internet, printer, maintenance expenses, etc.).

A group meeting room, with a reservation system, also allows you to fully exploit the space that you are renting.

Why not also consider sharing software licences? Creating an additional account is better than subscribing to a new full subscription.

If your businesses are successful and the coworking goes well, you can consider renting bigger spaces for your growing companies. It will enable you to increase the standard of your office without costing too much.

 

Say goodbye to loneliness

One of the main problems of entrepreneurship is loneliness. Therefore, another main advantage of coworking is the possibility to meet people.

By “crashing” into offices that are not your own, you can meet other people and no longer work alone. These meetings can often also generate additional business for you or your host. Coworking with people in a field of activity close to or complementary to your practice is a smart move. You can respond together to requests from customers or simply seek help from those around you.

 

Shoot for your business’ growth

If you trust and get along with your coworkers, try to organise regular meetings. For example, you can have breakfast together on Friday mornings and talk about what happened during the week. These meetings would allow you to discuss problems and think up solutions, like a team. This is a great way to come up with fresh ideas that you maybe would have never thought of alone.

Incubators are particularly suited to this practice and are the ideal place to find coworkers.

 

Prerequisites for problem-free coworking

For coworking to work, you have to get along with the other parties. This is why a lot of people choose to cowork with friends. However, strangers can also make for perfect coworking partners.

For instance, open spaces are places where everyone can work together as long as they follow the rules. The aim is to create an atmosphere of mutual respect and understanding. These rules should include noise restrictions and security measures. You can also create a contract to make sure that everyone abides by the rules you define.

If you can find the right coworkers and working environment, your business will evolve in a dynamic space. This is less socially taxing and more beneficial in terms of money and growth than working at home. Ultimately, the key is to follow the rules and get along with each other for a smooth coworking experience.

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How to promote your start-up in 2019

Communication is the key to promoting your start-up. However, getting a website, promoting via phone calls and/or advertising through the web are not enough in 2019. There is a lot of work involved in making your start-up known to its market/audience. Take a look at the alternative marketing strategies below for a glimpse 2019’s advertising trends:

 

1. Develop a content marketing strategy for your start-up

Content marketing is one of the best strategies you can turn to. Not only is it affordable, it is also effective and renders tangible results.

To attract the attention of your audience, you can create any kind of content. These can be blog articles, infographics, videos, podcasts, guides, white papers, etc. You can also distribute the same content through various forms of media. People are more likely to share interesting content on social networks and make it become viral. This will likely garner the attention of your potential clients and will eventually lead to sales.

However, any content marketing strategy requires special attention to SEO. It is essential to boost your visibility on search engines. You can call on SEO professionals for this task.

A content marketing strategy should allow you to:

  • Become a reference brand in your industry
  • Be credible in the eyes of netizens
  • Inform your audience about the products or services you sell
  • Improve your SEO and your site’s traffic

Make sure you know your target before you start creating content. You should also regularly measure the performance of your strategy to improve it.

 

2. Go for videos and webinars

The video format is currently extremely popular and versatile. You can use it to create all types of content: interviews, testimonials, presentations for your company, and even webinars!

You can present your company, the products or services you sell and their features and benefits live on Facebook or YouTube. This allows your audience to react in a more immediate way. You can also answer their questions and thus get closer to your customers. Make sure to promote your webinar a few days or even weeks in advance for a bigger audience.

As long as you make your videos or presentations interesting and lively, you are sure to reap great results.

 

3. Use influencers to advertise your products

Similarly to videos, influencer marketing is in full hype. While famous influencers are expensive to hire, you can still increase your visibility with micro influencers.

For this strategy to be effective, choose web stars who communicate to target that you want to reach. This will allow them to effectively promote your products to a wider audience.

Another advantage of using this method is that it will make your company appear trendy. Your audience will see your start-up as innovative and it will gather more interest. It also increases your chances to go viral and gain the attention of investors.

The above-mentioned strategies can help increase your visibility as well as your credibility. Depending on your target audience, some methods might work better or less well than others. Carry out research about your competitors and differentiate your business from them. While tactics will work for your 2019 audience, the future is still open to innovations. Therefore, do not hesitate to adapt your method according to the changes in your market.

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5 tips to improve communication within your team

Communication between the members of your team is crucial to make your company achieve its objectives. Difficult communication wastes time, creates distrust and becomes a source of stress for your employees. These are the ideal factors for mediocre results. However, there are several measures that you can take to make your employees work better together. Here are 5 tips to promote harmonious collaboration between colleagues:

 

1. Promote human contact

Considering the variety of internal communication tools that companies employ, human contact is often deemed negligible. Some of your staff would rather send an email than walk to a colleague to talk over an issue.

Try to encourage your employees to get together for coffee. They might also benefit from a small informal meeting in the morning to get the day going. These will allow for a lot more productive discussion than a series of virtual messages would. Moreover, meeting face-to-face strengthens the bond within your team.

 

2. Correction: ‘reasonable’ human contact

While face-to-face communication has many benefits, it can also have some negative effects. For instance, walking up to someone to ask them about various small matters can become quite overbearing.

Before interrupting a colleague, it is important to look for signs of his/her availability. One of these might be to check whether the door to his/her office is open or closed. Another sign that someone is focused on their work would be when they are listening to music via headphones. In case the person is unavailable, it might be best to come back at a later time or to send an email.

 

3. Organise meaningful meetings

Spending time together brings team members closer and helps to identify common interests. In meetings, employees get to know each other and communicate properly. While these will not make all of the colleagues friends, they are an opportunity to understand everyone’s motivation. This will in turn also work towards making communication much easier. Also, if face-to-face meetings are not possible, video conferences are still a viable option.

 

4. Hang out with colleagues

If you want to create bonds between your team members and improve communication, consider bringing them together for fun activities. Arrange lunches together or go for drinks after work. Team building events or simply relaxing days out can also be helpful.

These moments bring your employees closer to each other and definitely end up having a positive impact on their teamwork.

 

5. Encourage respect and honesty

Improving communication requires commitment from the whole team. In order to achieve this, you should establish a corporate culture that promotes respect and honesty.

When there is an issue, your employees should be able to express themselves as much as they should be listened to. If you send an email or use any other technological means of communication, take the time to reread your messages to check the tone. Thoughts may manifest differently in text than in real life.

 

With seamless, respectful and effective communication, your team will become more productive. It will be easier for your employees to work together towards a greater goal: the success of your business!

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Influencer marketing in Mauritius

Be they comedians, YouTubers, models or even bloggers, they are more importantly the new faces of Mauritius’ influencer marketing sector. For example, Vincent Duvergé and his friends can be seen at Chantecler, while Neeshi Beeharry is the brand new endorser for Patel Optics. Influencer: is it a promising job?

From YouTuber to influencer

Probably one of the most recognisable faces across the Mauritian Web, Vincent Duvergé, under 25 years of age, is already a major influencer. The young YouTuber quickly seduced his audience thanks to his parodies and mimics on the video platform. Today, brands contact him to promote their products. Making use of a familiar face that Mauritians already appreciate seems to be a winning formula for many companies.

What is influencer marketing?

Companies are increasingly using social media to get closer to their customers and gain greater visibility. Influencer marketing thus refers to the use of the popularity of influencers to promote products and services. This method is gaining in importance in Mauritius and throughout the world. Considering that 70% of millennials rely on the recommendations of influencers before making a purchase, there is no longer even a trace of doubt. The vast majority of young adults seek inspiration from influencers, and brands are not about to let this opportunity slide.

Driving trends and promoting sales

These social network “people” already have a substantial number of followers. This popularity enables them to influence a lot of users. This can be achieved through product testing or by becoming a brand ambassador. One such example is Laetitia Darche Sauzier, Miss Mauritius 2010, who is now an ambassador for Huawei in Mauritius. However, popularity alone is not enough to influence consumers’ purchasing decisions. These influencers must also act as true professionals.

What type of future awaits influencers in Mauritius?

Few Mauritian influencers can currently make a living out of this “profession”. However, the companies or agencies with which they collaborate regularly send them gifts and products to test. Depending on their popularity, they can be contacted by several brands. Joel Capillaire, who has more than 9,000 followers on his Instagram account, is hired by three brands. He even happened to go to Malaysia and Singapore to take pictures for a travel agency. However, income is not stable and until this concept grows in Mauritius, most of the influencers have another simultaneous occupation.

Influencer marketing on a worldwide scale

Nevertheless, at international level, a large number of influencers manage to succeed. Swedish blogger Lina Lindholm covers 100% of her life costs through the means of her Instagram account, which currently has more than 100,000 followers. The same applies to female YouTuber Lilly Singh, aka IISuperwomanII, who now has 14 million subscribers to her channel and no less than 2.5 billion views on her videos. A true success story for the 30-year-old, and certainly a glimmer of hope for our talented young Mauritians!

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3 ways to promote your start-up in 2019

Every year, thousands of start-ups are born and you might be one of them. While you may have found the right way to develop your business, you still have to work on gathering an audience.

Good communication is the key to promoting your start-up, but this year calls for new ways to attract attention. Strategies such as web advertising, telephone marketing and the creation of a website are simply not enough anymore.

Following the shift in trends, new marketing strategies have been developed. Here are some of them:

 

Develop a content marketing strategy

Content marketing is one of the first solutions you can turn to. Apart from being extremely affordable, its benefits are also more effective.

You can create any kind of content to attract the attention of your audience. From blog articles to infographics, including videos, podcasts, guides and white papers… you have a wide choice! Having various types of content will increase the chances of them being shared on social networks and going viral.

You can go even further by transforming one type of content into another. For instance, a video can be created from various blog posts. This will allow you to capture the attention of a larger audience around the same topic.

However, any content marketing strategy that you decide to implement should go through SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

Being careful about SEO will be essential to boost your visibility on search engines. To ensure that your content is optimised, you should firstly try to learn more about SEO on the internet. You can also turn to SEO professionals.

After creating your content and optimising it for search engines, you will have to promote it. You can do so via your site, in newsletters or on social networks.

A content marketing strategy should allow you:

  • To make your mark within your industry
  • To be credible in the eyes of netizens
  • To educate your audience about your products or services
  • To Improve your SEO and bring traffic to your site

Some tips

Make sure you know your target before you start creating content. Afterwards, you should regularly measure the performance of your strategy so as to improve it.

Creating webinars

Videos are currently a very popular format. They can be used to create an enormous variety of content: interviews, testimonials, presentations for your company, and many more. So why not webinars?

You can easily introduce your company to the world via Facebook Live or on YouTube. Videos also allow you to promote your product(s) or service(s) by stating its/their characteristics and benefits.

Some tips

Promote your webinar a few days or even a few weeks before actually posting for more viewership.

As for the presentation, it’s always a good idea to favour an enthusiastic tone. Netizens usually pay more attention to dynamic presentations.

 

Partnerships with influencers

Influence marketing is ‘the’ strategy which works for adverting.

While it may not be as strongly present on the Mauritian advertising scene as it is abroad, influence marketing is a very promising strategy. For this strategy to be effective, choose web stars who communicate to a target audience similar to yours. This will allow them to effectively promote your products to a wider audience.

 

As seen above, 2019 is not the year for widely spread marketing systems that are slow-rising. Instead, it calls for innovation and favours those who are strategically creative. So do not hesitate to try new ways to promote your start-up; it will need the boost.

 

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How to build an eco-friendly business

Going green is not just a thoughtful decision to take with regards to the environment. It also enhances the way customers perceive a company. For instance, for the same service, a client might choose one firm over the other just because it is eco-friendly. Firms can thus impress consumers and potential collaborators by opting to protect the environment.

There is no need to make drastic changes. A company can start shifting to eco-friendly means through some simple steps. Building a green business from scratch also involves the same ideas: rejecting practices that harm the environment to adopt those that support it.

Firstly, these are the materials that an environmentally friendly company should avoid using:

  1. Plastics that are made from polyethylene
  2. Multilayered packaging
  3. Styrofoam
  4. Polystyrene
  5. Fossil fuel energy
  6. Materials that cannot be recycled

A firm wishing to go green can use the following instead:

  1. Plant-based plastics
  2. Biodegradable plastics
  3. Alternative energy sources
  4. Recycled materials and products
  5. Recycled moulded packaging
  6. Post-consumer recycled polyethylene bags that are made from recycled waste

Just by changing the products that the firm uses, it is already positively enhancing its ecological footprint. In this sense, going green starts by producing less waste and favouring natural, recyclable energy.

This is only the beginning though, as many other measures can be taken to make a company eco-friendly. The list below shows certain steps than a firm can follow to drive its environmentally sustainable growth:

1. Invest in nature

Planting trees outside the office not only contributes to the protection of the environment, but also beautifies a building’s exterior aspect. Inside the building, plants can be used to purify the air. Scatter potted plants throughout the office, both in the lounge and next to employees. This will brighten up the atmosphere, make clients and new recruits more at ease and increase productivity to some extent.

2. Save energy

Switching off the lights when they are not in use decreases the amount of energy waste that a company produces. The enterprise can also opt for energy-efficient lighting instead of incandescent bulbs. At the same time, it can choose to replace old equipment and machinery with new, eco-friendly items. Adopting this practice also helps to save money on the electricity bills, resulting in an additional fund. This extra money can be used to better the company or to further finance the firm’s green venture.

3. Opt for electronic data management

Getting rid of unnecessary paperwork can significantly reduce a firm’s negative impact on the environment. Computerise as much data as possible. This is not only eco-friendly, but also saves money as there is no need to buy as much paper anymore. Recycling used paper which is no longer needed is another green practice.

4. Reduce oil consumption

A company will truly be environmentally friendly when its employees also adopt this value. For instance, carpooling is a good way to save oil and money. Public transportation and telecommuting are additional options that can be considered.

 

This is only a beginning. Many other measures can be adopted to build an environmentally sustainable business. It is never too late for a firm to decide to go green. The first step can be small, but its impact will undoubtedly be impressive.

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Launch your start-up in Mauritius

When you think about launching your start-up in Mauritius, various questions and doubts arise. Will you get funding? Does Mauritius have a market for your business? Will your start-up be able to grow within the island? However, despite its shortcomings, Mauritius may be just the right place to launch a start-up.

Helpful development schemes

Mauritius offers several development programs to help entrepreneurs in their venture. Schemes such as the SME Partnership Fund, the Mauritius Business Growth Scheme and the AFD Green Lending Scheme are available to business launchers. They can assist in both the opening and the growth of a start-up. Another way through which entrepreneurs can get support is incubators. These organisations specialise in the nurturing of a business. This includes, but is not limited to training, funding, legal assistance and the provision of office space.

The Mauritian market and growth opportunities

As a developing country, Mauritius is hungry for and open to new ideas. Innovation is fuelling the booming technological sector and creativity is being sought out everywhere. Now would therefore be the best time to introduce your idea and to try it in a start-up. Many young entrepreneurs have tested the waters, tasting sweet success. Some of them are Blast Burson-Marsteller, Focus Events, Sweat and Laugh, amongst others. As the country continues to develop, it will rise in terms of economy and innovation, providing further growth opportunities to Mauritian businesses.

Beginner friendly environment

Aspiring entrepreneurs who want to launch their first business will find Mauritius to be right up their alley. If you are Mauritian, you can count on your familiarity with the country and its citizens for a pretty smooth start. Mauritians who open their business on the island already have an idea about what their market will welcome or reject. They also benefit from the support of their family and friends, which is an invaluable asset. Before becoming a fully-fledged enterprise, start-ups often have to go through trial-and-error phases. While some aspects of a new business may pass with flying colours, others may fail. Dealing with failures is hard for anyone, even more so when in an unfamiliar place surrounded by unfamiliar people. As such, it is always a good idea to start in a familiar environment.

Foreigner friendly too

Favourable conditions also welcome foreigners who wish to launch a start-up in Mauritius. With the country’s low-tax jurisdiction and investor-friendly environment, the process to open a business on the island is quite smooth. Foreign entrepreneurs can also benefit from the support provided by the schemes and organisations mentioned above. Since Mauritius is a small country, it can also be a perfect test location for a start-up. Trying out an idea can be risky depending on the scale at which the test is carried out. Therefore, reducing the impact of the success/failure by testing in a small area can be beneficial to new businesses.

While Mauritius is small, it is a fertile hub for entrepreneurs. Its current status as a developing country prompts further growth, offering the right environment for the launch of start-ups. Whether you are enthusiastic or hesitant about opening your business, the advantages and opportunities that the island provides will undoubtedly be beneficial to your venture. So, ready to take the first step?

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Alexandrine Maigrot – Turbine’s Start-up Coach

Turbine is glad to have Alexandrine Maigrot as one of our Start-up Coaches. Alexandrine is coaching Nathalie, founder of Feuilles et Fleurs. We are pretty sure that her years of experience will benefit our start-up in the best way possible. Alexandrine shares her journey with us.

Alexandrine, please tell us about you.

I was born and raised in France, before settling in Mauritius. Through my professional activities, travels and various trainings, I had the opportunity and pleasure to open up to different cultures, all equally enriching.
With an initial Bachelor’s degree in Economics, Business Management and Marketing (advertising and international trade option), I started my professional career in large groups, notably as marketing manager and product developer.
In my jobs, I have always allocated space for creativity and attached particular importance to employee initiatives and personal development, accompanying it to the best of my abilities and skills.

Share with us your professional journey and your experience with entrepreneurs and start-ups so far.

Passionate about entrepreneurship and project developments, I made it my job, creating my own company to support and guide other companies, and also personally undertaking projects with partners (financial or operational).
Thanks to my 30 years of professional experience, various project accompaniments or implementation and a further training in Coaching (School of Anne France Weyl – Hedo coaching), I am committed to putting my skills at the service of other people to enhance their performance by accompanying their projects and providing individual  coaching, collective or organizations, with a certain attraction for the world of entrepreneurship.

I use my creativity to help my interlocutors develop their full potential and thus help them to meet the personal and professional challenges of our time.
I’ve been summing this up lately as “passing on knowledge to” doing with what we have, what we are to move from the ordinary to the extraordinary. »

Why have you chosen to be a Turbine’s Start-up Coach?

Working with Turbine and Start-ups is a pleasure in the sense that it meets my values.
I fully support the concept of Turbine, which provides guidance and expertise to new entrepreneurs and helps them spread their wings!
It sometimes seems difficult and complicated to start a business especially when you’re “alone”. Turbine offers the necessary coaching, networking opportunities, expertise, and support to entrepreneurs in their difficult journey. It is, in my opinion, an incredible chance for new entrepreneurs who will know how to seize this opportunity.
The experts and coaches accompanying these young entrepreneurs, within the framework of Turbine, provide their assistance to the development of projects and new ideas, which may become businesses that might not have been born otherwise. This can surely enrich Mauritius’ economy and reveal new entrepreneurs’ talent.

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15/02/2019: Free Business Coaching

Have business ideas or want to discuss about your entrepreneurial projects?

Our business coach is here to help you out.

Get a taste of how Incubation program coaching works.

Book an appointment

 

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