Author: Stuff Business

Finding competent and qualified employees is a major challenge many businesses face in 2023. And once you’ve found them, having them stick around long-term is an even bigger one. Fortunately, there is something you can do as a business owner/employer that can increase your chances of hanging on to your best people: you can give them choices when it comes to the computer and smartphone hardware you want them to use to do their jobs. And I don’t mean a basic choice from the range of cheap desktops, laptops, and smartphones that your business bought to save on costs; I…

The only people who have not heard about Microsoft Teams are likely Amish or live undiscovered in the Amazon rainforest. They’re also very unlikely to read this page. For the rest of us, Teams has taken over, and now we spend far too much time (so much time) in virtual meetings with colleagues, clients, and even friends and family. Teams is so popular now that it was reported in early 2023 that 280 million people were logging into the platform daily. Virtual meeting fatigue aside, it’s a fact that Teams is pretty popular. But even though many of us use…

We’ve all been between jobs at some point. It’s not a lot of fun. Without getting too depressing, let’s just say that not having a job while still having financial obligations… sucks. This is also why job hunting is so stressful. That’s where online platforms can really help. LinkedIn, for all its quirks, is actually quite useful when it comes to getting your professional profile ‘out there’, because it is pretty much ‘Facebook for Professionals’. But more importantly, LinkedIn offers the added bonus of giving you access to companies that you might want to work at someday, as well as…

A question we see from people running a small business is how to get the word out about who they are and what they do. Our answer is digital marketing – digital is everywhere, and it’s easy to get started. As for where to start, that’s also easy: use the social media services freely available to you. You don’t even need to sign up for a business account with any of them to start – just start saying what you think will get your business the most attention, follow the accounts you think might be interested in what you have…

It’s been over two years since MTN announced AirFibre, a new wireless internet technology that the company hoped would allow it to reach more people in underserved areas. And by all accounts, it has seen impressive take-up. As of May 2022, Supersonic, MTN’s internet arm, claimed AirFibre had been deployed to more than 3.4 million locations across South Africa. We’ve requested updated figures from them and will update when/if they arrive. Still, 3.4 million a year ago is pretty impressive. Why is this awesome? Getting the internet to more people is always good, as it unlocks all kinds of potential…

Keeping office equipment running smoothly is one of those goals that all businesses have, but sadly, it’s something that many need to pay more attention to. It’s easy to forget about maintenance and services when everything works, but when office equipment stops working because it’s broken down, there goes productivity, sales, and profits. And nobody wants that. The solution is simple: keep an eye on your printers, photocopiers, laptops, monitors, networking, and POS equipment, and call in service technicians when anything starts going a little wonky. That will save you time, effort, and heartache while preventing your profits from walking…

We’ll let you into a little secret: buying the right networking equipment and setting up your own wired and wireless network for the purposes of doing business things isn’t all that difficult. You just need to know a few things before embarking on your networking adventures, and you’ll be fine. Okay, that’s a lie; we’re only saying this because we’ve been doing networking things for nigh-on three decades now, and it only seems easy to us. When starting out, there are a lot of things you need to know that nobody will tell you. Like the things we’re about to tell you in this article. If you’re…

ChatGPT took the world by storm when it launched in November 2022, amazing humans with its almost-human responses to our curious queries. But as time went on, and we got to know ChatGPT better, it became clear that ChatGPT could do a whole lot more than just hold up its end of a conversation. It could write poetry, translate text into any language, compose haikus, write essays, and even generate code in a programming language of our choice. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. And slowly, our wonder turned to trepidation. Or at least, it did for…

Many of us use PowerPoint or other presentation software on a near-weekly basis, if not more regularly. Based on personal experience with supposedly “interactive press sessions” that were little more than Death by PowerPoint, it’s clear that not everyone knows how to make good presentations that engage and inform the audience. And that’s important because what is the point of a presentation if it doesn’t do those things? So we’ve put together some tips that anyone can follow to make their presentations more “power” and less “pointless”. The content of this guide was put together from internet research and extensive consultation…

Outlook is probably the most feature-rich email client in existence, but some of its most useful features are buried deep inside the interface. That makes them hard to discover on your own, leaving a lot of people simply unaware that they’re even there. We’ve put this article together to show our readers that there’s more to Outlook than simply reading, replying to, and archiving emails. That’s because Microsoft has packed it with all kinds of tools, functions, and features for people to use to get more out of their email. It’s just a pity Outlook’s interface doesn’t do an amazing…