1. Five Must Haves For Your Company's &ldquo About&rdquo Page Automatically
2. Five Must Haves For Your Company's &ldquo About&rdquo Pages
3. Five Must Haves For Your Company's &ldquo About&rdquo Pageant

All companies that have a need for employees to travel should have corporate travel policies in place. With travel getting back on its feet after the COVID-19 pandemic, there is no better time than now to review, and if necessary, revamp your corporate travel policy.

In order to effectively move your company from domestic to international, there are a few factors you’ll need to consider in order to have a smooth transition. To that end, here are five must-have pieces you’ll need before expanding your business to a global marketplace. 5 Must Haves for your Corporate Travel Policy On Jan 18, 2021. All companies that have a need for employees to travel should have corporate travel policies in place. With travel getting back on its feet after the COVID-19 pandemic, there is no better time than now to review, and if necessary, revamp your corporate travel policy. 5 Must-Haves in Your 2021 Financial Plan. The Motley Fool is a multimedia financial-services company dedicated to building the world's greatest investment community.

Whether it’s setting guidelines for spending, how to book hotels and flights, required health and safety measures, or how to track reimbursements, it’s a necessary guideline for companies. And while it’s not always the most fun to have to enforce, it’s an effective way to set in place expectations for corporate travel. Here are five must haves for your corporate travel policy:

Options and Flexibility

A great many employees are not fans of rigid policies and will go outside of them to book travel. To avoid that, your company should do research and negotiate terms with vendors in advance – a lot of negotiation! Give your employees multiple options for flights, hotels, and car rentals or services, and you’ll find that they more often adhere to the guidelines.

Expense Categories

When you write your corporate travel policy, make sure you are clear with the expense categories you list. You should list every travel and entertainment-related expenses that your company will cover, such as meals, hotels, alcohol, entertaining clients, etc. There shouldn’t be any confusion, and it should be very clear up front what is covered and what isn’t so no mistakes are made mid-trip.

Non-Refundable

Among some of the non-negotiables, dry cleaning, hotel staff tipping, in-room movies, excessive alcohol, etc. are often considered a no-no, depending on the location and length of the trip. Anything that your company will absolutely not pay for should be written into the corporate travel policy and reinforced with every trip your employees take.

Expense Reporting and Reimbursement Procedures

Five Must Haves For Your Company's &ldquo About&rdquo Page Automatically

Make it very clear from the get-go how employees are to track and report their expenses. Whether you use an online tool (with an associated app) or more traditional tracking methodologies, outline what back-up details the company requires and reimbursement options, such as direct deposit, check, or electronic payment.

Safety Information

As much as you trust your employees to go on their trip and return with meeting success, you need corporation and employee safety guidelines in place as well. In the age of pandemics, epidemics, and more, always have your employee’s travel details (flight, hotel), know what your insurance policies are with the hotel itself, and make sure required health and safety measures are met for each travel location.

For more information on implementing a Corporate Travel Policy, download the Dav El|BostonCoach white paper today.

In their book Start Your Own Business, the staff of Entrepreneur Media Inc. guides you through the critical steps to starting your business, then supports you in surviving the first three years as a business owner. In this edited excerpt, the authors offer tips to help you create a that truly represents what your company stands for.

Before you start designing a business card or picking colors for the letterhead of your new business, you need a logo. Featuring your company name, embellished with a little color and perhaps a few graphic touches, your logo is the most important design element because it's the basis for all your other materials: stationery, packaging, promotional materials and signage.

Through the use of color and graphics, your logo should reflect the overall image you want your company to convey. It should give people a feel for what your company's all about.

For example, say your product is an organic facial cream you'll be marketing to health-conscious consumers. Your logo should represent your product’s best benefits—being all-natural and environmentally sound. Creating a simple, no-nonsense logo using earth tones and a plain typeface will give the impression of a product that's “back to basics,” which is exactly what you want to achieve. Take that same product, and give it a slick, high-tech look with neon colors, however, and people won’t associate your logo with the down-to-earth product you’re selling.

The best have several things in common. Here are five keys to a successful logo:

1. Simplicity.

“A good way to think about simplicity is how many moving pieces there are in the logo,” says , author of Contagious: Why Thing Catch On. For instance, the old logo was rainbow-colored, while the current one is rendered in solid black or simple grayscale. That newfound simplicity makes the logo easy to look at, which customers appreciate. “The easier it is to process things, the more we like those things,” Berger says. For that reason, most brands want to present a simple aesthetic that's easy for consumers to digest.

2. consistency.

Your logo will communicate things to consumers about your brand, so you need to ensure that its design fits your company’s overall message. Consider the Apple logo again. Whereas Apple’s old logo connoted the free spirit of an upstart that was taking on staid tech giants, its current position as one of the most valuable corporations in the world calls for the sleek, futuristic logo it has now. “That’s consistent with the message that Apple wants to suggest: We are , but we’re friendly technology, we’re easy-to-use technology,” Berger says. If you’re starting a new company, Berger says, you should put some serious thought into your brand’s key characteristics and how you want to convey them in your logo.

3. Memorability.

Memorability is the quality that makes your logo easy for customers to recall, which leads to repeat customers and word-of-mouth, says Berger. Your logo should help them remember that you exist and what you stand for.

4. Remarkability.

The remarkability of a logo is what makes it “worthy of remark,” cutting through the clutter of your industry to reach customers, Berger says. TalentBin’s logo exemplifies this quality. The logo for the search engine that helps companies with talent acquisition consists of a cartoonish purple squirrel riding a unicorn. While it may seem ridiculous, it has a specific meaning. “In the recruiting industry, a ‘purple squirrel’ is a type of person who's really hard to find,” Berger says. “It’s a way for them to show they’re insiders, that they know the . If you’re an established brand, you may not want a remarkable logo. But if you’re a startup, you need to take a little more risk.”

5. Market testing.

Don’t just trust your gut when designing a logo, Berger says. Do market research. One way to test various logo designs is to put out a survey on a service such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. “We could throw up a quick study for an entrepreneur for $10 and, within a day, get a lot of feedback from different people about how heavy or light, fast or slow a logo would be,” Berger says. Get some independent feedback about whether your logo is saying everything you want it to say.

Logos come in two basic forms: abstract symbols (like the apple in Apple Computer) or logotypes, a stylized rendition of your company’s name. You can also use a combination of both. Alan Siegel, former chairman of Siegel+Gale, a design firm specializing in corporate identity, warns that promoting an abstract symbol can prove very costly for a small business on a budget. In addition, he says, such logos are harder to remember. “A logotype or word mark is much easier to recall,” says Siegel. “If you use an abstract symbol, always use it in connection with your business name.”

Five Must Haves For Your Company's &ldquo About&rdquo Pages

Trying to create a logo on your own may seem like the best way to avoid the high costs of going to a professional design firm, which will charge thousands for a logo alone. However, be aware that there are a lot of independent designers who charge much less. According to Stan Evenson, founder of Evenson Design Group, “Entrepreneurs on a tight budget should shop around for a designer, but don’t hire someone because of their bargain price. Find a designer who’s familiar with your field and your competition. If the cost still seems exorbitant, remember that a good logo should last at least ten years. If you look at the amortization of that cost over a ten-year period, it doesn’t seem so bad.”

Five Must Haves For Your Company's &ldquo About&rdquo Pageant

Even if you have a good eye for color and a sense of what you want your logo to look like, you should still consult a professional designer. They know whether or not a logo design will transfer easily into print or onto a sign, while you might come up with a beautiful design that can’t be transferred or would cost too much to be printed. Your logo is the foundation for all your promotional materials, so this is one area where spending a little more now really pays off later.