Category Archives: Strategy

Anything that has to do with strategic planning, vision development, forward thinking, risk management, and business planning.

Manage Your Energy & Your Choices (Be a Better Self-Manager)

Management & Human Relations, Operations & Efficiency, Strategy, , ,

Now there’s a thought?! As you plan your day and week, try evaluating the options and choices you have, and take into consideration the energy you need/want for each task.

We all know what it feels like to be stressed about “time”. You know, too many things to do and not enough time to do them in. If this sounds like you right now, you might be trying too hard to micro-manage every hour, often overfilling your schedule. This is a sure-fire way to set yourself up for frustration and disappointment, versus success.

Managing your choices and assessing wisely the energy and focus you need is a much more realistic and useful approach. You will be more inclined to have a better perspective on how much time you will really need to allot for each appointment or “to do” item on your list.  You will also quickly see the value of creating a cushion over the course of your day, to allow for the meeting that runs a little later or the road repairs that tie up traffic unexpectedly right in the middle of your day.

More positives:

•  The breathing space in your day will help you think more clearly, and recognize opportunities that you might have otherwise missed (being distracted by all that you still had to do).

•  Remaining in the moment will show more respect to others you are engaging with, and definitely give you more joy and respect in return too.

There are still a couple of other significant challenges people can face. Have you ever added tasks to your day just randomly (in reaction mode) without checking and prioritizing with your existing commitments? Or perhaps you added ones that shouldn’t have been there to begin with (i.e. those tasks belonged on someone else’s list)? I’m not saying that these things should never happen; there’s just a lot of wisdom in doing so with more thought than is often given.

To help you get a better sense of where your time is going and provide you a quick and easy way to see where you can tweak things, I encourage you to do what I call a Wellness Journal for one week.

 

From my book, Working From Home & Making It Work©

I initially created the Wellness Journal to help my clients and colleagues get a handle on their use of time—or as often was the case—get a handle on how and who else was using or consuming their time. As with many other tools I have developed or passed on from my mentors, the Wellness Journal has become an amazing exercise that I utilize regularly.

 

It’s very simple, and you can customize it the way you see fit for your particular circumstances. Detail is helpful, but not to the point where it will inhibit you from following through with the process.

 

Every one of us has 168 hours in our week, that’s 7 days times 24 hours.

 

I encourage you to pick a relatively normal week you can commit to—and write, type or record in some way, all that makes up your day. Note everything you do for yourself, for your friends, family, work, etc.

 

Quite likely, well before the week is up, you will see some areas that you can make adjustments in, to help things run more efficiently and productively.

Here’s to your success!

 

_______

 

 

This week’s guest blog is by Sheri Andrunyk, on Managing Your Energy & Your Choices, more insights of which you’ll find in her new book, Working from Home and Making it Work.

 

Sheri Andrunyk is Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Inspiring Speaker, Holistic Business and Life Coach, Author and Publisher. Her specialty is working with small business owners and entrepreneurs.

 

 

She has a passion for all forms of meaningful communication, and has expertise in providing invaluable guidance to her clients, colleagues, and community.

 

Sheri’s new book Working from Home and Making it Work discusses time and choice management, work/life balance and shares powerful insights on how we can become better self-managers, an essential component to success.

 

 

 

For more information and to download a free chapter, please visit

 

www.insightfulcommunications.ca

 

4 Conversations Of A Leader

Established & Growing Businesses, Management & Human Relations, Marketing & Branding, Sales & Business Development, Strategy, ,

Building rapport and having great conversations with customers, suppliers, employees, and everyone else you do business with is critical for sustainable growth. Plus better conversations can help build your referral base and your external sales force, a great thing to have as a small business.

 

Learn how to have better conversations for small business (and big business) success.

 

The subject matter expert is Stuart Knight, of www.stuartknightproductions.com

Build A One Page Business Plan That Pops!

Finance & Accounting, Innovation & Creativity, Management & Human Relations, Marketing & Branding, Sales & Business Development, Start Ups, Strategy, ,

A one-page business plan can be great if you are using the business plan more of an action plan for yourself, your partner, and your company. It makes it easy to update, keeps the attention of the reader, and is to the point.

Another way to use a one-page business plan is to use it to generate interest from customers, potential partners/employees, suppliers, and initial interest from financial companies.

The video is a quick overview of the main components of the one-pager & then how to make the one-pager a little bit different (add POP!)

New Year’s Resolutions for Small Businesses

Strategy

New Year’s is a time of reflection. What went well? What didn’t? So New Year’s resolutions aren’t only for individuals, they are a great idea for small businesses too.

For individuals, a typical resolution would be to lose weight, eat healthier, save more money, spend more time with people you care about.

For a small business, your New Year’s resolutions could look something like the ones below:

Better Customer Service: Get your customer impressed with your product or service by going over the top with your delivery. Maybe this includes guarantees, some extra services, loyalty program, or better employee training.

Higher Employee Retention: Employee turnover can sap a business’ time and money, especially for a small business. With less to offer in terms of large pension plans and benefits, a small business often has to fight harder to keep its best employees. A retention plan, performance incentives, employee events, collecting employee feedback, and staying in touch with everyone are some basic ways to get started.

More Customers: Marketing awareness, sales and referrals will be the key to getting more customers in the door. If this is your plan, make sure you have a solid way to deliver consistent service to these incremental numbers.

More Customer Retention: Keeping 100% of your customers is almost impossible, as even the best financial planners lose 10% of their clients each year and have to plan for this with incremental sales. However, to focus on retention you need a solid communication plan with your existing customers, you need to get feedback to improve things to what they are looking for, and you need to never rest on your laurels.

More Margin: Focus on the customers with the highest margins today, and go after new business that is similar to these types of customers. For instance, if you find that you get the best margin business as an IT company from accountants, target more accounting firms. As a minimum, start saying ‘no’ to customers who don’t meet your margin requirements. Remember, one way to increase margin is to reduce costs, don’t overlook this option!

Do More With What We Have: Growing the business doesn’t mean that you only have to get more customers. You could just get more business from the customers that you already have. As a salon, you could be giving a customer regular haircuts, but this year you focus on getting them to use your for dyes, styling, and facials.

Work Life Balance: One of the most common reasons for a business closing its doors is that the owners have become burnt out. Make sure that you have strict guidelines to your own working hours and do things outside of work to make sure that this doesn’t happen to you.

The final thought….

…New Year’s resolutions are famous for not being followed and many people have the same resolution year over year. This is one similarity a small business doesn’t want to have!

To Patent Or Not To Patent

Regulations & Legal, Strategy

Think you have a milllion dollar idea that you want to patent?

Million dollar ideas are common. Almost everyone comes up with an idea that eventually becomes a million dollar idea.

So why not patent everything you think of? There are a few downsides.

 

1. Patenting is extremely expensive and you have to patent internationally due to globalization and sometimes that is simply not possible.

 

2. When patenting, you have to detail what is novel about your idea. Organizations including Coca-Cola and Caramilk have elected to not file for a patent as they feel their intellectual propoerty is better protected by simply keeping it a company secret.

 

3. Patents only work when you are willing and able to sue an organization that has infringed your patent. If you don’t have the funds or a lawyer who is willing to work with you on contingency, you aren’t able to leverage the patent.

 

However! Patents are extremely important where you need to protect yourself for the 20 year timeframe it supports (pharmaceuticals). Patents can be important when you need to register your idea before the competition does and blocks you out of the market. Patents are great when you have the financial backing to protect yourself.

There are other options to help protect your ideas.

 

1. Copyrighting.
Copyrighting applies to anything written. Copyrighting is cheaper (free) and applicable to software and code writing. You can add a copyright to anything that you have written.

 

2. Keep It Secret.
Follow some industry leaders and have policies that protect anything that you deem as intellectual property. This can be documentation, processes, programming, or ideas. Simply don’t let just anyone know what you know.

 

3. Continue Inventing.
You have to assume someone is going to find a way to copy you. So the only true way to stay ahead of the competition is to keep re-inventing yourself and stay ahead. If Apple rested on its patents, it simply wouldn’t be Apple!

Three E Pillars

Management & Human Relations, Strategy

There are many key pieces of a successful business, but the newest insight I was given fro a successful entrepreneur I would like to share. It is as follows;

“For all ‘improvers’ to keep in mind, the three E pillars of a successful team and business are…

1. Educate – pass on your learning and learn from others. Pass on your learning and experiences to your team members, subordinates, bosses, family and friends alike. Be humble in your learning and learn from others. Life is too short to learn everything ourselves firsthand; learn from others and teach others likewise.

2. Empower – empower your team with the tools and guidance to do exponentially better than you ever can.

3. Entrust – entrust in your team to do better than they know how.

Hope these three pillars serve you as well as it have served me in developing successful ventures.