Do Business Well

Here are two examples of what can happen. Let’s say that you currently own your own home, which is worth $150,000, and it has a mortgage of $70,000. You also have stocks and other holdings worth $25,000. You intend to open the business with your savings of $20,000. After six months in business, you decide to close down due to continuous losses. You are out of cash and owe suppliers $40,000. You signed a lease that has eighteen months to go at $500 per month. You also failed to pay employee tax deposits of $10,000.

Your vendors, the landlord, and the government will go after your home, stock, and anything else that isn’t nailed down to collect the $59,000 you owe. And they will have every legal right. Continue Reading »

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How do you find reps? Call the buyers you wish to sell. Tell them you’re planning to introduce a new line into their area, and you wonder whom they might recommend as a rep. I have never had any problem getting one or more suggestions from every call.

After you’ve amassed a list of potential candidates, call each one and do a brief telephone interview. Give him some background on your company and product to see if he’s interested. Determine if he has any conflicting lines (it’s usually considered a conflict of interest for a rep to carry the same items from two factories). Continue Reading »

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Set the Example

Your attitudes, priorities (or lack thereof), and business practices will have a way of trickling down. You shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the negative ones will trickle down in torrents, while the positive ones will try to defy gravity.

If. you feel that managers should not be clock watchers, then you can’t work nine to four-thirty with a two-hour lunch and every other Wednesday off. If you’re the first to arrive and the last to leave, it becomes embarrassing for a top manager to see your car in the lot when he comes and when he goes.

Do you want others to turn in reports on time? You’ll need to do likewise. Do you want your people to answer the phone professionally and cheerfully? Make certain you do. Is quality or service important? Can those in your organization tell that by seeing your reactions to quality or service issues? Ask yourself these questions on an ongoing basis. Continue Reading »

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5. Building a solid foundation: infrastructure required to manage your business

Just as you need a solid foundation for a building, so you need theright infrastructure for your business. This needs to be addressed ahead of time. Seriously, many businesses fail because they become too successful. Their infrastructure can’t cope with their growth and so their business literally falls apart. Don’t make that mistake. Clearly define what infrastructure will be required to run your business, both in the short and long-term. Let’s look at the different components of your business infrastructure:

• Premises: What is the physical capacity your business will require? What will be the optimal location for you in terms of closeness to your customers, major roads and the location of the competition.

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1. You’ve called your staff together to explain that more cutbacks will necessitate reassignments and reduced benefits. They vent their frustration with remarks like, “Why didn’t we hear about this earlier?” and “How come managers don’t have to double up too?”
2. You are proposing a campaign to a client’s marketing department. They have not forgotten your staff’s blunder in the previous campaign and roar disapproval: “You promised that the lasttime—why should we trust you now?”.
3. You are presenting a new promotion to the sales force. They interrupt with challenges and criticism. “How do you expect anyone to believe that?” and, “You’ve got to be kidding if you think I’m going to lug all that sales literature around all day.”

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In an attempt to encourage more communication with her staff, a manager institutes a policy of taking a different employee to lunch each week. She also makes it a point to make the rounds every couple of days for informal chats. After a while she finds that employees are canceling their lunch dates. She also discovers that they find her visits intrusive and artificial.

In order to review the status of ongoing projects, keep everyone informed, and provide a forum where employees can speak their minds, a department head schedules daily 9:00 a.m. meetings. After the first week, attendance declines.

An administrator who advocates participative management sends employees a detailed questionnaire designed to elicit suggestions for improvement and announces a series of follow-up meetings. Employees respond with an “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude, and their response level is very low. Continue Reading »

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In any group of employees, you’re bound to find some who don’t hesitate to speak their minds, even if their opinions are unpopular.

This is not inherently good or bad. But you need to learn to distinguish between well-intentioned objections, which contain valid insights, and ill-meant dissent, which tends only to stir up conflict. You must find a place for the former and authority to defuse the latter. Some suggestions:

• Look for patterns. Not everyone who states a divergent viewpoint is really trying to cause trouble in the workplace. “Employees tend to build histories of conduct based on consistent intentions,” observes Dr. Ralph H. Kilmann, a professor of business administration at the University of Pittsburgh and author of Beyond The Quick Fix. When someone establishes a track record for taking issue with company policy, that record usually shows a pattern in the way it is expressed.

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Whistle-blowers—employees who believe their organizations are engaged in illegal, dangerous or unethical conduct and speak out about it—occupy a peculiar niche in America. On the one hand, the public applauds their courage. On the other, it stands quietly by as the whistle- blowers are punished and ostracized for their revelations.

• Allan McDonald and Roger Boisjoly, engineers at Morton Thiokol, testified about serious technical flaws in the space shuttle Challenger and were promptly transferred to menial jobs.
• Herbert Rosenblum, an official of New York’s Human Resources Administration, revealed that 14,000 people who had died or moved away were still on the city’s Medicaid rolls. His reward: demotion and a pay cut.
• Several years ago, Charles Atchison, a quality control engineer at a Texas nuclear power plant, brought numerous safety infractions to the attention of a regulatory board. He was fired and blackballed.

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Because it’s so easy to capture, store, process, and redistribute digital information, it is becoming almost impossible to police trademarkand copyright infractions on the Internet. Consider for example, the problem of the Digital Fan.

The digital fan: Let’s say you own a major rollerblade hockey team, the Hanover Hippos. Your team has won the world championships three times in a row, and made you millions of dollars selling merchandise and information about the Hippos. You’ve created your official Hippo Home Page, and receive more than a million hits a week. But something is amiss. Many of your fans are starting to set up their own online fan clubs. They’re plastering the Hippo logo all over their pages and posting statistics and player profiles downloaded from your site. As well, fans of your archrivals, the Neustadt Nimrods, have set up anti-Hippo sites filled with lewd images which they have made by digitally altering your logo. Continue Reading »

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But suddenly, it takes off. In practically no time the building is in the air. Network marketing is very similar.

Your dreams can come true

Pick up an American magazine on networking. What does it tell you? ‘Network marketing will provide you with riches beyond your wildest dreams, a car that is the envy of your neighbourhood, a dream home that looks like a palace or overseas vacations at the snap of your fingers.’ That kind of hype is irresponsible. The figures are grossly inflated and, ultimately, this kind of exaggeration leads to disillusionment and disappointment.

Experience gained from many network marketing organisations shows that the average, seriously committed networker will make the following ballpark figures:

• within three to 12 months: from R1 000 to R3 000 per month
• within one and two years: from R3 000 to R5 000 per month
• within three to five years: from R5 000 to R10 000 per month.

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