Do Business Well

Having carefully assessed your own situation, and the type of accommodation you can offer, what can you expect of your prospective clients?

The flat and bed-sitter brigade

Provided you have a proper lease drawn up, renting out part of the house as a flat is the most trouble free way of having people under your roof. Failing that, properly equipped bed-sitting rooms should bring you equally trouble-free tenants. You need, of course, to have a large house to do this. And you may have to spend out capital in the first place to equip the accommodation. But over the months you should quickly recoup your outlay. Continue Reading »

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There are many definitions of service. To many, it means being friendly, delivering on time and attending promptly to the customer’s needs. While this behaviour certainly is a part of service, there is more to it. Continue Reading »

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Opportunity knocks

Life is filled with an abundance of opportunity. You just need to train yourself to recognise it. An Italian restaurant used to order a huge amount of mozzarella cheese from a rep for dairy products. The rep could not believe it when the owner told him all the cheese was used for just one outlet, so that evening he visited the restaurant. Continue Reading »

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From the surface, a glasses shop is nothing more than selling glasses. If you see more and more satisfied and loyal customers just like me, that glasses shop must be a top glasses shop. Continue Reading »

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Computer technology has brought much efficiency into the office. As a small IT business owner, I have to put the investment on office software into serious consideration. Office software especially industrial edition is very expensive. I can only afford one or two.

Phase 2 is good news for small and medium business owners. They provide the access IT software for our office employees, which we don’t have to invest a huge amount of money to pay once off to buy the life time usage of the software itself. We can pay month by month, which might depend on the numbers of employees who access this software. In my personal opinion, it is a smart way to manage the expensive software which I have to use but can’t afford. Continue Reading »

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Many organisations use periodic surveys of customer satisfaction. There are two types: Continue Reading »

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To increase the effectiveness of your presentation, allow your audience to get involved: to question, clarify, or to redirect what you are saying. You can allow questions before, during, or after your presentation; each time has certain advantages.

Taking Questions at the Beginnings

This assumes your audience knows a good deal about your subject and has questions before you begin. By getting these questions out ahead of time, you get an idea of what people want to know and can reassure them that their questions will be answered during your presentation. It allows you to tailor your material to the needs of a particular group. Continue Reading »

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The human touch is going to come back into fashion. It will (yet again) become the differentiating factor between services. Computers can deliver lousy service pretty much on their own. The very best of humankind needs to be coaxed and coached out into the open. People need to be showcased and supported.

On the way to the virtual world some businesses have a lapse of memory — it’s a kind of ‘Honey, I forgot the people‘ approach. Others adopt an Animal Farm like ‘machine is good, people are bad’ approach. If they adopt the attitude of pigs they should expect to end up as bacon.

Every business should understand that at heart the internet is not a machine, it’s the interaction of millions of people. In the end someone still says ‘I have something for you to buy’ and someone still replies ‘I would like to buy it’. The technology simply represents one set of people trying to sell to another group of people. Continue Reading »

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Service organizations will grow up that will enable demand for ordering and delivery to be met continually. Production will be the only variable. Let me explain. There is a relatively finite amount of purchasing power in the world at any one time. There is also a finite amount of time to view and order products. This means that if there was only one shop to order from it would be relatively easy to build a process and an infrastructure that could cope with the total demand for dealing with orders, complaints, payments, deliveries and returns.

This is how postal delivery services work. They know how many homes there are and organize delivery men to deliver each day to a certain percentage based on the general level of demand. Most of the time there is sufficient slack built into the system to cope with demand blips. This may just mean the delivery people working a little faster or longer occasionally. Continue Reading »

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It’s almost Meeting Failure-Proof

Keep in mind that most meetings aren’t very effective as they are now run. When you get a chance to facilitate or record, it will be because your group has agreed that it is worth trying something new. You are probably going to look good no matter what you do. The mere presence of a facilitator, recorder, and group memory will do wonders. Even if you think you have done a lousy job, your group may well be impressed just because it will all be so new. Explain that you are learning and will make mistakes. Ask people to help you stay in your role and remain neutral. You are there to help them. It’s their meeting and they share the responsibility for making it a success. Continue Reading »

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