Do Business Well

Perhaps one of the best examples of caring for employees is Raymond Ackerman, who credits part of his success to his good relationship with them. He has always attempted to pay the highest wages and provide the best working conditions in the retail business. He celebrated his sixtieth birthday by sending cake to every one of Pick ‘n Pay’s 27 000 employees!

Keep out the red tape where possible - high achievers are intensely demotivated by it. If you nit-pick about unimportant aspects like taking leave you are on a losing wicket. Continue Reading »

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One of the first questions you should ask yourself is if you will be able to run and manage your new business with the resources you’ll have at hand. For example, if your budget projects that you won’t be able to hire help for the first three months, and you plan to work six full days a week by yourself to be available to serve customers, when will you find the time to do the bookkeeping, recordkeeping, marketing, Continue Reading »

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Here are some guidelines for directing your thinking about television.

Rule 1. Keep it simple. Use your micro-creativity. Get inside your visual and maximize it. One idea explored in depth is more effective than superficial exploration of a dozen visual ideas.

Rule 2. Make your first scene audience-involving. You have four seconds or less to capture your viewers’ attention. If you haven’t accomplished it, your competition will.

Rule 3. Be larger than life. Exaggerate. Get as close to your product and the action as you can. If you stand back at a medium distance, you never really come in contact with your product. And neither does your audience. Continue Reading »

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It would be hard to overestimate the importance of standards. And by “standards” we are not referring to moral or ethical standards. We mean languages, symbols, conventions, scales. These are the DNA of civilization. Without our ability to devise and then accept standards, we could never have developed such a complex society.

Standards enable us to communicate. Each language is simply a shared set of standards. If you don’t share someone’s grammatical standards, and if you cannot agree on what certain symbols mean, then you can’t speak that person’s language. All communication, no matter what its medium, demands shared standards—just ask a Windows user who has tried to download a document from his Mac-bound buddy. Continue Reading »

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“Average thinking” not only leads managers away from excellence and awa_y from their top performers. There is one final, and perhaps most damaging, way in which it harms a manager’s best efforts. “Average thinking” actively limits performance. Jeff H., a sales manager for a computer software company, describes this debilitating effect:

“I work for a company with one goal: 20 percent annual growth in revenue and profits. We have it drummed into us from day one that 20 percent growth is how we will judge our success as a company. We’ve hit it for twelve years straight, and Wall Street loves us. I can see why the company needs to shoot for that number every year. I can see why Wall it’s hard. 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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No matter how many books you read, how many training programs you attend, or how many meetings you run, you can always improve your facilitating and recording skills. Professionals in any field know this. Famous athletes or performers are constantly experimenting, trying new techniques, striving for perfection which they know, no matter how hard they work, no one can attain. Even if you’ve been fortunate enough to receive professional facilitation training, if you want to become a topnotch facilitator or recorder, you will have to continue learning by yourself. Continue Reading »

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Even if you managed to obtain adequate finances for your business, one of the biggest traps is cash flow. Cash flow basically means the movement of money into your business (from the sale of your goods or services) and the movement of money out of it (to suppliers, the bank, other creditors and employees). The relationship of these two flows is very important. Many businesses go under because although they are owed a lot of money they do not have enough in hand to pay the bank/their own debts. There is nothing more frustrating than knowing you are owed 0,000 but not having enough cash in hand to pay for the weekly shop. Continue Reading »

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A contact plan describes in specific detail how you will contact prospects and customers over a period of time to meet your specific goals. Each contact plan should contain the following sections:

A Written Contact Strategy

Your contact strategy spells out your goals and describes how ongoing customer communication will be used to meet those goals. When thinking about your contact strategy, be sure to consider the online service imperative. What are you going to offer your existing and prospective customers in exchange for giving you permission to contact them? When Wegmans Food Markets developed its contact strategy, it focused on extending the service and customer-oriented approach that you’ll find in its retail stores to email communication. It has developed a contact strategy that is focused more on delivering relevant content and information than on selling. Its goal is to ensure that it provides its customers with notification of special produce, recipes, health tips, and more in order to simplify their grocery shopping and food preparation tasks. Continue Reading »

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What kinds of things will trigger contact? In some instances you’ll plan and schedule your contacts far in advance (such as annual sales). Others times you’ll be responding to one of the following situations:

• Consumer requests contact. A customer might sign up to receive a personalized monthly newsletter or send an email asking about a new product you’re selling. When a new subscriber signs up for eHarlequin.com’s newsletter program, she immediately receives a welcome message confirming what she’s signed up for and ensuring that she will know how to modify her personal preferences if she should ever decide to change the content she wants to receive. When eBags receives an email inquiry from a customer, a skilled customer service professional looks up any relevant information and answers all My eBags membership, product, or order-related questions by email within 12 to 24 hours. An inbound email from a customer regarding an order the customer would like to return even triggers a series of follow-up emails that are automatically delivered within a few days of each other. These follow- up emails ensure that the customer’s product return is picked up, and that a replacement order is processed satisfactorily.

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