Business Tips – Maximize Performance and Business Development Results

Strategy Plan One

August 1, 2012

Business Tips for the Entrepreneur

As you are midstream through harsh economic times, take the time to reflect on your current business operations.  Think about the small things that could be tweaked that can have the maximum positive impact on your business.  Here are some helpful business tips to maximum the output in your organization and in your business development.

Business Tips – Maximize the Use of Your Time

Time is definitely considered an asset when you are a busy, mult-taking entrepreneur. Delegate operational tasks to staff and area specialists as much as you possible can.  Free up your time for business management functions, business development, planning and implementation.  Institute shorter, more concise meetings and communications as much needed time savers for all.  Cut the slack time and concentrate efforts in a condensed shorter period.  Incorporate that into individual and team goals.

Establish Priorities

Clutter can occur in many ways from physical bunched up clutter to the mental clutter of massive workloads of relevant and non-relevant tasks.  Take the time to sort this out.  Getting organized on a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis should be a standard part of your business and of the action plans across all employees.  Encourage organizing and priority setting as part of the valued added side of your corporate culture.

Business Tips – Create a Constructive Environment

Feedback is necessary on all aspects of your business.  Ensure that you develop a culture of encouraging and valuing input from all levels in the organization.  Constructiveness is essential … when everyone puts on their constructive gear and behavior, everyone is “building” towards a common goal.  Feedback can be critical nature, but as team members put on the constructive hats, criticism turns to positive alternative idea and solution generation.  Problems and issues are better solved when the collective can feed into the solution.

Be Social

This business tip is not necessarily focused on spending massive amounts of time on social media.  Being social in business means networking, partnering, collaboration, team work.   Every business, every entrepreneur venture is vastly stronger when you and your team get out there and communicate and network with everyone.  Not all deals, partnerships and customers will automatically fall into your lap … you need to get aggressive and make the moves to communicate and network with others.  Remember that social media is only one form of communication and engagement with other businesses and customers.   Communications, marketing and business development occur in many ways outside of normal office functions and social media.

Business Tips – Be Helpful

As a leader, entrepreneur and community member be helpful to all and it will eventually return to you in spades.  Being a business leader is not a one-way street…. you need to not only receive but to give.  Your valued staff give their efforts and their time to helping you achieve your success.  You need to help your staff become successful through employee development, encouragement, recognition and in your acceptance of their needs professionally and in their personal lives.

When developing products and services for customers, remember this two-way street.  It’s not about just gaining revenue from clients.  You should be developing your business around how your products and services can first help the intended market, and meeting the needs of the consumer.   Revenue then potentially follows after successfully meeting the needs of the customer.

Plan well for maximum benefits and results!

Relevant personal and business development blogs and articles

• Customer Retention Strategies and Tactics
• Strategy Plan One – Entrepreneur tips

• High Performance – Star Qualities to Get You Noticed

• Small Business Tips – From Mashable
• Business and Economic Impacts of the Games
• Business Issues Faced in the Summer Months
• Young Entrepreneurs – Business Tips
• Business Intelligence – Keeping you Wired In
• Business Plan – The Next Steps
• Capacity Building in Business

• Marketing Tips for Better Customer Engagement and Results

Strategy Plan One

http://strategyplanone.com

Business information, resources and tips for the entrepreneur

© 2012 Strategy Plan One

High Performance – Star Qualities to Get You Noticed

Strategy Plan One

July 19, 2012

High Performance

Whether you are an employee in the private or public sector, or into self-employment, you need to set yourself apart from the pack.  To make a significant impact on your organization or industry, there are things you can do to achieve high performance.  Possessing and demonstrating qualities will ensure you stand out from the competition, internally and externally.

For the most part, personalities get noticed, but other characteristics and qualities gained through experience can make you shine through.  Your qualities can assist in your performance, but can also rub off also in the higher performance of employees, teams and business itself around you.

High Performance Qualities and Tips

Here are some qualities and tips to performing at a high level and getting noticed:

• Demonstrate excellence in everything you do, strive for excellence and encourage all to achieve excellence
• Set aggressive, achievable goals and demonstrate dedication by hitting them
• Seek and implement continuous improvements for yourself, for your team, for your business
• Be genuine, truthful, honest, respectful and fair; uphold strong values and ethics and treat others as you would want to be treated
• Create an open and transparent environment around you; staff, stakeholders and customers will want to go to as you have gained levels of trust
• Keep emotions in check
• Be consistent in your responses, decisions, and in your daily work
• Be an example of collaboration, partnership building, encouraging team effort
• Rely on other’s expertise; be noticed for calling upon others for their value-added advice, opinions and recommendations
• Value everyone’s input and feedback
• Lead by example
• Be energetic, enthusiastic, creative and innovative
• Be loyal to colleagues, staff, customers
• Hit and make the deadlines, be on time

More on personal and business development:

• Social Media Jobs – What Social Media Companies Are Looking For
• Productivity – 6 Small Steps For a More Productive Day
• Fathers – Great Dads, Great Mentors
• Positive Words – Business Communications in a Positive Way
• Goal Setting – Keeping You Going in the Right Direction
• Presentation Tips for Business Meetings and Interviews
• Values and Ethics – Integrating Strong Principles into your Organization

More business blogs of interest:

• Business Plan – The Next Steps

• Business Intelligence – Keeping you Wired In
• SEO Guide to Higher Conversions with a Few Steps [infographic]
• EService, Social Media and Customer Service Trends [infographic]

Strategy Plan One

http://strategyplanone.com

Business information, resources and tips for the entrepreneur

© 2012 Strategy Plan One

Fathers – Great Dads, Great Mentors

Strategy Plan One

June 17, 2012 

Fathers, Our Valuable Mentors

As Father’s Day is upon us, the great things our Fathers have done for us come to mind.

Not only do Fathers provided the ongoing, loving support in raising the next generation to be productive member of families and societies, but Fathers have also provided their daughters and sons with the necessary business building blocks.

Here are some examples of the business skills and traits Dads passed on to their kids:

Learning Diverse Operational Skills

Through much experience and learned skills, many Fathers emerged as jack of all trades and in turn, transferred skills and training to the next generations in areas their kids may never have taken in classroom training.  Throwing tools into the hand of a more educated, more schooled generation, leading and demonstrating on particular trades task in the house may have been par for the course.  Fathers would take the time to show us how things worked and some of the very essential life skills we all needed.  Many of us had these relationships where our Fathers promoted a continuous learning environment, whether it was related to school, work or in life skills.

Hard Work Ethic

Fathers demonstrated an unbelievable hard work ethic in the good times and the bad, and never seemed to give up or never let up.  Many of us were so motivated to continue the trend of working hard throughout our generation, supporting our families at all costs.  In most cases, we all wanted to be “just like Dad”.

Working Effectively and Efficiently

Although extreme efforts were experience by Fathers to achieve success, they knew how to effectively and efficiently work through tasks.  Through trial and error, more streamlined processes were developed and transferred on to the next generation.  It was advantageous to experience this continuous improvement, with tasks being completed in a  more timely, streamlined manner.  We all learned this process.

Dedication

We may have all experienced our Fathers working until the job or task was complete.  Whether it was your Father’s career, working on the house, or another specific goal, Dads  never seemed to give up.  In parenting us, Fathers expressed how important it was that we all be dedicated, otherwise goals and objectives would fall apart with uncompleted projects everywhere you looked.

Intuitiveness

Fathers often expressed gut feelings and gut reactions, mostly gaining these feelings and reactions through a series of learned experiences.  This intuitive nature of our Dads was observed by the next generation, and applied to our very own experiences.  With intuitiveness we were able to predict and be pro-active to certain business scenarios.  Fathers taught us to jump on things in advance knowing how some things could play out.

The examples of traits and characteristics could go on and on, with almost every aspect of  entrepreneurship originating in part from things we learned from our Fathers.

This Fathers Day, love and thanks go out to Dads for being loving Fathers, for being great leaders and transferring the necessary business skills that helped us all to be successful.

Strategy Plan One

http://strategyplanone.com

Business information, resources and tips for the entrepreneur

© 2012 Strategy Plan One

Best Practices – Encourage, Promote and Share Best Practices

Strategy Plan One

March 28, 2012 

Best Practices

In your business or organization, teams and units work to find effective and efficient operations, methods and procedures.  Most of the time through the normal course of business evolution, teams find brilliant solutions.  As a leader it is in your realm to bring teams together to encourage them to share best practices, to bounce great ideas off each other, and to create a constructive learning environment.

The sharing of best practices across multi-functional teams is one method of implementing continuous learning and improvement processes.  Success is achieved at many levels when best practices are shared and implemented across business units.

Identification of Best Practices

As a leader in your business you may note differential results between units that do the same work.  In your regular meetings and briefings, investigate the methods and successes that are isolated or behind the scenes.  Best practices may be revealed from frequent communications and engagement with individual staff members and with teams.

Encourage and Promote Best Practices

Great work and efforts should be recognized.  Incorporate recognition in your organization as a way to illustrate appreciation across colleagues.  Promote an environment where teams can openly share what works well for their units.  Promote an environment where teams can learn.  The combination of sharing best practices and open learning environment spells potential success broadly across the organization.

Best Practices Forums

If your organization is large, establish a formal setting for the sharing of information and effective practices.  Forums or working group meetings assist in bringing large groups together to share a broad array of topics.  Structured, these forums can result in improvements to cross-functional units that are not related, such as an administrative efficiency that improves the general operation of all units.

Intellectual Property

As a leader ensure you identify any process, product or design that may fall into your business’ intellectual property rights.  Pay close attention to the best practice or method as it may warrant protection of intellectual property.  Investigate whether patents, trademarks and copyrights should be filed with your Federal Patents office.

A very effective way to improve your organization across individuals and business units is to share and implement best practices.  Allow your professional teams to help others be successful with results-based best practices.

Strategy Plan One

http://strategyplanone.com

Business information, resources and tips for the entrepreneur

© 2012 Strategy Plan One