Small Business
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6 things to do when you don’t have cash reserves and find business not to be as usual
Would be nice if we all had built cash reserves to deal with the kind of uncertain economic time we are living in at the moment. Truth is most of us haven’t built up the necessary cash reserves. Here are a few things small businesses can do today to help themselves: Ask debtors to pay quicker than they normally do Ask the creditors if it is possible to push the payment explaining your situation Have an honest chat with your team and be 100% transparent if their hours need to be cut and explain why and keep them in the loop as things change. Look for new sources of revenue…
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Putting your money where your home is
There is always need to support your local businesses but if a disaster strikes or the economy is not going well the need to buy local and support local small businesses multiplies. Outsourcing services to overseas providers, sourcing cheaper ingredients or importing products might save you a few dollars but at times as business leaders we have look at the bigger picture. Let’s give the local businesses a chance and source locally if the products or labour is available locally.
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Same Difference
Looking for flights for future travel I was comparing flights on a couple of sites. To my surprise the same flights were 3.7 times higher on one of the sites compared to the others. Flights have become a commodity and surely there was no difference as both were exactly the same classes and same times on both the sites and no there was no specials or anything. Businesses have invested heavily in technology over the years but if you don’t get a simple thing right, it can cost your business heavily. This is not a rant hence no naming of the respective brands involved.
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The need for decision makers to understand a business
A successful business that has been going from strength to strength has to provide the banks with their business plan as part of their general review on a periodic basis. The bank manager says that the business plan is the same as the one we provided in the last review. My client and I explain that the business has been showing tremendous growth from year to year and thus we don’t need to change anything and keep doing what we have been doing. The bank manager says we can’t submit the same business plan as last review and he wants us to “Submit it in another format, even if the…
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4 business lessons from playing video games.
My school holidays were heavily used to play video games. We would play Super Mario Bros and Contra for hours. What a waste of time, you might think and I might just agree but unknowingly I was also training myself into four very important business mindsets: Know where you want to end up (rescuing the princess in the game Super Mario Bros) and keep trying. You might fail several times but you start all over again and not give up. If you are good enough, you would succeed in the end. Learn from others. Super Mario Bros was a game that could only be played one player at a time…
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In Scheme Of Things
Some of us are of the view that everything needs to be perfect and any discrepancy needs to be sorted out. It would be good if the business world would be perfect and we had all the time we needed on our hands but the truth is we just can’t get everything right. I use my “In scheme of things” stick to measure things very often when I need to make a judgement call and it has served me well so far. Look at the bigger picture at times and small gains or losses don’t matter as much. You can’t be underprepared but if you try to make everything perfect…
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Doing more with less.
We all (me included) want to have more. More money, more time, more clients, more holidays, and the list goes on. We at times don’t understand how more works. Say you want to increase your revenues. Your first thought might be “I can be able to do this by getting more clients/customers”. As true as that is, a smarter version of that might be “I have this set of clients/customers, how can I increase my revenue with not necessarily increasing my clients?” You would soon discover that you may be able to do this in a better way if you just went through the clients you have and then find…
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The need for your business to focus on the present and the future and not the past.
We very often hear phrases like “When we were young”, “When I started my business”, “When I was at university”, “We used to do things like this”, “Before we expanded”, “When I was 25 year old” etc. Unfortunately some of us just stay in the past and don’t come to realise that as wonderful and insightful as those stories are, they all have a past tense attached to them. What really matters is the present and the future. You don’t have any control of changing the past but you do have control of what you are doing in the present and what you would do in the future. So once…
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Value of customers and team
A partner in a firm decides to leave the firm so he approaches another firm to be a partner there. “How many clients are you bringing with you?” he is asked. “None, I am going to leave them there and start afresh” he says. He is told to get lost. Customers who buy from you are valuable, not necessarily yourself. A person thinks of buying a business, finds a good one and has a meeting with the seller. All is fine and and then asks if all the team are staying after he purchases the business. They are not willing to stay and would leave the business on sale, says…
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Be impressed not envious…
The nature of my work is that I come across many stories of success and super duper success. So what happens when I come across a client who is more successful than I am? I get impressed or inspired even. The other way to feel would be envy, which so many of us do feel when we see others being more successful than ourselves. Move ahead in life and take others with you on the journey. Don’t make it a race where you have to win or be better than someone else. Be inspired not envious!!!