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Progress can be slow
All businesses have flaws in plenty (including mine and yours and anyone else’s you know) and as owners and decision makers we should all be working to eliminate them so we can have a near perfect business that gives us the best opportunity to deliver to clients what we set out to deliver in the best possible manner. While eliminating the flaws you might think that nothing seems to be changing but with time you would see the results more clearly. Look at It this way: You have a jar full of 900 red marbles (flaws) and 100 blue marbles (things you do right). As you start replacing the red…
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Decisions need to make business sense
As the German retailer Kaufland decides to pull out of its expansion plans in Australia, its time for all business owners to remember that just because you have made a business decision and are so much advanced and invested in it, it doesn’t always mean you have to go through with it at any cost. If it doesn’t make business sense anymore, could be time to re-evaluate. Could be time to pull out and use your resources elsewhere. #business #smallbusiness #economy #growth #plan #resources
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Seek the changes that help your business and you would find them
Ever thought of buying a particular car and then all of a sudden you seem to see the same make of car on the road more than before or ever thought of buying a home and then all of a sudden you seem to notice a whole lot of for sale boards? This is obviously your mind playing games with you but how about you play games with your mind then? If you are going to look for faults in your business or people, you would find them in plenty. If you are looking for negative in situations, you would see a truck load of them. How about changing the…
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Just passion is not enough in business.
If you see any business for sale listings, you would note that the most common businesses for sale are cafes/restaurants, fitness related or hair salons and despite what the listing might say to sell them, they are just not sustainable in the economic sense. They are all businesses highly driven by passion but yet chances of them failing are more than any other sort of business. Passion is important in business but just passion doesn’t do nothing. You need to add the ingredient of business sense too there. #smallbusiness #business #passion
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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…