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Archive - 2019

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1
Have a Great Holiday!
2
How To Implement an Effective Staff Review System
3
How Systems Can Change The World (or at least your sanity)
4
Why Understanding Finances Is The Secret Ingredient
5
How Properly Focused Marketing Can Change Your Business

Have a Great Holiday!

To all my wonderful readers – have a happy Christmas and take some time off! You deserve it!

I’m going to be back on the 14th of January with a great post on How Strategic Planning Can Save You From Being a Gibbering Wreck!

Make sure you put the email address teik@teikoh.com on your safe list by adding me to your address book on Outlook or create a contact in Gmail so that you get this fascinating insight into long term planning in 2020!

Go, go get some downtime, then let’s get back in January, refreshed and ready to build your amazing business into the success you can be proud of!

How To Implement an Effective Staff Review System

In a small business, the effectiveness of any staff you have is critically important.

Typically, small businesses employ a small number of people before they expand and grow. So in this period, the performance of those people is critical because of the leveraging effect of their impact. In much larger workforces, one slow performer is not as noticeable in the outputs generated.

It makes sense then that a small business should employ effective methods to ensure the best performance from their employees. These include the best recruitment procedures, to ensure that you not only choose people who have the skills you need, but who also fit into the way you do things in your business. These methods also include the preparation of an organisation chart or staff structure system with position descriptions so that everyone knows what their roles and responsibilities are. They also include the need to have a performance review system.

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How Systems Can Change The World (or at least your sanity)

There was the Stone Age.

In the Stone Age, small business owners learned the best ways of doing things. Then, they hired staff and they tried to get their staff to do those same things the way they had done them earlier.

Of course, their staff tried to follow. But the small business owner had other tasks to do, so they left their staff alone. But somehow, their staff could not do those things in exactly the same way the owner did them before. Something was always forgotten, one step perhaps, or a key ingredient. The small business owners got frustrated. They showed their staff again. Over time, their staff again kept missing something. In fact. left on their own, their staff often found different ways of doing those things. They thought it was better, but the owners did not agree! In fact, services started to suffer. Their customers just weren’t as satisfied as when the owners did things for them. They complained that each time they bought something, they got something different. I mean, when Fred ordered a Brontosaurus Burger, he expected it to taste the same every time. Yet, sometimes it was served rare, sometimes well done; sometimes it had lost of sauce, sometimes none. What was going on?

So the poor Stone Age small business owner had to keep re-training his people and more often than not had to go back and do it himself. This really was stopping his ability to grow and open more stores because he spent so much of his time training staff, correcting mistakes or doing things himself. He was driving himself insane!

Then came systems, and the world changed!

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Why Understanding Finances Is The Secret Ingredient

I’m going to talk about finances.

Stop!

Don’t delete the email or close the window! You really need to hear this, and I promise it won’t be boring!

OK, jokes aside, unless you are a finance specialist like an accountant or a bit of a numbers nerd, finances usually make a small business owners’ eyes go blank.

That’s understandable because if you are like most small business owners, you started your business as a subject-matter expert. You knew your stuff, that’s why you had the confidence to start your own business. You knew that at worst, you could back yourself on selling what you know. But you’re an intelligent person, so you realised that running your own business wasn’t like working for the man, where all you had to do was show up and do your stuff. That’s why, to your great credit, you end up reading websites or newsletter like this.

You knew you had to find out about business planning, you had to know about marketing, you had to find the sales prospects and work out the best and most efficient way to supply what you supply. You had to hire staff and then manage them.

And, you had to manage the finances.

Like most people who are not finance trained you probably bought software that was hopefully easy to use, and you copied the data at the end of the year and gave it to your accountant. As soon as you could afford it, you hired a bookkeeper and handed the operation of the accounting software to her.

I don’t like to tear you down, but that’s not good enough.

Here’s why. Read More

How Properly Focused Marketing Can Change Your Business

I don’t know any small business owner who truly says that they have too much work.

Even if they are at the upward gradient of their growth phase, more is always better, and especially when they start to peak or plateau, more is definitely better.

Yet, not many small business owners think about their marketing in any serious, consistent manner. Often, their growth is through a number of factors such as excellent service resulting in referrals, unique products or services filling a vacuum, a market devoid of good competition, even luck.

From time to time, they may find themselves in a quiet period so they “do some marketing” by calling clients they haven’t heard from in a while, putting an advertisement in the newspaper or a trade journal, advertise a “sale”, or send out leaflets. Then, for whatever reason (other than by accident such disparate and inconsistent marketing is working) the business picks up again, and the need for marketing is forgotten.

The problem with this inconsistency is that you are not in control, and in business, you should always try to be in control of your own destiny, especially at the front end of being able to control your income.

Read More

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