5 Effective Techniques to Get More Done in Less Time

June 23, 2010


People often say that once you have started your small business you can pretty much forget about your wife, girlfriend, kids, friends or everyone else that matter in your personal life. We tend to disagree. While it is true that running a business is no small task – they don’t call the owners Chief Everything Officer for no reason – there are ways by which you can get more done in less time and have time left to enjoy those personal moments.
Here are five techniques we have found useful in our experience in running the previous business as well as the current one.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Employees, Management, Operations Tagged With: , ,

Go Above and Beyond Customer Expectations

June 22, 2010


I came across this interesting article showing examples of excellent customer service from some of the companies you may already know. I am sure we all have experienced this type of customer service in our daily lives. Usually, it is easy to find this with small mom-and-pop businesses that are close to their customers and know them by names. We wrote one such example in my personal life not too long ago here.
We have come across some more well-known companies that strive to provide the best customer service every day. Below we have listed some of them along with examples of why they are famous for their customer service.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Customers, Employees, Marketing Tagged With: ,

Do you know Why your Customers are Dumping you?

June 14, 2010


If history is any guide; you will lose about 20% of your current customers by the end of the month and 40% by the end of the year. I know it sounds terrible; but that’s fact of life. While 30-40% of sales for any business come from existing customers; the rest comes from customers using revolving door. They will come and go for a variety of reasons.
This customer churn can be costly for your business. You need to constantly recruit new customers to fill the gap left by those customers who have dumped you. This costs money reducing your profit. It is said that it is 4 times more expensive to get new customer compared to retaining the existing one. We will look at the ways to stop customers from dumping you in a later post; but let’s understand why they leave you in the first place. The reasons are quite varied and some are easier to correct than others.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Customers, Employees, Management, Marketing, Operations Tagged With: , ,

5 Effective Techniques for On-boarding New Hires

June 11, 2010

Onboarding
Many business owners miss an opportunity to get the most out of new hires because they do not have well-thought plans to acclimatize new hires quickly. First few days of new hire play a large role in determining whether the person will contribute effectively to your business or will be dud.
In the previous posts we have identified several insights for hiring best employees and reducing staff turnover. Our goal here is to get the best use of your employees once they are hired.
I know several managers and owners who would give a written training manual to the new hire and let him figure out how things are done. In our experience nothing is more effective than on-the-job training by letting the new hire dive right into operations from day 1. In addition, there are several other techniques you can use to get the most out of your new hires. Below we show 5 most effective ones:
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Employees, Management Tagged With: ,

10 Questions You must Ask before Hiring an Employee

June 10, 2010


In our previous post we mentioned that hiring best employees makes a big impact on how your business performs. We also showed how to go about hiring best employees for your business. However, we have felt that many employers are at a loss when they think about what questions to ask in the job interview. They end up talking about different things before wrapping up the job interview and making hiring decision based on their gut.
In this post we give you ideas on how you can to go in the interview well-prepared plan; so that you can get a clear picture of the job candidate and make informed hiring decision. We also mention what type of personal quality of the job applicant they aim to find out (in parentheses). By understanding personal qualities you can get a pretty good idea of what drives the person and whether he will be motivated and successful after you hire him. Here are the questions:
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Employees, Management Tagged With:

7 Proven Techniques to Hire Best Employees

June 9, 2010

Hiring Techniques
It is fair to say that the owner of small business builds the business; but it’s the employees who make it a success. It has been our personal experience and those of countless other owners that if you want to make your business successful pay careful attention to who you are hiring. Hiring a “right” employee can improve your sales by almost 15-20%; while hiring the “wrong” one can bring it down by the same amount.
How do you make sure you are hiring the “right” employee? What are the good practices you can follow to ensure you don’t end up with someone who will bring your sales down? Here we outline suggestions that can help you do that.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Employees, Management Tagged With: ,

5 Low Cost Ways to Motivate Employees

June 8, 2010


Let’s face it. Motivating employees that are making pretty good salary is hard enough. Now try to do it for those who are making minimum wage in a small business and you understand the magnitude of the problem.
However, all is not lost in this battle. There are ways to motivate the employees who are working part-time, on a minimum wage as long as you know what makes them click.
Below we highlight the 5 best ideas we have collected from our own experience and those of our colleagues and business partners.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Employees, Management Tagged With: , ,

Effective Techniques to Reduce Employee Turnover

June 7, 2010

Employee Turnover
If you own a small business and are not seeing employee turnover of greater than 30% per year you are doing something right and need to advise all the other small businesses. As we all know; for small businesses the employee turnover is a fact of life. One of our clients tells us – “I am not in the restaurant business. I am running a training business because of the constant need to train stream of new employees that I have to hire because of turnover”.
In order to find ways to reduce the turnover it is important first to understand the causes behind it. Some of the causes listed below are obvious and are common across majority of small businesses.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Employees, Management Tagged With: , ,

Are you Giving your Heart or just Hands to your Business?

June 2, 2010


If your heart is not in your business (or anything you are doing for that matter); you might as well not own the business. Your business is just going to drag along at best and in worst case it will fail causing you financial and emotional pain.
We say this from our experience at a concert we attended this past weekend.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Customers, Employees, Management, Sales Tagged With:

How to Overcome Challenges of Starting a Business in Bad Times

June 1, 2010


In our previous blog post Is this a Good Time to Buy a Business we argued that the difficult economic times present an excellent opportunity to start a business. There are a number of advantages and opportunities that bad economy; like current one; provides. The advantages include less competition, good talent available at reasonable salary and others.
While it is true that this is a good time to start a new business you cannot ignore the challenges that you will be facing in starting business in bad economic time. By understanding the challenges and preparing yourself to meet them head-on you will improve your success rate. Here are three most difficult challenges in our mind along with suggestions on how to overcome them.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Buyers, Employees, Finance, Management Tagged With: , , ,