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How to Love Your Business

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On Valentine’s day when love is all around us, I’m wondering if you’re still in love with the business you’re running? When a business starts up there is always a period similar to a ‘honeymoon’ period, when we love everything about being in business. Its fresh, it’s new and exciting and some of the challenges we experience later are no where to be seen on the horizon. (Does that sound familiar with life too?) As we start to develop and grow the business, bringing new people into the mix means new relationships, sometimes conflicts and if we are unable to manage these we find great chunks of our time being eaten up, and as a result our energy levels going down.

As a business leader you have to be the inspiration for the people you lead. You have to know where the business is going and how are you going to get there and how you are going to lead your people and above all re-ignite the passion you experienced when you first started.

So let’s go back to basics…..

1. Identify all the things that you love doing in your business and all the things you hate doing and put these into two lists. Have you simply carried on from when you started the business and still doing some things that someone else could do? Who would be the best person to delegate or outsource to? You need to hand things over to the right people though, otherwise you’ll come unstuck. For example, something that requires a high level of detail needs to go to someone that is patient and already demonstrates they like doing detail. Make sure you retain some of the things you’re really good at and love to do.

2. Go back to the beginning. What were your goals when you started? What have you achieved since then? What are your goals now? Write some new and inspiring goals and share with the people around you.

3. How do you show your gratitude to the people around you? When was the last time you said thank you or even wrote them a note of thanks. When we are able to show gratitude to the people around us, we also start to identify what we’ve also personally achieved. Yes it’s OK to also give yourself a pat on the back for a job well done or even to take that well deserved holiday you’ve been putting off. Try writing a gratitude diary everyday – I guarantee that even on the toughest of days you can find something to write about.

4. Get everybody together in the business and listen to ideas they have that could be introduced to the business. Getting your people inspired and fired up creates a level of energy and activity, which are the two key elements to motivation.

5. Have some FUN in your business. When was the last time you heard laughter, chatter and happiness. What could you do to have more FUN? Share a meal, organize a night at the pub, plan a summer picnic – the list is endless.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

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Management & Leadership

The Art of Strong Leadership

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Being a great leader is like a shining beacon for you employees to look up to and follow. A good leader has an honorable character that selflessly serves his/her organisation. Your activities affect the organisation’s objectives and their well-being, so focusing on the ‘right’ things that are important to the business maintaining a positive outlook at all times and showing respect to everyone you come into contact with is crucial.

A respected leader concentrates on three key areas:

  • Be – what he/she is (beliefs and values)
  • Know – what he/she knows (job, tasks, human nature)
  • Do – what he/she does (implement, motivate, and provide direction)

What makes a person want to follow a leader? People want to be guided by people they respect and who have a clear sense of direction. To gain respect, they must be ethical. A sense of direction is achieved by conveying a strong vision of the future.

The Three Most Important Keys of Leadership:

Studies have shown that trust and confidence in top leadership is the single most reliable predictor of employee satisfaction in an organisation.

Effective communication by leadership in three critical areas is the key to winning organisational trust and confidence, and involves:

  1. Helping employees understand the company’s overall business strategy.
  2. Helping employees understand how they contribute to achieving key business objectives.
  3. Sharing information with employees on both how the company is doing and how an employee’s own division or department is doing – relative to strategic business objectives.

So basically, you must be trustworthy and you have to be able to communicate a vision of where you are going. I have set out below what I believe to be the 10 principles of strong and effective leadership.

10 Principles of Leadership:

  1. Know yourself and seek self-improvement. In order to know yourself, you have to understand your “be”, “know”, and “do” attributes. This is possible by continually strengthening your attributes by reading and self-study.
  2. Be technically proficient. As a leader, you must know your job and have a solid familiarity with your employees’ jobs.
  3. Seek responsibility and take responsibility for your actions. Search for ways to guide your organisation to new heights. And when things go wrong, do not blame others.
  4. Make sound and timely decisions. Use good problem solving, decision-making, and planning tools.
  5. Set the example. Be a good role model for you employees. They will believe what they see – not what they hear.
  6. Know your people and look out for their well-being. Know human nature and the importance of sincerely caring for your workers.
  7. Keep your people informed. Know how to communicate with your  the whole organisation, be it good news or bad news.
  8. Develop a sense of accountability, ownership and responsibility in your people. These traits will help them carry out their professional responsibilities.
  9. Ensure tasks are understood, supervised, and accomplished. Communication is the key to this responsibility.
  10. Train your people as a team. By developing team spirit, you will be able to ensure your organisation, department or section, are working to their fullest capabilities.

Here’s some questions to get you thinking about your style of Leadership….

  • Do you lead your Team by example?
  • How well do you delegate to them – do you give them clear instructions that they can follow?
  • How often do you hold a Team meeting?
  • Do you have an Agenda for all your meetings with a set amount of time that you keep to?

 

To see out upcoming events click below:

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Time

Time Management Tips

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Many business owners are challenged by managing their time and themselves, especially when they start to grow the business and bring on Team members.  The cost to the business of not managing time is huge so the opportunities for improving your profitability are generated from saving time across the business.  For a business owner this does not mean abdication, but means effective planning and delegation.

Here’s some ideas to get you started………

  1. Create a good written plan with each part or step identified in term of the priorities and grade these a, b, c, d etc
  2. Clean up your workspace and have only the one thing you are working on in front of you.
  3. ‘Important’ tasks are not usually ‘Urgent’, and ‘Urgent’ tasks are not usually ‘Important’.    Many urgent tasks are telephone calls, emails, people’s demands etc.  Always start with the tasks that are both ‘Urgent and Important’.  Start with the ones that have very short time fuses, then move to the tasks that are merely ‘Important but not Urgent’.
  4. We always tend to procrastinate on tasks with considerable future value.  Successful completion of these major tasks can make a real difference to your life by scheduling time to do them and not leaving them until the last minute.
  5. Learn to procrastinate about the little tasks that contribute little or nothing to the major high value goals.  First identify them, and then learn to leave them unless they are going to have an impact in the future, in which case, schedule them in.  Otherwise they have a natural tendency to die off.  Ask yourself “what would happen if this wasn’t done at all?”  If the answer is not much or nothing, then put if off for as long as you can.

16 TIPS TO OVERCOME PROCRASTINATION

  1. Think on paper.  Prepare on paper and chunk it down.
  2. Gather all the necessary tools and materials for completing the job before starting.
  3. Do one small thing to get a big job started.  Confucious says “a journey of 1000 miles starts with one small step”.
  4. Salami slice the task.
  5. Swiss cheese technique – punch a hole in it.  Schedule 5 minutes to get it going.
  6. Start from the outside and complete the smaller tasks first.
  7. Start from the inside and do the biggest single thing first.
  8. Do the task that causes you the most fear or anxiety.
  9. Start your day with the most unpleasant task first. i.e. “Eat that live frog”!  What’s the worst thing left then for the rest of the day?
  10. Trigger yourself into action by identifying the consequences of not doing the job.
  11. Think how you will benefit by completing the task.  Write down all the reasons it would be beneficial to get it done.
  12. Set aside a designated 15 minutes a day to work on your project.
  13. Don’t try to achieve 100% perfectionism.
  14. Pick one area where procrastination is hurting you.  One area where your tendency to procrastinate is holding you back.
  15. Develop a compulsion to closure.  Make sure you finish the last 5-10% of the job to get it completed.
  16. Maintain a fast tempo – its essential to success.  Constantly aim to speed up all your habitual actions.  Working faster you will start to experience flow.

IT TAKES COURAGE AND SELF DISCIPLINE TO BREAK THE HABIT OF PROCRASTINATION – THE REWARDS HOWERVER ARE GREAT.  THEY ARE SELF ESTEEM, SELF CONFIDENCE, PRIDE AND LIFE LONG SUCCESS.  YOU CAN DO IT IF YOU PUT YOUR MIND TO IT.

DO IT NOW, DO IT NOW, DO IT NOW ………….

Action Item

Here’s some questions to get you thinking more about your business….

  • How many hours do you work each week?
  • How many of these hours are you working ON the business (improving strategic planning and growth)?
  • Where are you fire fighting in your business and why?
  • Are you willing to let go of tasks that you no longer need to get involved in?

If you need some further help then drop us a line  – we’re experts at making changes to the way business owners manage their time which directly improves their profits.

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Business

Changing Habits in 2012

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As we move into the 2nd week of 2012 I’m wondering whether you’ve managed to keep up with your New Year resolutions?  Setting resolutions is about resolving to do something, which usually takes the form of a goal – for example to be a better parent, to stop smoking, to start running, to lose weight.  The reality of making these changes is about breaking consistent habits at a sub-conscious level.  In order to do this we have to have a motive and take some form of consistent action over a 21 day period to enable the new habit to be planted in the mind.

I’m currently enjoying reading “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” and the author Stephen Covey talks about breaking habits from the ‘inside-out’.  The reason we fail at breaking poor habits is that often we work at it from the ‘outside-in’, in other words some outside influence is the reminder to us, but because its not our own initial idea or we fail to embrace it, then it soon gets forgotten.

Covey relates changing habits to making a ‘paradigm’ shift – in other words taking the example of what we want to change and looking at it from a different perspective.  In order to do this we need to get clarity on the WHAT to do and most importantly the WHY.  If you don’t have a strong enough WHY or reason for doing it then the desire and therefore the motivation flounders.  Along the way we also need to have the skill or at least access to information from some source to enable us to know HOW to achieve it.

So firstly we need to listen to our inner voice and engage at a deep level to really want to make a change.  Then we can spend time thinking or brainstorming with a mentor on how we go about making the changes.  Then we can put a plan of action into place, committing your idea to paper as well as getting someone to hold you accountable will also enable you to improve your results.

Covey goes on to state “by working on knowledge, skill and desire, we can break through to new levels of personal and interpersonal effectiveness as we break with old paradigms that may have been a source of pseudo-security for years”.

If you consistently fail to keep to new habits or you want to improve some aspect of your personal development then I recommend you picking up a copy of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”.  Also take a look at the website www.stephencovey.com

Contact Business Coach Mandy Hildred at www.actioncoach.com/mandyhildred for more information.

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Time

Great Time Management Advice

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I often talk in my seminars and workshops about the importance of time and time management — how everyone has the same amount of time every day – 24 hours. It just depends on how you use it. I find Brian Tracy very inspiring.

‘I always give the principle of: Begin the day by “Eating That Frog”. It basically says that if the first thing you do in the morning is eat a live frog, then you will have the satisfaction of knowing it is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long. And your “live frog” is your most important task. Now there are two thoughts to bear in mind. The first one is if you have two frogs to eat, eat the ugliest one first and the second is if you have to eat a frog at all, it doesn’t pay to sit and look at it too long.

So the key to high performance is to plan every day the night before, in advance, and set priorities for it. And then say, “If I can only complete one task on this list before I was to be called out of town for a month, which one task would it be?” And whatever that is, it becomes your frog and the next morning discipline yourself to start in on that task, the most important thing on your list, and do only that until it is complete.

If you can develop that habit, you can double and triple your productivity, you’ll take full control of your life, you will eventually become wealthy, and the personal feeling of pride, accomplishment, discipline and achievement you get will be absolutely extraordinary. It is one of the most important of all lessons to learn, and one of the hardest things to implement if anybody has tried to do it’.

Visit www.briantracy.com for more inspiration.

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Money

Looking Ahead

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These days, it is very easy to believe that it’s all doom and gloom for UK business owners. You may well think that making a success of your business is near-on impossible, and I can assure you, many people I speak to feel this way too.

In my opinion, this is simply not the case. And why do I believe this? For starters, in only the last month the government has announced a number of steps to help stimulate the growth of business in the UK economy – many of these specifically targeted at SMEs. The removal of the infamous ‘red tape’ for small businesses being one, and a reduction in corporation tax being another.

There are countless other tools, resources and benefits out there to help businesses move from surviving to THRIVING. I firmly believe that maintaining a positive outlook and using the resources available are the most effective ways to stay ahead – regardless of what your competitors are doing. If you want to chat about what you and your company could do, as always just get in contact.

Cloud Computing

Just this week, the government’s Transport Minister Norman Baker has recommended that companies within the private sector consider switching to a system of ‘cloud computing’ as a means of reducing traffic on the national transport infrastructure. The concept is simple: where appropriate, allow staff to work remotely from their home computers, thus eliminating the need for battling transport congestion, and the usual ‘seasonal issues’ which prevent the workforce reaching the office.

The concept of working ‘smarter’ and adapting to changing conditions are right at the heart of everything I teach as a Business Coach. Even within my own team, I always look for new techniques to improve the way we work, and I would encourage you to do the same. By working ‘smarter’ we can positively impact not only our own companies, but the wider Yorkshire and Lincolnshire business environment.

TIME IS MONEY

Understanding that managing time in business = more profit is generally a difficult concept for business owners to understand.  Many people go into business as a result of working in a similar industry and then find themselves as the “technician” in the business.  A good example of this is the hairdresser cutting hair or the plumber mending pipes.

In order to move a business forward, first the business owner needs to grasp the concept of working ON the business instead of IN the business.  Not a straight forward thing to do, but working at this day in and day out, gently leveraging their position up the ladder to truly fulfill the Managing Director’s role is what needs to happen.  Along the way it means getting the Team to develop the skills and take the business owner’s role IN the business through training and mentoring.

Read “The E-Myth” by Michael Gerber for more inspiration.

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