Author: Ethan Theo

Abe WalkingBear Sanchez is an International Speaker / Trainer / Consultant on the subject of cash flow / sales enhancement and business knowledge organization and use. Founder and President of www.armg-usa.com, WalkingBear has authored hundreds of business articles, has worked with numerous companies in a wide range of industries since 1982 and has spoken at many venues including the Shakespeare Globe Theater in London.

Categories
Work Life

3 Tips to Clean Up Your Dirty Business Habits

I walk in and out of our backdoor every day. I see this door a lot, but I learned recently that I don’t really look at it.

For some reason, I noticed how dirty the glass was in this door.  But it was like I saw it for the first time, or the first time in a long time.

I sprayed and wiped the window, then wondered, “Why hadn’t I noticed that before?”

Walking through that door is a habit. Once something becomes a habit, it’s familiar. That means we assume we know how it looks or acts without really looking.

Take your business, for instance.

You have certain business habits. They’re familiar. Based on your assumptions.

Most of them are about you.

And they’re strangling your profitability.

Here’s some familiar business dirt that could use a good cleaning.

Features and Benefits

When you talk about your company, what words do you use?

Do you focus on the company itself, the key features it offers? As you listen to yourself, do you hear, “I” or “Us”?

Or, “You” and “Your”?

It’s a familiar habit to extol the virtues of your company. You work hard and you’re proud of your business. It’s a familiar door.

However, your business features have value only as they benefit the customer.

What problems do you solve for them? How is their work accomplished more quickly or pleasantly by your services?

It’s not about you. It’s about your customers and what you do for them.

Clean the “me” from your feature-driven conversation and let “thee”-benefits shine.

Selling and Buying

Which do you do—sell to your clients or remove the obstacles to their buying?

Your habit may be to sell, which focuses more on why your widget is the best one in the world. But what if that customer isn’t interested in a widget? No amount of selling will close the deal.

I heard a story about a furniture store sales rep who attempted to sell a customer who wanted a round coffee table. The rep showed her every square and rectangle table in the store. Exasperated, the customer asked if he could order her one. “Of course,” he said. “I’ll email you a picture and the website.”

You guessed it. The picture was of a rectangle coffee table.

Accurate listening is the difference between selling and buying. Ask the right questions with a smile, listen carefully, and you’ll discover everything you need to know to help convert the visitor into a customer for life who sends all of her friends to you to buy.

Spray and clean the “selling,” listening until it sparkles with “buying” and you form a mutually beneficially relationship.

Transactions and Transformations

Such mutually beneficial relationships are transformative, not just transactional.

Who do you take your vehicle to for repairs—someone who just keeps replacing parts and charging you for it?

Or, someone who accurately diagnoses and fixes your vehicle’s problem, and you drive away confidently?

Your customers give you far more than their money. They give you their trust.

They return when they trust you because you transformed the relationship.

They never come back if you don’t because you simply transacted business.

Spray and clean your business practices until they sparkle with more than money. Trust is the currency of doing business today.

Clean up your dirty business habits and you’ll see clearly more profits than ever before.

About the Author:

Best-selling author, speaker, and coach Dr. Joey Faucette shares how all of us working together create a more positive world this week. Adapted from his #1 Amazon best-seller, Work Positive in a Negative World.

Categories
People & Relationships

Strengths-Based Coaching: Creating Real Impact for Clients

Why did you get into coaching? One of the most likely reasons is that you wanted to have a real, positive and lasting impact on the lives of your clients.

Unfortunately, many of the approaches that coaches currently use in their work don’t have this kind of lasting effect, for the simple reason that they focus on what clients currently don’t do well, as opposed to what they do.

It sounds counterintuitive, doesn’t it? After all, the client has come to you, the coach, because they have an issue in their life (or a host of issues) they want to change. Change, by definition, calls for something new. Surely there can’t be any harm in helping clients figure out new skills that can help them change their circumstances.

Well, yes and no.

A coaching approach based on the usual method of trying to strengthen these acquired skills – i.e., things that don’t come naturally to them – may have an impact on a client’s life, but it is likely to be short lived and superficial. (It’s also, quite honestly, the kind of stuff you find in self-help books and magazines that want to help you, essentially “become someone else.”)

Clients come to us as coaches most often because they don’t know what to do to change and often cannot articulate why what they are trying to do isn’t working. Over the past 30 years of coaching, my business partner and I have found that real results come when we help our clients discover what it is they already do well, and put it to greater use in their lives. We call this strengths-based coaching.

Using their natural gifts consciously in their lives not only tends to help a client blow through whatever blocks they might be facing, it’s more fun for the client. After all, who doesn’t enjoy doing what they do well? It’s a winning combination that inevitably leads to a real, lasting impact.

Of course, a total focus on a client’s strengths isn’t always an option – sometimes, in order to overcome a block, a client really does need to acquire new skills. But even so, we do our best to focus on those new skills in a way that honors who the client is by taking advantage of their natural capacities. When letting go of roles that require acquired capacities is not an option – such as job, for example, that doesn’t really satisfy the client, but which they can’t quit for the time being – then coaching should explore how the client can keep the end objectives (to keep the job) but modify the means used to achieve it so that they use their natural skills and abilities as much as possible.

In the end, it’s all about making room for your client’s brilliance, and how that person can put it to work in overcoming their challenges. Ultimately, the client needs to accomplish his or her personal objectives and goals by using their own natural strengths.

About the Author: 

Gary Jordan, Ph.D., has over 27 years of experience in clinical psychology, behavioral assessment, individual development, and coaching. He earned his doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology – Berkeley.  He is co-creator of Perceptual Style Theory, a revolutionary psychological assessment system that teaches people how to unleash their deepest potentials for success. He’s a partner at Vega Behavioral Consulting, Ltd., a consulting firm that specializes in helping people discover their true skills and talents.  For free information on how to succeed as an entrepreneur or coach, create a thriving business and build your bottom line doing more of what you love, visit http://www.YourTalentAdvantage.com

 

Categories
Operations

Five Reasons How QuickBooks Can Drive Your Business

1. It’s easier, faster and helps you make sense of your figures

QuickBooks business accounting software is quicker than doing everything on paper and simpler than using spreadsheets. Sure, it probably won’t make your accounts exciting. But it will help you understand and stay on top of your finances.

2. Stop wasting time on pointless tasks

Still struggling with spreadsheets or plugging away with sheets of paper? Time could be wasted along the way. QuickBooks automates painful accounting tasks so you spend less time on jobs like invoicing, reconciling payments and creating VAT returns.

3. Watch sales like a hawk (or an investor)

Track every sale you make and every expense you incur, with up-to-the second cash flow figures. QuickBooks puts the very latest cash flow figures in front of you – so you can see exactly how you’re doing without bothering your accountant.

4. No maths or spreadsheet skills required

It’s not just faster. It’s easier too – master your accounts without manual calculations or tricky spreadsheet formulas. QuickBooks does the sums for you, using built-in formulas. That’s one in the eye for Excel!

5. You don’t have to commit until you’re sure

No matter which edition of QuickBooks you choose, you’ll get plenty of time to make absolutely sure it’s right for your business. There are both desktop as well as online accounting software. All the packages include either a trial period, or a 60 day money back guarantee – so you can buy with confidence.

Categories
People & Relationships

Teamwork and Psychology: Insights from 30+ Years of Business Coaching

Article Contributed by Gary Jordan

What does it take for 800 people to work together on a project with minimum friction? Back in 1983, that’s exactly what my partner Lynda-Ross and I aimed to figure out.

When I fist met Lynda-Ross, she was managing a very large multi-year systems development project for a major corporation, and she was searching for tools to help the people working on the project stay motivated, reduce conflict, and perform to the best of their capabilities.

Through my years of college and graduate school, I had been fascinated by theories about psychological styles—such as those posited by Carl Jung—but none of the theories I studied fit my personal experience. Beginning with my doctoral dissertation and continuing through 18 years in private practice, I had worked to create a practical, useable psychological styles theory that integrated internal experience with observable behavior.

Lynda-Ross brought me in as a consultant to the project to help the management staff learn tools and techniques to improve teamwork and optimize the talents of the existing staff.  The more we observed and worked with people, the more we discovered.

One of the things we learned was that, not only do people who perceive the world similarly get along better, but they also had many of the same skills and abilities. As we thought about it, it made sense to us that people who perceived things similarly would possess similar skills. It was the next logical step to realize that the skill and ability similarities we observed were based on a similar style of perception, and that each of the six Perceptual Styles had an innate set of natural capacities.

Together we developed processes and training that used the Perceptual Styles Theory to help build teams, diffuse unnecessary conflict, and help people to understand that seeing things differently is not wrong, just different.

More than thirty years later, the same things we observed on that first project have held true, and they remain the basis of our work as coaches. Why? Because what it took for that huge team to succeed is what it takes for any team to succeed. Here are the four main components:

1. It takes people with different Perceptual Styles filling different positions on the team. After all, skills and abilities are directly tied to the ways that we perceive the world as individuals. The person who excels at accounting is generally not the same type of person who thrives in customer service.

2. It takes all of those people learning how to communicate effectively with one another, despite the differences in their Perceptual Styles. Simple adjustments in language and message delivery can eliminate 90 percent of all communication conflicts.

3. It takes all of those people feeling motivated, even though the differences in their Perceptual Styles means that they will be motivated in different ways. A range of incentives are required for optimum momentum on a project.

4. It takes leadership based on the team leader’s actual skills and abilities. There are many different ways to lead, but the only right way for any given person is the one that fits their innate Perceptual Style.

At every level of development, psychological styles are a huge factor in the success or failure of a business—because no matter what it is or what it does, people are what make your business tick.

About the Author: 

Gary Jordan, Ph.D., has over 27 years of experience in clinical psychology, behavioral assessment, individual development, and coaching. He earned his doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology – Berkeley.  He is co-creator of Perceptual Style Theory, a revolutionary psychological assessment system that teaches people how to unleash their deepest potentials for success. He’s a partner at Vega Behavioral Consulting, Ltd., a consulting firm that specializes in helping people discover their true skills and talents.  For free information on how to succeed as an entrepreneur or coach, create a thriving business and build your bottom line doing more of what you love, visit www.YourTalentAdvantage.com

Categories
Business Trends

Green Procurement and Business: What It’s All About

Businesses are more aware of the bonuses associated with green procurement than ever before, given the vast number of benefits that it can bring. Essentially, green procurement ensures that businesses protect local environments and economies from the effects of their operations, all the while allowing a business to deliver goods, servicesand utilities. By focusing heavily on local, or at least ethically-sound national supply chains, you can do your bit for conservation.

Now, it seems that there are plenty of financial incentives to encourage manufacturers to design environmentally-friendly items, whether it’s to avoid taxes and additional costs levied against those uninterested in resource conservation, or the extra outgoings paid through utility bills because of inefficient use of energy and water.

Sourcing locally can certainly boost sales. Flyerzone, an eco-friendly supplier, works particularly hard to forge relationships with nearby clients to boost their productivity, environmental credentials and save themselves money along the way. Many other organisations are very happy to broker regional deals to save money, even if local sourcing demands is becoming a bigger public desire.

Supermarkets in particular are angling themselves towards these programs. Waitrose, Asda and Tesco are particularly proud of highlighting times when they have sourced directly from a farmer in the region, while online stores such as Farmison.com solely market around these individuals and even give you specific insights into the companies and families that sustain their sales.

Procurement policies are also beginning to heavily centre on waste regulations, for money-saving reasons as much as ethical ones. The Packaging Directive tries to minimise extraneous materials and goes on to promote energy recovery as well as the re-use of packaging; it has effectively led to EU member states introducing national policies to set a minimum level of recycling, which is steadily increasing as recovery technologies improveThe UN advocates sustainable development of products made from popular materials such as woods and metals, and the United Nations Environment Program has proposed incentives for companies to replant and recycle to limit potentially devastating deforestation and water pollution. This is limiting international companies from visiting foreign nations such as Brazil and harvesting their wares, avoiding local and national regulations through importing. When businesses demand local produce, it is becoming clearer that this approach simply isn’t acceptable.

By adopting environmentally and locally-friendly initiatives, procurement managers can reduce overall production costs, create new standards and keep a solid supply chain in their area and beyond – all the while adhering to compliance regulations..