Category: Planning & Management

Article Contributed by Michele DeKinder-Smith

When a female entrepreneur is ready to hire help, delegating to an assistant may seem more cost-effective and less complicated than hiring an entire team. While working with a team yields great results for most entrepreneurs who choose to do so, an assistant can provide an extra set of hands immediately and a link to a team in the future. An assistant can handle some of the daily tasks the entrepreneur doesn’t have time for, such as listening to voicemail messages, checking e-mail or running errands. Also, an assistant can help an entrepreneur stay on schedule and can act as a sounding board. In the future, an assistant can act as a liaison between an entrepreneur and her team.

A recent study from Jane Out of the Box, an authority on female entrepreneurs, reveals there are five distinct types of women in business. Based on professional market research of more than 3,500 women in business, this study shows that each type of business owner has a unique approach to running a business and therefore each one has a unique combination of needs. This article outlines three of the five types and provides tips for each one to consider when hiring an assistant.

Merry Jane business owners typically are building a part-time or “flexible time” business that gives her a creative outlet (whether she’s an ad agency consultant or she makes beautiful artwork) that she can manage within specific constraints around her schedule. She may have a day-job, or need to be fully present for family or other pursuits. She realizes she could make more money by working longer hours, but she’s happy with the tradeoff she has made because her business gives her tremendous freedom to work how and when she wants, around her other commitments. About 19 percent of women business owners fit into this category.

Because a Merry Jane business owner has many responsibilities in addition to running her business, she might consider selecting an assistant who has the confidence to work independently, and the knowledge to make the right decisions for the company and to handle the business details so Merry Jane can exercise her creativity. Merry Jane enjoys a smooth-running life, so a detail-oriented assistant who can keep the different aspects of the company in order will prove helpful as well.

Merry Jane-run businesses often do not generate enough work to justify hiring a team, but as the entrepreneur’s circumstances change and she evolves into a different type of business owner, the business may grow, too, requiring more sets of hands.

Professional skills and experience Merry Jane should look for: customer service, financial knowledge, marketing knowledge.

Personality traits Merry Jane should look for: confidence, detail-oriented, decision-making capabilities, flexibility.

Tenacity Jane is an entrepreneur with an undeniable passion for her business, and one who tends to be struggling with cash flow. As a result, she’s working longer hours, and making less money than she’d like. Nevertheless, Tenacity Jane is bound and determined to make her business a success. At 31% of women in business, Tenacity Janes are the largest group of female entrepreneurs.

A high percentage of Tenacity Jane-run businesses are young – less than four years old. In many cases, a Tenacity Jane business owner has knowledge in her craft or skill, but not in running a business. Also, Tenacity Jane business owners tend to lack focus; while their boundless passion results in many wonderful ideas, their businesses cannot support all those ideas at once. Keeping both of these issues in mind, a Tenacity Jane business owner would do well to hire an assistant with experience in business particulars (whether it’s marketing, budgeting or planning), and with the ability to help Tenacity Jane hone her passion into a particular area until the business grows enough to sustain another bold vision.

Professional skills and experience Tenacity Jane might look for: business planning knowledge, marketing knowledge, planning skills.

Personality traits Tenacity Jane should look for: focus, confidence, reality-based thinking.

Accidental Jane is a successful, confident business owner who never actually set out to start a business. Instead, she may have decided to start a business due to frustration with her job or a layoff and then she decided to use her business and personal contacts to strike out on her own. Or, she may have started making something that served her own unmet needs and found other customers with the same need, giving birth to a business. Although Accidental Jane may sometimes struggle with prioritizing what she needs to do next in her business, she enjoys what she does and is making good money. About 18% of all women business owners fit the Accidental Jane profile.

Because Accidental Jane so enjoys her freedom, she (like Merry Jane) might want to look for an assistant who feels confident enough to make decisions on his or her own, and who doesn’t necessarily require traditional employment in an office. Also, Accidental Jane should hire an assistant with whom she enjoys working, even if the relationship is entirely virtual or by phone, because she deeply values all of her working relationships. Accidental Jane’s assistant must be customer-friendly because Accidental Jane business owners value their working relationships and because their companies typically thrive on repeat business and referrals.

In the future, if Accidental Jane chose to hire a team, her assistant must be capable of managing that team so that Accidental Jane could maintain her time freedom.

Professional skills Accidental Jane should look for: great customer service, the ability to work independently, excellent communication skills via e-mail or phone, managerial skills.

Personality traits Accidental Jane should look for: confidence, loyalty, a self-starter.

In many cases, hiring an assistant can provide a female entrepreneur with innumerable benefits, especially when the business owner takes the time to carefully select an assistant with the business skills and the personality to fit her needs precisely.

About the Author:

Michele DeKinder-Smith is the founder of Jane out of the Box, an online resource dedicated to the women entrepreneur community. Discover more incredibly useful information for running a small business by taking the FREE Jane Types Assessment at Jane out of the Box. Offering networking and marketing opportunities, key resources and mentorship from successful women in business, Jane Out of the Box is online at www.janeoutofthebox.com

Article Contributed by Sharpenz

The benefits of sales meetings and consistent and timely connections outside the front line include improvement readiness, recharging, repeatability and retention. If these benefits are important, then how do you ensure your meetings are timely?

There are several ways:

1. Hold regularly scheduled meetings. Meetings need to be held often enough to keep sellers at top performance. Cars need oil changes every 5,000 miles, how often do your sellers? Weekly meetings with a purpose are still the ideal.
2. The time with your team should focus on what is most important – help them sell more to reach (or exceed) their goals and energize them. Many meetings default to “sharing” of numbers, product updates, operation issues, or process changes. If there is a lot of “sharing” needed, narrow it down to the basics for the “live” time together. Use other means (handouts, emails, etc.) to share the nitty gritty details.
3. Focus on different “times.” Past, Present and Future are all important. Most meetings I have observed focus on the past and the present — more of that “sharing” of information. A meeting becomes timely when more focus is on the future – equipping your team to sell more, get in front of more people, and build their confidence and competence to exceed quotas.

When Alice Kemper was a sales manager at Harte Hanks Communications, she broke her 60-minute weekly sales meeting into 45 minutes of training and 15 minutes of need-to-know information. Her results speak for themselves. “Our team had less turnover and higher results that many of the other teams,” she said. ”And each time a new branch was opened, the new manager-to-be was selected from my team. That time investment was a strategy.”

A guideline: Break whatever meeting time you have into:

• 10% focused on the past (sales results, wins, losses, etc.)
• 10% on the present (current promos, operations updates, etc)
• 80% building for the future

For a 60-minute meeting that’s about 10 minutes of what happened, 10 minutes of present information and 40 minutes to help them capture more sales in the future!

What do you do to ensure your sales meetings are timely? Let us know in the Comments section.

About the Author:

Sharpenz is dedicated to providing sales managers the resources and tools they need to motivate and equip their sales team to sell each week. Our 30-minute power sales booster programs help companies increase sales by providing the right tools and training – fast. Designed with the busy manager in mind, Sharpenz’ ready-to-go sales training kits will give your sales team the opportunity to grow and earn more – all in a half hour of power.  To learn more, visit www.Sharpenz.com and sign up for your free sales training kit today!

Article Contributed by Sharpenz

I often observe sales and service professionals who are so busy and who believe that multi-tasking during phone calls, conferences, while driving, etc. makes them more productive. My friend Kelly calls this “wearing your Busy Badge.” Does this sound like you? I know it can be me. That is why it was interesting to research information on the productivity of us busy people.

I found Dr. Edward Hallowell, a Massachusetts-based psychiatrist, who has written a book titled Crazy Busy. I love that title because it is something I hear often from friends, clients and colleagues. In fact, I have two emails from people in the last week using that term…“Sorry for this or that, I’ve been Crazy Busy!”

Dr. Hallowell reports some interesting information for us to consider. He says multi-tasking is a “mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously.” In an article, he describes a new condition he calls “Attention Deficit Trait.” ADT is “purely a response to the hyperkinetic environment in which we live,” writes Hallowell, and its hallmark symptoms mimic those of Attention Deficit Disorder. Whew, I thought I needed Ritalin to get through the day.

“Never in history has the human brain been asked to track so many data points,” Hallowell argues, and this challenge “can be controlled only by creatively engineering one’s environment and one’s emotional and physical health.” Limiting multi-tasking is essential.

Mutli-tasking affects our economy as well! Jonathan B. Spira, an analyst at the business research firm Basex, estimates that extreme multi-tasking costs the U.S. economy $650 billion (yes, that’s a “B”, not a typo) a year in lost productivity. How can that be?

Researchers at the University of California at Irvine monitored interruptions among office workers and found that workers took an average of twenty-five minutes to recover and return to their original task after an interruption such as a phone call or answering e-mails. Twenty-five minutes! Even if the phone call was 2-3 minutes – this is nearly a half hour of lost productivity.

In today’s day and age – and not to mention economy, we’re all “crazy busy.” But be smarter about your busy by concentrating on one task at a time. It is not a badge of honor to multitask!

Are you guilty of multitasking too much? What do you to focus on productivity? Let us know in the Comments section.

About the Author:

Sharpenz is dedicated to providing sales managers the resources and tools they need to motivate and equip their sales team to sell more each week. Our 30-minute power sales booster programs help companies increase sales by providing the right tools and training – fast. Designed with the busy manager in mind, Sharpenz ready-to-go sales training kits will give your sales team the opportunity to grow and earn more – all in a half hour of power.  To learn more, visit www.sharpenz.com and sign up for your free sales training kit today!

Article Contributed by Gary Jordan

At Vega Behavioral Consulting, we help businesses unleash the power of teams by fitting the right people to the right tasks—and showing people powerful skills for understanding themselves and others. It’s all based on the Perceptual Styles Theory, which holds that all people, regardless of race, class or culture, fall into one of six unique Perceptual Styles that has everything to do with who they are, what they value, and how they see the world.

Early in my career a clinical psychologist in solo private practice, I was overwhelmed by many of the business functions I had to perform for which I had no natural talent. As a corporate executive, my business partner, Lynda-Ross, had experienced the disasters that accompany projects that fail to put the right people in the wrong roles.

After working together for a number of years in corporate consulting, we knew that Perceptual Styles Theory could revolutionize the way that small businesses operated, too. But in order to launch this new business, we had to learn many of the things we had worked so hard to teach our own clients. We call this ‘Living the Theory.’

When we started this new business, ACI for Entrepreneurs, we faced what many of the entrepreneurs we work with face at the outset. We had a great product, passion for the services we offered, and a deep belief that it would be of value to others. But, just as with many other entrepreneurs, we didn’t have the natural skills and talents to build a significant market presence.

Traditionally, we had worked together in marketing our services to large corporate entities. We soon discovered, however, that building our new business around the natural skills and abilities we had—the way we advise our clients to—meant shifting our market focus to entrepreneurs. And the internet was where the entrepreneurs were!

Rather than face the need to build a new team that had the ability to support this new marketing direction, we tried to shoehorn our new business into the old marketing models we were familiar with. Before long, we realized that this approach was not going to work. Between us and our team, we were lacking some of the key skills and knowledge to be successful with internet marketing

So what did we do? We focused on ‘Living the Theory.’ Using the Perceptual Styles Theory to catalog the skills we did and did not have, we pinpointed exactly where we needed help. From here, we began our search for the right support in a clear and focused way.

The result is a solid support team that is a combination of employees and contract help. Five of the six Perceptual Styles–Vision, Activity, Adjustments, Methods, and Flow—are represented on our team. This creates a mix of different perspectives and priorities, which means everyone needs a basic understanding of the theory to work closely and productively, day-in and day-out. But the results have been amazing.

We still have occasional missed tasks or mis communications here and there, but they are usually minor and quickly resolved. And the upshot is: our business is thriving, and our clients’ businesses are, too.

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 more information, visit http://www.yourtalentadvantage.com.