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Archive for Productivity

Will It Affect Your Business?

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Tuesday, December 22nd, 2015

growthMany businesses and companies, comfortable in their growth up to the present time, tend to be leery of changing their present methods of doing business, afraid it may upset the balance that they have achieved so far.

While it’s wise to be cautious in a slow economy, concerns that verge on paranoia will not help your business survive, let alone thrive. There are several methods that obviously help businesses to expand and learning more about them can help.

I don’t need a website or a shopping cart.

My products and services sell very well right now, so why would I bother selling them online also? As of last year only 11% of Canadian companies sold online, yet the value of what Canadians bought online more than doubled. Canadians spent 18.9 billion dollars online just three years ago and the amount is increasing rapidly but a lot of those dollars went to companies outside of Canada, due to the unavailability of what they were looking for in their own country. Businesses need to look at what consumers are asking for and provide it, otherwise they will be left behind by those who will.

My relationships with my team and original supporters are not or no longer important, as long as the job gets done and I make money.

While team members can be a source of relationship problems, the original relationships that you brought into your business should always be taken care of. These include financial and marketing experts who may have originally helped get your business started and gave you advice that kept you from making mistakes that would have caused your business to fail. All businesses, even those where the sole proprietor wears all of the hats, have supporting members and those members should be taken into account as your company expands.

Details don’t count.

Most business owners have no idea from month to month how they stand in comparison to previous months. You need to know your numbers and the numbers are in the details. While working with a team can help your business expand faster, if you aren’t keeping track of the little things, your expansion can quickly slow and even start to contract. The smart business owner does his or her homework and takes care of any outstanding issues before they cause major problems.

Managing and pinpointing the key areas where you need help – either from the outside or from learning more, are the stepping stones of a long term, financially viable business. Understanding the underlying details and determining what needs to stay and what needs to go will help you avoid the mistakes that will keep you from growth. Keep your vision for your business intact by always being aware that there may be something you are missing, new ideas you could apply to your business and changes you could make that will help you avoid major business mistakes.

© Chris Draper, DemGen Inc. 2015

image courtesy of growthagenda

 

Categories : Productivity, Small Business
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A Curious Trait of the Most Successful – Introversion

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Thursday, December 17th, 2015

introvert“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti

Most of the general public think of small business owners as extroverted, shameless self-promoters and extremely competitive. Though some are, do these traits describe the most successful business owners? Not by a long shot.

While extroverts gain energy from those around them and that is why you will always find them at the centre of a crowd if at all possible, it is the introvert, with no desire or need to be motivated by others, who becomes successful when they spend more time alone, as they lose energy when around others for too long a period.

Extroverts tend to enjoy social situations and do well in them, while introverts cherish their alone time and actually relish being an introvert and the freedom it allows them. Not afraid to be solitary for long periods of time, they put this time to use wisely and building businesses is one way they can use their highly developed creativity.

They value this solitude and put limits on the number of people who are allowed access to their personal living space, which gives them more time to concentrate on their business. Not craving attention, their solitude lends them the ability to focus more on their work and they are able to process ideas and information much quicker without the incessant clamouring of others for their time and the distraction of too many people speaking at once.

Introverts tend to speak less, so listen more and observe what is going on around them. They pull in ideas from their environment and are so good at being independent that they are excellent innovators. Being different doesn’t bother them at all because they realize that what they think is much more important to them than what others think, unless it’s their customers who are speaking to them.

Since they do so well at one-on-one relationships, the outcome of any business problem is usually positive because of their great negotiating skills. They are far more adept at selectively deciding what is really important and what isn’t and know how to give and take and when it is in their best interest to give more than take, something that the majority of extroverts don’t understand at all.

All in all, both extroverts and introverts can be successful business owners if they understand how to use their talents to their advantage. Each works a different way and both ways, when focused solely on a business, can mean huge business growth.

© Chris Draper, DemGen Inc. 2015

image courtesy of fineartbyirenevincent

 

Categories : Entrepreneurial Lifestyle, Productivity, Small Business
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Is Your Business Too Rigid?

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Thursday, December 10th, 2015

rigid

Most small businesses started off with a business plan and while most business owners tend to keep to a plan, schedule or set of goals, there are many whose “sticktoitness” actually keeps them from attaining what they’re aiming for – a successful business.

All business owners should believe in their product or service. It’s your sincerity that helps customers to trust you. When they know you believe in what you’re doing, it helps them to believe in you too. It’s when your belief starts to verge on the fanatical that it becomes a problem. You know you’re becoming a fanatic when you can’t see the mistakes you make or improvements that could be made.

We all like our businesses to have a brand and to be different than those who compete with us to a certain extent. ‘A certain extent’ is the important phrase here. Taking things too far and tweaking your products until they don’t resemble anything useful is going too far and if it’s just for the attention factor it won’t be of any help to your business or you.

There are business owners who refuse to give up even the slightest bit of control within their business. When this concerns finances, that’s one thing but if you are buried beneath a pile of work, need help and refuse to let anyone help you because you can’t control every little thing they do, your business is going to go downhill quickly. Even worse is the business owner who hires an assistant and then insists on everything being done his way. It was his way that got him in trouble in the first place.

Don’t compromise? A business is a series of small comprises. You can’t have everything exactly the way you want it to be and remember, you are working with customers. At some point, you have to give a little. The same thing goes for those who insist on sticking to the smallest possible budget. It will show in what you are offering your customers. Cheap is cheap.

To avoid becoming rigid, choose the right type of business for yourself. This may not be that dream business you had always envisioned. Pick a business that you know something about, not what is popular at the moment.

Always keep an eye on the future, advice given by many business gurus. Don’t forget to look to the past sometimes. It helps you to see how far you’ve come and also shows where you made mistakes. Concentrate on the present. That is where you are now and if you want a successful business future, it will always be based on what you are doing at any given moment.

© Chris Draper, DemGen Inc. 2015

image courtesy of lightshouse

 

Categories : Entrepreneurial Lifestyle, Productivity, Small Business, Starting a Business
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How Do You Spend Your Life?

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Wednesday, October 7th, 2015

your businessHow we spend our days, is, of course, how we spend our lives.
~Annie Dillard

For most of us, especially business owners, our days are spent chasing what we call productivity. The more we feel productive, the more we manage to pacify ourselves with the feeling that we are doing what’s right, what is important.

Is it really that important? Is most of what we’re doing, in our bid at success, nothing more than coasting through the day, not being totally aware of what’s going on around us?

What are the three most important things in running a business? The first is your product or service. Is it needed? Are you able to provide it with relative ease and at a competitive price? Is there a market for it?

The second most important thing is your customer base. Who will purchase this? What problems will it solve for them? Do they absolutely need it and if not is it needed enough that it will sell? Included in this are the activities involved in providing it.

The third is relationships. Yours with your customers and how you will relate to them to create a demand for your product, answer their questions and provide a valued service or product.

The realities of running your own business have always involved long hours, intense work and an ability to market to customers well. What you have to decide is what is more important to you. Running a business and having a life or running a business and only running a business. Efficiency is not a trait that many of us are born with but it can be learned. Many business owners are as easily distracted as the rest of us and just like us, they like to play hookey and spend their time doing what they want to do, rather than work. Wise business owners have also learned to concentrate their time and effort on the customers that buy from them the most. That way they aren’t putting in wasted minutes or hours dealing with the difficult customers who don’t end up purchasing from them, but go elsewhere. Learning to decipher one from the other is worth your effort.

The most successful business owners have a vision and they keep it in mind while working. If you look at your time each day and divide it into chunks that are worth so many dollars, you will quickly decide what is worth doing and what isn’t. Concentrate fully on your market and be consistent with your products and services. Decide what is most important about your business, what you can offer that will bring the most value and then go after it. This way, you are working only a certain amount of hours where you concentrate fully on the most important aspects of your business. If administrative work and details are taking up too much of your time, hire a virtual administrative assistant – one that can keep up your website, take care of your email, write your blog posts for you and handle all of the other little things that are needed to fully operate a small business.

Decide what you love to do, what is most important to you and do it. Realize that productiity isn’t everything, having a life is much more important. Your job and business may be rewarding but there are other things in life that bring much greater rewards when they are combined with your small business.

© Chris Draper, DemGen Inc. 2015

image courtesy of thevisualcommunicationguy

 

Categories : Entrepreneurial Lifestyle, Productivity, Small Business
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What Does Perfectionism Cost You?

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Wednesday, April 15th, 2015

perfect  Once upon a time, there was a young lady who was quite fussy about everything around her. If things weren’t just right, she wasn’t happy and this attitude also pertained to how others lived their lives and what they owned.

Do you have perfectionist tendencies? Do they show up in the way you run your business?

Before you answer, think about the way you do things. Also, ask yourself if you have ever used the excuse that you put a lot of emphasis on achievement. You believe there is only one right way to do things and this applies to your business also, which makes it difficult for you to take advice. What others think of you is extremely important. In fact, their opinions are so important that you care about them more than your own. While trying to do your best is great, when it gets to the point of becoming a neurotic fixation, you are in trouble and your business is also.

How does perfectionism get in the way of your success? Setting unrealistic standards for your business, such as comparing it to one that is much larger, can hinder your outlook. A small business owner needs to set goals that are in line with the type of business they run, not goals that would be much more appropriate for a large corporation. By striving to be perfect in every small detail of your business, you will be afraid to take the usual small risks that the majority of small business owners thrive on. Your customers may find you inflexible because you must do things a certain way, without any leeway to work with your clients and perhaps give them special offers and deals.

At some point, you will realize that your insistence on everything being just right is actually slowing you down. Your version of perfect will take extra time out of your day that you could spend on more important tasks. Innovation will be next to impossible because in order to think of new ideas for your business, you will have to let go of your old “perfect” ideas and the thought of this terrifies you. Your insecurities over your own way of thinking led you to this point and in order to change, you will have to realize that there is such a thing as “good enough”. Perfectionism is actually a form of negativity, about yourself and the way you are running your business.

Trying to do your best is great but only if it comes with a positive outlook, not one that insists that what you are doing isn’t a good job. Focusing on what is wrong won’t help your business, it will just slow you down. Focus instead on what objectives you need to achieve and which major problems need to be overcome. Realize what motivates you. Is it the desire to do well or is it fear that what you are doing isn’t as good as everyone else? Part of running your business should be enjoyment in the actually process, that you have grown this business on your own and you are succeeding. You are trying to make improvements for yourself, not to outshine everyone else.

Oh, and just in case you didn’t recognize her; the young lady in the first paragraph? That is Goldilocks.

© Chris Draper, DemGen Inc. 2015

image courtesy of willbratt

Categories : Productivity, Small Business
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The Truth About the Benefits of Project Management

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Monday, March 30th, 2015
The Truth About the Benefits of Project Management

Categories : Productivity, Small Business
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Famous Success Quotes

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Monday, February 23rd, 2015

demgen famous success quotes

 

Success Quotes

Categories : Motivation, Productivity, Quotes
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Are You Efficient or Just Busy?

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Tuesday, February 3rd, 2015

efficientIt’s the beginning of February and many small business owners are looking ahead (but not looking forward) to tax time and all that it entails. How well you have organized yourself and your business over the past year will show itself in the amount of time it takes to make sure you have all of your receipts and documents required to accomplish this.

This is where the difference between efficiency and busyness comes to light. Many of us are “busy” or so we say. Our calendar is packed full of meetings, our voicemail is full of messages that need our attention, our work is building up and it all needs to be done. We are actually busy being busy. When you look at the results that should be there, they are hard to find, if not non-existent. We aren’t effective at accomplishing our tasks, focusing on our work or prioritizing what needs to be done so we still have time for ourselves.

We feel hurried and rushed, as if we have no time to complete the most important things in our day, let alone get to those that aren’t as important or don’t have to do with work. While there will always be those projects that end up being more complicated than we expected, we’re wasting our time on the trivial rather than the most meaningful. Looking productive and being stressed out do not go hand in hand with efficiency.

If you’re efficient, you manage your time well, finish your tasks within a reasonable amount of time and are able to concentrate on what is most important to you at any given time of the day. Other demands that conflict with your responsibilities at the present time aren’t allowed to interfere, unless they’re emergencies. In order to be efficient, you have to be clear on your priorities and what is important to you. Your day has a specific purpose and you know what needs to be done to complete the most important tasks and still have time and energy left over for yourself.

Efficient people function at a higher level than busy people. They do things right the first time and make sure they are doing the right things, not those that waste their time. They’re well aware that the day can fly by and at the end of it there is nothing to show for the time spent on what appears to be work but is really just busyness. They value quality over quantity and eliminate tasks of little importance by either delegating them to someone else or grouping them with a similar set of tasks to save time.

Efficiency involves planning, organizing and maximizing time that would otherwise be wasted. Scheduling your day, focusing on each job that needs to be done and not allowing unimportant interruptions and distractions are part of efficient work strategies. Lifestyle changes have a large effect on just how efficient you can be each day. A well rested business owner who pay attention to their diet and how much exercise they get is usually much more efficient than one who sleeps few hours, lives on take-out food and spends their off hours laying on their couch.

The next time someone tells you how busy their life is, take it with a grain of salt. A closer look will show you that they may be busy running around, spending their time on trivial things but they probably aren’t accomplishing much at all.

The really idle man gets nowhere. The perpetually busy man does not get much further. ~ Sir Heneage Ogilvie

© Chris Draper, DemGen Inc. 2015

image courtesy of tnt.dist.uniqe

Categories : Entrepreneurial Lifestyle, Productivity
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Daily Routines of Famous Creative People

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Friday, January 9th, 2015
The Daily Routines of Famous Creative People

Categories : Entrepreneurial Lifestyle, Productivity, Work/Life Balance
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Have you Really Lost Your Creativity?

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Tuesday, December 23rd, 2014

creativity  Getting stuck in a rut, unable to move forward and unable to visibly improve their present circumstances, many business owners become frustrated with what they feel is a lack in their marketing techniques, their skill or their business knowledge.

Moving ahead seems to be impossible and new ideas appear to be just out of reach. Energy is lacking and you seem to have lost your confidence. How do you regain your original curiosity in how you could improve your business and where do you find the resources to do it?

Try something new and different in your personal life. This alone opens you to new ideas, new people and new experiences, any of which can kick start a new approach to your business life. Artists such as painters, writers and musicians all know that in order to have new ideas, you have to broaden your life experiences, otherwise your well of ideas dries up.

Turn your ideas on their heads. Observing something from the opposite direction can lead you to examine more closely how well they would work and provide you with ways to improve your existing products or provide something completely different.

Look at your business through someone else’s eyes. If you were a total stranger and just seeing your products or services for the first time, what would you think? What would be missing and what would satisfy you the most? Take action on anything you find would make a big difference in improving what you have to offer.

Ask yourself if what is happening is really that important. Maybe this is just that time for your business to roll along at the level it is at for awhile. What may be happening could be totally inconsequential and just a normal stage of your business.

Be mindful of what is going on in your business from day to day. Take a closer look and decide if what you see as a lack of creativity is really just downtime. Balance is a key factor in any business and often the more you try to focus on what is wrong, the harder it is to find, it if even exists at all.

Decide when you need to take a break. There are times when nothing works and this is when you need to walk away from your business for several days. Take a weekend off, relax, don’t talk about work and spend your time with people who aren’t involved in your business, doing things that are completely non-business related.

It is possible to get out of any rut and improve any set of circumstances if you realize that not everything in your business revolves around being creative every day. Most of the work in your business is just that – work. While being creative within your business is enjoyable and helps your business to improves, don’t forget all of the other day to day things that you do that lead to business growth.

© Chris Draper, DemGen Inc. 2014

image courtesy of bedlammag

 

Categories : Entrepreneurial Lifestyle, Productivity, Work/Life Balance
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