If you are a business owner or manage teams have you thought about what you will do for growth of your business and team this year? After reading a book titled Bluefishing by Steve Sims, the following resonated and might with you.
If you are a business owner, one of the challenges is ensuring continuity of communications from leaders to the team and clients. A content messaging challenge for many business owners that I have worked with is having only team members (or outsourcing partners) write all the content for the company.
The concept of keeping a regular gratitude journal has been around a long time, so it’s nothing that new, but have you considered a regular practice into your normal daily routine. The one benefit by keeping a Gratitude Journal is that you will become more positive.
Personally, when things don’t go according to plan and I feel down, get stuck, too much negative noise, I go back to adding journal entries related to gratitude. Gratitude journaling improves my mood and relaxes my mind.
As the year of 2016 comes to a close and you are perhaps doing a bit of self- reflecting, ask yourself: did you DARE yourself with action or just dream about it? I wonder how many new entrepreneurs started to launch their ideas into a real business with sales as I wrote about December, 2015.
Build momentum into 2017 by asking your top 3 customers what it would take to get an incremental increase in business within your specialty. Ask about what your competitors are doing and how you can assist for a small percentage of increased business.
As the business world has evolved to more discussions around the health benefits of standing with the stand up desk station and sitting in front of the computer classified as the “New Smoking”, have you considered how standing up can help your presentations, writing and sales results, beyond the health benefits? “New research from Texas A&M University showed a 46% increase in worker productivity by standing up.”, IIE Transactions on Occupational Ergonomics and Human Factors. They looked at two control groups for 6 months and productivity was measured by how many successful calls each group made from stand up desks vs. sitting.
One of the ongoing challenges many founders will face at some point is the dreaded capital raise beyond friends and family. I have not met many entrepreneurs’ who actually enjoy the idea of going out to the market and asking for money. This year has been a typical year for us evaluating over 100 capital raise deals and most will never get funded for one specific reason – the PASSION is not directed to what matters most – EXECUTION.
The Branding Pyramid and 21 Brand Monitoring Ideas
Guest blog post by Jim Harshaw.
In the fall of 2012, I pulled the plug on my business.
I labored at it for years but it was now clear that it would fail. It was a terrible feeling. Like years of time and money have been wasted.
I’ve felt that feeling before.
It was March 20, 1998. In front of 14,000 fans at the Convocation Center in Cleveland Ohio, I failed to reach my goal of becoming a Division I All American. Years of time and money that had been invested felt like they’d been wasted. I found myself in the locker room, my face buried in a towel in tears wondering why I can’t do this. “What’s wrong with me?,” I thought. “I couldn’t possibly have worked any harder. I couldn’t have run more miles or lifted more weights or watched more film. There weren’t enough hours in the day.”
In the past two weeks, three close colleagues in the “big” corporate world sent the dreaded email to me – “Wayne, I wanted to reach out to see how you might be able to help with my next job search and contacts as my job was just eliminated?” Their roles were Chief Financial Officer, Chief Marketing Officer and VP Sales (Pharma, Manufacturing and Banking industries). Downsizing, slow business growth and wage costs were the reasons for their new job searches.