Changing Lanes consults savvy, open entrepreneurs who feel overwhelmed and time starved by the success of their business and desire to further leverage their time, resources and money. As a result of working with Changing Lanes, they will define their perfect work system which will lead to a more profitable business bringing balance, energy and joy to their life.Owning your own business or managing a small business means the pot of gold is often obscured by the day to day realities of business. Take the time to put your business on the fast road to your dreams. As your business is growing, expanding and you are just loving it! You know there are other opportunities out there. Let Changing Lanes, LLC help you identify and implement your next success.Working with our business consulting team, you and your business will experience growth with less stress. Together, we will identify your goals, strategies, vision, mission and create the plans to make it happen.

Recent Blog Posts


Email Overkill

I recently read an interesting article about Ferrari putting a stop to emails containing more than three recipients. Why? Because it is counterproductive, too many emails in the inbox causes people to loose focus on what is really important.
Think about the emails you receive on a daily basis, how many of those emails really pertain to what you need to be doing and how many of the emails that you send really need to be sent to everyone?
Sure, it’s great to be able to copy important people in an email to “keep them in the loop” but wouldn’t it be better to fill them in over lunch or at a meeting?
Before you shoot off your next mass email, consider the following:

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If I Had More Money I Would

When I was 12, I was given my own passbook for my savings account.  I was told to “Save for College” so all my babysitting money and rag money went there.  Rags? Yes, through girl scouts I’d learned about the market for clean rags; some went to the making of rag rugs and some to painters.

I also discovered that what money went  into the account could also come out just by filling out the form differently at the bank. Add to this that I learned how to sneak out of Saturday AM religion class and meet my girl friends at Woolworths for fries and pop after stopping by the bank for funds. Within less than three months, I also learned about bank statements.  Seems these showed up at the family home quarterly and my ill conceived plan was exposed.

The three most popular apps for tracking spending and savings are Mint.comPersonal Capital, and Manillia.  Each has it’s own feeling and differ [More]

How do you track your savings, spending and goals for your personal finance? 

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What Is Your Goal?

July 1, 2013 and that means we are half way through the year and how are your goals doing?

You have a goal in mind and you want to put it to action, only problem is the in-between. Getting to that goal requires teamwork and planning.  Planning works best when handled by a team, a team works best when it has a good plan of action. If you are stuck on how to get from point A to point B in your goal, here are a few ideas to get you started:  [More]

 

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Lean Up

Have you been down the rabbit hole lately? Maybe this happens to you, too.  You look for information on one topic or fact on the internet and it leads to . . . 

Well, I was reading local news article called the Last Straw at Maumee Bay State Park.  Susan Pollock talked about the resort no longer providing a straw with your drink because of the actions of Milo Cress.  He is working one straw at a time to make a better world because in the USA we use 46,400 large school busses of straws each year! 

Thinking about waste, I go straight to how can we Lean Up what we are doing.   Often, as a consultant at a small businesses when we start talking about getting the business lean, the employees often think “Well, there goes my job” but  true lean has been defined by Mark Graban as  

  1. Elimination of waste – waste is the opposite of value-added.
  2. The Practice of respecting people – beyond being nice.

Back to young Milo Cress, [More]

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Source Forge is My Best Friend

Software can be rather expensive and even if it isn’t it can still add up. If you have to install it on multiple computers and have to get a license for each computer, you just doubled your cost. Just between the four major programs I use, Office, Dreamweaver, PhotoShop, and NaviCat cost me close to $1200 to start. After that I just pay for upgrades but still that was $600 or so. That cost doesn’t include all the other software I need/use, a zip program, screen capture program, FTP program, a PDF program, to name a few. Those are also not cheap. But I guess that is the cost of doing business right? Wrong.

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Vacation from your Business

When was the last time you took off two weeks?  Business owners need to plan and then take vacations to refresh, reinvigorate and renew their commitment to their business.  A vacation from your business is important to the health of your future and your businesses.  Other things that may happen when you vacation include:

  1. Identify Number 2 or Second in Command (2iC);
  2. Test “What if” scenarios for an extended owner absence;
  3. Test Standard Operating Procedures;
  4. Identify things you don’t need to do leading to new space in your calendar;
  5. New ideas for the future!

Planning for a vacation is a key step to long range planning.  Creating a business that is “You-Proof” will be important

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Preventing Employee Theft

Did you know that 95% of business experience employee theft? It’s a horrifying feeling when your business experiences theft from the inside. The feelings of anger and guilt can eat away at you.
Preventing employee theft can be time consuming, but the costs and time involved truly outweigh the costs of having to recover from the theft. Here are a few ideas to keep your businesses money flowing where it should be.
• Policies and procedures
• Alterations of ANY photocopied documents
• Employees in close relationships with suppliers
• Inventory (including office supplies)
• Checks written to cash

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Avoiding Bias In Evaluations

We make assumptions about people almost every minute of every day, it’s only human. We are naturally geared towards certain personality types and avoid others. In the workplace these natural human behaviors can cause bias evaluations on an unconscious level. Supervisors who fill out staff evaluations need to be careful not to let their personal perceptions get in the way of an evaluation.  There are several biases anyone handling evaluations should be aware of.

  • Direct Supervisor Bias 
  • Personal Bias
  • Avoiding the Truth Bias

Read on to find out more about these bias and how to avoid them.

 

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Is Your Business an Instagram or Tumblr?

Dreaming about the value of your business?  Especially when Instagram sold for $1 Billion in 2012 to Facebook and Tumblr being sold in May 2013 to  Yahoo for A$1.1 Billion with $13 Million in revenue.  These were both still very much start-ups Instagram with 13 employees and Tumbler with 178.  These two businesses have won the business start-up lottery.

Sometimes, serendipity will knock at your door as it did with Paypal when the elegant software made for the Palm and was being used by 12,000 users was discovered by 1.2 million users selling crafts and beanie babies to each other on Ebay.  More often than not, businesses are sold based on real financial data that proves the business is profitable and has a teachable and repeatable process to drive revenue. 

We all would love to win the business lottery, but most of us will do it the old fashioned way, creating a cash flow machine.  Getting to HOW your business will do this is key – for more ideas go here.

 

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