Recent Blog Posts
Keep the Sick from Work
Sitting in my office preparing for horrid weather reminded me of getting sick. Why? because I’m wearing a snuggie 
(yea, I own one) with my slippers and drinking hot tea. It’s my usual “I don’t feel well” garb but it felt right with all the cold wet snow out side.
So what does this have to do with business? Well, unless you have the worlds healthiest and cleanest staff members, it could mean a lot when it comes to sick time. Staff members suffering from either a cold or flu can lose up to 40% productivity and infect others causing more and more lost production.
So what can be done? Common sense will tell you to wash your hands, sneeze and cough into the crook of your arm and take your vitamin C. While these are all great plans, everyone can go a bit further to help ward off the sick.
Prepare yourself and everyone else.
Use visual reminders.
Send an email.
Tell sick people to stay home.
Practice what you preach.
Time to do . . .
We mark time in years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds. Sometimes a millisecond will make a difference and sometimes a year won’t matter in the long run.
Time is the only resource we all share equally.
Resolutions are a way to make us pay attention to the past and try and make the future better by directing how we will spend some of our time. Does anyone want to make this year worse? I don’t think so.
Checklists are big in my life and often doing smaller things regularly will lead to BHAGs
Looking Forward to 2014
I’m not one for New Year Resolutions. I look at it as if I need a date to start doing something, I probably won’t do it. But this year as I sat at my desk on Jan 1st and reflected back on 2013. I realized that I need, no… want to make a change. 2013 was just a blah year for me. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t good. The most I can really say is I work a lot on my business, I’m still doing a lot of things I don’t want to do and I visited two places I don’t care to go to again. So for 2014 I thought, why not make some goals and changes? Things that I want to do to make my life better.
Making 2014 the Best
If we want 2014 to be better than 2013, we have to Plan performance and results and sometimes a management incentive program maybe the tool to help.
1. Do set Ground rules:
- Program must be simple and easily understood by participants
- There must be a mutually agreed-upon and achievable goals
- Tie incentives to sales building, customer retention as well as cost control
- Results should be reported and rewards distributed on a timely basis.
2. Weekly meetings help managers stay focused. These meetings should be short, positive, problem solving and results oriented.
3. Systems need to be in place and these are some that you may want to consider:
- Leadership systems – identification of leaders and grooming more than one.
- Recruiting systems – we will always need new blood, always looking leads to great decisions.
- [More]
Good Idea, Bad Location
Last week I was in New York City. I've been to the outskirts of New York City before but this time I was able to actually go into the city. It was about 40 degrees out with a light rain as we made our way to Little Italy then back to Time Square, Rockefeller Center...
End of the New Year Checklist
The end of 2013 is upon us. Are you ready for the new year?
If you planned ahead you already have a jump start on getting everything right where it should be to make your accountant happy. Good for you but, if your like most samll business owners this time of the year seems to pop up out of nowhere.
If you have no idea where to start I have a made a checklist for you:
Get your books in order
Take a look at your financials
Evaluate last years goals
Brush up on new laws
Gather your documents
Set new goals
Letting Your Customers Take Too Much Control
Since I've gotten into web development I've spent a good amount of time building new web applications and taking care of web applications. One web application in particular really stuck out by slowly becoming a train wreck. This web application was highly specialized...
Angry Birds
Totally off the subject of business. This time of year, I have always fed the birds. I did a report on bird feeding in 3rd grade receiving a "B" which I'm sure was for the awesome colored pencil drawings on creating and installing a squirrel baffle not the poor...
Can’t Please Everyone PR
Yesterday while reading my news sites I came across yet another article about a company that had a PR disaster. It was a tweet on Twitter. The company got a backlash and soon after the tweet was removed and an apology was made. Grant it the tweet wasn't in the best...
How to Lose Users & Alienate Potential Customers With Advertising
I read a lot of blogs and articles online. Like most young (ish) adults it is where I get all of my news and information. In general I read a lot about start ups and being an entrepreneur, mainly business consulting and technology.
So naturally I see a lot of sites trying to get you to signup for a newsletter, service, or buy a product. Which is totally fine. The business worked hard to get me to their site, instead of advertising other businesses, it is best to advertise their own. Most of the time there might be a pop up I need to close out of. Maybe some advertising on the side. A signup box for a newsletter on the bottom of the article. All pretty standard and acceptable forms of self promotion. But today I came across a site that took what is acceptable and ran it over with a truck then set it on fire.