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Develop Your "Tomorrow's Leaders" Today
The future leaders of your company could be right under your nose, but identifying employees who are leadership material can be tricky. The following are key steps that will help you prepare today’s employees to be the company leaders of tomorrow:
- Identify high potential employees systematically via:
- Performance reviews,
- Employee self-evaluations, and
- Participation in volunteer activities.
- Develop employees’ skills for the future. Provide “potential leaders” with additional mentoring and training
- Identify which aspects of your business would be best served by a training plan.
- Check customer comments and solicit input if necessary.
- Identify the weakest areas in your company.
- Determine how you can boost performance in your weakest area.
- Note all critical, specialized positions
- Check out the competition
- Find what you do better and worse than your competitors.
- Most importantly, market and implement those differences that your business does better than the competition.
- Find out what training your employees would like that would move them and your business forward.
Start to implement these and invest in training your team. Immediately begin measuring your results. You’ll see a big leap in revenue, profits, customer satisfaction, and productivity.
5 Top Tips That Will Make You a Ninja Master at Creating Facebook Ads
Whether you want to build brand awareness in your local community or grow your social media following, you can't beat the ROI of Facebook advertising. To maximize your marketing spend, here are five crucial Facebook tips you need to know:
- To reach new customers, analyze consumer behavior and use those insights to your benefit. While existing fans might react to requests for likes or social shares, a new customer is more likely to respond to ads targeting their behavior.
- Unlike keyword-based Google ads, Facebook ads are targeted at demographics, interests, behavior, and location. Understanding this can make a huge difference in your success.
- Just because you have an online business, that doesn't mean you can overlook your local customers. Consider creating geo-targeted ads within your local city. Not only will your shipping costs likely be lower, you might grow a loyal local following.
- Be clear on your objective. Without having a clear focus in advance, you can't possibly measure the success or failure of your Facebook ad campaigns.
- For maximum success with Facebook ads, understand the different types of advertisements available and the correct size specifications for each.
14 Tips to Help Increase Email Marketing Conversion Rates
Here are 14 tips to help you increase the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts:
1. See email marketing as a relationship-building effort.
2. Avoid using technical terms, jargon, and "fancy" phrasing.
3. Do as much as you can to inspire trust in your company.
4. Don't rely on images to convey your message.
5. Use A/B testing: alternative headlines, calls to action, offers, colors, wording, etc.
6. Optimize content for readability on smartphones and mobile devices
7. Avoid a premature sales pitch. First you have to make them aware of what is being offered, and make them interested in what you are offering.
8. Develop a list of possible objections that your audience may have to entering your sales funnel.
9. Use a variety of analytic tools to determine what works and what can work better.
10. Reward consumer loyalty with incentives to make another purchase.
11. Increase awareness of your company, brand, product, or service with message consistency.
12. Leverage consumer reviews where applicable.
13. For online marketplaces, follow through on cart abandonment.
14. Coordinate your email marketing campaigns with social media marketing.
Feeling Overwhelmed? 4 Things You Can Do To Help Yourself
It seems like there aren't enough hours in the day to get everything done. But, there are things you can do to reduce this feeling. Here are four tips for helping you feel less overwhelmed.
1. Disconnect. Disconnecting from your online social life, text messages, and email for periods of time may be the best way to stop feeling overwhelmed.
2. Make lists. To-do lists can be extremely helpful. Staying organized can help you feel more in control. Before you sleep each night, make a list of things you want to do the next day. The next morning, you’ll quickly get on task.
3. Stop taking everything on as your responsibility. If you find yourself being the person who takes on work others should be doing or helping with, it’s time to set different expectations. Don't simply ask for help – expect it.
4. Make time to relax. Taking the time to re-energize can actually help you when you're feeling overwhelmed, because you give yourself time to think, relax, and prioritize. Avoid all distractions. Taking a bath, running, walking, or even just sitting in a quiet room alone is a great way to relax.
Why You Absolutely Must Prepare Your Business for Sale Today - If You Expect To Recieve Its Full Value Tomorrow
With a glut of baby boomer business owners eyeing retirement, when you want to sell your business competition could be very stiff and even keep you from finding any buyer.
Here’s how to beat the odds:
- Start Early. If you don’t “tune up” your business a good two to four years before you sell, you might have to take a price cut.
- Focus on Profitability. It’s essential to show the highest possible profit margins. Streamline your processes and cut costs without compromising quality.
- Reduce Risk. Reduce the amount of risk faced by your business. Create recurring revenue, reduce your reliance on a few major customers and few major suppliers, and get processes in place so not everything depends on you.
- Set the Price. Get a professional appraisal based on income, assets, and market comparisons, so you have some objective numbers on which to base your pricing.
- Identify Buyers. Strategically identify the types of buyers to target.
- Create Demand. Make your business look good on paper, online, and on land.
- Get the Right Help. You will need the help of experts in business sales, negotiation, financial planning, taxation, and law. An experienced business coach is the first person you want onboard because they help you find opportunities for fast gains and make that changes that can dramatically increase the price you'll receive.
If you own a business now, you owe it to yourself to read the full article and see why you have to start tuning you business today so your company will be the one everyone wants to buy and not one you are trying to sell when tomorrow comes.
You'll also discover why getting started today helps you'll make more money and take out more money in the meantime.
You Are a Potential Genius... How Many of These Traits Describe You?
Studies of geniuses have concluded that they use creative thinking to solve problems. Creative thinkers are responsible for many of the great breakthroughs in human history.
Here are some proven strategies to release your inner genius.
- A Genius Keeps an Open Mind. The more open your mind is to new and different approaches to situations in your life, the more likely it is that you are going to get insights and ideas that move you out of your comfort zone.
- A Genius Considers Every Aspect of a Problem. Refuse to jump to conclusions, and instead gather more data. Test and validate your tentative conclusions at each stage. Do not rush to judgement.
- A Genius Uses a Systematic Approach. Follow a carefully designed checklist to work through a challenge, step by step toward a conclusion.
- Solve Your Problems Faster with Creative Thinking. Always seek never-ending improvement. Be prepared to fail when you are developing new products, services, methods, or strategies.
- Think like a Genius and Take Charge of Your Future.
If you want to put yourself in a power position of complete control over your future, you must consider working with a business coaching and training professional.
Join hundreds of other driven, passionate business executives from around the world who today are enjoying greater success, personally and in business with our proven systems. Let’s chat and discuss how you can unlock the potential you know you and your business represents.There is never any obligation.
And if you know someone who is looking for a new career direction and has an excellent business background, send them this article, it could open a whole new world of opportunity to them as a member of the FocalPoint team.
- By Andrew Phillips, FocalPoint International, N. Adelaide, Australia
Email: aphillips@focalpointintl.com
Mastering Daily/Weekly Team Meetings
At the heart of team member performance is a rhythm of tightly run, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual meetings – all of which happen as scheduled, without fail and with specific agendas. Weekly/daily meetings must be short (20 – 30 minutes) and:
- Have a structure,
- Be timely, and
- Have an effective agenda.
Also, faster growing companies need a faster meeting rhythm. If your business is growing 15 percent each year, strategically you can treat the year like a full 365 days. However, if your business is growing 20 to 100 percent each year, you need to think of every quarter like a year and put a new strategy in place every 90 days.
Here are six helpful ideas:
- Hold Daily/Weekly meetings. Set them up and run them for 30 minutes.
- Do not have a comfortable cushy sitting arrangement.
- Make attendance required.
- Pick someone who can run an effective meeting.
- An effective agenda is:
- Good news: 5 minutes,
- The numbers: 5 minutes,
- Customer/employee feedback: 10 minutes, and
- One issue or “Big Rock” to address: 10 minutes.
Closing. Have attendees summarize their reaction to the meeting.
- By: Mark R Steinke – Elite Business Coach/ / Area Representative
Focal Point Business Coaching of Pennsylvania 1.610.768.7774
Why Financial Analysis is Essential in Any Business and How to Use It to Improve Sales and Generate Greater Profit
If you want to operate and grow like Fortune 500 companies do year after year, you have to do the hard work they do and it starts with a bottom-up financial analysis.
It all begins with an income statement and balance sheet. Often these financial instruments are in poor form and inaccurate. When that is the case, the first step is to get these documents into shape.
Next, I recommend three steps to help clients understand how they are doing:
- Pull together a geocentric industry benchmark report.
- Create Financial Ratios, both general and industry specific.
- Perform a comparison to see how their business stacks up to the competition head to head.
For these comparisons, various important ratios are used. These fall into four categories:
- Liquidity Ratios,
- Leverage Ratios,
- Profitability Ratios, and
- Activity Ratios.
Ratios are your sentinels that tell you about what's working, what's not and where trouble lurks before hidden problems wreck your company .
When you commit to analyzing these data regularly, it will reveal if you are allocating too many or too few resources to sustain your position in the market and to be able to create tactics to grow your market share into the future.
Learn what each financial ratio means, what it is telling you and how to easily calculate it when you read the full article.
- by Ben Pumphrey
Certified FocalPoint Business Coach & Trainer
Overcome Obstacles in Life and Business: Act and Think Like a Warrior!
What can you learn about overcoming any obstacle in business or life from the way elite SEAL teams think and are trained? Use their techniques and transform your success.
- Passion and devotion. Warriors have total passion and act wholeheartedly because they have a crystal clear focus on their purpose.
- Control of mind. What you think about most of the time is necessary to have perfect focus. Combined with determination, this helps you achieve more and pushes you to the maximum.
- Defeat your FEARs. Understanding that FEAR (Fantasized Event Appearing Real) is debilitating allows you to overcome your weaknesses.
- Do not discount your subconscious, embrace it. Practice relaxing, diaphragmatic breathing and meditation.
- Be positive, keep your mind filled with peaceful positive thoughts and visualize success.
- Be a leader. Always confront difficult situations. Lead first, eat last to inspire confidence.
- Increase your efficacy by mastering your physical, mental, emotional, intuitional and spiritual selves.
- Always allocate the necessary resources to high-value targets.
- Being an elite warrior will bring success in the global business environment. If you are not leading, your competition will be the leaders by default.
From “The Way of the SEAL,” by Mark Devine
Timing Is Everything In A Negotiation
The Law of Timing says: Timing is everything in a negotiation.
A negotiation can be made or unmade by time. You should use the timing of the negotiation to your advantage. When your timing is right, you will always get a better deal.
The first corollary of the Law of Timing is: “The more urgent the need, the less effective the negotiator.” If you are in a hurry, your ability to negotiate diminishes. If the other person is eager, you can exploit it to your advantage.
The second corollary of the Law of Timing says: “The person who allows himself to be rushed will get the worst of the bargain.” If you are pushed to decide quickly, say, “If you must have an answer now, then the answer is no. But if I can take some time to think about it, the answer may be different.”
The third corollary of the Law of Timing says: “You resolve 80 percent of the vital issues of any negotiation in the last 20 percent of the time allocated for the negotiation.” This means you must be prepared for the key issues to be resolved at the last minute.
- from "THE 100 ABSOLUTELY UNBREAKABLE LAWS OF BUSINESS SUCCESS" – Brian Tracy