“When you buy a company, you are not buying a building or the employees but you are really buying the customers.”
Planning of acquiring business? There are a couple of things you definitely need to know before you sign that check Here’s some tips that you need to keep in mind.
Tony Schwartz, the president and CEO of The Energy Project and the author of “Be Excellent at Anything” shared in Harvard Business Review the magic of doing one thing at a time.
Why is it that between 25% and 50% of people report feeling overwhelmed or burned out at work?
It’s not just the number of hours we’re working, but also the fact that we spend too many continuous hours juggling too many things at the same time.
What we’ve lost, above all, are stopping points, finish lines and boundaries. Technology has blurred them beyond recognition. Wherever we go, our work follows us, on our digital devices, ever insistent and intrusive. It’s like an itch we can’t resist scratching, even though scratching invariably makes it worse.
Tell the truth: Do you answer email during conference calls (and sometimes even during calls with one other person)? Do you bring your laptop to meetings and then pretend you’re taking notes while you surf the net? Do you eat lunch at your desk? Do you make calls while you’re driving, and even send the occasional text, even though you know you shouldn’t?
The biggest cost — assuming you don’t crash — is to your productivity. In part, that’s a simple consequence of splitting your attention, so that you’re partially engaged in multiple activities but rarely fully engaged in any one. In part, it’s because when you switch away from a primary task to do something else, you’re increasing the time it takes to finish that task by an average of 25 per cent.
But most insidiously, it’s because if you’re always doing something, you’re relentlessly burning down your available reservoir of energy over the course of every day, so you have less available with every passing hour.
I know this from my own experience. I get two to three times as much writing accomplished when I focus without interruption for a designated period of time and then take a real break, away from my desk. The best way for an organization to fuel higher productivity and more innovative thinking is to strongly encourage finite periods of absorbed focus, as well as shorter periods of real renewal.
If you’re a manager, here are three policies worth promoting:
1. Maintain meeting discipline. Schedule meetings for 45 minutes, rather than an hour or longer, so participants can stay focused, take time afterward to reflect on what’s been discussed, and recover before the next obligation. Start all meetings at a precise time, end at a precise time, and insist that all digital devices be turned off throughout the meeting.
2. Stop demanding or expecting instant responsiveness at every moment of the day. It forces your people into reactive mode, fractures their attention, and makes it difficult for them to sustain attention on their priorities. Let them turn off their email at certain times. If it’s urgent, you can call them — but that won’t happen very often.
3. Encourage renewal. Create at least one time during the day when you encourage your people to stop working and take a break. Offer a midafternoon class in yoga, or meditation, organize a group walk or workout, or consider creating a renewal room where people can relax, or take a nap.
It’s also up to individuals to set their own boundaries. Consider these three behaviors for yourself:
1. Do the most important thing first in the morning, preferably without interruption, for 60 to 90 minutes, with a clear start and stop time. If possible, work in a private space during this period, or with sound-reducing earphones. Finally, resist every impulse to distraction, knowing that you have a designated stopping point. The more absorbed you can get, the more productive you’ll be. When you’re done, take at least a few minutes to renew.
2. Establish regular, scheduled times to think more long term, creatively, or strategically. If you don’t, you’ll constantly succumb to the tyranny of the urgent. Also, find a different environment in which to do this activity — preferably one that’s relaxed and conducive to open-ended thinking.
3. Take real and regular vacations. Real means that when you’re off, you’re truly disconnecting from work. Regular means several times a year if possible, even if some are only two or three days added to a weekend. The research strongly suggests that you’ll be far healthier if you take all of your vacation time, and more productive overall.
A single principle lies at the heart of all these suggestions. When you’re engaged at work, fully engage, for defined periods of time. When you’re renewing, truly renew. Make waves. Stop living your life in the gray zone.
There is much debate over whether or not extending net terms to customers is a smart practice for small businesses. There is risk involved, with providing a service or product and trusting the customer to pay you back at a later, specified date. Some say it is harder for small businesses to monitor their credit department, as they don’t have the tools like Fortune 500 companies, but thanks to emerging technologies, handling their customers’ payments is easier than ever. The truth remains that, if your business model supports the practice, extending credit opens an immense opportunity for your small business.
Travel is one of the most expensive line items on anyone’s budget so here are a few tools courtesy of INC magazine to save key dollars that could be spent on your marketing and sales machines.
In today’s entrepreneurship, you are either succeeding or failing. Your business might be the next Apple, or it will be a dud.
Being an Educated, Experienced, Creative Professional (EECP) is not enough to survive a start-up. While there is a kind of rapid growth is the entrepreneur’s dream, it also creates problems and requires the difficult transition from having a great idea to making it happen. What will help you is to take a small, “smart step” toward something you desire to achieve.
Here are some hard-won lessons from INC Magazine for start-up survival which are worth more than a read—you might actually want to print them out.
Since Bankers Advocate has Virtual Offices with teams members in Orlando, South Florida and the Philippines (Jessie and Rachael, our wonderful Virtual Assistance), we thought you would be interested in the tools we use to be in the “Cloud” and communicate with each other effectively:
This has been a brief introduction to some of the tools we use to keep in touch and freely communicate with our far flung team members. Please contact Chris Curtin at 561-882-1331 or chris@bankersadvocate.com for more information.