small-bizXpress

Since we checked to see if You Outgrown Your Home Office lets see some tips to balance your personal life and home base business under same roof:

1. Set goals.
2. Establish and honor your home office.
3. Make the most of your time.
4. Set office hours.
5. Stick to your guns.
6. Get away often.
7. Project a professional image.
8. Stay motivated.
9. Develop a strategy for fighting isolation.

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Tags:home business, balancing life, set+goals, organize

1. Casual benchmarking
There is nothing wrong with learning from others' experience-vicarious learning, as contrasted with direct experience, is an important way for both people and organizations to learn how to navigate a path through the world. After all, it is a lot cheaper and easier to learn from the mistakes, setbacks, and successes of others than to treat every management challenge as something no organization has ever faced before. So benchmarking-using other companies' performance and experience to set standards for your own company-makes a lot of sense. In the end, good or bad performance is defined and measured largely in relation to what others are doing.

The fundamental problem is that few companies, in their urge to copy ever ask the basic question of why something might enhance performance. Before you run off to benchmark mindlessly, spending effort and money that results in no payoff, or worse yet, in problems that you never had before, ask yourself:

• Is the success you observe by the benchmarking target because of the practice you seek to emulate?


• Why is a particular practice linked to performance improvement-what is the logic?


• What are the downsides and disadvantages to implementing the practice, even if it is a good idea? Are there ways of mitigating these problems, perhaps ways your target uses that you aren't seeing?

2. Doing what (seems to have) worked in the past
There is nothing wrong with learning from experience and developing proficiency at certain strategies and tactics. The problems come when the new situation is different from the past and when what we "learned" was right in the past may have been wrong, or incomplete, in the first place.

As in benchmarking, asking some simple questions and acting on their answers can help avoid the bad results that come from mindlessly repeating the past:

• Are you sure that the practice that you are about to repeat is associated with the past success? Be careful to not confuse success that has occurred in spite of some policy or action with success that has occurred because of that action.


• Is the new situation-the business, the technology, the customers, the business model, the competitive environment-so similar to past situations that what worked in the past will work in the new setting?


• Why do you think the past practice you intend to use again has been effective? If you cannot unpack the logic of why things have worked, it is unlikely you will be able to determine whether or not they will work this time.

3. Following deeply held yet unexamined ideologies
The third flawed and widespread basis for decisions often does the most damage because it is the most difficult to change. It happens when people are overly influenced by deeply held ideologies or beliefs—causing their organization to adopt some management practice not because it is based on sound logic or hard facts but because managers "believe" it works, or it matches their (sometimes flawed) assumptions about what propels people and organizations to be successful.
To avoid succumbing to using belief or ideology over evidence, ask yourself:

• Is my preference for a particular management practice solely or mostly because it fits with my intuitions about people and organizations?


• Am I requiring the same level of proof and the same amount of data regardless of whether or not the issue is one I believe in?


• And, most important, are my colleagues and I allowing our beliefs to cloud our willingness to gather and consider data that may be pertinent to our choices?

For more on this check the book Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management or this post.

Tags: management, management myths, benchmarking, small business

5. Failure to use your time wisely
80% of your top results come from 20% of your efforts/customers/actions.
4. Failure to keep overhead low
There are three ways to make more money in your business: Sell more, Raise your prices, Reduce your overhead. Businesses that underperform from a financial perspective often have allowed success to creep in and increase overhead;
3. Not dancing with the one that brought ya
You got to where you are in business by having a few or many customers who believed in you and liked what you do. But if you don't continue to nurture your best customers, you run the risk of failure.
2. Not charging enough.
Far too many small-business owners, especially owners of service businesses, set their prices some time in the distant past and then failed to raise them as necessary.
1. Not earmarking enough money to marketing and advertising
The only way new customers will hear about your business, by and large, is through marketing and advertising.

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Tags: financial mistakes, small business, 80 20 rule, overhead, marketing, advertising

1. Can you walk to your desk without tripping over something?
2. Are you hemmed in by filing cabinets and shelving units?
3. Have you taken over your children’s closets?
4. Does the living room look like an extension of your office?
5. Do you have to move a pile of papers off of your printer to use it?
6. When was the last time you saw the surface of your desk?
7. Do you have to move boxes off of chairs when company comes over?
8. Does your entire house look like an office building?
9. Does family members roll their eyes when they see you bringing in more equipment?
10. Do you dread going into the “pit” that has become your office?

If you have answered yes to more than three of these questions, your home office needs more room. It may just be a question of rearranging the rooms of your house. If there is a larger room that can accommodate your office, try switching rooms.

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Tags: home office, home business, office organization

Pioneering research into the nature of innovation in small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) has revealed that ambitious, smaller enterprises are more likely to focus on incremental innovation, rather than radical developments.

The research, carried out by Cranfield School of Management, contradicts the traditional and widely held belief that SMEs tend to focus on radical innovations because of their agility, flexibility and entrepreneurial management style.

The most successful, ambitious SMEs are in fact those which have achieved growth by ‘sticking to the knitting’ – selling more of their existing products or services to their existing market.

Link

Tags: small business success, pioneering, research:

It’s common knowledge that most small businesses fail within 5 years. These statistics are mindblowingly depressing for people looking to start up a new venture. No-one starts out with the intention of creating something that isn’t sustainable. In fact most people would be adamant that they weren’t going to be one of those statistics. There are many things that can undermine a business. Here are a few:

Getting wedded to a single idea and sticking with it too long

How long has it been since you updated your offer? That can be as simple as delivering your product or service in a new way. Remember, new ideas are the currency of entrepreneurs. Schedule time to brainstorm new ideas for your business.

Believing your own b.s.

Without wanting to burst your entrepreneurial bubble, sometimes we can believe so strongly in what we are doing that we ignore other (differing) opinions. Just remember that an alternative view is also likely to be based on sound reason, and it's a great idea to understand what those reasons are.

Ignoring your cash position.

It's often the case that business owners are overly optimistic about sales, particularly of a new offer. In the event that this happens, your reserves of cash will be your lifeline. Knowing exactly how much cash you need to run your business from week to week is step one in avoiding this trap. Step two is obviously having the cash you need, plus extra in reserve, to survive for 6 months with low or no sales.

Letting unproductive employees linger

If you employ other people then one of your key activities is managing and coaching the performance of the people that work for you. Tthere will be times when your employees just aren't working out as you had hoped. Have you ever stopped to notice how draining it can be dealing with "staff" issues?

Selling too hard.

If you find yourself selling an idea or product too hard to too many people, perhaps it's time to listen to why they are not buying and learn from that, rather than trying to become a better salesperson. Have mechanisms in place that allow your customers to provide feedback. Ask your customers what else they want before you go and create something new.

Not setting up support structures.

Admitting that you need helping some areas is the responsible approach to business management. Hire people and services to handle the stuff that you're not good at, or don't have time for. Most entrepreneurs do better when they are fully supported, it's amazing the difference that taking the pressure off yourself can do for your energy levels and focus.

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Tags: entrepreneur, traps, cash, selling, support, small business

Email marketing isn't complex or new. Yet we see the same mistakes being made over and over by the marketing executives, sales professionals and owners of small businesses.

If done correctly, email marketing is a very effective medium to generate new leads, and build continuous contact with your customers and prospects. It can easily help you yield new sales and meet your targets.

Take care of these top 10 mistakes and you are on your way to new sales!

1. Underestimating Current Customers List


2. No specific Target


3. Using cheap lists


4. No system to measure response


5. No clear goal or strategy


6. Marketing folks don't have time to update anyone about their initiatives


7. Marketing message is inconsistent


8. Boring Marketing Message or Ad copy


9. Dropping Prospects Half Way


10. Not interested in Educating the prospect

Check details on them here

Tags: email marketing, online marketing, small business, small business marketing