609-531-4776

A Good I.d.e.a. for Business Growth

All owners want their businesses to grow. Many of us invest time and energy into planning how we will grow our businesses.

The biggest problem with growing a business is neither the lack of desire or planning.

It’s finding and implementing the right strategies. There simply are too few sound strategies that owners can easily and effectively apply in their own businesses.

The Good I.D.E.A.

One of the best approaches to planning business growth is the I.D.E.A. concept: Identify Develop, Evaluate, Act.

Instead of re-inventing the growth-strategies wheel, I offer the following outline of the approach.

IDENTIFY—Specifically What Would You Like to Achieve?

Like all planning processes, this one starts with identification.

Specifically you start by identifying the growth you want: increased clients, revenue per client, sales volume etc. Regardless of what you plan to increase, it’s important to establish a clear measure for this improvement.

Identify the growth as measurable amounts such as “10%” or “15 over last year”. This yields an objective measure against which you can evaluate the results of your growth strategies.

Read more

The Power of Positive Influence

A positive influence may come in many shapes and sizes. There is a theory I read about, quite a long time ago but that theory left an impact on me. It goes something like this-just the act of observing something can have an influence on what is being observed. In simple terms, to look at something or just be in its presence actually changes its nature. Now if I was to explain what this means I would have to go into a physics lesson and that is not what this is about. The overall principle and how it relates to human behavior and interaction is what I am most interested in.

When we come into contact with other people we need to have the knowledge and inclination to discern whether they will have a positive influence over us or a negative one. While people can have all sorts of influence over each other, there are two general classes that we can examine and those are negative and positive. Negative influences are to be avoided or weakened in their power over you. These are people who are pessimistic, complaining, hopeless, deceptive, and basically believing that life is an endless struggle.

Filling your life with positive influences will have a far better effect on your ultimate destiny. Positive influences are people who are optimistic, disciplined, confident, supportive, cheerful, honest, loving, and generally believing that they can control their lives and destinies. The degree of influence we have over each other is much more powerful than you may have ever known. The mere presence of someone with a negative personality can affect you in a negative way. You see attitudes are contagious.

Read more