Posts belonging to Category business systems

You might be asking yourself “How can I improve staff morale and staff satisfaction“, this post should give you some ideas to help you get started.

If you are a business owner with 1-20 staff you may like to keep reading as I discuss how to improve staff morale within your team(s) and get them to start thinking about working towards your goals for the business, rather than just completing their daily tasks.

Regardless if you have 1 or 20 or more staff, each member of your team needs to know their role and what you expect from them and believe it or it, you may find it is relatively easy to improve performance in any area of your business that includes resources, this could be suppliers, contractors, customers and so on.

How do they know their role?

Your staff (including Managers) should have …  (more…)

In light of recent events in Queensland and other parts of Australia over the past couple of weeks, and a nasty experience that someone very dear to me had with her business last week, I wanted to write an article about how you can ensure you have a business continuity plan in place to get you back on your feet quickly; even if everything is falling down around you and it looks like all hope is lost. (more…)

Below is a small list of little things you can do to start increasing traffic to your website. Once you have a product to offer or some useful information you can start attracting more attention. Have you implemented all these marketing strategies. I am still working on some of them:

1. Create useful content. Nothing else is important (hopefully I am starting to do that for you)
2. Update your useful content regularly. Today’s web audience expects to see fresh material, and having regularly updated content will keep them coming back (don’t forget to sign up for my blog)
3. Build sticky and interactive pages on your website including discussion boards, comment capability and anything else that helps build a community (include sharing buttons)
4. Seek out partnerships with other people with email lists to promote your website (would you like to partner with me, if yes, please sign up to my blog and email me. I am currently developing an awesome product for family and small business that you might like to be part of)
5. RSS feeds are a great way to keep visitors informed of fresh content on your site. For an explanation of RSS feeds, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGssU and how easy it is to receive up-to-date information from your favourite sites
6. Create an affiliate program to promote your products and services (working on that one myself)
7. Use SEO techniques to get listed naturally at the top of Google, Yahoo and other search engines (I achieved this on 2 sites)
8. Podcasting is a great way to build a regular audience and keep them coming back, see http://www.feedforall.com/videos/what-is-podcasting.htm
9. Invest in PPC advertising (ie. Adwords) to drive targeted traffic to your website, see http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/adwords/webinars/index.html
10. Create a blog with fresh content that builds a regular audience. Use the following tool to find out which blog software is right for you http://www.weblogmatrix.org – I use WordPress or Blogger
11. Build profiles on popular social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Use your profiles to connect to others with similar interests and send them to your site, see http://www.linkedin.com/in/michellepavel and http://twitter.com/bestbuys and http://www.facebook.com/?sk=welcome#!/profile.php?id=100000072687878
12. Invest in other forms of free and cheap advertising including banner advertising – visit http://www.fasterprofits.com.au  for a full list.

This post concept was courtesy of David Riklan, Self Growth. Links and info has been updated

Delegating tasks to your staff or hiring a consultant may help you with tasks that will free up your time to work ‘on’ your business rather than ‘in’ it… but you need to ensure the person carrying out the task knows everything required to complete it to your satisfaction – upfront!

Working ‘on’ your business allows you to:

• look for new ways to attract customers
• improve your business system
• monitor staff performance; ensuring your values and guidelines are being followed
• find new products
• analyse and beat the competition
• create new marketing campaigns
• enhance your business image
• find business partners
• and the list goes on

Of course, if you don’t want to work ‘on’ your business, and prefer to work ‘in’ it doing what you love, then delegation is great for handing out the tasks you despise. You may even have staff that would love to do that task and be better at it. (more…)

Are you dreaming of creating a really successful business?

Then you might like to start by following these guidelines.

This cycle diagram represents all the elements of your business that need regular attention; if your really are dreaming of being successful in business. Some of these elements you may have working beautifully, but have you considered that the others need a little TLC as well.

A synchronised business system will help you to achieve … (more…)

What if the reason why we are currently experiencing an economic crisis is because there are too many ‘get rich’ schemes ripping people off or products being sold that are not quality or do not provide value? How can they get away with it? Maybe it is time for those ‘advantage takers’ to step back and realise they now need to provide value and quality or they won’t get the droves of customers they were getting a 1-3 years back.

Have you noticed all the ‘deals’ that seem to be popping up lately, like ‘buy xyz car and get $000s cash back’; and that’s not all, you also get a set of steak knives (just kidding). If you are in business that provides a product that is ‘not’ of sound quality (unless you are a bargain shop), what do you think is going to happen to that business down the track. In recent months I have purchased several items through online wholesaler sites. The items were for personal use mostly, but here’s the thing, most of the items have either been thrown out or just not used at all because they were not of the standard I expected. (more…)

It is now more vital than ever to stay ahead of what is going on around us, so that our businesses remain in tact and stronger than ever. I strongly believe a ‘quality system’ is one way to do that. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to go to all the trouble and cost of obtaining an accreditation certificate to ISO 9001; what it does mean is that you can use the ISO 9001 guidelines to setup your very own quality system.

If you are having problems in areas of staff performance, comebacks, customer satisfaction… a quality system can help you:

• identify problem areas and rectify them quickly
• track customer feedback
• improve performance of staff
• with continual improvement
• develop or provide better quality products and services
• force you to communicate more with your staff and customers
• increase sales and profits
• grow your business
  
• define an appropriate supplier
• protect your business
• standardise processes and procedures
• gain recognition from external bodies
• with obtaining government projects (usually certification is needed here though, but not always)
• define roles and responsibilities of management and employees- reduce overhead costs
• and heaps more benefits

There is a catch though … (more…)

Below I have created a little questionnaire that can help you determine if you are providing ‘quality’ products.

If you have more than one product, write down or type up your answers (excel maybe more suitable) so you can see if there is a pattern by product type, supplier and so on. Below is a list of questions to ask yourself: 

That should get you started towards figuring out where your business sits in regards to ‘quality’ products but … you might like to setup a ‘quality management plan’ that includes any issues related to the above items and the action you are going to take to rectify any problems. Try to make each item in the plan measurable, so that you can see how much your system has improved over a period of time. It’s like tracking your marketing campaign really.

Congratulations if you are not experiencing any problems associated with questions 1, 2 & 3. You obviously have some sort of quality system setup, regardless if it is documented or not, and you likely know how to supply ‘quality’ products. Of course, there is probably always room for improvement and documenting a process that is working well also helps you delegate tasks to others, so you can spend time working on your business, rather than it in.

How did you go on a scale from 1-10? Please leave a comment and share your experience with us.