Do you treat your staff like grown-ups? For example, how much freedom do you give them to get their jobs done or how much do you trust them to work when either you’re not there or they’re working from home? During the recent London tube strike, which the government estimates cost the capital £50 million…
Can you say that you know who your competition are, where their strengths and weaknesses lie, why consumers might choose them over you? If you can’t then how can you compete with confidence? I work with owners of micro businesses (typically employing 1-9 people) planning how they are going to get from where they are…
Having started my career in sales, I remember I had it drummed into me from very early on “under promise and over deliver”. My question as I’ve got older and more experienced is why would you under promise what something you’re trying to sell could do? I understand the principle of not over promising on…
I was talking to someone at a networking event this week whose opinion is that business coaching is a luxury and as such when times are hard it is dropped. I used to face similar objections from business owners who would want to stop all advertising when the economy was weak. I would point out…
FIFA, the governing body for association football (soccer) needs to get to grips with the scandal that has engulfed the organisation in the last couple of weeks by cleaning up its act. We argue here that the only way is ethics. In recent years FIFA has been dogged by accusations of corruption, particularly the award…
There is no second chance to create a first impression. Over the Easter weekend my partner and I visited her family in Scotland. Driving up on the Thursday evening, we stayed at a hotel which is part of a chain close to Preston just off the M6. The room was clean, the staff very friendly…
I recently read an article in the Harvard Business Review entitled ‘Why Smart People Struggle with Strategy’ which made me think – as small business owners can we go wrong with strategy? The article suggests that smart people are more brittle in their thinking and lack the key characteristics of a good strategist – flexibility,…
In his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R Covey’s 5th habit is to Seek first to understand then to be understood. Essentially you should listen intently with the objective of understanding. I spent twenty five years in commercial radio in the UK. I was trained to conduct a thorough fact find,…
As the old adage goes, ‘To fail to plan is to plan to fail’- and you don’t want to become a government statistic! There are many people setting up in business today who are fantastic at what they do – in fact they are just the sort of person a business owner would want working…