First, our motivation can only come from inside ourselves. Why? Because motivation is an internal force that drives individuals to act in order to achieve a specific goal. Two people might read the same book, or listen to the same inspirational speaker but respond differently. One person might feel motivated to act, the other might not. Second, you must have a big enough ‘reason why’ in order to feel motivated. Your reason why must provide a ‘meaningful motive’. It can be useful to look for a reason that’s bigger than yourself. For example, you may want to earn enough money to take care of your family - not just yourself. So David McNally’s advice is to dig deep into the truth of what you want. This is why it’s so important to choose goals to which you feel 100% committed. Third, you need to believe that your goal is attainable. Either that or your fear must be so great that you will try anyway. Without this fear or belief self motivation is difficult to maintain. Given that you probably don’t want to live with feelings of dread, let’s take a look at belief. You can start by looking for evidence within yourself that you can achieve your goal. You can then back this up by seeking support, mentors and role models, either directly or indirectly through books and audios.
Fourth, your environment is an influence on motivation. That’s a key reason why you need to choose
your friends and colleagues carefully. This doesn’t have to mean saying goodbye to the people you know now.
But consider whether it would be helpful to make new contacts. Again, books and audios can be very
supportive when you are looking to new ways of thinking. Finally, there is a difference between motivation and inspiration. Inspiration is getting in touch with our human spirit, whereas motivation is the driving force to move towards our goal. Inspiration can certainly help self motivation - and we can look outside ourselves for help with inspiration. So speakers like David McNally might help us feel inspired. It is then up to us whether to decide to be motivated to take action to achieve our
goals.
Taken from David McNally - Goal Settings
Archive for the 'Business and Management' Category
It will help you manage your time well if you know where your time actually gets spent. One very helpful way of determining your actual usage of time is to track your time. The process here is like making a schedule, but it works in reverse. Instead of writing things in that you are planning to do, time logging is a process of writing down the things that you have already done. Doing this is sort of a get-to-know-yourself exercise because this procedure will highlight many of your habits that you might selectively ignore currently.
For instance, some people find that every time they plan to do math homework they end up watching television. Other people just can’t seem to follow their schedule until the week before finals. Whatever your time habits, time tracking will help you adjust and fine-tune your time management practices. Having accurate information about your time usage patterns can serve as another important point of reference for self- monitoring. A few ways to track your time follow:
Strategy #1: Time Tracking is fairly straightforward. At the end of every hour jot yourself a quick note about how you actually spent your time for that hour. The note needn’t be long; one sentence or less should suffice. If how you spent your time doesn’t match an already planned activity, simply enter a comment as to what you really did during that time. This way you will be able to review patterns that emerge in your use of time and make adjustments to improve your productivity.
Strategy #2: Some people find it helpful to modify the planning page to facilitate tracking time. The modifications are easy enough: make two columns on your paper for each day of the week. In one column, write down the plan you are trying to follow; in the second column, make notes on what you actually did with your time. The side-by-side comparison is very telling and an excellent way to figure our where you’re not using time in the way you intend.
Strategy #3: Another effective way to make changes and get results from your time management strategies is to summarize your time use by time category such as: sleep, study, work, travel and so on. Before doing the summary, estimate the amount of time that you think you spend on the various activities listed on the form below and enter these in the “expected” row of the summary sheet. Feel free to add any additional categories that might be helpful. Then log your time for one week on an hour by hour basis. When the week is over summarize your time by category for each day, add up the values for all seven days of the week, and write the totals in the “actual” row of the summary sheet.
Taken from : Time Management for Students, Brian Pose
Once you have a set of goals, it is useful to decompose the goals into manageable steps or sub- goals. Decomposing your goals makes it possible to tackle the m one small step at a time and to reduce procrastination. Consider for instance the goal of obtaining your degree. This goal can be broken down into four sub-goals. Each sub- goal is the successful completion of one year of your program. These sub- goals can be further broken down into individual courses within each year. The courses can be broken down into tests, exams, term papers and such within the course, or into the 13 weeks of classes in each term. Each week can be further subdivided into days, and each day can be thought of in terms of the hours and minutes you’ll spend in your classes and doing homework for
today. While it may seem challenging to take in the whole scope of that convergent goal, thinking of your goals in this way helps to reinforce the idea that there is a connected path linking what actions you take today and the successful completion of your goals. Seeing these connections can help you monitor your own progress and detect whether you are on track or not. Take some time now to think through the goals you’ve set and to break them down into their smaller constituent parts.
Now, with anonymous marketing anonymous marketing strategies developed by companies yet we haven’t found the best one that could automatically draw customer to choose their products instead of competitor’s. Today on digital and virtual world when customer and producer not only can meet on the conventional market, an internet marketing strategy could be one way to grab those niche market. This strategy, when used on the right way could be a turn around point for your company.
A huge list of marketing tools and strategies can be used and implemented to get your sales grow as your company’s targets and goals. One of the oldest of these techniques is email marketing, this technique is used by sending your product’s offer right to your potential end users. This is a cheap marketing techniques, you could get in touch with those potential customer personally. Yet, it has weakness, if you do it wrong, you’ll probably will get caught to be a spammer and you’ll get banned from sending those promotion to your potential customer.
But don’t have to worry further, you should see an email marketing software which will help you to eliminate those problems with email marketing strategy. With this software you could self managed how your promotion email will be sent to your potential customer without worrying about spamming issues. So, I suggest you to get email marketing software for your marketing program as soon as possible so you could start it right away.
Some software are not only send promotion but could also draw feedback from customers providing you with data on how you can afford a product’s improvement. With these feedback you could create an improvement program for your products accommodating market needs. An online survey tool will help you with a customer feedback improvement program. Just as email marketing software, this kind of software will help you with your marketing campaign.
Having a meeting with your team are important thing to keep you and your team share information. It could be more important if you and your team are willing to achieve more than your target. A good meeting would be great place to share your knowledge about something that could increase sales, for example. The point is communication, how your team could get information about the market so you could discuss about how to solve problems faced on the market. Few years back, people still have problems to get teams seat together on a table to talk about business. Yeah, each person has different activities, different job, so it would be difficult to find some time that most of the team member could seat together to have a meeting.
But now, technology change everything, a meeting could be held even when your team are not in the same place. Yes, you still can have your meeting without waiting your team arrive in one place. Teleconference is one thing that change that culture of having meeting that must have your team in one place, seat on the same table.
This conference technology is first implemented on audio conferencing, allowing just voice. So it works like common telephone but we talk with a group of people at the same time. Then it’s developed to video conference, so you’re not only hear what people say but you could see his/her face while in the video conference. It just like the same old meeting, only you couldn’t touch him. Then there were internet, so now we have web conference. Now they have a company that serve your needs on teleconferencing, they provide variety of services, from the old audio conference to the updated web conferencing. Yeah, you could have three of them at one place. Choose the most suitable type of conference for your meeting.
Customer retention program, or customer relationship management are two things that must get more attention from the company. If a company want to improve their performance and always step ahead from their competitor, they should listen what their customer really want. With a good customer relationship management you’ll always get in touch with them, know what they really want, and then you could make products or services that can fulfill their needs.
What is this thing called customer relationship management? A customer relationship management is one of those management tools, it’s focused on how to make customer loyal to our products. So, in customer relationship management we try to be more closer to the customer not only touching their mind but touch their heart. You know when people or customers put our products on their heart not just their mind, they not only gonna be our loyal customer but they also will be our best marketer. How’s a loyal customer could be a great marketer?
A loyal customer is the one that has a big interest on your products or services, they’re like a huge fan of them. So without you asking them to promote your products, they will do it for free. And these marketer are the best, because they do the job from the heart, with the heart, and they will try to touch other potential customer by the heart. Yes, you will get a buzz marketing by building a good relationship with your customer. When you do customer relationship management in a right way, you’ll get your way to customer relationship marketing.
So just like I mention before, maintaining your customer will improve your performance overall. Because with them you could build a huge team of marketer, ready to buzz the market about your products. So build a good relation with your customer, get customer feedback, improve their product the way they want, make them loyal, and finally get them on your team.
To make a decision to start a business or to develop your current business will be a difficult thing to do when you don’t have a good and reasonable data on how’s the market will react on your ideas. Sometimes risks must be taken but without supported by data describing about your target market that would be suicidal action to do as I say here.In order to develop or starting business would be better if we first do several pre-development steps to ensure that our decisions later will be the best steps to take. What are those steps that I wanna talk about here? These steps are the common steps that people will take when they start to think about starting business, they are :
- Survey (Survey is a step to mapped about market condition. What are they want, their needs, so when you got those data you’ll be able to create some plans to accommodate those needs. With this survey thing you also be able to see how’s the market segmentation of your target area)
- Feasibility Study (With data you got from the survey, next you have to develop what they call Feasibility Study. Analyze your business feasibility from technical aspect, marketing aspect, then summarize it on financial aspect. Calculating your investment, revenue projection, cost projection, and of course profit projection, and see whether your business is feasible or not)
- Business Plan (Now you know what the market want, and you know that your business is feasible to run. It’s time for you to create plans about how’s your business going to be ran, how’s your marketing strategy, your operational methods, and anything that you would do for getting profit from your business)
These three simple steps, will sure make your plan to develop a business easier. Because these steps will resulting on data that describe about the opportunities on your business that you’re gonna jumped in. I’ll write more on each step later.Technorati Tags: business, feasibility study, business startup, business plan, business survey, market survey
Just as I told you before, to have your business franchised, you’ll need everything on your business to be standardized. This is why you should develop documents of Standard Operating Procedure (SOP). With a good SOP you won’t be bothered by your franchisee asking how to operate the store, how to pay their employee’s salary, etc. You could compiled and explain everything they need to run the business in the SOP document. SOP is made as detail as possible, so even people with no clue about running a burger outlet (assume this is a burger franchise) could be an expert on the business just by reading the manual. Yeah, it’s just like the manual book included on your notebook, reading this SOP as a manual to run the business is a smart way for a franchisee.
SOP documents are unique between one business compared with another, each business has its own characteristic so the manual must developed in a specific way that suits your business characteristics. To tell you the truth, it’s not that hard to develop those SOP documents. To make it easy, you could use a preparation document, I usually call it as Document Control, in this document we divide SOP as three major parts : Entry, Operating, and Exit. Each of them will be your guidance for you to develop a procedure related to the part.
- Entry (This would consist of manuals that will give franchisee and/or franchisor a guidance on how to start a franchise outlet, for example : Outlet startup procedure, Market research procedure, locations survey procedure, franchise agreement, etc)
- Operating (On this part you must develop SOP on how to operate a franchise outlet, starting from warehouse management, financial management, marketing tools, customer service manuals, serving food & drinks manual, etc)
- Exit (Consist of SOP on how to end a franchise agreement)
Those are Document Control, developing SOP for your business will be much easier when you setup them with this Doucment Control guidance.
To build a franchise outlet we need few things to take care of, these things are compiled on a document called Project Files. Within this project file we put some analysis on outlet that planned to be franchise outlet. Things to put on this project file are :
- Operational feasibility (Analyze the feasibility of the project on an operational aspect, is the location feasible enough to be a franchise outlet, is this place could get enough water resource, provide a good waste management, enough electricity power for a franchise outlet, etc)
- Market research (Analyze the market of the location. is it located near public facilities, near housing area, is it located on an area that has similar business, etc)
- Location research (Analyze its location, give a site map, draw a layout planning, etc)
- Financial simulation (Finally you’ve to put some financial calculation on the location, this financial simulation will give you a brief description whether that location feasible or not to be a your new franchise outlet)
These aspects are the important things to analyze before deciding whether a location could be a franchise outlet or not, some additional analysis could be added to complete your project file. We’ll discuss these aspects later on my next post.
Developing a business proposal is one thing that you should do if you’re on a plan to create some business opportunities. Whatever it is, initial business development, franchise, licensing. Attracting form of this kind of proposal could be the key on pulling investor to put their fund on your idea. But often this thing is the thing that bother most people, they have many, many ideas of new business opportunities, but they don’t know how to put on the line, describing their ideas to money making opportunities in front of those investors. The important point of developing a great business proposal is how you could put your ideas into a profit generator for them. You have to describe it clearly to them, make it make sense for them. Don’t try to give them some sky high words, hiperbolic words about your idea. They just want a simple explaining how this idea of yours could be their money farms.
In fact, some investors just needs a summary wrote on a single page, defining how much it would cost, how much they’ll earn from it, and how you can make it happens. If you’re able to describe these clearly, and sounds make sense for them, then your proposal is good enough. But you couldn’t stop here, at good, you want to create a great business proposal. A perfect proposal usually consists of these :
- Background of your ideas (Explaining, why you could come up with this idea, and why do you think it would be a great opportunity that if they’re not taking it immediately somebody else will)
- Technical Analysis (On this chapter, you have to describe what these ideas needs to support on, technically of course. Technical means what kind of support do you need to make this idea operational. What equipment do you need, location for this business, vendors, etc. So they’ll see if they could put investment on your ideas or not).
- Market Analysis (This part should be explaining about the market of your business ideas, which segment of the market you’re aiming, position that your brand will have on the market, etc. So they could start analyzing is your ideas makes sense or not).
- Financial Analysis (Financial analysis would be their big concern, here you must interpretate your technical and marketing analysis to a financial statement. Make a financial simulation that they could read about it’s BEP, ROI, IRR, and other financial indicator. So they can decide whether to take or not your offer).
There you are, four simple factors you should considered when you’re developing a business proposal. Hmm, I’m thinking about writing proposals for people will be a great business idea. What do you think, guys? Actually, I’m on a preparation to launch a writing proposal services, I’ll launched my website on it next month, hope I could draw some feedbacks from you guys.
