Wishing everyone a very prosperous 2012
and all the years to come......
HAPPY NEW YEAR and God Bless each
and everyone !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ♥♥♥
How To Identify And Eliminate Waste In Your Budget
1.0]Understand the ROI for each expenditure
Return on investment, or ROI, isn’t just for the big stuff like marketing and technology. It’s time to rethink the return on investment for every expense your business incurs.
For this step, it often helps to think of your business as a brand new enterprise. If you were launching your business today, what would you change? What long-term commitments or contracts are working against you, and is there room to renegotiate or reinvent a few things and save some dollars in the process? What would you lease instead of buy, buy instead of lease?
2.0] Avoid death by a thousand cuts.
Take a look at all levels of your business in your effort to reduce waste. Can you refine your marketing strategies to reach a more targeted audience? Are you communicating with your customers too much and not optimizing each message? How can you deliver your product more efficiently? Are you paying too much for office space or paying for space you don’t maximize? This soup-to-nuts approach can help reduce incremental expenses and catch operational inefficiencies that add up to big dollars over time.
3.0]Look for repetition, redundancies and communication gaps
Examine the entire lifecycle of your operations to see if there are redundancies or unnecessary repetition and replication of duties.
Often, the view from ten thousand feet can reveal clear opportunities to streamline workflow, better divide tasks, eliminate unproductive steps and ultimately save money. Pay close attention to what consumes the largest amount of time in your business, like sourcing products, manufacturing, sales, fulfillment or customer service. Take a critical look at each phase independently to see what can be done better, and then examine how each phase works together. Is customer service missing opportunities to communicate upsell opportunities to the sales team? Are delays in fulfillment creating double work for customer service?
4.0]Tap your resources
Often, it’s the people closest to the day-to-day operation of a business that can be your best waste-reducing advocates.
Regardless of the size of your business, seek input from staff at all levels as you work to refine your budget and reduce unnecessary expenses. Reward employees who have the best suggestions for streamlining processes.
5.0]Formalize efficiency reviews
Businesses are constantly changing and evolving. So it's important to continuously review how things are done and how things can be done better, smarter and faster. Consider scheduling a periodic efficiency audit or creating a permanent team that is tasked with identifying and reducing waste on an ongoing basis. But watch out that your efficiency committee doesn’t become a source of inefficiency itself. Look for concrete results, and empower committee members to review and vet each new opportunity to curb waste and bring only the best options to you for final approval.
Return on investment, or ROI, isn’t just for the big stuff like marketing and technology. It’s time to rethink the return on investment for every expense your business incurs.
For this step, it often helps to think of your business as a brand new enterprise. If you were launching your business today, what would you change? What long-term commitments or contracts are working against you, and is there room to renegotiate or reinvent a few things and save some dollars in the process? What would you lease instead of buy, buy instead of lease?
2.0] Avoid death by a thousand cuts.
Take a look at all levels of your business in your effort to reduce waste. Can you refine your marketing strategies to reach a more targeted audience? Are you communicating with your customers too much and not optimizing each message? How can you deliver your product more efficiently? Are you paying too much for office space or paying for space you don’t maximize? This soup-to-nuts approach can help reduce incremental expenses and catch operational inefficiencies that add up to big dollars over time.
3.0]Look for repetition, redundancies and communication gaps
Examine the entire lifecycle of your operations to see if there are redundancies or unnecessary repetition and replication of duties.
Often, the view from ten thousand feet can reveal clear opportunities to streamline workflow, better divide tasks, eliminate unproductive steps and ultimately save money. Pay close attention to what consumes the largest amount of time in your business, like sourcing products, manufacturing, sales, fulfillment or customer service. Take a critical look at each phase independently to see what can be done better, and then examine how each phase works together. Is customer service missing opportunities to communicate upsell opportunities to the sales team? Are delays in fulfillment creating double work for customer service?
4.0]Tap your resources
Often, it’s the people closest to the day-to-day operation of a business that can be your best waste-reducing advocates.
Regardless of the size of your business, seek input from staff at all levels as you work to refine your budget and reduce unnecessary expenses. Reward employees who have the best suggestions for streamlining processes.
5.0]Formalize efficiency reviews
Businesses are constantly changing and evolving. So it's important to continuously review how things are done and how things can be done better, smarter and faster. Consider scheduling a periodic efficiency audit or creating a permanent team that is tasked with identifying and reducing waste on an ongoing basis. But watch out that your efficiency committee doesn’t become a source of inefficiency itself. Look for concrete results, and empower committee members to review and vet each new opportunity to curb waste and bring only the best options to you for final approval.
5 Essential Characteristics Of The Entrepreneurial Mind
Essential characteristics of the Entrepreneurial mind control are as follows:
1. Creativity
The seed of entrepreneurship is the ability to see things differently. Whether it's with new products or new processes, entrepreneurs are driven by the uncanny knack to see holes in the marketplace and devise innovations to fill them. Though it’s not the only essential quality to success, creativity may be the foundational mental skill. Entrepreneurs ask the “what ifs” that drive inquisitiveness, and they’re able to let go of what they already know to source fresh information and new ways of thinking about a problem.
2. Suspicion of predictors
Entrepreneurs tend not to labor under the assumption that data is the sole predictor of an outcome. Especially in new markets and with new products where data is largely interpretive or extrapolated, entrepreneurs are undaunted by the typical predictors that may put off fainter hearts. One study by Inc. magazine found that nearly 60 percent of Inc. 500 CEOs had not written business plans prior to the launch of their companies, and only 12 percent had done market research. These entrepreneurs realize that creating something new is a heated evolutionary contest, and no one can know the outcome with any amount of certainty. It’s as if their thinking, freed from the “no’s” of the data, can begin to build, test and refine.
3. Comfort with uncertainty
Similarly, a distrust of prediction and analysis creates an atmosphere where uncertainty rules. Indeed, uncertainty is the very essence of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs are comfortable existing in that space between raw idea and successful product, and they tend to thrive in the wide middle ground of experimentation, revision and testing.
4. Openness to experimentation
A comfort with experimentation goes beyond educated trial and error. The ability to experiment with products, processes and outcomes, no matter where the results may lead, is the key element of this quality. It’s difficult to fully appreciate how much of what we call “experimental” is actually quite predictable. Most people are comfortable testing new products or systems with a range of one or two possible outcomes. When the results fall nicely within the range, we move on to the next step. But for entrepreneurs who are bringing something new and novel to the marketplace, experimentation can be truly…experimental. Removing expectations and letting the results lead you in completely new directions is the attribute that marks a truly entrepreneurial mind.
5. Functional humility
Egos can destroy the very best ideas. Entrepreneurs who are committed to solving a business problem or reinventing a product or service display a functional humility. They understand that their egos are only useful in moving the idea forward, not dictating outcomes or wrestling to make results conform to a preconceived notion. The very best entrepreneurs may constantly generate and promote their own ideas, but they think and act collaboratively and are staunchly solutions-focused.
So can everyone have an entrepreneurial mind? Probably not. But with time and practice, we can begin to think more like entrepreneurs. We can start to make subtle shifts in old, reflexive thinking that keeps us from exploring a new idea or taking the leap and launching our own business. Entrepreneurial thinking may be less of a destination and more of a journey as we push our own boundaries and explore exactly what we’re capable of. There are few things more elemental than how we think. What kind of beneficial chaos could we create if we began to think differently?
1. Creativity
The seed of entrepreneurship is the ability to see things differently. Whether it's with new products or new processes, entrepreneurs are driven by the uncanny knack to see holes in the marketplace and devise innovations to fill them. Though it’s not the only essential quality to success, creativity may be the foundational mental skill. Entrepreneurs ask the “what ifs” that drive inquisitiveness, and they’re able to let go of what they already know to source fresh information and new ways of thinking about a problem.
2. Suspicion of predictors
Entrepreneurs tend not to labor under the assumption that data is the sole predictor of an outcome. Especially in new markets and with new products where data is largely interpretive or extrapolated, entrepreneurs are undaunted by the typical predictors that may put off fainter hearts. One study by Inc. magazine found that nearly 60 percent of Inc. 500 CEOs had not written business plans prior to the launch of their companies, and only 12 percent had done market research. These entrepreneurs realize that creating something new is a heated evolutionary contest, and no one can know the outcome with any amount of certainty. It’s as if their thinking, freed from the “no’s” of the data, can begin to build, test and refine.
3. Comfort with uncertainty
Similarly, a distrust of prediction and analysis creates an atmosphere where uncertainty rules. Indeed, uncertainty is the very essence of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs are comfortable existing in that space between raw idea and successful product, and they tend to thrive in the wide middle ground of experimentation, revision and testing.
4. Openness to experimentation
A comfort with experimentation goes beyond educated trial and error. The ability to experiment with products, processes and outcomes, no matter where the results may lead, is the key element of this quality. It’s difficult to fully appreciate how much of what we call “experimental” is actually quite predictable. Most people are comfortable testing new products or systems with a range of one or two possible outcomes. When the results fall nicely within the range, we move on to the next step. But for entrepreneurs who are bringing something new and novel to the marketplace, experimentation can be truly…experimental. Removing expectations and letting the results lead you in completely new directions is the attribute that marks a truly entrepreneurial mind.
5. Functional humility
Egos can destroy the very best ideas. Entrepreneurs who are committed to solving a business problem or reinventing a product or service display a functional humility. They understand that their egos are only useful in moving the idea forward, not dictating outcomes or wrestling to make results conform to a preconceived notion. The very best entrepreneurs may constantly generate and promote their own ideas, but they think and act collaboratively and are staunchly solutions-focused.
So can everyone have an entrepreneurial mind? Probably not. But with time and practice, we can begin to think more like entrepreneurs. We can start to make subtle shifts in old, reflexive thinking that keeps us from exploring a new idea or taking the leap and launching our own business. Entrepreneurial thinking may be less of a destination and more of a journey as we push our own boundaries and explore exactly what we’re capable of. There are few things more elemental than how we think. What kind of beneficial chaos could we create if we began to think differently?
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