As a business owner, you must answer to unexpected problems that affect your business. But make sure you are responding, not reacting to these situations. This article discusses the critical difference and why it matters significantly in an economic downturn.
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Do you wish you had a crystal ball to predict whether your business will sink or swim in a recession? While we can’t know what’s ahead, we can plan ahead to avoid three business-killing scenarios detailed in this article.
Why do some businesses thrive while others crash during economic downswings? There are uniquely dynamic and healthier approaches to the business cycle that separate successful enterprises from those that collapse.
Suppose your business is at that point where it's ready to launch into growth mode. But you require a team of well-trained sales representatives to cement its place in the market, except you don’t know where to start to source high-caliber candidates. Here are some helpful tips to find the best sales team to support your growing business.
Does it seem like you’re in a never-ending cycle with your business? You may have built yourself into a rut of menial tasks that you struggle to get away from because, well, “someone has to do it.”
Do your failures have a bigger effect on how you operate within the business than your successes? Your reaction to failure says a lot about your culture. If you’d like a culture where employees are empowered to be innovative and accountable for their results, keep reading.
What I find when I talk to business owners interested in getting help is that there seem to be massive misconceptions about business coaching that make it extremely difficult for business owners to find the best coach for them.
What if bad employees could identify themselves before you hire them? For many business owners or human resource professionals this seems like a dream. But with our deselection hiring practice, it has become a reality for many businesses.
When you open your doors, having a sense of who your customers will be will make it much easier to drum up interest in what you have to offer. However, don’t make the mistake of focusing on only one target market.
Time doesn’t stop for anyone, despite the pleas of many business owners who seem to work all day but can’t get ahead of their business. Instead of spending your time doing things that seem to never get done, invest it so that you can actually work less.
As a business owner, it’s not ideal to have to constantly tell your team what to do, when to do it and how to do it. You hire employees to take responsibilities off of your plate by designating it to people who are capable of doing it as well as, if not better, than we can.
With only 24 hours in a day, it seems like you need 8 arms. Make the most of your hectic day as a business owner by having key activities running in the background while you focus on building the business.
When it comes to quarterly planning, many business owners lack a strategy to tackle the task. As a result, they make ineffective plans to achieve unrealistic goals, if they even plan at all. Here’s what you should include in your 90-day plan and how to make planning a priority.
Has your business seen explosive growth in profit but you’re still hesitant to reward yourself? Here are three considerations why business owners must give themselves raises.
Do you feel like your team is not meeting your expectations or cannot do the job as well as you can? One of the hardest things to do as a business owner is to loosen the reins with your employees. Here’s how to create a plan to ensure you’re developing a winning team.
Creating a winning marketing strategy is one of the most stressful and overwhelming components of being a business owner. Many don’t even know where to start and survive blunder after blunder before embracing a strategy that actually works.
How do you spread the sense of commitment throughout an organization when you as an owner are the only one ‘actually’ on the hook? Here are examples of what a culture that encourages commitment should look like.
Procrastination may cost your business thousands of dollars, unbeknownst to you. The best way to beat procrastination is to understand the root. This article will discuss the implications of procrastination and its common root causes.
Focusing on abundance means you are engaged in activities that raise wealth for everyone you encounter. In this article, we’ll discuss how in business, abundance can lift the lives of yourself, your employees and even your family.
Does it seem like you’re getting further and further from your business goal despite working harder and longer on your business? Today I’ll discuss three principles for success that every business owner should keep in mind when they’re feeling unmotivated in their business.
How well do you manage your time? Or is your time managing you instead? Sometimes it feels like we need a copy of ourselves so we can do two things at once. But what we actually need is to improve our self-management skills so that we’re mastering the limited time we have in a day.
Every year business owners abandon their annual planning goals because they lack a clear purpose, and have not laid the foundation for To plan means you have a purpose in mind. While tactics and strategies to achieve the goals set forth might change the PLAN, the foundation for what you want to accomplish shouldn’t.
Coaches and advisors surround every great entrepreneur, but when you first set out on that journey for support, how do you choose who to put in your corner?
Understanding money and finances in a business is not something we’re taught in school. We’re really lucky if they even touch on personal finances. This puts business owners in a really hard place when they finally want to begin their own business, because as passionate as they are about the work they do they need money to keep their business afloat.
We hire and promote managers to increase your capacity as a business owner and to scale our business. But what should happen when managers and leaders struggle to lead when these changes come?
Planning is a critical part of doing business. Often, however, business owners get so busy doing that they don’t take the time to plan the actions they need to take to be really successful. This article will discuss:
If you want a team that has top-notch collaboration and mistake-proof communication, we highly recommend you do regular team-building exercises to bring your employees together. Here are some creative activities to bring your employees together.
“Shutdown”, “cutbacks”, “shortage”, and “inflation” are all words that are striking fear and frustration in business owners around the country as they struggle to find ways to manage conditions in an ever-changing environment. Let’s discuss ways you can pivot your business to combat the ever-changing economic conditions.
Do you feel like you’re ready for the next step of your business but are unsure of whether life coaching or business coaching is it?
If your sales team is having trouble selling to prospects, they could probably boost sales by shifting the focus to a different model. Let's break down the difference between upselling, cross-selling, and down-selling and how you can use them to communicate value to customers.
Are you confused about all the talk about business coaching and sick of people telling you that you need help with your business? There are many owners that had the same perspective that have seen tremendous success through business coaching. In this article, we’ll discuss how we really help business owners.
Are your employees having a hard time keeping up with how rapidly your business is growing? If your team is struggling to handle the capacity of work that comes with scaling the business, implement these three tactics to help them keep pace.
Business owners spend around 30% of their workweek on time-wasting, low-value or no-value activities. There are three biggest time-wasters for business owners and three solutions that every business owner needs to know.
10% may not seem very significant, but when it comes to buying customers, 10% can make the difference between failure and profitability.
Skipping meals for many can seem like a sign of productivity and success. In reality, it’s a sign of poor time management that will end up negatively impacting your business.
There are many reasons that businesses fail - debt, lack of revenue, unforeseen circumstances - the list goes on. But what business owners don’t realize is that they are usually the cause of their own demise.
Hiring comes with a lot of hurdles and frustrations for business owners, but it is a critical part of growing one’s business. In this article, we discuss best practice hiring processes that are listed in Brad Sugar’s Instant Team Building (2006).
It can be incredibly frustrating when the end of the year quarter comes and you're expecting to be a few steps closer to your goals, but instead are in the same place or even further away. Your first instinct may to immediately blame your team and their shortcomings. But when you point the finger at someone else, how many fingers on that same hand are pointing back to you.
Business coaching is growing in importance today more than ever, as hundreds of businesses are closing their doors every day. So how can business owners find a coach that meets their needs?
Employee meetings should boost morale and make team members excited about the direction the business is going. Instead, it is often seen as a time-waster that lowers efficiency and fails to connect employees to the company. In this article, let’s discuss how team meetings can be used to facilitate team building and realign employees to the vision of the company regularly.
March is Women’s History Month, which is a great opportunity to highlight women business leaders who inspire us to persist through the hardships of being business owners.
Businesses make more money by building a returning customer base than they do by getting new customers, but often lack the customer service to make customers want to return. In this article, let's discuss how and why businesses should work on improving customer service systems.
We talk a lot about vision and mission and why it’s important for any business. To further emphasize why this is important, we want to share about TBC ActionCOACH’s vision and how we plan to achieve it.
If you’re still trying to selling your product, you’re doing it wrong. Customers aren’t buying your product, they’re buying a vision of how they will feel by using your product. In this article, we highlight how Apple does a great job at selling a vision and how business owners can create their own.
With rising levels of stress many business owners are questioning if they even enjoy what they do. They leave their employee position at their corporate job to become an entrepreneur, just to be drained to the point that forget the vision they had for themselves and their business.
The start of the new year is a great time to revisit the vision and mission as it sets the course for the rest of the year.
You know that little voice inside of your head? What does it say to you? What does it say about you? Do you believe it?Sometimes we can engage in negative self-talk about ourselves that may not always be true, but can still affect how we view ourselves and our success.
As many businesses switched to full remote or a hybrid version of the office, a good number have had concerns about how to maintain their company culture when people are not all together working side by side. If we look at what healthy company culture is and how it impacts a business, we will see that it doesn’t have to be attached to a physical space or the street address of an HQ. Maintaining and nurturing company culture can happen no matter where employees do their work. In this article, we discuss:
If you’re like billions of other people in the world, you may be in the process of creating your new year's resolutions. This is a time of reflection on the past year and here are our three key learnings from 2021.
What many business owners don’t realize is that while attracting new customers is very important, often they can increase their profits by tapping into the customer base they already have.
Do you have any nightmarish manager horror stories? These can include things like power trips, feuds, unachievable expectations, and creating rifts between the team. Let’s discuss how we can avoid promoting poor managers to positions of leadership. In this article, we will discuss:
Many business owners are blinded by the success of their past that they don’t recognize the signs of a plateau. In this article, we will discuss:
Do you feel like your business is just doing well enough? You’re not doing badly, but you’re not doing great, but you’re happy with that? Well, to sum this feeling up is something called complacency and this can be a detriment to many businesses. In this article, we will discuss:
Do you want to sell your business later? Or maybe you want to grow into other locations. You may even just want to free yourself up enough to go on vacation. If we want any of these things, we must scale our business so that we can reach these goals.
Thanksgiving is a great time to express gratitude to the people around us. One group we should be especially grateful for, but often neglect is our customers. So we must keep them happy and make them feel valued by shopping at our business. A simple way we can do that is by finding ways to express gratitude to customers. In this article, we will discuss:
A big part of owning a business is competition. But it’s an important part that stimulates the economy and drives innovation. So, to stay ahead of the competition, we must work harder in defining our niche than following industry trends. In this article let’s discuss:
Feeling overwhelmed lately? This article discusses the 5 main stressors for business owners and how they can address them to ease some of the stress in their business. We’ll address the following areas 1. Money 2. Hiring 3. Time 4. Loneliness 5. Marketing
If you’re like most business owners, you’re probably working well over 50 hours per week. This is a lot of time, but unfortunately for many owners, it does not lead to positive results. To get the results we want in our business we must evaluate how we spend our time and what we spend our time on. In this article, we’ll discuss:
If you want to attract top talent to your business, you must be very specific in evaluating your wants and needs for these roles. Specificity is the difference between hiring a competent and incompetent employee. This is especially important in the first three steps of the hiring process.
The fourth quarter of the year is the most important of the year as it has the biggest impact on sales and the future growth of your business. To make sure you take full advantage of the opportunities the fourth quarter brings. Be sure to focus on these four things:
Do happiness and business seem like an odd pair? It shouldn’t be. Our business should spark joy and excitement not only in us but the people around us. Read below as we discuss:
Does your team as a whole struggle with time management? It may be time for some big changes for the team, but you may have to start with yourself. In this article, we will discuss 5 ways you can improve time management.
Are you proactively collecting reviews from your clients? If not, now is the time to start so that you can see serious growth in your business. In this article we will discuss:
Your mindset is your most powerful tool in the fight against failure. So if we want a strong mindset, we must train it to be tough and impenetrable. This article will discuss:
Do you work long hours on a regular basis? Many business owners I speak to are working crazy long hours! Some are working from 5 am to 9 pm every single day. This is not only unhealthy, but it is preventable. The solution is to increase productivity in our business.
If we focus all of our time and resources on trying to replicate this success, we actually miss out on opportunities that could help us achieve even greater success. Essentially, we become so blinded by the success of the past that we don't see the opportunities of the present that could achieve even better success in the future.
Sales training should be a regimented and continued practice in any business. If you want your team to be the best of the best and outsell competitors, here are three things you should know about sales training.
When unexpected challenges occur, sometimes it can paralyze us and we are unsure of how to face these situations. It can feel like we’re drowning as we navigate our business through the rain. Here’s how to embrace these challenges so that we continue to grow our business.
Too often business owners overwork themselves to their own detriment and don't even realize it until it's too late. Knowing how you spend your day is crucial for efficiency and productivity. In this article we discuss: How to conduct a time study, what a default diary is, and the number one cause of business failure.
Do you find that failure can paralyze you? Well, failure is a part of the journey towards a successful business, so let’s talk about failure and how we can positively pivot from it. In this article we’ll talk about: Real-World Examples of Failures The First Step to Overcome Failure in Business In times of failure, turn to your community!
If we want to maximize the little time we have in a day, we must determine what is urgent vs what is important. Once we do this, we are able to improve our time efficiency and mastery. Keep reading if you'd like to learn more about: How to Decide What To Spend Our Time On6 Ways to Improve Time Efficiency
When everyone’s in a race to chase the money, prioritizing your vision is the quickest way to the finish line. When you define your vision and keep it at the center of your business, you are more likely to make decisions that will positively affect everyone involved in your business. This will keep the passion alive in your business and propel you towards success. In return, the money will follow!
Communicating with others at work can be a challenge. If we want to minimize miscommunication within our team, increase productivity, and resolve conflict easier, the key is to know our team’s communication style. One way we can learn our employees’ communication style is through DISC profile assessments. Learn more about this tool and the four unique personalities in this article.
Growing up, we all learned the magic words are “please” and “thank you.’ These words not only display good manners, but they are powerful words that we use to communicate our gratitude to one another.
Spring is coming soon, which signals a time for change and renewal. We can apply the same concept to our business as we rid it of the things that are not working and make room for new systems that will make it even more efficient.
The word “luck” gets thrown around quite a lot when it comes to business. People often ask “what are lucky colors for business?”, or “what are business lucky charms?” hoping to cheat fate and strike gold for them and their business. This causes us to question, is a business’s success determined by luck or by hard work?
No matter what business we are in, the customer should always be at the center. Virtually every aspect of our business has a direct correlation to how well we treat our customers and how well we manage issues that occur. This includes sales, marketing, production, and revenue.
Have you ever heard the phrase, “you must learn to earn”? This is a phrase that our ActionCOACH founder and CEO, Brad Sugars say a lot. Essentially, what it means is that to earn success in your business you must be willing to learn. Learning is a key foundation of our principles, and it should be our mission as business owners to continuously learn. To grow and expand your knowledge, you must be willing to seek and accept knowledge from a variety of sources. This can include coaches, other business owners, articles, courses, or classes.
As a business owner, you can not avoid every setback or business challenge. The goal is to not take your eye off the prize despite these failures. Focusing on the ultimate mission and vision of your organizational goals is critical.
Are you looking to increase the value of your business and make it even more profitable? In this article, we have compiled a list of 6 ways that you can increase your average dollar sale, increase your profits, and put more money back in your pocket.
Are you struggling to find the best ways to market your small business? In this article, we have laid out 5 ways for you to market your business and increase visibility in this digital marketing era.
As a business owner, are you turning your failures and mistakes into learning opportunities for your team? Many are not. We are bound to make mistakes so learn how to turn them into opportunities for the people you lead by reading this article about how to utilize the tool called the "Point of Power".
If you feel like your business is not growing or getting to that next level that you are hoping for, it's time to start setting goals. Many business owners have trouble setting goals for themselves and my tip is to start S.M.A.R.T. Learn how to implement goal setting into your business by reading this article about S.M.A.R.T. goals!
There are 3 major mistakes small business owners are making in their marketing and sales process that is preventing them from converting their leads into sales. Read this article to see if you're making these mistakes and how you can prevent them.
Can your business function without you? This is typically a foreign concept to business owners, however, the businesses run efficiently and effectively when every member of the team can execute their roles routinely. Once this happens, you can achieve synergy.
Having client testimonials is not only something that can boost your SEO, but also adds credibility to your business page that pushes potential customers through the initial hesitations of purchasing from you. Read this article to learn the benefits of testimonials and how to get them.
Do you find that your business is struggling to compete against others in your industry? With a saturated market of similar businesses, it's important to have a clear and defined niche. Redefining your niche might just be the difference you make that allows you to outsell your competitors. This article discusses what a niche is, how to define it, and how to utilize your audience to do so.
Do you value emotional intelligence in the workplace? If you're a business owner, you should. Studies have shown that those with a high EQ are more successful in business. Read this article we wrote to evaluate your own EQ and see how you can incorporate this in your workplace.
With the start of the new year, many business owners may scramble to get things ready for what’s coming. They are deep in the planning stage and are filled with a mix of excitement and nervousness. It is crucial to bring your team into the planning stage as they will have a hand in the day-to-day processes of your business. Whether they are interacting with customers, taking inventory, or managing marketing efforts, they are all important to the business and to each other’s individual efforts.
Do you often feel like you have too many tasks on your plate each day that you become overwhelmed and start to procrastinate? Your are not alone. Read this article to learn new ways to beat procrastination and take back that time to work on your business!
Are you looking to create a team that considers work more like a second home? In order to create a work environment like this, you have to be sure to weed out the toxic employees that tear down the environment and mindset of others. Read this article to learn the traits of toxic employees and how they might be affecting your company morale.