You should be aware that every time you start a business, take the risk that the transaction could fail. What do the experienced people protect themselves from risk at every opportunity to ensure that they keep the business going for months on the brink of disaster, and handle it gracefully, if they really go down.

You need to have a plan for what you’re going to do if your business looks like it’s going bankrupt. Are you going to borrow more money, if you can? Sell your car? Raise prices? Get rid of staff? Done right, you should have a good package of ‘rescue measures’ that really do have a chance of rescuing the business.

Borrowing.

If you need to borrow more to keep your business afloat, take great pains to avoid looking desperate. Act like your business is moderately successful but needs more investment, and you’re far more likely to succeed in getting more funding.

Bye-Bye Staff.

This is a bad idea, but not always a terrible one. In a home business, you presumably only take on staff because you have enough business to cover it, don’t you? So it makes perfect sense to get rid of the staff when things start to go wrong and go back to doing it all yourself.

Price Hike.

When your business is in trouble, there are few things guaranteed to destroy it faster than a price rise. Just don’t do it, however tempting it might be – cut costs instead. If you absolutely must raise prices, do it by scaling back what you get for your money in each of your price ranges, without actually raising the prices.

I know of a struggling bus company that kept its fares the same for years but gradually started to run fewer buses and send them all over town, making journeys take longer. People reacted a little badly to the longer journeys, but it was nowhere near the scandal that there would have been if prices had risen.

Keep Staff Pay Aside.

Whatever you do, make sure to keep staff pay separate from the other business finances, and pay it out immediately if the business looks to be heading for trouble with its creditors. It is far better to be paying your staff on the last day than to be giving all that money to the creditors. Leaving staff unpaid will destroy your reputation, not to mention hurting a lot of innocent people.

The ‘Closing Down’ Sale.

If you plan it well, your last day in business might not be so bad. Just make sure everyone knows that you’re closing down for real, but still price everything ever-so-slightly above cost. In this way, you can avoid the drastic loss-making ‘Everything Must Go!’ mentality, and come out of your business the same way as you would if you’d decided to shut it down that day for some other reason.

Selling Your Business On.

If you’re shrewd about it, you might be able to keep your business going long enough to sell it to someone who could turn it around. There’s nothing dishonest about this route – it’s the one most big companies take if things start to go wrong. You might even find that one of your competitors is willing to buy, even if only for your established customer base.

It’s Up to You.

Disaster plans are very personal, and they depend a lot on how much risk you’re willing to put on yourself. If you do things the sensible way, then you’ll go as far as you can to avoid selling or borrowing against any of your own assets just to keep a business afloat. On the other hand, if you’re really determined and a bit of a risk-taker, putting some things of your own at stake might buy you enough time to recover from whatever hit your business.

It’s a little like playing poker: are you going to be the guy who walks away and leaves his money on the table, or are you going to throw your car or house keys onto the table and raise the stakes? That’s risk management for you.

As I relate this to restaurants, it’s so easy to see why dining room service is excellent training for actors, since they’re performing all of the time. There might be days when their energy level is low, yet they are still expected to perform on the show stage at night. It is not much different for dining room service staff whose livelihood depends quite a bit on how they look and act before many people per night. The word “performance” makes a lot of sense when relating it to other Service fields such as medical, legal, financial and armed, even in religion they’re called prayer services.

With increased human knowledge and modern inventions, the term “Customer Service” has evolved over time. Whenever a new technology is invented, an array of “services” develops making it accessible to the general public with success depending on product “performance” and the product related “Services performance.” Whether it is a bulb to make a room bright or a flying machine that sends people around the world faster, the need for developed services attached to new technologies does create jobs.

Even at the computer, we dial up our Internet “Service” Provider to gain access to the information highway. The instantaneous delivery of sorted out information within seconds is now the norm. Proper navigation “performance” (that word again) allow us to surf the World Wide Web streamlining information at our fingertips. ” With improved search engine technology, the return of consumer searches has become more categorically specific-once again proving better performance results in better service.

Why focus so much on the holiday and seasonal storage? Heck, there are a lot of money to be made! The next time you tip the car around a center aisle display, ask yourself how you can benefit from a little holiday bonanza.

Let’s face it, people are aware of the season … if they like it or not. Therefore, in secret language of a little holiday in their headlines direct mail is a good idea.

3 steps to incorporate the holiday news

1st What year your product / service must relate to?

New Year,Valentine’s Day,President’s Day,St. Patrick’s Day,Holy Week,Spring,Fourth of July,Graduation,Summer,Family Reunions,Back to School,Sweetest Day,Halloween,Fall,Thanksgiving,Winter,Christmas

The list is endless! Are you looking to focus a few. Keep a life in your marketing campaign throughout the year!

2nd Combine this offer with a holiday theme
Add a new twist to his offer in the season. If you are a lawn care services, you can concentrate on the case of leaves on the ground. There are 1,000,001 ways to turn your product to match next season or holiday.

3rd Target Audience
Why should the reader want your services or products to use? It is unique, top-line, cost effective, time saving? Talk to the needs of the reader.

normal business depression can be avoided by riding in the wake of the endless list of events and holiday season!

1) Definition: A meeting is a business where people for a job that a team will be adjusted accordingly.

2) A business meeting as an event that occurs when it is preceded in the planning, stress, characterized by the structure determined and controlled by a budget.

3) The youth meetings are free of the core business, work at the heart of their work. Unlike many sessions to prevent people from working on critical tasks such as planning, communication and learning.

4) combination of three things that are unproductive and include: poor planning, lack of adequate procedures and hostile culture. Effective leaders in all this for an effective meeting.

5) Effective meetings, sharing of control and making appointments.

6) The purpose of each meeting are agreements, decisions or solutions. The meetings for other reasons, rarely produces anything of value.

7) prepare the participants spend their time at the meeting in preparation for the meeting.

It is better to spend a little time to prepare solutions using a lot of time to solve problems.

9) The meetings are an investment of time and resources required for performance.

10) A meeting may be treated with every chair in the room. And if your meeting, ask your president.

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For many businesses who are on the cutting edge of new business paradigms, the concept of a geographically isolated business is becoming obsolete. It is entirely possible to put together a business consortium or a project team made of subject matter experts spread across all time zones and from around the world. In fact, this kind of decentralized management of business projects is becoming more of the norm than the exception in the twenty first century business environment.

So just as those in marketing, product development and investments have already learned how to maximize a project team that is separated by hundreds or thousands of miles, the project manager must also adapt the project management methodology to accommodate a similar approach to getting business done.

Conventional project management is a systematic approach to taking a project from scope to implementation that has proven successful in thousands of companies. We have no reason to abandon this well developed methodology. But as new business paradigms come to play, we have to adapt even a standard methodology like project management to fit the way business is done in this century.

Communications is the key to any successful project. This is the challenge of utilizing a team from across a great geographical divide. It is entirely possible you may execute the entire project with team members you never see. So to facilitate frequent and up to date communications, we must exploit the technology we have at our disposal such as…

§ Blogs, wiccis and shared working environments. Group sharing environments on the web are becoming more and more common. By setting up a tool set on line in which team members can post status reports, leave emails, update the project management software, file expense reports and stay in touch with each other, you facilitate the kind of communication that keeps the team moving forward successfully. Blogs, private message boards and wiccis are also excellent means by which an ongoing “conversation” can be carried out between team members that anyone can check into and get caught up with the content of what has been done and what is being planned for the project.

§ Controlled email trees. As the project manager, email is an obvious way to quickly stay in touch with team members. However, it can get chaotic trying to keep up on fast moving email trees. That may be a good reason to trap all emails trees within your online project management software so the contributions of everyone on the team can be captured for further review.

§ IM staff meetings. IM can be expanded so it doesn’t just bring in two participants. You can schedule your weekly staff meetings using an IM conference room and capture the entire proceedings in the IM log thus assuring yourself that nothing that was said will “fall through the cracks.

By becoming adept at using cyberspace as the primary “location” of your project team’s interaction, you can literally create a team of highly specialized talent that can be located from anywhere in the world. This vastly expands your ability to tap the best minds for your work and to streamline the project management process. It will take time to get used to and there will be some missteps along the way. But if you can conquer global team management using internet tools, it will be a valuable skill for successfully executing global projects for your business.

It makes you wonder, just how many banks do we need in town and why are the banking institutions spending so much money to put branches in virtually every location that has open space? It is a business trend that gets your attention and it makes you wonder what is driving this bank explosion. After all, in many cases there are not more customers for those banks. You have to wonder how banks can cost justify such expansion when the growth of bank branches is not even in step with population growth in a given community.

The phenomenon has become more profound in the last ten years than ever before. And much of it has to do with changes in how banks are regulated and the financial objectives that these branches are targeting, financial objectives that bring big money to the banking institutions spreading all over town.

· Regulatory Changes. The rules for how many branches a bank can own and where they can open them have changed significantly in the last decade. Now banks can open branches inside grocery stores and at a greater density than before. And this has set off the growth war of branch banking that we notice going on all over town.

· An explosion of services. Along with a freeing up of the branch banking laws, commercial banks can offer many more services than ever before. While we think of banks in terms of checking and savings accounts only, if you walk into the bank, you will be buried with offers for a huge variety of financial services including varieties of investment services and different forms of credit arrangements. And these services are huge money makers for your local banker.

· How banks really make their money. Obviously banks don’t make much money just keeping your checking account working correctly. But using checking as a loss leader, banks can capture your business to offer credit services and investment vehicles that yield them much higher returns on the use of your funds. Further, the fees that can be applied for overdraft accounts and other fee based services are a pure profit mechanism for banks.

· Visibility counts. Each new customer a bank lands takes revenue out of competitor’s banks. And if they can capture your banking business, the money you store in your accounts is available for loans and interest they can realize by using your money while it is in their care. So they want to be visible to assure you think of them first when it is time to open a new account.

This trend is not likely to change any time soon. The competition in the banking industry is fierce and bankers are aggressive business people. So we should expect them to continue to work hard to capture the consumers business and make themselves available to consumers to steal your business away from competing banks. And while it might be troubling to see every street corner filled with bank branches, its part of the market system that makes our economy strong. And that is a good thing.

“The HP Way” which the “management by walking around” method was a part of was based on the concept that employees, particularly the subject matter experts in their fields, are capable of being part of the problem solving process and that a team approach to creating new business ideas and innovate ways to solve problems was far superior to the “top down” approach of management coming up with all the answers and dictating them to a mindless but obedient staff.

Packard was a believer in the open space, no walls and easy access to management corporate culture that MBWA exemplifies. By enabling frequent and unscheduled interactions between employees and between management and staff, new ideas were given maximum opportunity to be birthed and encouragement to be developed which leads to a more responsive and flexible business culture and one that has a robust approach to growth and change.

In order to implement MBWA, the manager must embrace the concept of a flexible and relaxed relationship with staff. The details of the method that MBWA promotes is summed up nicely in the title, management by walking around. It suggests that instead of only meeting with employees at scheduled times in formal settings away from other employees or in a staff meeting where the agenda is published in advance, many opportunities for employees to talk to management are encouraged. When the supervisor or manager walks freely amongst the employees throughout their work day, the opportunity to ask questions and to interact about new ideas the employees are considering is frequent. From those unscheduled and frequent visits as the manager walks from cubicle to cubicle, great concepts can be birthed which can then be nurtured into new product ideas or novel solutions to problems.

However, if the relationship between management and employee is formal, based on fear or intimidation or not otherwise grounded in warmth and friendship, the MBWA system will go from a powerful method of collaborative problem solving to a tremendous nightmare for everybody. You don’t want your employees dreading your “drop in” visits and seeing their productivity drop as you enter their work space because they are so concerned with impressing and serving management that they dislike your arrival in their world. It is amazing how quickly a network of employees can detect and set up an early warning system when the manager is walking around so everybody “gets ready” for what they perceive will be an unpleasant sudden visit by management.

To avoid this, the supervisor should in other ways foster a relaxed relationship with staff. The employee must feel free to discuss issues and questions openly with management without fear of being scoffed at, mocked, belittled or punished. Many a company has generated a “HP Way” concept that comes out of the human resources department that amounts to little more than color posters on the wall and a suggestion box but nothing changes in the corporate culture or how each manager interacts with the staff. Employees are quick to notice the hypocrisy of such a program and the result is management because an object of ridicule instead of inspiration.

By making your visits enjoyable, a welcome experience and one where the employee doesn’t fear your arrival, you can expect outstanding results from the MBWA method. And you will know you have achieved true change in your corporate culture when not only do you walk around to visit employees but employees “drop in” on you by walking around if for no other reason than to share a joke or a donut. That is an ideal setting for team work and proactive problem solving.

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In theory a raise in the minimum wage should be a nonevent economically. It should be a simple adjustment for inflation which the business has already adapted to. In fact, as inflation raises the cost of goods and the prices the business charges, one might expect the wages of workers to rise naturally to match that upward slope caused by inflation.

How you view the good or the bad of the minimum wave increase may depend on which side of the fence you reside, the employer side or the employee side. To the employer the rise in employee costs makes doing business more expensive and affects the bottom line. To the employee, the employer is just being competitive and paying his or her employees a salary that they can live on. In many cases, you may be on both sides of the issue if you own or operate a business but have people in your family who are trying to get by on the minimum wage.

The hardest hit businesses by this upward push in wages is small business. Enterprises that employ a large amount of unskilled, lower paid workers can see a huge jump in the cost of keeping employees because of state or federally mandated increases in employee pay. Many times small business enterprises operate on a thin margin of profit and any change to the cost structure can be a deadly hit to their budgets. Moreover, since the small business model is intensely competitive, there is little room to raise prices to clients or customers without risking losing business to a larger competitor who can absorb the minimum wage increase without increasing prices.

These concerns are part of the reason that from a governmental stand point, congress is slow to increase the minimum wage. There is already a tremendous resentment in the population for businesses that are relocating their production or support facilities over seas to take advantage of low paid workers to keep their bottom line on track. You have to know that employee costs are a big issue when a business is willing to relocate much of their operation to a foreign country and incur all of those costs just to tap an employee base that will work below the minimum wage.

From the worker perspective, it’s hard to understand how this trend to take low paid jobs out of the country can be changed. We are slow to stop businesses from taking actions they need to take to compete in the markets which is why passing legislation to stop the exporting of jobs is not a popular idea. While it might help the plight of the worker in this country, it goes contrary to our priority on letting the free market and capitalism play out. Sadly, when the free market does reign, sometimes good people get dealt out of the program.

The best way for American workers to combat competition from unskilled workers overseas is to stop being unskilled. By taking advantage of educational opportunities and gaining valuable skills, they can enter a new market where those skills will land them a good paying job that is not likely to go overseas because of the specialized skills the worker offers to employers. So the best way for government to fight the export of jobs due to high employment costs is not to artificially suppress the market to hinder free trade. The best move is to make our workers more skilled, more valuable and for workers to simply outwork their competition overseas. This is capitalism at work at its best and if that line of attack is followed, the outcome for everybody is a stronger work force, the retention of jobs in America and a stronger national economy as well.

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