Category: blog

We have prepared the best tips for you to be better in management.

So, you have become a manager, but you are now looking for ways to be better in managing. Well then, you have come to the right place as we have prepared the best tips ever. Read down below, and enjoy the ride.

Strategise

There are many ways to outwit everyone else when it comes to managing a business. Since there are a lot of factors that need to be considered, the key is to maximising everything. Planning ahead is one proven way to a better management. You can do this by customising all the perils of management that was mentioned previously. Doing this can prepare you on future problems that you may face. It is never outdated to always hope for the best yet be prepared for the worst.

Delegate

Accepting that you cannot do everything is vital to be able to lead well. Having so many limitations makes it impossible for anyone to do a ‘one-man’ show and become successful.

Whilst it may give you a lot of peace of mind knowing that you are able to greatly perform tasks on the basis of your own standard of greatness, you can actually accomplish more by delegating other stuff to others. This will be possible if you are able to train them to think and do things the way you will. Proper delegation involves being able to delegate the tasks accurately with set expectations and troubleshooting methods in case the expectations are not met.

Hire Virtual Assistants

If you have budget constraints and will have difficulty hiring traditionally, getting help from virtual assistants is your best option. In fact, there are lot of cases wherein it was proven that hiring someone to work virtually is much more effective than hiring conventionally. Not only that virtual workers cost less, other matters, such as benefits, taxes, office resources, and supplies, will not be a problem. Setting up a virtual office is surely more cost-effective than having to set up an actual office. The key is to look for quality virtual assistants that can really help your business. Virtual assistants are abundantly available on the internet; they offer different skill sets and levels of expertise.

Gather Financial Resources

Whilst keeping your outflow fluid, it is also essential that you have solid backup resources when it comes to your finances. In the event that you are unable to sustain your cash outflow vis-à-vis your cash inflow, having alternative ways to gather up finances is very important. One best way is to strengthen up your credit rating. To be assured that in the event that you will need additional capital, having the ability to secure loans is very important. When a calamity happens or an economic bump is underway, being amongst the first on the list of qualified businesses that can avail of assistance, whether from a private or government agency, is great for your business. Keeping close ties with other business owners is also one great mode of securing your financial fluidity.

Innovate

There is no sense arguing about all industries being saturated already. The business world is, no doubt, highly populated already; both with big and small players. There is no way that your venture will be successful unless you are able to provide new and fresh offers and contributions to your industry. If you cannot offer any innovation, then you will be amongst the thousand hopefuls whose dreams were turned into nightmares. It is important that you will be able to offer new and exciting stuff to your target market. Whether it is a new marketing strategy or a unique brand, the key is to be perceived different. If you will just follow the leaders in your industry or plan to duplicate one company’s success, the likelihood of getting your own success will be very remote. And if for some luck you did get successful by reproducing other’s triumph, it is expected that unless you innovate, your success will not last for so long.

There are always those days when work is quiet. But on those slower periods, it’s an outstanding chance to not only grab hold of on all of your administration work. It’s also a great chance to get your business out there and plug yourself wherever you can.

Here are 25 Effective Ideas Used by Successful Businesses:

1. Cold call
Begin each day by following up any new leads or making several cold calls. It’s always good to keep your marketing on track and investigate any new opportunities that come your way.

2. Generate an e-newsletter
Distribute a regular e-newsletter to your current customer base. Inform people about what you’re doing and any new products or services you’ve launched. It’ll keep you on their radars and encourage repeat business.

3. Get into your local newspaper
put in writing about anything interesting going on in your business. Not sure how to write one? Read these tips or simply pick up the phone and speak to a journalist to see if they’re interested in running something. If they are, they’ll probably write the story themselves.

4. Publish a blog
Blogs are great opportunities to not only extend your digital marketing strategy by creating a whole range of long-tail keywords, SEO-wise. They’re also a good chance to show off your skills and expertise while building trust.

5. Present mini versions
Consider creating a ‘mini’ version of your product or service at a discounted rate. This may persuade new or existing customers to part with their cash and might lead to a longer term business relationship

6. Discover a niche
Research and discover a niche in the market that could benefit from your product or service, then subsequently target. Find out what’s missing and what people really need. Offer solutions to people’s problems.

7. Talk to your clientele
Don’t be afraid to chat to your existing customers to ask them why they hired you. And take the opportunity to ask them if you could be doing anything more to improve your service to them.

8. Use Twitter
Twitter is often referred to as the business-friendly social media platform because it’s a great way to start networking online while giving your brand personality.

9. Always carry business cards
Never ever leave home without your business cards. You never know who you might bump into. Make sure your business cards contain all relevant information, including your website address and any social media accounts you might have.

10. Promote on blogs
Explore online advertising opportunities by researching where your target market likes to go. Are there any blogs that appeal to your customers? get in touch with the blog owner and sponsor them in exchange for advertising space.

11. Write link-bait blogs
Make the most of your own blog by writing posts that naturally encourage people to link to it. The more people who recommend your blogs, the more web traffic you’ll get to your website.

12. Get testimonials
Nothing works better for your marketing than having a genuine testimonial from a happy client. If you haven’t yet added any testimonials to your website or marketing materials, do it now! Just make sure you ask full permission from your client first.

13. Make the most of your email signature
Link everything up by adding social media accounts and website URLs to your own email signature. Even consider adding your main marketing message or company slogan. Remind people why you’re business is good.

14. Make friends with leading bloggers
There’s a wealth of new media out there, so get researching and find some influential bloggers to make friends with. Get them to write a review about your business, product or service.

15. Sustain a competition
There are always competitions at newspapers and radio shows. Consider sponsoring one of them to raise your profile. You’ll not only advertise your brand and company name, you’ll be putting yourself in front of a much wider market.

16. Offer discounts for limited periods
Discounts at certain times of the year are always popular. Offer your own products and services at a discounted rate, for example – ‘Summer Savings’ or ‘Winter Deal’. People always like a bargain.

17. Sponsor an awards ceremony
Although often an expensive option, sponsoring awards can really get your business name out there. Remember, not all awards are expensive. There are always niche award ceremonies that better suit your business and budget.

18. Give something away
Got something you can offer in a competition? Newspapers and magazines will give you free editorial space in exchange for a prize. Just be aware they’ll always want minimum prize values.

19. Create an e-brochure
Hard-copy brochures can be expensive to design and print. Save your money and create a PDF version instead, available to download via your website. Take the opportunity to really sell yourself and explain to potential customers why they should hire you.

20. Write a column for your local paper
Get in touch with your local rag to see if they’d benefit from a regular ‘ask the expert’ column, then provide regular expert features for them to publish. Don’t ask, don’t get – so pick up the phone today.

21. Traditional mailers
Mail-drop campaigns are simply pushing marketing leaflets through doors or sending out postcards to your existing customer database. They might be old school but they shouldn’t be underestimated.

22. Add interaction to your website
People want to interact with websites these days, so create something that will be really appealing and helpful to your potential customers. For example, a recent website we created for our client Manchester Fertility Services includes a bespoke feature that has proved hugely successful in drawing new enquiries and customers

23. Become an expert spokesperson
Journalists are always after industry experts to add a little something to their news reports. Contact your local TV, radio and newspapers to put yourself forward as a willing spokesperson and expert in your own business field. Be prepared to be available for any interviews that might come up and do some media training so you’re ready to go.

24. Create a press kit
Pull together some background information about yourself and your business, ready to send out to any journalists. Have a ‘press’ section on your website where media can easily find out more about you and contact you.

25. Delegate
Delegation is one of the most important management skills. These logical rules and techniques will help you to delegate well (and will help you to help your manager when you are being delegated a task or new responsibility – delegation is a two-way process!). Good delegation saves you time, develops you people, grooms a successor, and motivates. Poor delegation will cause you frustration, demotivates and confuses the other person, and fails to achieve the task or purpose itself. So it’s a management skill that’s worth improving.

Many companies and businesses stop growing because they refuse to delegate. It is a result of thinking that tasks can be handled by one person only.

If big companies, such as Yahoo and Google, delegate tasks – even allow home-based jobs – then why can’t you?

Psychologically, entrepreneurs are scared of delegating what they have created. They are afraid of taking the BIG leap of delegating tasks and letting others oversee them; afraid of making mistakes along the way; afraid that someone brighter than them would handle the tasks with flying colours and end up being their competitor instead of being their worker. But hey, if big companies see that they are growing through the delegation of tasks to tons of people, then probably it’s worth the try. Don’t you think so?!

Regardless of what the argument is, the result of delegating tasks has been proven and tested already, and all you have to do is follow what the BIG guys are doing. Who knows? You might see yourself one day enjoying with your family at your favourite beach, with your favourite cocktail drink in your hand. You might be enjoying the clear blue skies and loving life whilst you’re confident enough that your business is running smoothly because of the BIG leap that you took that you thought was scary.

Businesses these days must be smart. Entrepreneurs look for ways to stay in the business lane. Some look for alternatives to survive because of their inability to thrive within large businesses.

Realising this truth, businesses should be able to evolve in the rapidly changing market. Indeed, businesses these days have to be smarter to survive.

Consumed by your business?  

Tired?

Burnt out?

You can choose to alter and start managing wiser. There are a lot who would say they’re managing wiser, but are they really implementing the strategy or are they just investing lip service to the idea?

Working ‘On’ your Business

It was Michael Gerber who outlined on ‘The E-Myth Revisited’ the efficient strategy of managing ‘on’ your organisation rather than managing ‘in’ it.

One has to exhaust all her time in the day to day operations like accounts and managing staff. Managing your business requires you to Stop. Stop..take a deep brOne has to exhaust all his or her time in the day-to-day operations like accounts and managing staff. Managing your business requires you to stop. Stop, take a deep breath, and look at the entirety of your business objectively. This includes marketing, strategies, systems and procedures. Looking after your business gives you an opportunity to assess, evaluate and identify new improvements, possibilities and ideas. It’s the difference between your business providing you with a job and the success you truly deserve. This is essential to provide you with the knowledge and information you need to be effective.

The most essential aspect of managing on your business is that you take time about once every week to be away from your organisation with the only purpose of looking at it rationally. There are many things which can be considered in this time, which range from vision, strategies and systems. Until you stop and do this, your organisation is likely to keep managing you, leaving you jaded, uninspired and unable to reach your full potential. At this stage, don’t worry about the information on what you need to do in the ‘once’ every week – that will become apparent as you do it. Think about the concepts, improvements and opportunities you may see.

Wouldn’t it be better if it’s an organisation that you run and control effectively rather than an organisation that controls and runs you until you’re burnt out?

What are Leadership and Delegation?

Delegation is the act of assigning tasks and responsibilities, together with the necessary authority (leadership) to carry them out, to your employees. Effective delegation can save you time and motivate your team by demonstrating that you trust them and value their abilities.

Common Mistakes Managers Make When Delegating

• Don’t give enough freedom
• Don’t communicate clearly
• Aren’t open to new ideas

Firstly, concentrate on the most important matters yourself. You should be doing activities that only you can do (that involve a high level of skill and, ideally, that you enjoy doing). When delegating, set broad controls and allow your team to make mistakes.

Take the time to make your requirements known to your team member. Give a clear picture of the results you expect, the time limits involved and the authority being transferred to that team member. Also, make sure other people in the organisation know about the delegation so they can support it.

Encourage Participation

Employees are least satisfied and least motivated when they can’t inject their own ideas into the project. They need to be able to display their own talents.

Examine results not methods

An effective delegator needs to accept varying approaches to achieving results. Since no two people approach a solution in exactly the same way, you need to concentrate on whether the desired results are being achieved or not or whether they are being achieved your way. A poor delegator says, ‘This is what we want to achieve, and this is how we will proceed.’ An effective delegator says, ‘Here is the result we have agreed we want to accomplish; give me your best recommendations as to how we can get that result.’

Show trust

Allow your team members to get the job done without micromanaging. Excessive checking will convince the employees that they are not really responsible for the job.

Delegate credit only

You cannot delegate blame. Remember that you bear the final responsibility for the actions of your team

Know your team

You need to know what and how much you can delegate to a person. You should gradually increase the level of responsibility and importance of the tasks as results are successfully achieved.

Things to avoid

Don’t let the chain of command get too long. If there are too many levels of responsibility, some information will never trickle all the way to the bottom.
Don’t ask one subordinate to report to two people. It will be impossible for the subordinate to decide whose work comes first.
Don’t make fuzzy job assignments. Grey areas between positions simply invite overlap, conflict and duplication of effort.
Don’t be too rigid. Try to maintain flexibility to provide for situations that inevitably crop up and need nonstandard solutions.

Exercise

Make a list of three things you are doing today that you should be delegating. Identify who you will delegate them to, and write down how you will go about doing so. Then, delegate.

Do you want to hire virtual assistants (VAs) but are not sure and do not know how to do it and where to start?

If you’re like many small business owners and you have heard of outsourcing your work to VAs, you may like to try it but just don’t seem to know where to begin. You are not sure whether hiring VAs is a viable option because either you can’t afford them or you’re afraid that they will be unable to perform the task as well as you can or just do not know how to hire a VA and it’s too much work just to start.

The challenge for you then is if you don’t start delegating your work, how will your business grow to the next level? Can you do everything alone in a reasonable amount of time? Have you ever known somebody who can do it all by himself and wasn’t stressed out at the end of each day? How much is your time really worth? Do you have time to do it all?

Nowadays, a lot of very savvy entrepreneurs with multimillion-dollar businesses outsource their repetitive, boring and menial tasks to personal VAs from the Philippines. They appear to be a one-man show, but they have a team of VAs working for them so they can smartly do whatever they want to do.

However, if you are still not sure whether to hire a personal VA from the Philippines, let me explain further.

Competence of VAs

VAs are like any other group of employees. Some are lazy, whilst others are hardworking. Some are good at what they do, and some aren’t. Your job is to find the good ones. Fortunately, once you find a good one, you can keep him or her for as long as you wish. If you are worried that a personal VA from the Philippines couldn’t match the quality of work you put out, prepare to be pleasantly surprised. Most VAs from the Philippines are highly educated, equipped with university and college degrees and highly trained in areas depending on where you need them most. Most of them can handle the daily tedious tasks, such as email updates, calendar and appointment scheduling, transcribing, doing research, data entry, scheduling invoices, handling delivery, billing issues and much much more. Whilst you are trying to balance work and managing a business, they are there only to carry out whatever time-consuming work you put in front of them.

Cost of VAs

Compared with hiring local staff, you can afford a personal VA from the Philippines. Hiring someone locally costs a lot. Hiring someone from the Philippines doesn’t. As they work virtually as well, you save on office space, insurance, office equipment, and much much more. In addition, $1 in the Philippines goes much farther than it does here, so wages are also decreased. The monetary costs are more than compensated by the next benefit of hiring a VA.

Time

Quick, which would you rather spend your time doing: growing your business or filling out tedious paperwork? Not only is growing your business a lot more enjoyable, it’s also more profitable. Whilst you might be saving money right now by doing your own work, you are wasting tons of time that could be better spent elsewhere. In essence, you’re sacrificing future profits and a more enjoyable day for a few extra bucks now.

Hiring a VA from the Philippines or a team of VAs is not only affordable; it also costs more and more the more you put it off! Your company can’t grow unless you delegate menial tasks, and hiring a personal VA from the Philippines is a great way to start doing this. This leaves you with more time to do more of what you love and more of what is profitable!

So, success; how does that really work, yeah? And you may be wondering how to be successful in your business? Well, the idea itself is the most important. The very concept of success will blast you.

‘Success doesn’t come to you, you go to it.’
– Marva Collins

We’ve all had them. Those days when discouragement threatens to defeat purpose and conviction and start us down the steep, slippery slope of self-doubt.

The early days of entrepreneurship are filled with activity and busyness. Once that initial phase passes and things settle down to a more or less predictable routine, when our fantasies of tremendous wealth have not materialised after six months of endeavour, when someone is critical, when those orders just aren’t coming in no matter what we do or how many hours we work … we get discouraged and begin to question whether we really do have the right stuff for this business, after all!

So, how do you get through those times of self-doubt and back into the saddle? The first thing is to prepare for them. KNOW that there are going to be ‘days like these.’ If you expect them, then you
will be better able to recognise them for what they are and not give them greater prominence than they deserve. Nine times out of ten, things really DO look better in the morning!

Next, get right back to basics. What motivates you and keeps you focused? What are your motivation and purpose in starting your own business? The strength of your purpose will ultimately determine your level of motivation and hence determination. Is your purpose clear in your mind? If not, maybe you need to remind yourself of the reasons why you want to work for yourself. You may find that your reasons aren’t sufficient motivators. If not, find some that are.

Remind yourself of your purpose when you need to motivate yourself. If you’re a mom, perhaps your purpose in starting your home business was so you could be home with your children rather than in the paid workforce. So, when you’re feeling discouraged because you didn’t land that account you wanted or didn’t make that sale, remind yourself why you’re doing this in the first place. Picture your children. Visualise your purpose as vividly as you can. Then harness that motivation and turn it into energy you can direct back into your business. Use that energy to examine why you didn’t land the account or make the sale and then change whatever needs to be changed. By making changes in response to such stimuli, you are increasing the odds of being successful next time around.

Your response to setbacks will also be determined by your personal confidence level. A confident individual is more resilient in the face of setbacks, whereas a less confident person is more likely to react to a setback as an indication that he or she is not really capable of being successful. Your response to setbacks is critical to the future success or failure of your business. If you’re someone whose self-talk is positive, you will tell yourself, ‘Well, that approach didn’t reach what I wanted. I’ll have to try something different.’ If, on the contrary, your self-talk is pretty negative, you are much more likely to tell yourself ‘Well, that obviously didn’t work. I just don’t have what it takes to be a success at this.’

*The difference between the two is that the positive self-talker refuses to internalise a setback as a personal failure. By contrast, the negative self-talker doesn’t view the setback as just part of the external environment where the business operates but, rather, internalises the setback as a personal failure.*

So, watch your self-talk. The language you use in your thoughts makes an enormous impression on your subconscious. If you impress upon your subconscious that you are not deserving of success, your subconscious will busily go about proving the truth of that statement. Similarly, if you impress upon your subconscious that you are a successful, confident person, it will work just as hard to validate that presumption. The important point is this: your subconscious DOESN’T CARE where it takes you. It will literally take you WHEREVER you program it to go.

One highly effective technique to help remove the negative self-talk that can be so harmful to long-term success is self-hypnosis. There are many good induction tapes available that will guide you into a state of deep mental relaxation and then provide you with positive suggestions. If you are in a state of deep relaxation when you receive a positive suggestion, it will be absorbed much more readily by your subconscious, where those nagging self-doubts emanate from in the first place. Choose a tape that deals with such issues as self-confidence or positive thinking. By programming your subconscious with positive messages of confidence and success, it will actively go to work integrating those qualities.

Do not underestimate the value of positive programming and the danger of negative programming in determining the ultimate success of your business. It may very well mean the difference between stunning success and whimpering failure.

So, are virtual assistants worth it? Let’s find out.

Hiring a virtual assistant to handle your busy schedule or carry out tasks that don’t make a good use of your time is probably one of the most effective ways to get yourself on track and become more productive in your business. So, are virtual assistants worth it? Yes, a big yes!

The goal of Virtual Office Angels is to free up your time, increase your productivity and reduce the amount of stress in your life. Most of our clients are small business owners who require extra help in getting things done, need access to a wide variety of services and are working on a budget.

Virtual Office Angels can help take care of

• things that are neglected or procrastinated,
• projects that are beyond your capability,
• matters that are absorbing your time
• and anything that you don’t have to be doing yourself.

By delegating these things to our virtual assistants, you can focus on the truly important, high-leverage activities within your business that need your attention.

The result?

• Increased productivity
• Greater efficiency
• More Time
• Less Stress

The outcome is that your business moves forward, faster and easier.