4 Ways CEOs Can Effectively Build Their Personal Brands

As a CEO, you have a lot on your plate. All of the responsibilities in front of you make thinking about anything other than the company seem downright impossible. Furthermore, thinking about yourself and your own career can seem like a ludicrous proposition. But that’s exactly what forward thinking CEOs do – they think about themselves from time to time.

Super CEO

4 Ways to Build Your Personal Brand

Regardless of whether you anticipate staying in your current role until retirement, or feel weary about your future with the company, it’s imperative that you build your own personal brand. Not only does brand building open up future job opportunities, but it also exposes you to things like paid speaking engagements, book deals, and industry recognition.…

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Looking To Sell Your Small Business? Here Are Things You Need to Do

If you’re a typical entrepreneur, you have a habit of jumping from one idea and project to the next. When you find something that works and you build a successful business out of it, you’re already looking for the next thing to sink your teeth into. You get easily bored and can’t do the same thing for too long. That’s the reason you’re in the line of work you’re in. Entrepreneurs innovate. They don’t sit on successes of the past. They create the success of the future.

Sell a business

If you’re an entrepreneur anxious to move onto the next project, but you have to offload the current one, it’s not always easy.…

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The “Drilling Down” Principal – Do One Thing Well

Steve Jobs quote on doing one thing well

Do not try to do everything. Do one thing well. – Steve Jobs.

It’s Hard to Do Less

As business owners sometimes the hardest thing is doing less. All sorts of opportunities can present themselves to us and with that can come the temptation to take on work that’s beyond the original business plan.

If we aren’t careful we can spread our resources so thin that we end up doing nothing really well.

There is incredible power in drilling down and focusing on one thing and doing it with excellence. Drilling down and offering a superior product or service can lead to the following benefits:

  • Consistent Demand: The law of demand means your product or service will always be in demand if it is superior
  • Higher Revenue: A superior product or service will attract a higher price because of higher demand
  • Lower Costs: By focusing on one product or task, you can better optimise your resources towards it

Sounds like the ideal business model.…

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5 Ways to Show Your Employees that Your Small Business Cares

As a small business, you know it’s very important that you do what you can to keep your employees happy. After all, turnover costs your company money, and in a small business, money may not be something you have much of. As an employee of a small business, it’s very important to know that your employer cares about you. If an employer shows you that you’re appreciated, it encourages you to stay there for a long period of time.

It’s known in the business world that employees need to feel appreciated. As a small business, you need to find creative and useful ways to do this in order to keep your employees happy.…

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Stop Profit Shrinkage: Small and Sneaky Ways Your Business is Losing Big Money

There are more ways to lose money in business than to make money. In fact, if you’ve been in business for any length of time, you know this adage can ring very true. Here are a few mistakes that have killed even successful businesses.

Frustrated businessman making business mistakes

Too Many Meetings

The 1980s called — they want their meetings back. If you spend more time in meetings than you do making sales, then your business is in trouble. Having too many meetings is the hallmark of a company that can’t find itself, doesn’t know how to turn a profit, and spends way too much time trying to compensate for poor marketing.…

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How Can a CEO Get (and Stay) in Touch with Employees?

Often CEOs lose touch, or are perceived to have lost touch with their people. What’s worse, they can appear to have lost touch with the reality of working in the business. Clearly, this can be incredibly damaging.

Respectable CEO

If, as CEO, you don’t really understand the concerns, ideas, motivations or realities of your employees, you’re likely to make some very poor decisions, which will impact the business. If you are simply perceived to be out of touch, you soon start to lose the respect of your people. So, what can a CEO do to avoid either situation?

Joining interviews

A great way to set off on the right foot is to insist on meeting all new joiners.…

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Employees Need to Feel Appreciated

If you’ve been paying attention to the principles of sound management theory, then you already understand the value of emotional intelligence. It’s not just psychobabble, but a real aspect of intelligence that needs to be respected in the workplace.

Although it may sound like an oxymoron, there is such a thing as happy employees.

Happy and motivated employees

Happy employees are engaged employees. In turn, engaged employees do all the things necessary to help a company prosper.

  • They are easy to manage because they are conscientious, hard-working, talented, and productive,
  • They show up on time,
  • They help each other out,
  • They work all the time they work,
  • And they provide such excellent customer service that customers wouldn’t think of going anywhere else.
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Why Office Dress Codes Are Going Out Of Fashion

When you run a business with onsite staff, it is down to you to set the policy when it comes to how you expect people to present themselves at work. However, while office dress codes used to be pretty much expected by employees, more and more businesses, particularly in certain sectors, are abandoning the concept in favor of less restrictive dress policies.

Hip and fashionable business people

1. Dress Code Options

There used to be just a few options for your office dress code. You could have a formal business dress code, a business casual dress code (where men, for example, could wear a shirt without a tie but things like jeans, t-shirts and sneakers were not allowed), or no dress code at all.…

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Identifying and Removing Major Roadblocks in SMB Growth

Thousands of small business enterprises are being founded and closed every day in this modern era of startup. This makes almost every niche highly competitive and company growth needs to be fast and continuous, since even the smallest oscillations and breakdowns can cause major loss of customer trust.

Business growth

In this article I’ve reviewed some of the most common problems small business entrepreneurs face during their road to success.

1. Problem: Not having enough funds

This is a very common problem that affects many small businesses. In most cases good idea and hard work are not enough to turn innovative startup into a multi-million dollar business.…

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Small to Medium Sized Enterprises need Culture

Small to medium sized enterprises (SME) have long been noted as important economic engines of many countries and account for approximately half of GDP in the United States, yet this sector has continued to have mixed success and failure with such businesses having less than 50% chance of surviving five years! Despite this challenge most efforts to identify what leads to small firm success has been personal opinions or conjecture.

Great company culture

To gain a deeper real world understanding of what successful small businesses do to succeed I interviewed 29 owners and senior leaders of profitable and growing small firms that had been in business at least five years.…

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