Judith Germain - Talent Management

Finding the balance

When you are running a business you need to find the right balance between doing the work, marketing, and getting the right cash flow. Stowe Boyd talks about this in his blog, where he gives his perspective on these important issues.

Lots of first time consultants make the mistake of assuming that they can conduct all these activities at the same time, rather than determining just how much time they should devote to these activities and calculating the appropriate day rate that they should be charging. Stowe's blog is a great first read for those considering going solo before they leave their day job.

Take care

Judith

How to find work when you are on your own

Deciding to run your own business is a brave thing to do, especially if you are fresh out of the corporate world and setting up on your own. That's why joining a networking community (for example Ecademy) can really help. These types of communities enables you to build social and business relationships that can provide you with advocacy and work based on the strength of your relationships and the quality of your reputation.

Social, business communities provide business owners with all important support, development and very real profitable networking opportunities. Ecademy is one of the best of these social and business communities. There are also networking communities such as Linkedin that can help business owners find important contacts.

Getting regular clients is the life blood for businesses. Richard J White is an expert in Soft Selling, he provides sales and marketing guidance for experts. Richard has written a short article on 5 Strategies for winning more referrals from networking. Following these strategies will enable you to gain more business as you learn to stop push selling and begin pull selling.

Take care

Judith

Improve your performance in business

Every executive and business owner has one key objective – to improve performance. Behind every business objective, (whether it is, for example, to grow your business by 10%, increase ROI by 5% or become a better leader), is the desire to improve performance. It is this aspiration that makes us successful in our labours.

Performance Improvement can be defined in many ways. For example, the International Board of Standards for Training, Performance and Instruction (2003) defines it as the process of designing or selecting interventions which may include training directed toward a change in behaviour, typically on the job.

I believe that performance improvement is any positive change that can be measured after you have actively decided to make a change in your current circumstances. This is why defining the improvement requirement and measurement method is all important.

If we assume therefore, that a key success factor in business is to improve performance, where would you start? A logical approach would be to decide which area of performance needs improving and look for experts in this field to enable you to achieve the appropriate improvement. For example, you may need to improve your sales so you engage a marketing consultant to enable you to achieve this.

I believe that the first step towards performance improvement is defining your goal. Following a goal setting process will ensure that performance enhancement is made.