We don’t always appreciate what we have, whether at home or at work. That angst that fights against complacency is actually a good thing – the sense that the grass is always greener on the other side is what makes us jump into new opportunities. That said, making a team work together with real synergy is not an everyday feat. Learn to spot the successes in your collaborations, so you can replicate that synergy elsewhere.

Does your team actually seem to enjoy working with each other? Happy people are productive people. If you find yourself actually looking forward to seeing the people at your office every day – well, that’s no small thing.

Then there’s the skill set. With an optimal balance where everyone is assigned tasks and workload according to their talents rather than which person has the smallest stack of projects on their desk, you’ll get real productivity.

Next, look at how your group talks to each other. If discussions are fluid, with plenty of back and forth, engaging ideas, and everybody listening to what other team members are saying, you’ve got something special. Far too many groups are dominated by someone with a forceful personality rather than expertise in all areas that the team has to work in. Freedom of speech and thought are not just good for civil society – they make businesses work better.

If you do recognize your team is functioning very well, analyze what it is about this group that works well. Often, it is based on good habits rather than some innate ability to work well with others. Try to transfer these habits to your other collaborative activities and watch your successes add up.

Linda Chu
CEO – Out of Chaos, Professional Organizing Solutions
www.outofchaos.ca

Productivity and disorganization don’t mix. I’ve been recommending and training clients on the GO System to help their operations remain organized and competitive. In tough times, telling your employees to just “work harder” isn’t an inspiring message – but providing them with simple, specific recommendations to decrease workplace stress and frustration will pay dividends.

Employees already come with project management skills and some effective organization and time-management habits (otherwise, why did you hire them?). But that doesn’t necessarily provide cohesive organization across a company. Without training in procedures, two employees working right next to each other in the same room, even doing similar kinds of work, may organize files, projects and effort in very different ways, making collaboration challenging.

Throughout your organization, all members of your team stand to benefit from standardized processes that can be adapted to your particular organization. You’ll want to focus on things like processing incoming items, prioritizing, rational time management, understanding personality and psychological issues and more. The GO System is particularly good at covering off these points.

For more information, check out the GO System at www.thegosystem.com/ or get help from a professional organizer.

Linda Chu
CEO – Out of Chaos, Professional Organizing Solutions
www.outofchaos.ca

In my last post, I emphasized the importance of using your time according to the 80/20 rule, where you focus your efforts into your most profitable efforts. But how do you know which efforts are really paying off?

You’re going to have to log all your activities and how much time you spend doing non-productive work. For that, you’re going to need a spreadsheet.

Put together a simple Excel grid with two columns showing time range and the type of activity. Start recording the actual work that you do, going into some detail as to the types of tasks involved. This will help a lot later, when you’re not just focusing on what activities provide the most benefit, but also how efficiently you’re doing them. There may be ways to reduce the number of steps to produce virtually the same output.

If you’re being interrupted, record that as well – who’s doing the interrupting, who called you on the phone, who instant-messaged you, why you left your desk and so on.

Do this for at least one day, though if your week varies significantly, you may need to do this exercise for the entire period. This will also help you to arrange more consistent routines.

Finally, you get to the most important part – go through the logs you’ve recorded and note the activities that are providing a real measurable benefit to your business. This can also be the hardest part. You may want to consult with a business coach or time management expert to provide feedback on the best use of your time that you’ve recorded.

Now you’re on your way to designing a better time management system that you can use for the long term. You know what to do. There’s no time to waste.

Linda Chu
CEO – Out of Chaos, Professional Organizing Solutions
www.outofchaos.ca

One of my favorite fables that has a pretty straightforward application to business is of the grasshopper and the ant. The hardworking ant prepares for the future by gathering and storing his food. His lazy neighbor, the grasshopper, doesn’t get organized and spends his time in idle pursuits. When winter comes, the ant is content in his home, enjoying the fruits of his labours. We never really hear precisely what happens to the grasshopper – you just kind of guess that he might not still be around when the warmer weather rolls around.

The story reminds you of the preparation that’s required for businesses to be successful. It’s about getting organized and sowing the ground with opportunities. For business, that includes building your networks, marketing, sales, product development and administrative tasks like bookkeeping and filing. Just as important is setting up the processes to ensure that when it comes time to reap the benefits, you’re ready. A few examples:

1. We all know networking is a great way to build business. Organize your new contacts, don’t just leave their business cards in a stack in a drawer. Put a system in place so that it’s easier to keep in touch and even add personal greetings to your messages as you build relationships.

2. Time management by itself won’t generate revenue, but it can generate opportunities for you to see the benefit later. An organized calendar allows you to spend your time more productively, leading to bigger profits. It can also help you allocate more time to pursuits outside of your work, so you can actually spend time on the fruits of your labours – perhaps in the Mayan Riviera or Las Vegas?

3. Keep your financial paperwork organized. File your contracts so you’re ready to submit your invoices on time. Business is not just about the sowing – reaping is work, too. You could even say the work is the reward.

Linda Chu
CEO – Out of Chaos, Professional Organizing Solutions
www.outofchaos.ca

Social networking sites let you build your brand and connect with new partners and customers where they are – online. But to do it well, you have to be organized.

Many business owners think they’ll be wasting time on activities on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere that may not lead shortly to cash-in-hand. But you can avoid that if you have a system and keep a schedule.

Let’s imagine that your goal is just to build targeted web traffic. Let’s also assume you’ve already got a blog where you post at least somewhat regularly. Make sure you schedule time both for getting content and publishing. Don’t procrastinate.

Next, you create a Twitter account. From here, you post links from your blog automatically using third-party tools like Twitterfeed. You do the same thing with your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts using tools like Ping.fm. It’s sort of like being on several TV channels at the same time. People are clicking and coming to your website. It can be great exposure, but it can only happen if you take some time to do these things systematically.

Just like with other parts of your business, using the right tools and staying organized will help ensure your social networking efforts meet the goals that you set.

Linda Chu
CEO – Out of Chaos, Professional Organizing Solutions
www.outofchaos.ca

One of the hardest things for entrepreneurial women to do is trust their systems, especially if their system comes in the form of another human being. Being able to let go and leave your business in the hands of someone else, or a computer system can be a challenge for many, but not if you whole heartedly trust the system.

However, in order to truly trust the system there has to be some level of understanding on how it works. Fear is the opposite of trust and, in my experience, fear is most often bread from ignorance or not knowing. I’ve heard a countless number of clients say that it’s just ‘easier if I do it myself’, and this makes it impossible to walk away from your business, even for a few hours.

Sit down TODAY and write down a wish list of things that you would love to delegate in order to put your business on auto pilot. Then write down what you would need to know in order for you to trust that a system would take care of your business as well as you would. Then take action in educating yourself on how the system would work. You might ask an expert, read a book or article, or simply go for coffee with a fellow business owner who’s having success with a system you want to implement.

Your ability to trust systems will allow you to create a work/life balance that gives you the ability to truly ’shut off’ without ever compromising the credibility or success of your business.

All the best,

Heather White, CEO, 2020 Communications Inc.

Automating scheduled business functions like bookkeeping, filing, follow up calls is critical to profitability.

If you’re running a small business, you may be handling many of those administrative tasks on your own. These can distract you from your real work, providing the products or services that earn you income. But these things must be done.

Multitasking is a tricky art. A study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance (Vol. 27, No. 4) indicates that multitasking may actually be less efficient. Shifting the kind of work that you do requires extra energy and focus; doing so multiple times a day can be draining. If you’re always “putting out fires”, you’re not going to get as much accomplished.

As performance expert Adam Fraser notes, “what we have to do is start to control our environment and minimize distractions – turn the technology off, set aside times of the day to focus on work, and practicing being present, even in conversations.”

The trick is to schedule certain tasks at regular times of the week or month, so you get it all done in the same work session. For instance, you might schedule your invoicing to be done for the middle and last days of every month. Schedule regular filing for the third Tuesday of every month, and follow-up phone calls to contacts (new and old) for two hours twice a week. Whatever the activity, it doesn’t really matter when you do it, so long as it becomes a regular, easy-to-remember part of your schedule so you can’t procrastinate.

Building these kinds of time management systems into your business will help you be more productive and also allow you to keep better track of employees’ time as your business grows, since you can pass on tried and true practices to them.

The first step in developing your schedule is defining the measurable priorities and tasks that you must do for your business and coming up with reasonable time estimates to plug into your calendar. If you need help with that first step, make it your first scheduled task to consult with an expert to make it happen.

Linda Chu
CEO – Out of Chaos, Professional Organizing Solutions
www.outofchaos.ca

Working the system and working on the system are very different things. As an employee, working in corporate sales, I worked in the system. I was told who, what, when and where and I did it. As a business owner and entrepreneur it is my responsibility to make sure that there are proper systems in place that allow me to maximize my efforts, activities and profitability. But making this transition from ‘worker bee’ to ‘queen bee’ can be tricky for a lot of people, myself included.

At first, when I left my corporate job, I would still get up at 6am, and go and sit in front of my computer. I would check email, check voicemail, then head to the office. I’d ‘work’ for 8, 10, 12 hours, head home and just because I could, I’d probably check my email again later on in the evening, just in case something had transpired in the few moments ‘off’ that I had allowed myself. (Can I say LOSER!) Finally about 6 months in to my first venture, I had my ‘aha’ moment. I don’t have to work 12 hours a day, I don’t have to check my email every 2 seconds, I don’t have to be attached at the ear to my phone. I am a high achiever and I believe strongly and passionately about exceptional customer service, but, providing your clients with exceptional service and checking email 24/7 do not have to co-exist. What I needed were systems. Systems that freed up my time while still serving my client base in the way that made me proud of my business.

Giving yourself permission to deploy systems in place of you doing the work is the most rewarding thing you can do for your professional life. You do the work once and then allow the system to repeat itself exponentially – giving you more time to work on new ideas, create and implement new systems and remain the visionary that you are.

The first step in making this transition is to take stock of the time you spend ‘working’. What are all the activities that you are doing on a daily, weekly, quarterly and annual basis. Then, take a look at your list of activities and ask yourself what you can systemize? Start slow so as to ease yourself into this process. But, be forewarned, once you realize the power of having systems do the majority of your work, and the freedom you have as a result, you’ll be looking for the next project to sink your teeth in to.

All the best,

Heather White, CEO, 2020 Communications Inc.

I have business owners coming up to all the time telling me that their big plan is to build and sell their company. Having been in this situation before, I have to smile to myself when I hear this. There is a misconception in the market that if your company makes money, someone will pay you millions for it. This is not the case for most businesses. Some of the reasons why someone would buy your company are:

1. You have intellectual property that has a unique and enduring value to the market.
2. You have a cashflow positive business that is system based and can run without you.
3. It is cheaper to buy your business then compete with you.
4. It is cheaper to acquire your business then to build one from scratch.
5. You have existing contracts in place that have value.
6. You run a great business model poorly and someone sees that if they were to step in, they could make money from it.

When people tell me that they are going to sell their business, the first thing I ask them is, “Why don’t you license your model rather than sell it?” If you company’s model runs so well, then license it to an interested entrepreneur rather than sell them the entire business. It is cheaper for them, you can share in your hard work and their hard work, they don’t have to the ground work, and you make a revenue stream from your work. It isn’t as much as selling it, but it showcases the value of your model.

Any business (aside from a tech company) needs to have systems in place for the company to run on its own. If you are going to license a business model, you have to develop systems so even the most inexperienced business person can have success following your lead. If it runs well as a license, it will be much more attractive as something to sell. I am a big fan of having a licensed model in business. Every new partner I take on through Flett Ventures needs to have a model that can be licensed. We may sell the company down the road, but if you can take a great idea, marry it with amazing business systems, and find good licensees, you will have positive cashflow in no time. I’m in the process of doing a deal like this right now around a childcare/babysitting model. Great woman has a great business idea, that needs to be system based. Once it has all its systems built, it can be licensed, and from there cashflow will begin to flow into the company.

Forget searching for the great white whale to magically come and buy your company. Instead, grow a business model that any entrepreneur can run successfully run without you. That’s step #1. Once you have a sustainable model, you can then grow the licensing model of your business. You will become attractive to buyers looking to get into a cashflow positive model, and the courting begins. Last week I spent time to two people I do business with. One is stuck being self-employed and we need to bump him into being a ‘business builder’ (i.e. Rich Dad, Poor Dad.). He grew the company’s bottom line by $100,000, BUT he works much too hard and takes on work that only he can do. It isn’t sustainable. We are going to work together to shift his model.

The second colleague talked about how hard she is working and how she doesn’t think she can keep up the pace. We’ve been talking for two years about her building business models that she can license to others, but she hasn’t got traction with that. She will need to get  frustrated, mad, tired, or a mix of the three to finally take a step towards making things happen.  The problem is that people focus on the money rather than the model and they keep on chasing the dime rather then trying get more time. This is hard jump for people to make. Although this colleague has a relatively successful business model, it has no value because it can’t operate without her (yet). This can change, but she has to be mindful, as we all do, that the only money you make is the money you don’t earn! If you don’t want to put the time and effort into building a model that you can license, then you need to find peace with working hard and smart and socking money away for a rainy day. All you need to do is ask for help if you want to build a model. The catch is you then have to be willing to do the work. There are a million excuses why someone doesn’t have the time to build a sustainable model. There is one good reason why you should…you’ll get rich.

Work smart, not hard and if you want to sell your business, think about what it is REALLY worth, not what you think it COULD BE WORTH.

Best,

Chris.

www.GhostCEO.com