Monthly Archives: May 2021

succeed as a business start-up

What you Need to do to Succeed as a Business Startup

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The first thing you need to succeed as a business start-up is customers and sales revenue. You can have customers and no revenue coming in because you may be giving free access to a subscription model business to hopefully get customers to upgrade to a paid plan. This has become immensely popular for technology companies and many of them fail. Uber with a market value of $97 billion still does not make a profit.


According to Investopedia the main reason 90% of businesses fail is they run out of money. Other reasons are wrong market, lack of research, bad partnership, not an expert.


When I first started in the field of training and development, I remember reading similar stats. So, things have not changed much and in fact seem to have gotten worse. Perhaps that is because you can start a business with almost nothing. You can open a store on eBay or Amazon and just sell products that are shipped by someone else. At that time, the main reason for business failings was poor management.


When I read the reasons from the article in Investopedia, I see the same cause. You can have a great product or service and build sales revenue, but poor management will do you in.


According to the article by Investopedia the way to avoid failing is to set goals, research (plan), love your work and don’t quit. Elon Musk is a good example of that. He also is drive by a purpose that goes beyond money. In fact, he ended up investing his fortune he earned from PayPal into Tesla to keep it from bankruptcy.


I recently worked with the owner of a start-up that is an online business. I helped him recruit a marketing/salesperson to acquire new customers using the free at first model.


I felt the business owner had a good chance to succeed as he seemed to be showing good leadership and doing the things listed above. He had used freelancers to build his business without taking on big debt. He knew his market very well and understood how to standout from the competition. He did the sales from the outset and as revenue is now growing, he can afford to hire a salesperson to give him more time to work on other aspects of the business.


The bottom line for success is to do you research and planning, put your goals in writing so you can plan each step and foresee obstacles. Then you need to execute the plan and be prepared to shift things as needed. And above all build your sales as quickly as you can so you do not run out of money.


success in business and life

Staying Focused on your Purpose is Crucial for Success in Business and Life

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Gary L. Smith is a leading business and life coach and the author of four books on business and personal development. His latest Purpose Driven Achievement is a roadmap for discovering your purpose and living the life others only dream of.


I interviewed Gary and we spoke about what it takes to discover your purpose and to live it. In the interview Gary gives examples of people he has coached who have transformed their lives and are now living their purpose.


We spoke about removing obstacles standing in the way of living your purpose and the rewards and benefits of risking following your dreams.


Gary can be reached for a free exploratory session through his website where you can also learn about his work and his books.


resolving conflicts

Resolving Conflicts Between Employees

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Conflicts between employees arise from time to time in the workplace and is difficult to avoid. Ideally people will develop the skills to resolve conflicts on their own without management having to intervene. In fact, conflicts are likely to happen at the leadership level and in this case if third party help is needed, it will land on the doorstep of the boss or HR department if there is one.


Skills

But even if people learn the skills to manage conflicts it may go unresolved if both parties are not able to function at the responsible level. I covered the levels of growth in other articles and videos. People may function much of the time at the responsible level but slip down to the self-protective level in an instant when a potential conflict arises with another employee. And this can happen at all levels in the company from front line workers to top leadership.


resolving conflicts

Situation

One of my clients was telling me of a conflict she has with a co-worker that has been going on for over 20 years. Both have been through training on communication and how to use active listening to resolve disagreements and move forward with an action plan.


But it seems that one party is being self-protective and does not want to collaborate to end this conflict. Usually there is something that happened in the past that the person hangs on to, or it could be their personalities clash and one party just wants to take revenge on the other.


Action

Conflicts like these zap energies, impedes collaboration and ultimately affects performance and productivity. So even if skills training is provided for conflict resolution, people need to work on their own issues to be willing to act at the responsible level and take the action required to resolve the conflict.


Leaders need to identify conflicts in the workplace and exercise zero tolerance. They need to get the parties to the table to talk it out and commit to responsible action.


Prevention Preferably prevention is being practiced in the form of personal development along with skill development so people can self-manage handling of conflicts as they are sure to arise at one time or another.


hard and soft skills

Consider both Hard and soft Skills when Hiring Employees!

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Employees need both hard and soft skills to do their job and perform well. Hard skills are the technical skills needed to do the work such as programming, operating machines and software, and knowledge-based skills such as scientific, legal and health.


Soft skills are interpersonal skills such as communicating, listening, collaborating, negotiation, giving feedback, conflict resolution, etc. These skills have always been important but are even more in demand now that a lot of emphasis is placed on teamwork. They are also essential skills for leadership and the more they are developed the better the quality of leadership.


Assessing Hard Skills

When hiring employees, you are essentially assessing how well their skills meet the requirements for the job. People can claim they have a specific skill set and the best proof would be past performance. You can validate the past to a certain extent through the resume, interviews, and reference checking. Adding skill testing can give you immediate insight into how deep they possess the skills.


I remember helping a small business owner hire an executive assistant and one key task was to draft letters to clients and suppliers. I had the candidate sit at the computer and open Word to draft a letter according to instructions I provided. Even though she had written highly proficient in Word on her resume it quickly became clear that her skill level was below par.


You can create your own testing method for the skills you need. This should not be too difficult and is highly recommended specially to verify critical skill levels.


Assessing Soft Skills

For many companies soft sills can be more difficult to assess. This is because we tend to focus more on the hard skills especially as the workplace becomes more dependent on evolving technologies.


But as I mentioned earlier, soft skills are seen today as important as hard skills, as if you cannot collaborate with others, it can hinder teamwork, collaboration, and innovation.


Testing for soft skills is best done in the interview and using behavioural type interview techniques to have the person demonstrate certain basis skills such as active listening.


I use a psychometric assessment when helping my clients hire new employees as this will give me an indication how well suited is their personality to developing soft skills. For example, of someone is higher on the scale of Sociability, I know that they like interacting with others and tend to be friendly and outgoing. If they are exceptionally low on this scale, they would prefer working alone and this could affect collaboration if group discussions need to happen often.


Using this type of psychometric assessment is more about knowing how well a person fits the job and then developing their skill set that is most crucial for performing well. You do not want to try and turn a highly introverted person who prefers working alone into a friendly outgoing person. This never works and is counterproductive and a waste of time and money.


Fit for the Job

The best approach for hiring the right person is fit for the job. This should be skills fit, company fit and job fit. The job fit part is where you use testing to see how well their personality fits the job and this should be to measure their fit to a performance model for the job as in the graph below.


The more you use well-developed resources to test for both hard and soft skills, the better your chance will be to hire the right person for the job.