April 26, 2012

3 Avenues to Safe, Reputable Business Advice

ME Liz Strauss wrote this at 7:22 am

Safe Advice for Smart Business Decisions

If you already have your own small business you probably know that finding sturdy, credible business advice can be a tricky task. If you’re just looking to start a business, beware, for there is an endless sea of websites and business “professionals,” willing to give you the “latest and greatest” advice on how to start and run your company. The following tips should help lead you to some safe advice, or at least get you started down the path of making smart business decisions.

Personal, Real-life Advice

Although this can be a bit more expensive than the do-it-yourself route, the quality, personal poignancy, and accuracy afforded by this option is often well worth it. Hiring or meeting with a personal life coach or business coach is an effective way to get good personal business advice without wasting your own precious time searching high and low for it. These professionals will take the time to sit down with you and go over virtually any business concerns or questions you may have. They’ll make sure that the advice they offer is specific to your personal needs and take much of the guesswork out of the equation.

Good Websites

Much like the site you find yourself on now, there are plenty of trust-worthy business sites out there offering quality information. Finding them in the midst of all the clutter now on the net is the tough part. Here is a link to a helpful website offering a top 20 list of the best business websites for Entrepreneurs and CEOs in 2010. The list is still quite relevant for us here in 2012.

Friends and Relatives

If you know any personal friends or family members who’ve started their own successful (or unsuccessful) business ventures in the past, absolutely solicit some advice from them. This is as good an option as any, and one that usually casts a safety net over any intellectual property and personal business ideas depending on your level of trust with said acquaintance. People are usually very willing and often eager to discuss their personal models for success and business experiences with a fellow entrepreneur, especially one they already know. Don’t overlook the enormous potential that your personal connections may hold.

In this dog-eat-dog world, which currently hangs loosely in the balance of a delicate economy, sound advice can be the difference between a successful idea coming to fruition, or fading back into the ethos for someone else to find and successfully develop. Make sure you take the necessary time to research before embarking on any financial endeavors. You never know when or where that last missing link may be hiding. Using the right tools, in any case, surely gives you a better chance of finding it.

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Author’s Bio:
Alex Brown: Alex is a prolific writer with specialization on various aspects of financial finance. His articles on debt, mortgage industry and personal finance are offer valuable guidelines to the readers.

Thank you, Alex!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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Filed under Strategy, Successful Blog, Survival Kit | 2 Comments »

April 25, 2012

Time Waits for No One

matt wrote this at 1:38 pm

As the saying goes, just about all of us are just one job layoff, illness or other unfortunate happening away from major financial turmoil.

For me, that day of reckoning came some six years ago when I was laid off from my job of five and a half years. Once the initial shock of getting laid off by an e-mail died down, my first thoughts turned to how I would pay my rent, buy food, meet my car payments etc.

I was fortunate in that I had a pair of very supportive parents, not to mention a can-do attitude, reminding myself I was going to see this layoff as a challenge and not the end of the world.

Fast Forward Six Years Later

As I today celebrate my one-year anniversary with another employer, I am thankful that the layoff six years ago did not entirely derail me. While some may just brush off a layoff, I took it personally, especially given what I would discover were the true reasons behind it. As they say, however, move on and move up.

Today’s job finds me working with some extremely talented people, many of whom are quite younger. I see some of myself 10-20 years ago in them today, knowing that they have a ton of opportunities ahead of them.

While I am far from retirement, I am also not foolish enough to not be putting money away for that day.

Yes, I often live paycheck to paycheck like many others I know, but I do my best to take a little from that bi-weekly check and dump it into my 401(k). I also set up my own retirement account a number of years back. While it is certainly nothing to brag about, it is comforting to know that I’m more of a saver than a wild spender.

Lessons Learned Over Time

As I look at the faces of a number of younger co-workers these days, I admire those that pay close attention to how they handle money.

For those putting money away for a rainy day and for decades from now when they retire thumbs up. Although I was by no means careless with my money when I first started working, I would have definitely done some things differently financially if I knew then what I know now.

One of the cool things about my profession of writing is that unlike other jobs that require major physical efforts, something many of us “older” folks will see dwindle in the decades to come, writers need only be of sound mine, have a trusty Internet connection, and an audience desiring to read their content. Until the day comes that I am not physically able to write, you can bet I will be banging out article after article on my keyboard.

If I could offer just a word or two of wisdom to those younger folks, think about your futures, especially from a financial point of view. Be smart with your money and think about how you would get by should your world as you now know it be suddenly turned upside down.

I never envisioned 23 years of work having flown by so quickly, although I am very grateful for some of the opportunities that have been presented to me. The difficult times too were good learning experiences, something that allowed me to grow as a person.

Now, however, I would not mind if things would slow down a little, although we all know that time waits for no one.

Photo credit: Facebook

Dave Thomas, who covers among other items workers compensation and small business loans, writes extensively for Business.com.

Filed under Strategy | 3 Comments »

April 25, 2012

Investing: Even Fixed Income Products Have Risks

ME Liz Strauss wrote this at 7:39 am

Investment Risks in Fixed Income Products

One of the key things to understand when investing in fixed income products is risks associated with this asset class. Contrary to popular notion, fixed income products are not devoid of risks and you need to be aware of them before investing in these products.

Investment risks: The Basics

Risks fall under two broad categories – Systematic risk (also called Market Risk and cannot be mitigated) and Unsystematic risk (this can be mitigated through appropriate portfolio strategies). Systematic risk impacts the entire market. Examples of this include change in government policies. Unsystematic risks are specific to a particular investment and can be mitigated through portfolio diversification. Within a fixed income portfolio, you can diversify your holdings across a number of products and minimize the risk. We will look at the unsystematic risks and see how you can avoid some of them.

Sources of Risks in Fixed Income Asset Class

Interest rate risk: This is caused by movements in interest rates. The value of bonds is inversely correlated to the interest rate and hence an upward movement in interest rates in the market will cause the value of bonds to dip. The Federal Reserve is holding the interest rates low for a prolonged period to spur credit demand in the economy. Once there are visible signs of the economy picking up, the Fed will announce an increase in policy rates which would cause the prices of bonds to decline. While you continue to receive your periodic interest payments on the bonds, the capital value of the bonds that you hold would decline, causing a capital loss. However, if you hold the bonds to maturity, you will not suffer a capital loss, as the bonds would be redeemed by the issuer at the face value.

Re-investment risk: This is the risk that you may not be able to reinvest the proceeds from an earlier investment at the same rate (as the original rate) at the time of maturity. If interest rates go up, you would gain and lose out in a declining interest rate scenario. You have to consider this risk when the maturity profile of the instruments you hold is less than your time horizon for investment. Laddering is a popular technique that helps reduce re-investment risk. What you should do is to invest your money in a staggered manner and vary the maturity profile of your investments. This would help you ride out the volatility on the interest rate front.

Liquidity risk: This is the risk that you may not be able to sell your holdings when desired. Or you may end up selling your holdings far below their intrinsic worth. Certificate of Deposits come with definitive lock in and are not liquid instruments whereas bond funds can be bought and sold on the exchange and carry minimum liquidity risk (the bond funds that are listed heavily traded). Always keep in mind your liquidity needs when you decide to allocate your funds to fixed income instruments.

Exchange rate risk: You would be exposed to exchange rate risk when you invest in instruments denominated in a currency, different from your domestic currency. You may find interest rates attractive in emerging economies and choose to invest in bond funds that hold these securities. What you should also remember is that this investment has an inherent risk of currency exchange rates. During uncertain times, an adverse currency exchange rate movement may offset the interest you earn and even cause a capital loss. One way of mitigating this risk is through currency hedges; however, these instruments are not available to all. And the cost of these hedges may outweigh the returns and make the whole exercise not worthwhile.

Credit risk: This is the risk that the issuer of the instrument may default on the obligations to pay the periodic coupon payments and/ or the principal. You should look for those instruments that carry a high credit rating and not get swayed by attractive coupon on offer. Instruments with good credit ratings carry a lower coupon as a general rule. Sticking to highly rated securities would protect you from this risk.

Summary

If you are looking at building a fixed income portfolio, it would be worthwhile to understand that this asset class is not devoid of risk. The objective of fixed income investing should be to generate steady income without taking undue risks. And understanding the risks in this asset class and ways of mitigating them would help you plan your allocation to this asset class.

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Author Bio:
George is a full time financial adviser and blogger. His interest lies in trading, investment, portfolio management and business finance. He also owns a couple of finance blogs which provide valuable information to intellectual readers.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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Filed under Business Life, Strategy | No Comments »

April 24, 2012

What Customers Already Know about Influence and Loyalty

ME Liz Strauss wrote this at 7:55 am

Time is the New Money: 7 Crucial Truths for 2012

The silos of thinking that made our processes work were great when we were building assembly lines and factories. The spreadsheets of data that sorted our thinking were fine when we were counting dollars and doughnuts and things that didn’t think too. Fear of change, love of past success, bias that interprets history in our favor leads us to repeat and re-imprint bad or outdated behaviors in our organizational brains.

But when it came to predicting human behavior, teaching and training leaders, or bringing together teams in collaboration,

Big data has crashed through the halls of our silos.

Now through weird combinations of buying habits Target decides that we’re pregnant. For as much as they’re right, they’re wrong too. Just ask my friend who isn’t pregnant who’s getting samples from Similac.

Why don’t they just ask if it’s true? We talk to people who ask us more than we talk to people who tell us.

Find out about Influence and Loyalty

Once in the world of broadcasting, companies could control the conversation. Is it that habit of controling that keeps them secretive about asking?

The older, the larger that business has grown the harder achieving that new culture must be;
that is … they have more past success, more to lose, more to fear, fewer models of trust and collaboration.

Yet the business that will win my trust and gain my influence will be a role model, leader, learner, teacher, guide to the use of its product or service. If you want your company to embrace the social web, champion these ten roles as an action plan …

It’s important that we recognize that customers already know …

Influence is more than moving people to click on an add or retweet an offer. We might do those. We might even write a blog post. Hand us a free phone and we might use it, but that doesn’t mean will carry your banner of influence.
Want me to tell my friends about you, evangelize and spread the word to others who I hardly know? You have to be even better than your product. Understand what it means for me to put my seal on your product. I have to trust that it won’t show up broken, or break when someone first uses it. I have to know that my good experience wasn’t just a fluke. I want to know that you weren’t only extremely to me, but that you’re extremely professional to everybody.
Loyalty is a relationship based in trust. Lasting loyalty isn’t tied to price, points, or other forms of bribery.
The “tools of social media and social networking” are as important, but not more important than other social tools and venues through history, such as cave paintings, paper and pencil (or crayons), print communication, the telephone, radio, television, the neighborhood bar. Loyalty is a belief that you’ll be there and be the same person even when I’m not around to see you.

We are influenced by our friends because they are predictable. We know which ones always buy the first of everything and which buy after the sell-by date. We don’t follow the fickle ones blindly. We don’t follow the judgmental ones to places where we disagree.

And we don’t follow people who tell us what to think without finding out who we are.

Just yesterday, I heard someone who spends no time online talk about “companies that don’t ‘get’ it.” What she meant is that her favorite store changed a policy in a way that served themselves not their customer.

What customers know about influence and loyalty is that we don’t like companies who are selfish.

Are you sure you’re serving your customers?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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Filed under Customer Think, Inside-Out Thinking, Successful Blog | 3 Comments »

April 23, 2012

Use the Psychology of Focus to Get More Done

ME Liz Strauss wrote this at 12:47 pm

Beware the Illusion of Multitasking

Have you ever had one of those days when you felt like you achieved a lot of things, but when you thought about it before a good night’s sleep, you found you’ve actually achieved nothing?

That is the illusion of multitasking.

Or as Clifford I. Nass, a professor of psychology at Stanford University once said, “Heavy multitaskers are often extremely confident of their abilities, but there’s evidence that those people are actually worse at multitasking than most people.”

And he’s not alone with his opinion. Various psychological studies have since found that multitasking comes with a host of side-effect, which includes everything from dampened creativity to lower IQ, and ironically, decreased productivity.

In fact, studies have shown that your brain can really only handle one task at a time, and even though it only takes one-tenths of a second to switch from one task to another, these “little” delays can add up and account for as much as 40% of a person’s productive time. And that’s not even including the 15 minutes it takes, on average, for people to get back “in the flow”.

So you want to multiply your productivity and grow your business? The answer is simple: focus.

Optimizing Your Work Space

Most people think focus is an issue of “willpower”. That if you just “try to focus more”, the problem would go away. I believe the inability to focus are really two problems: a lack of willpower and an abundance of negative triggers.

Before I go on, let’s get one thing straight: willpower is a limited resource. It’s not a motivational issue. It’s a capability issue. Studies have shown that if you spend your willpower resisting a piece of cookie, for example, you’ll spend less time trying to solve a complex puzzle later.

Willpower can grow, just like a muscle can get stronger, but there’s always a limit. It is a resource that should be managed like time and money. When we run out of willpower, we need to take a break. And because focus takes willpower, I believe multitasking, therefore, is a form of “mental break”.

So my approach to focus is twofold: increase willpower and conserving it. The first approach — willpower — is not only widely discussed, it’s also a painful process. I won’t go through it in this article.

The cleverer approach is to cut down on the distractions that drain your willpower. And one of the biggest drains of willpower are triggers. What are triggers?

According to BJ Fogg, founder of Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab, three things must converge at the same time for a particular behaviour to take place: motivation, ability and trigger.

So according to Fogg, if you want to stop multitasking, you can try to change your motivation (difficult, in my experience) or you can hamper your ability (eg: hire a supervisor to stand over your shoulder). None of which are ideal, of course.

The last, and in my opinion, the easiest way to avoid multitasking is to simply get rid of triggers. Triggers are reminders for you to multitask. They are like temptations.

So for example, if you’re working on this report and Outlook pops up saying you have a new email… guess what you’ll do? That’s right, you’ll immediately check out the email. The same is true with any other alerts and notices.

Other common triggers include:

Advertisements. Have you ever surfed the web for research but clicked through an ad and as a result, abandoned what you were doing? Enough said.
The people around you. I used to work from home and one of the biggest triggers for multitasking at the time was my wife – once in a while she would ask me to check her email, or come into the room with a plate of food (it was a loving gesture, but that doesn’t make it OK!)

In your case, the trigger maybe the colleague who keeps dropping by, asking if “you have a minute”. Or perhaps it’s your boss always looking over your shoulder.

Mental Drains

Other than triggers, here are two more common mental-drains:

Noise. Try this: Close your eyes and just listen. Can you hear your computer buzzing? How about the air conditioner humming? Maybe it’s traffic speeding by?
These background noises have been shown to lower willpower and discipline, even if the subjects didn’t perceive stress from them. And as we now know, as your willpower drains, you begin to multitask.
This one is the least talked-about mental-drain: functional control of your working environment. Functional control means you have to be able to adjust anything you want in your working space, things like the temperature, where you sit, what’s on your desk, brightness, etc.
Functional control not only gives you physical comfort, it also give you psychological comfort. The fact that you can control the space gives you a sense of territoriality and safe space. It’s the difference between working in a strange environment and a place you’re familiar with.

Now some entrepreneurs I know of are perfectly comfortable working in a cafe, but most of us just couldn’t handle the lack of functional control. The fact that there are strangers around you all the time puts most of us on edge.

So there, 4 easy ways to conserve your willpower and focus more. Do you have any tips? I’d love to hear them in the comments.

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Author’s Bio:
Andrianes Pinantoan is part of the team behind Open Colleges, an accredited business management courses provider. You can follow him @andreispsyched.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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Filed under Productivity, Successful Blog, leadership | 3 Comments »

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