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Is There Light at the End of the Tunnel for U.S. Businesses?

October 5, 2011 by Thomas Leave a Comment

According to a report released Oct. 5, from Automatic Data Processing Inc. (ADP), U.S. companies brought on more workers in September than the previous month, however the number was not enough to put a dent in the large unemployment numbers nationwide.

While the ADP report brought some encouraging news, two separate reports unveiled the same day noted that layoffs increased rather dramatically last month, while service companies are not hiring additional employees despite the sector’s relatively stable growth.

Looking back at the brighter report, ADP and Macroeconomic Advisers LLC report that private-sector employers added 91,000 positions in September, an increase of some 2,000 jobs from the previous month. The government’s official jobs report is slated to be released on Oct. 7.

Is Minimal Growth Better than None at All?

While the news is somewhat encouraging in that the country appears at this point to be dodging another recession, the recent report also demonstrates that growth is coming in very minimal numbers at best, providing us with weak growth at best.

While everyone is looking for any signs of growth, we shouldn’t be deceived by the numbers.

Much like when gas prices are inflated to high levels, drivers think they’re getting a deal when they pay less for gas, the bottom line being it is still $1 or $2 above what they paid the year before. Improvement, but much better is possible.

As for expanding on the down side, a report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas points out there were sharp increases in layoff announcements for September, with businesses planning to cut some 116,000 jobs, more than double the August report and the worst in more than two years. The biggest cuts came among the government and financial sectors.

What is Your Business Doing to Grow?

With the recent numbers showing a mixed bag, has your company been impacted either positively or negatively when it comes to job growth lately?

For many companies, especially smaller businesses, growth has been hard when you throw in the added costs for health care that many employers have been dealing with. While the government has tried to throw some incentives in the direction of small business owners, a fair number of them have either stood pat on hiring or even laid off where they felt it necessary.

If your small business is contemplating hiring, do you plan on? –

  • Waiting until after the holidays?
  • Waiting until you see better jobs numbers and additional incentives from Washington?
  • Waiting until next year’s presidential election is over?
  • Waiting to see if health care costs come down?

Lots of questions still remain for many small businesses, many of whom are playing the waiting game.

Photo credit: gaebler.com

Dave Thomas, who has authored a number of articles regarding business phone service writes extensively for www.business.com an online resource destination for businesses of all sizes to research, find, and compare the products and services they need to run their businesses.

Filed Under: Business Life, Strategy/Analysis Tagged With: bc, business growth, layoffs, LinkedIn, recession, small business, workers

How to Use Strategy to Build Opportunity into Your Life Now!

September 19, 2011 by Liz Leave a Comment

Making Random Decisions Is as Reliable as Luck

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Get up in the morning, get working, solve today’s problems go have fun is that the way life is working for you? Facing each day with a single-day view will get you through a life or a career, but at the end you may find that many of those days might have put to better use.

If you think of it making random decisions probably has about the same long-term results as relying on luck.

Strategy is a longer view, a stronger view, and a more useful way of leveraging opportunity too.

20 Everyday Situations That Strategy Could Turn to Opportunity Right Now!

With a mind toward strategy, you can leverage the opportunity in any situation, fix the problem your facing, open the door that isn’t moving and get things working FOR you. Strategy is not some high-falutin’ sort of thinking that only great minds do.

It’s a method of solving problems. Did you ever want to …

  1. be more visible in your circle?
  2. become the first, trusted source at what you do?
  3. settle a conflict without becoming part of it?
  4. help solve a problem with friend, family or coworkers?
  5. enlist powerful people to your cause?
  6. get sponsors for an event or meeting?
  7. quit a bad habit or change unhealthy thinking?
  8. get out of debt or pay off a loan?
  9. negotiate a new or better position?
  10. get upgraded to a better hotel room?
  11. change how people see you?
  12. raise money for your cause?
  13. get a meeting with someone you admire?
  14. find a new career that fits you?
  15. organize a group trip?
  16. motivate people to join you in something cool?
  17. get a raise you deserve or raise your rates without worry
  18. start doing what you were meant to do with you life?
  19. do damage control?
  20. start investing in a retirement you look forward to?

Too often we walk into all of the above situations without putting together a system for finding success. A clear strategy could turn any of those 20 (or most other) everyday situations into an opportunity rather than leaving the outcome to instincts and chance.

What Isn’t Strategy and What It Is

We use the word strategy as a synonym for the word way or the word plan. It’s not right, but it sounds cool. Bet you’ve heard people say things like this …

  • I’ve figured out how to use two tools to offer a new strategy for making money online.
  • My strategy is to say “yes” and then do whatever I want.
  • Our strategy this year is to focus on growing by 50%.
  • It was a bad strategy to spend money on that vacation.
  • Our long-term strategy is marry well and have a house with a great view.

Those are not strategies. Some aren’t even decisions or plans.

Strategy is more and more useful in our lives than most folks expect.

Strategy isn’t a business tool. It’s not a single goal, or a choice, or good idea, or a description of what we’re going to do. Strategy is a practical system that changes how we view and interact with the world.

Next time you have a situation that offers a change of any kind bring some strategy with you before you respond. Here’s how to do that.

  • Think about the outcome that you want to achieve — your goals.
  • Think about the people involved and what motivates them — their goals.
  • Think about your position and what you bring that adds value to THEIR goals.
  • Think about what you might offer to align your goals with theirs.
  • Think about how you can turn your what you want — your opportunity into a benefit for them.

Start by listening to what you know and asking questions to hear more about what they know. Offer a few suggestions that are unfinished, allowing everyone to participate in defining a great outcome. Call the group to action. Then claim and celebrate the agreed upon result! The hardest part is thinking it through before you begin.

How have you used strategy to build opportunity into your life right now?

Be irresistible!

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

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

Filed Under: Inside-Out Thinking, Strategy/Analysis, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, business growth, LinkedIn, Strategy/Analysis

Why B-2-B Is B-2-C … And Social Media is Biz Dev!

October 4, 2010 by Liz Leave a Comment

What Do Business Customers Want?

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I sneaked into publishing through the back door, first I freelanced. Then I worked for a contractor who built products for bigger publishers. It was definitely a b-2-b business. I was all about serving my customers. I was also clueless about how to do it.

I thought my customers were the clients who paid me.

It wasn’t until I became a publisher hiring other contractors that I realized how off my thinking had been. I’d been looking a short-sighted wrong direction.

Why B-2-B Is B-2-C … And Social Media is Biz Dev!

The business to business model (B-2-B) isn’t that hard to understand if you think a few seconds about it. What do business people want most? They want to grow their businesses. They want to know what successful people in their jobs at other businesses are doing to be successful. We can bring that to them in two simple ways:

  1. We can use social media tools to connect them to other people who do what they do. Social media tools are fabulous for starting and building deep networking relationships. Great social media strategists are fluent at making those relationships happen.
  2. We can use social media tools to build occasions online and offline where they can learn about companies like theirs who are growing. Webinars, seminars, teleconferences about business development, integrated marketing, reaching out to customers in new and more relational ways can be key to helping our clients’ business thrive and grow.

What I didn’t get then is that if we stop with thinking of our client as our customer we leave them to do all of thinking about how their customer might respond to what we suggest, offer, and recommend. But if we look through our customers to the people they serve we become their partner in business development.
We grow our own business by aligning our goals to help them grow theirs.

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Do you know how to serve your customers’ customers? Do you think B-2-B and B-2-C at the same time and turn social media marketing into business development?

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

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

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Filed Under: Marketing /Sales / Social Media, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, business growth, LinkedIn, social-media

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