4-Step Approach to Deal with Difficult Employees

November 6, 2011


Every business owner encounters difficult employees – commonly referred to as jerks – in the course of running his business. These difficult employees are easy to spot in an organization. They complain about any task you give them, spread around rumors, slack on their jobs and bully their peers and subordinates. In general, they drain lot of energy from everyone, particularly the managers and business owners.
How you deal with them can help you minimize the impact on you and your business. As a business owner, avoiding them is not an option for you, as much as you would like. This will only delay the problem for later and make it even more challenging to address. Rather than avoiding them it is better to nip the problem in the bud and address the situation head on. From our own experience and after talking to fellow business owners we have come up with a 4-step approach that can help you deal with this problem in an appropriate manner.
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When is a Good Time to Increase Your Payroll?

November 3, 2011


This blog post was created by Bert Deorhoff, CPA, who specializes in small business bookkeeping in Jefferson City.
If you are running a small business, then you are making a lot of big decisions daily. As your business grows, you will need to start thinking about increasing your payroll and hiring new employees.
The first thing you need to do is start planning. You will have to do quite a bit of number crunching in terms of how another employee will affect monthly, quarterly and yearly expenses.
Ask yourself, “Do I have enough work to justify hiring another person? Am I meeting the needs of my customers?”
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How to Ensure You are Working ON your Business, not FOR it

October 31, 2011


In the previous post we explained that there is a subtle, but important difference between working ON your business and FOR it. The difference stems partly from how the business owner is thinking about the future of his business. Is he preparing the business for long-term success or worrying about day-to-day cash flow? Great companies are created when the founders focus on long-term viability of business and lay strong foundation, even if it means sacrificing short-term gains. Just look at the examples of great companies of today – Microsoft, Dell, Facebook, Apple and so on! All of their founders worked didn’t focus on short-term gains in the early stage of their companies.
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Are you Working FOR or ON your Business?

October 27, 2011


On the surface this sounds like a trivial question to ask. After all, when you own your business you are expected to take care of everything. Whether you do it by working FOR or ON your business should not be relevant. However, when you read the question carefully you realize that there is a subtle difference between the two. How you approach it can have long-term implications for you and your business.
So what is the difference between working FOR and working ON your business?
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How to Measure the Success of Onboarding Process

October 23, 2011

Organizations invest a lot in their workforce, and it’s no surprise that they expect to see a return on their investments (ROI). But as business leaders look for the best ways to maximize the ROI of their workforce, the onboarding process is often overlooked. For many, the onboarding experience is reduced to a mere checklist of tasks to be completed and forms to be submitted. The fact that such organizations fail to understand, though, is that an employees that experience a smoother onboarding process will be more connected to the organization, better trained and, thus, quicker to produce.

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10 Things (Bad) Franchisor will not Tell you (Franchisee)

October 16, 2011


When buying a franchise business you should make sure the franchise you are looking to get into is good and will make you successful as well. After all, selecting the wrong franchise can hurt you and may even wipe out your hard earned savings. Below we have listed traps many novice business buyers fall into when choosing a franchise.
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Wildly Successful Companies that Decided NOT to do Everything

October 2, 2011


We have highlighted virtues of focus in the last couple of posts. The decision NOT to pursue something is the most important decision small business owners will make to be successful. You can use the framework described in the previous post to get better understanding of how to apply this principle in everyday decisions.
In this post we want to show examples of companies that have used this principle and have become wildly successful. They are the companies whose products we use every day. After studying their business model and decision making we have come to appreciate the way they go about doing their business. Here they are:
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Framework for Deciding What NOT to do

September 28, 2011


In the previous post we highlighted that the most difficult decisions you will ever make are the ones where you decide NOT to move forward. By focusing your resources and energy on narrowly you can achieve number of benefits and get higher return on your investment of time, money or effort. We mentioned how Apple has succeeded to become the most valuable company in the U.S. by applying this principle, while GM had floundered by spreading resources over multiple brands with lot of overlaps.
You should use this approach in decision making every step of the way. If you take a step back and think about the decision in terms of cost vs. benefit of the current choice and evaluate it against alternatives you can improve the odds of making the right choice. You can use this principle in number of different areas as shown below.
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What you do NOT do is more Important than what you do DO

September 25, 2011


The most difficult decisions you will ever make are the ones where you decide NOT to go ahead. We live in a world full of constraints – there are only 24 hours in a day, the bank is only willing to give you 50% of requested loan, you can only hire 5 employees. The list goes on and on. Given that there is only so much you can do with the limited amount of resources it is imperative that you pick your battles wisely. Decide to fight all the battles and soon you will run out of ammunition.
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Five Step Action Plan to Remove Trouble Spots in your Business

August 31, 2011


In an ideal world your small business should operate like a well-oiled machine without encountering hiccups. However, as we all know, this is not the case in real world. Problems could and do arise from time to time. We are not talking about transient problems that can be fixed easily and quickly. We are talking about structural changes that occur very slowly and can go unnoticed for a long time. These are the problems that can do a great harm and eventually put you out of business.
To avoid this unfortunate fate we recommend you implement a three-step process. (1) Implement systems to provide you with warning signs about potential issues. (2) Interpret the warning signs to find trouble spots in your business. (3) Take appropriate actions to remove trouble spots.
We talked about the warning signs earlier. In the later post we showed how to interpret these warning signs This post will focus on what actions you can take for each type of the warning sign so that you can take care of the trouble spots and get your business on the right track again.
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