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Monthly Archives: June 2008

Happy New Year – Start Planning

It’s the start of the new year for business, the start of a new tax year, but even more important, the start of a new business year. Picture12 While it is important to “re-set” your tax systems and tax plans for the year ahead, consider why you pay taxes. Taxes are paid on profits, and the ultimate tax plan is to simply make losses – however, not a great plan for your business and personal wealth! So, while we would all like to keep the Taxman at bay, ultimately the secret of your success is to make your business grow. It is an old adage: “businesses don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan”. Yet time and time again surveys show that fewer than 3 to 7% of small and medium businesses that fail have ever done any business planning. The start of a new business year is the best time to start a business plan. You can “close the books” and think about new initiatives and ideas about your business. It is the business equivalent of making your New Year resolutions, but with a better process that can lead to follow-through and...
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Effective Meetings

Your meeting should be an event that produces results or outcomes and not the "process of meeting." Things need to get accomplished. Picture33To improve the results of a meeting, begin by defining and improving the meeting process and people's commitments to it. According to a study by the University of Southern California in Los Angeles (as cited in Forbes, 10/25/93)
  • The average meeting takes place in the company conference room and 11 in the morning and lasts an hour and 30 minutes.
  • It is attended by nine people -- two managers, four co-workers, two subordinates and one outsider -- who have received two hour prior notification
  • It has no written agenda, and its purported purpose is complete only 50% of the time.
  • A quarter of meeting participants complain they waste between 11 and 25 percent of the time discussing irrelevant issues
  • A full third of them feel pressured to publicly espouse opinions with which they privately disagree. Another third feel they have minimal or no influence on the discussion
  • Although 36% of meetings result in a "complete" resolution of the topic at hand, participants considered only one percent of those conclusions to be particularly creative.
  • A whopping 63% of meeting...
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OTS Management