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Recent Posts by teikoh

Recession Proof Your Business

sorry closedIs this possible – to recession-proof your business?  Well no, probably not despite the wealth of articles about how to do so appearing on the internet (about 614,000 hits on Google). However, what is possible is to secure your business as much as is possible by following a series of simple and common sense business strategies.  These strategies are no different from strategies you should employ under normal circumstances, but which application is much more acute in today’s economic climate, and with a different emphasis required.  Sadly when times are good, businesses allow themselves to get “fat” and some of these every-day disciplines are allowed to slacken. The strategies can be grouped into defensive and offensive strategies.  As you look at your business performance it is likely that you will find profit performance heading south, and with the economy looking the way it is, it is difficult not to panic and begin to tighten all the hatches.  However you can tighten too much, to the extent that your business finds it difficult to operate normally.  Hence, while it is natural to concentrate on the defensive strategies such as cutting costs,...
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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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The Vision Driven Plan

Stephen Covey, author, personal and leadership development guru is coming to Perth for a seminar at Burswood on the 29th of May next week. For those of you who cannot attend and who have not read his books The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and Principle-Centred Leadership, I suggest you get those books and see how a business can be run effectively on core-principles. At OTS Management we believe in placing our core-values squarely in the centre of our planning and business decisions. Our Vision Statement drives our everyday behaviours, moulds our culture and provides the parameters for our long-term strategic planning as well as our annual business plans. Vision_mission_goals_core_values When we facilitate planning projects for our clients we start with the end in mind and ensure that the client has an enunciated vision for the business and that it is quantifiable so that each goal and objective can be squarely measured as well as relate in a straight line from the vision those goals and objectives are designed to achieve. Our model is that, from the Vision comes clarity of action. Your planning project should:-
  1. Clarify and Quantify...
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