FrontLine Results : Business Coaching

Welcome!

Are you so busy with the day to day 'stuff' that it's hard for you to find the time and energy to work on developing your business?  So you get stuck.  You're doing OK, but you know you could be doing better.

If you've been in business for a year or so, you want to move up to the next level but are struggling to get there - you're in the right place!

(To read the rest of this welcome message please click on the link below.)

Important Tasks : Productivity501

Have you ever started a day with some great ideas of everything you want to accomplish, but suddenly it is 6pm and you have nothing to show for your day?  While it is probably impossible to keep this from ever happening, we can minimize it by doing something very simple: Do something important first.

via www.productivity501.com

It's so easy to get distracted, especially if your work involves the internet! At least if you follow the suggestions in this article you'll end the day with a sense of, at least some, achievement.

Don't Delegate Your Customers

A delegate at one of my recent time management workshops was telling me he’d taken someone on to help in his web design business.  As he explained how he’d been so relieved to hand over a number of customer accounts, alarm bells started to ring.  Here’s why:

• Employing someone to manage any of your customer accounts is risky – especially if that person has similar skills to you.  What’s to stop them from setting up their own business once they’ve learned everything from you, and then ‘stealing’ those customers away from you?  

Tiny Revolutions

By “revolution,” let’s consider these your moments of break away. You decide one day that you loathe being a cubicle farmer. You decide one day that you need more money. You decide one day that you’re sick of feeling fat and lazy. You pick whatever the “cause” is. What happens next is that you move from thinking into action-taking.

via www.chrisbrogan.com

This great post from Chris Brogan reminds us of the importance of making decisions and acting on them. Planning is good, action is even better!

What I like about copycats!

In previous posts I’ve had a good moan - and the odd rant - about people who copy ideas, designs, offers and generally jump on the latest bandwagon, regardless of where it might take them – just so long as there could be money somewhere along the way!

As soon as you put an idea ‘out there’ it really is fair game isn’t it?  Whether people model it respectfully, or just downright copy it wholesale without even bothering to change the words.  I suppose it’s kind of a back-handed compliment even if very annoying.

But there could also be a benefit.

The people who came up with the original ideas are the real achievers and winners.  Being copied forces them to keep thinking of new ideas that are even better than before.  In fact, often they’ve already moved on from the original idea and leave the copycats standing in the dust as they power ahead.

I’m certainly not condoning copycats or plagiarists, just smiling slightly at how they’ve unwittingly raised the bar for the rest of us who can’t resist a challenge.

What if they don’t like me?

I remember coaching a client some years ago when she was just starting her business.  We were working on getting the basics in place, including her new website.  But I noticed that every time there was work to be done on the website, it wouldn’t happen and my client would be full of apologies and excuses in our next call.

When I delved deeper, it turned out she felt very vulnerable knowing so many people would be able to read about her and her business.  I confess I hadn’t thought about it in those terms before – but it’s hardly surprising since a fear of rejection is one of the basic human fears which can stop us in our tracks.

I wonder how many people approach social networking with the same trepidation?

Soon after I started blogging, I received a long angry email from someone who decided one of my posts was a direct criticism of her.  The message ended with me being ‘struck off’ her mailing list.  I have to admit I was mortified to think this person ‘didn’t like me any more’.  Until I saw sense.

It was actually nothing to do with me, it was about the words I used and more importantly, the way this one person chose to interpret them.

One of the whole points of blogs, and Web 2.0 in general, is to be able to share information, thoughts and opinions – and we actively invite comments!  Whatever we write, someone, somewhere won’t agree with our words, just as we won’t agree with everything another person writes.  But it doesn’t mean they don’t like us or that we don’t like them.

By being prepared to be vulnerable we let people get to know us (as little or as much as we choose).  We are taking a small chance, but a necessary one if we’re to build successful business and personal relationships.