Why hire without industry experience

A manager that is looking for a new team member faces a stressful situation: The sooner does his firm need to fill a position, the more pressure lies on his shoulders. As a result, he is less likely to find the person that the firm actually needs. When the HR are desperate for someone to occupy a role, that role is prone to be filled with somebody who may have a shining resume and a laundry list of helpful accomplishments, and yet lack the right personality that would match the employing company's profile. What ends up happening after signing of the contract and a period of successful, promising work is a clash between the identities of the company and the new employee.
The new business development manager presses for a lower-cost source of coffee beans in a cafe that prizes its own fair trade values. The new marketing officer gets fed up with daily mandatory dessert tastings while working for a trendy bakery in the middle of a busy city.
Both the cafe and the bakery are the companies that they are because of their staff's original quirks that the companies do not have to accommodate to survive. The new employees don't fit in - and that doesn't mean they are bad workers. Their values just don't correspond with your firm's.
That is where hiring on a rolling basis would be handy. Looking out for the right people for a venture when it doesn't have a particular role to fill takes pressure off the hiring process and therefore allows the firm to find the people that would make it what it aims to be.
With that said, the new employees do not have to have specific skills - since there aren't certain positions they would fulfill. Instead, they would create their own roles within the company by bringing their own quirks and passions to the table. Any technical skills can then be acquired already on the job (this should be especially easy considering that the new guy loves working at the firm. Those who don't love it shouldn't be hired.)
Industry experience might even become an obstacle in this situation. Having worked at another place that offers similar products as yours, the person's output will be impacted by the rival's values. A conflict of corporate differences would then not help any business that seeks to have its individual voice. And any firm, at that, should aim to do just that.

How and why to become a non-profit for a day

When we are talking about corporate social responsibility, it is very important to ensure that there are sincere intentions behind every corporate decision that is made with sustainability in mind. Sure, this sounds self-explanatory: don't go green-washing, because that will not help anybody, it will waste resources and, on top of everything else, might also ruin your company's image in the future. Empty CSR is wrong, and everyone knows that.
However, putting sincerity behind a company's pledge to care for its stakeholders does not come as easily as we'd wish. Since most firms exist for the sake of generating profits, corporate motivations oftentimes naturally conflict with working to improve the society's well-being. People can get greedy, which is especially difficult to control in a firm with multiple employees. The more players there are in the picture, the higher the chances that responsibility gets diluted and, as a result, nobody cares enough to do what is right: There is always somebody else within the company to blame for one's mistakes. This goes true both for having multiple workers under the same roof and for multiple firms sharing the same market.
A good way to isolate your company's profits from your company's goodwill to ensure that both survive and prosper is to regularly devote a portion of your company's time to seeking benefit for the society, while acting as a normal for-profit the rest of the year.
An excellent example of this alternative CSR strategy is Google's 20% time program. Under this plan, Google allows its engineers devote every Friday purely to projects that interest them personally. As a result, creative thinking is encouraged and is not bogged down by profit-seeking, which leads to the extraordinary innovations that we know Google to introduce for the world. Couldn't get more responsible.
Another example of this temporary non-profiteering is to pick a day each month where your staff's performance is measured on a scale other than sales or profits. If you are a dentist, for example, and you own a few offices, offer a prize to the office whose wait in line was shortest at the end of the day. Or reward the salesperson who decreases gas usage per sale from month to month. This is fun to do and can be very rewarding for your bottom line, even though the exercise aims at isolating your firm from its income statement as much as possible for one day.

The Weekend Business Challenge 2: the glorious results

NVSBS spent a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend in appreciation of our blessings and in speculation about corporate social responsibility. Now, with another WBD weekend behind us, NVSBS would like to present two articles about the practical implications of corporate social responsibility.

Today, we'd like to feature several words by Nikolay Safonov, CEO of NVS Business Solutions. Sasha's article on CSR will come in the next post on the NVSBS blog, so tune back in on Sunday, comment, subscribe, and enjoy the world of small opportunities for improvement.

The Internship Program that Might Save the World

Some can argue that corporate social responsibility can only coexist with diminished profit. I would like to offer a form of CSR that creates value for shareholders.

There are tons of high-school dropouts that end up in depressed sectors of economy with very little hope for social elevation. In the meantime, corporations suffer from high staff turnover, and consequential losses from the “Rookie effect”.

What if the corporations offer internship not only to university students, but to these outsiders too? Sounds crazy? But listen. When an internship is positioned as a “one shot” opportunity, disadvantaged applicants will take this opportunity to break away from their misery very seriously. Meanwhile, they will have a taste of the corporate environment, which can give them an impulse to go back to school.

In addition, during the internship they will acquire skills that are difficult to acquire in a different atmosphere. These will open up their choices in regards to employment.

Eventually, when the expertise gap is closed, high school drop-outs will be much more inclined to apply for a job in a fostering company.

As a result, everybody will win. The society will see the number of people living below a poverty line decrease. Companies will recruit loyal, skillful and dedicated staff.

A socially responsible extension- The Weekend Business Challenge

Due to the holiday weekend, Nick and I decided to extend the scond Weekend Business Challenge until this Thursday, December 2nd, 2010. We wish you a bright start to the new week, and we are hoping to hear more of your ideas about CSR. Ciao!

Thank you - can the world be more beautiful?

At NVSBS, we are thankful for the innovators in this world. They bring new joy to our lives every day.

We are thankful for those who offer their time to criticize our ideas.

We would like to especially thank those who work while we are on a holiday.

We highly appreciate musicians, cooks, parents, teachers, artists, actors, and gardeners who sacrifice their time for the sake of what they feel is their calling in life.

We are thankful for those who make sacrifices for the sake of what they believe to be the right thing to do.

Thank you, readers. Thank you, subscribers. Thank you, critics and supporters. You bring meaning to this world.

What is corporate social responsibility? The Weekend Business Challenge 2

Corporate social responsibility – which people also call by other interesting names like CSR, sustainability, and corporate conscience – is a model of business behavior that regulates a company in a way that aims toward generating benefit to the society. This CSR entails activities that range from making donations to nonprofit organizations and hosting recycling programs to making social responsibility the entire company's pivotal goal. In its strongest form, CSR runs next to social entrepreneurship. It is unclear however which form of CSR bring the most monetary profit, and whether it is appropriate for profit and social responsibility to stand next to each other in the same discussion.

After a brief break, NVSBS is coming back to challenge your minds with a new Weekend Business Challenge. This time, we would like to hear your ideas fire up into a discussion of corporate social responsibility. Do you believe that CSR is necessary in the modern world or, rather, that it creates inefficiencies that hurt society? We'd like to hear every one of your ideas about how to best implement sustainability in a corporate environment.

When I think about CSR, my mind inevitably arrives at the thought that today, too many businesses participate in their actions because they think they are supposed to. Too companies create environmental sustainability programs because of a lack of better ideas. Unless your firm transforms the wind into energy, these commitments to alien goals will not be able to bring much benefit.

So what should we do? You tell me, and I will tell you.

This challenge will run until Sunday, November 28^th. Once we have all your submissions on the twenty-eighth, I will read and feature them in the post for that day. Also, I will answer my own questions and I expect that our collaboration will leave everybody with fresh ideas and satisfaction from spreading wisdom and increasing the world's well-being meter as a team.

How and why not to rush capital into your company

Perhaps the biggest question one faces when starting a venture for the first time is “How will you afford it?” That question goes both for leaving one's day job and finding capital to support the company. While for the first-time entrepreneur, keeping the day job is a good option that will spare him quite some worry – we've been there – finding fresh capital might be something to hold off for later. Two major streams of increased financial stability and decreased need for borrowing are savings and postponing spending altogether.

The reason saving is so important to success lies in future's uncertainty. If I rely on inheriting a large sum of money at some point in the future and thus neglect my work, my chances at wealth go down every minute I choose to daydream instead of writing a business plan. If a firm's prospect depends on a single angel investor that might or might not show up, I have to suspect that the firm will not live for long, either.

Therefore, if financial injections are inevitable for a venture, it's best to conjure them from personal savings. A borrowing-free approach will make the firm that much more attractive for outside investors later on. It will eliminate the burden for repayment to outside parties. It will relieve a firm from outside controllers. Napoleon Hill said it well in his Law of Success: forming the habit of saving is the only way to independence.

And yet, in most cases, one does not even have to resort to spending his savings for a company to enter its blooming season. A manufacturing firm's need for packaging is a good example of a situation where being thrifty can result in a better costs-to-profit ratio than developing an original spending plan. I'll admit it: Developing and manufacturing new packaging is a fun, creative process. And yet, today's world could use less boxes, bottles, and double cellophane wraps. Instead, one can use that which has already been made. Look, the humanity is looking to reduce the speed at which it fills its landfills. Not to be preachy or to point it out, but yes, great opportunity for some truly socially responsible innovation. Saves money, too.

An even richer source of increased ROI that doesn't require any spending are the intangible assets that inhabit our planet. We humans have things like knowledge, experience, and imagination. Those who have already passed on left us with some pretty good intellectual and physical infrastructure. Those who are still here have not yet reached their full life potential. So, 21^st century entrepreneur, go out there and make use of what other people are more than happy to offer. They will thank you for that.

Quickly before you go catching the wave of free underutilized opportunities, leave your comments and subscribe to the NVSBS blog. We hope you have a blast this weekend.

How to bring Frankenstein's creature to life and then profit from it

Mary Shelley's infamous protagonist Victor Frankenstein knew it from the moment his creature saw the world: Victor's principal venture was going to bring an ROI that even the most optimistic business plan could not predict. Whatever happened there? Victor invested his college years into developing a clear goal, and, before too long, his vision materialized.

Now, I hope that those of you who've read the book realize that I'm joking. NVSBS would not wish the outcome of Frankenstein's actions for anybody. But a part of the story's moral still holds true: With enough persistence and the right idea generation mechanism, one can reach any ambition, including bringing the dead back to life - I'm not even mentioning generating simple everyday sales. Later in the article, I've posted a video that showcases how entrepreneurs would employ Frankenstein's creature in a more desirable way. The video is an excellent example of innovative thought that allowed the German company that made it distribute an extraordinary advertisement by word-of-mouth. I strongly suspect that the reason behind this project's success at going viral rather quickly lies in five concise concepts behind idea generation.

1. Ask questions. Tom Szaky, the founder and CEO of TerraCycle, has said in a presentation I attended earlier this year that the whole idea behind his upcycling business started with the question: "What is garbage?" Often, inquiring beyond the matter of fact leads to either greater understanding of the world or to discovering plentiful pathways for innovation, like it did for Tom Szaky. If you make electronics, ask your neighbors about how their lives could be more convenient, and your research and development will see genius coming through. If you are a freelance writer, ask questions when reading the New York Times and your opinion pieces will flourish, and so on.

2. Welcome the unusual. The "unusual" is unusual because people have not recognized its value. What that means is that everything obscure holds abundant wealth for the person who sees its value first and then shows it to the rest. Early adopters also get to indulge in the benefits of welcoming the unusual before the crowd follows. Maybe it's risky, but also it's the only path to successful idea generation: everything that's no longer unusual already holds too many entrepreneurs to support any new business.

3. Embrace the obstacle. Life's troubles are the entrepreneur's biggest assets. Once you think of a way to overcome a hurdle and make life easier for everybody else, you will be able to harvest lots of advantages from your findings. Apple does this by eliminating bulky hardware. Blackberry does this by putting your e-mail account into your pocket. MS Outlook does this by combining the functionalities of multiple professional software packs under one roof. You get the picture.

4. Link unconnected areas. Being an expert in more than one area or just thinking about several topics on a daily basis can bring your idea generating abilities a mile closer to those of celebrated polymaths like Michelangelo and da Vinci, whose expertise ranged from engineering and anatomy to writing and sculpture. With that said, broad interests can put a small business owner at significant advantage because of the immense innovation possibilities that reaching into multiple fields keeps. If your firm is a computer repair store, and you minored in art in college, one day you might as well come up with the idea of gold-plating your customers' MacBooks as an extra service.

5. Use the resources on hand. Maybe neither you nor I hold millions in the bank vault, and getting capital in this economy might not be the easiest task either. However, you do have plenty of other assets that are already free. Not to limit you down, but here are some examples: public domain art, the local library, tap water, your congressman's ears, the ocean, the sky, your friends and family, and, importantly, your knowledge and experience.

Now let's look at the real Frankenstein's creature and why innovative thought is not nearly as scary as Mary Shelley dared to depict it.

Let us know in the comments what you thought about the video and how soon you could tell the monster's identity. And, finally, don't forget to subscribe; it's good for you.

How to invent a bicycle

Every now and then, an idea will stick to my mind and will not let go so easily. The invention will materialize in my imagination in different shapes and forms, and sometimes the idea will be so pervasive that I will put effort into making it happen. This "bug" may be a completely new thought or just an improvement on some previous development, but in any case, I predict that most readers here are not immune from the inventor syndrome either. From personal experience, I can say that the brain children of plenty of inventors, entrepreneurs, designers, and artists go through the following life cycle that I'd like to call instinctive idea generation:

1. An image of a final product suddenly pops up in the thinker's mind
2. The image goes through some massaging and development as a thought
3. The owner of the image puts it down on paper
4. A model of the conceptual product goes through tests
5. A final version of the product comes out into the markets

Realistic or not, this sequence is a recipe for creative disaster. It can work with aesthetic creations, but with anything else, the five-step system above fails to ensure that the product meets a need or serves any sort of purpose. Therefore, even if the final product manages to reach the point of launch, its best chance of success will be to become a fad, and then quickly die out. That resonates with the idea that instinctive idea generation may create a cool-looking object, but consumers will quickly realize its lack of meaning and abandon it to the creator's despair.

Nevertheless; I plead thee, innovator: Do not despair. Things are not so hopeless for the creative thinkers out there. The best way to ensure that a project fulfills a purpose is to start with a question or a problem instead of a ready image. As an illustration of a successful innovation-based venture, Artemy Lebedev Studio published overviews of the creation process for each of their designs. For them, every project starts with a clearly formulated goal. Then they proceed to the fun part of thinking and creating. The results are stable and sound.

We would love to hear about your experiences with innovation and creative business models. Furthermore, NVSBS strongly encourages innovative thinking and is here for any visionary who might want some advice about the practical side of it all. We look forward to seeing new comments and subscriptions, and you will hear from us on Sunday! Have a good Friday now.

The hidden side of the holiday industry

The boys dress up as vampires; the girls dress up as princesses. The older siblings walk them around the neighborhood, and the adults hand out sweets at their doorsteps. This seemingly rigid, family-rooted structure, give or take pumpkin carving, has long been a staple of American childhood, but has been somewhat corroded by commercialization in the past few years. The October 31 industry, according to Selling Halloween magazine, is nearing five billion dollars in contribution to the national economy.

Now hold on there, a Selling Halloween magazine? Yes, there is an entire magazine dedicated to this very seasonal business. Granted, it does come out only about once a year, but their 21-year history only proves the stability of this very temporary field. Another standing testimony to the money-making abilities of Halloween is the Halloween Industry Association with its 5 day-long international Halloween show right next to Manhattan's Madison Square in December.

To me, this looks like a sign that there are some opportunities to take in the holiday market. The HIA and Selling Halloween are live examples of seasonal B2B, a space that might hold some potential work. Furthermore, there is a number of trends in our society that I could identify into which the 10/31 industry yet has to reach.

Does not doing homework sound like a good idea?

Ideas can be pretty amazing tools. At certain points in time, great ideas laid down the foundation for great inventions, remarkable commercials, masterpiece paintings, and every single book at your local library. Does that mean that every idea is good enough to seed your next victory? Maybe not. In fact, all the novels lying in publishers' slush piles without use, and all those projects that send well-established corporations into the red, also have the ideas of well-meaning individuals behind them. Nevertheless, the mere possibility of failure should never discourage you, especially considering that market research can significantly lower a project's riskiness.

So what is research? On the easy end, it can come down to a simple Google search for the information you need. On the other extreme, you might need to spend hours in a lab, hire test subjects, or conduct a survey at a mall. Take our word on it - there are many ways to go about researching and testing a business idea, and it is therefore important to know about the attributes of effective market research for a successful venture.

The main goal of it all

Setting the right goals is paramount to a useful outcome. These do not have to be too detailed if your project is just at its beginnings, but specificity helps get the project started on the rightest foot possible.

Here are some example questions for an entrepreneur researching his idea of a new vegetarian restaurant in St. Paul, Minnesota:

"Do humans enjoy vegetarian food?"

"How much money do people in St. Paul, Minnesota, spend on eating out every week?"

"How many St. Paul residents adhere to a strict vegan diet?"

This short list of things allows the entrepreneur to arrive at the ultimate goal of his research, and that is whether the market for vegetarian dining in St. Paul is big enough to support a new restaurant. Once he is able to answer this question, he will know for sure if his idea of a vegetarian diner is viable.

Beware of the confirmation bias monster

The same way the parent of a human would tend to see his child's accomplishments as signs of genius and dismiss his child's flaws as unimportant, the parent of an idea is predisposed to view his project favorably. So, idea parent, beware: The confirmation bias is out to get you. Ways to combat it include hiring an independent party to conduct the research, blinding all parties so that no participant in research is aware if its ultimate purpose, or just constantly reminding the ultimate aim of market research to yourself.

Questionnaires

Surveys are relatively simple to arrange. Thus, if you decide that this is the tool of your choice, it's important to keep some survey questions open-ended to allow for unpredicted responses. Other things to keep in mind are the various biases that can arise from question wording and from the order in which questions are asked.

Focus Groups

Focus groups can serve as a source of rich material, but are difficult and costly arrangements that require skilled moderators. Before setting one up, consider the following ways that these groups can go wrong: participants influence each others' reactions, and no response is genuine; the moderator intimidates the group into his way of thinking, or the participants do not take their job seriously. These pitfalls see a variety of researchers break their informational legs, including large corporations like Apple.

Market research is a fundamental task that goes into new product development and management. Ideas generation, another major task in the new product offering field, will be the next topic for discussion on the NVSBS blog.

SEO vs. AdWords: The winner is not that obvious.

We’ve heard it on numerous occasions; we know it well: a space on the first page of a popular Google search is the Christmas gift of choice for 99.8% of corporate websites. The other 0.2% already happily appears among the top ten, and is not very willing to move down. If you are the owner of a website that wants to be in the top ten for its keywords, your options come down to search engine optimization and AdWords. While both of them have the potential to let your web page reach its goal search engine position, there are distinct differences between them that lead some people to be “SEOers” and others to be “AdWorders.”

To many, the benefits of SEO are rather obvious. However, investment in search engine optimization is yet to become wide-spread:

• Better brand credibility. While SEO makes it possible for the website owner to deliberately get on the first search page, customers still perceive “natural” page promotion as more trustworthy than sponsored links.
• Offline services. It is slightly more importat to avoid pay-per-click in the first place if your customer will at one point or another interact with your firm outside of the Internet, be it a straightforward phone conversation or a full-fledged visit to your office.
• Long-run cost effectiveness. Once SEO gets your page onto the top, maintenance costs are practically absent. In the long term, investing in SEO brings enormous return on investment and thus makes a lot of sense.

On the other hand, some say that AdWords contradicts the nature of search engine marketing. They thus ignore pay-per-click as an option in the first place, to which I say that AdWords are not all that straightforward:

• Instant results. With a paid advertisement, you can generate immediate traffic to your webpage. AdWords is a relatively simple technology, the biggest prerequisite of which is your willingness to pay per visitor’s click.
• Ease. Showing up among the first ten for competitive keywords is a lot easier with a pay-per-click campaign than through search engine optimization. Again, one should only be willing to make a monetary investment into the program.
• No search algorithm changes. With pay-per-click, the need to spend time keeping up with changes in Google’s search algorithm evaporates because Google administers AdWords itself.
• Online services. Promoted searched are generally more appropriate for online services that do not require the customer to interact with your company anywhere outside the net.
• Only monetary investment. Finally, unlike SEO, AdWords does not require you to hire a specialist or study any literature. Like I mentioned, its technology is rather simple and anyone familiar with the Internet should be able to conquer it. Furthermore, by choosing to learn SEO, you give up the time that would have otherwise gone into improving the quality of your firm’s offerings, or making follow-up calls. Opportunity costs are looming.

It’s up to you whether you choose the one, the other, or both. Your choice should largely depend on the nature of your business. However, internet marketing is also a matter of personal choice that reflects your professional personality.

Check back for a fresh update on Thursday. Comment, subscribe, and have a remarkable week.

The results are in!

We are very proud to announce that the first NVSBS Weekend Business Challenge is officially over! Give yourselves some applause, because everybody who participated (even if they didn’t send in anything) should be proud. We thank you for being with us to witness the Weekend Business Challenge’s first step.

This week’s topic was the Pareto principle, or the idea that an average endeavor gets eighty percent of its results from only one-fifth of the time and money investment that it receives. This 80-20 rule concept is fairly simple. However, we asked you to think of additional applications for it, and think you did.

Advertising channels: the long but necessary list

Today, we have a fun list of the different channels that you may want to consider when brainstorming for your marketing campaign. The honest truth about idea generation is that, despite your elaborate knowledge of all your choices, your proficiency may evaporate under pressure. Consequently, we encourage you to come back to this list whenever you experience marketers’ block.

1. Magazines
2. Educational webinars
3. Newspapers
4. Direct mail
5. Brochures and flyers
6. Company website
7. Directories
8. Philanthropic activities
9. Newsletters
10. Community service programs

What is the 80/20 rule? The Weekend Business Challenge.

The Pareto principle, also called the eighty-twenty rule, is a movement of management thought that has been in development since the 1900s. The gist of the principle is simply that, in general, 80% of your sales income comes from 20% of your clients. This idea can be further expanded into the notion of a general effort-result distribution. That means that no matter how much one works, only about one-fifth of one's efforts go into generating the most of the results he sees. The rest of the energy, unfortunately, goes into less productive endeavors.

The principle has been widely applied to sales management as well as marketing, but that doesn't mean that you cannot get creative and see use of it anywhere else. After all, as an entrepreneur, your task is to find new applications for existing resources. So go ahead; think about 80/20; we are rooting for you. All the while, today's post is going to be fairly short. Instead of giving away all the secrets at once, we are giving extra credit to all of you who participate. Do some research, ask your coworkers, or just think about the information that we have given you already.

Leave a comment with your thoughts about the implications of the Pareto principle and how it applies to your professional life. Do you think it works? Which part of your workday do you think is affected by this rule? Then we will recap the challenge and write down our own thoughts about the 80/20 rule on Thursday, October 21, 2010.The best responses that we get from the participants will be featured in the post on that Thursday.

Keep in mind: your input doesn't have to be a Nobel-prize winning work. All we want is help you start applying theory to the work that you (yes; you!) are striving to accomplish these days. Here are some resources to get yourself started:

• Basic Pareto's Principle on About.com lays down some theory
• An intriguing explanation uses animation as a graphic example for the rule.

We are looking forward to your participation! Even though this challenge will run for a week, we will still run on schedule, so check back for a new article this Sunday. We believe in you!

The evening after: gain your customers' respect when they least expect it

If you have just found yourself a client and have gone through a successful deal with him, accept our congratulations. You have gone through the hard part of it all and made the deal happen. Now, all that is left is the easiest part of it all - and yet somehow the majority of ventures do not reach their full potential simply because they did not have an effective follow-up system. Psychological studies have shown that out of the four customer's experience combinations that are possible after the customer has done business with you twice, the best possible outcome for the customer relationship is when, initially, the customer is not completely satisfied, and, afterwards, his concerns get addressed to turn his second experience into a remarkable one. This is only made possible through thorough and effective follow-up system. Easily done, but somehow so often forgotten.

Looking out for rivals

Unless you are the Egyptian Pyramids, your business has rivals. While they can make our lives more painful than it is often necessary, they are not always such a bad thing. Opponents are a great tool for motivation and improvement. If your customers have no substitute for your service, why would you bother to improve? Additionally, rivals can become your assets even more literally, that is, when you work with them on the same goals that you otherwise be working to achieve on the opposite sides of the same river. Now, in order to help you get to the place of your dreams, your rivals need a small assessment.

Mitigate your weaknesses

Experienced entrepreneurs know: Their role is to organize incoherent resources into usable, marketable substances. Seeing opportunities and being able to pursue them before they slip away is the ultimate skill that a businessperson should know. On the other hand, the knowledge of production, accounting, finance, advertising, logistics, or any other science with which you may or may not be familiar could sometimes be useful, but by no means absolutely necessary for a profitable venture. In fact, and I am reiterating an earlier thought in this article, as an entrepreneur, you are to find and capture the needed resources, not attempt to be the sole human resource in your company. Building a team of experts in a collection of fields is a major task that you have to go through. However, once you get the hang of recruitment, human resources will be your biggest asset that will complement your other expertise and tools.

Leverage your strengths

Experienced marketers know that being specific about your offerings and your audience is crucial for professional success. Segmentation, targeting and positioning are not some abstract concepts any more. Instead, these three activities form the basis for any successful attempt at grabbing the public's attention. Knowing what, how and to whom to make an offer will get you a job, a donation, a sale, or even all three, if you're looking for that. With that said, finding the right audience and that unique feel can take quite a long time, and most of us don't have years to wait for such an epiphany before getting what we want. Today, Nick and I prepared a three-step outline to ease and, hopefully, accelerate the journey to our readers' goals.

E-mails or your life!

Suppose that you have to leave your computer for a mere twenty minutes. It may be a coffee break or a phone call; we won't ask. By the time you are back to your work station, many of us will have twenty newly unread e-mails in our inboxes. This can happen for a variety of reasons, and the truth is that the majority of those e-mails that regularly flood every inbox they can is that nobody reads them. All they do is take away our precious time. Moreover, if, for the reasonable sake of higher priorities on your task list, you let these unwanted e-mails pile-up for a week, bringing order back to your mailbox will take you an eternity. Luckily, there are several simple rules that generally apply to all professionals and that help clear away any unwanted junk and free up that precious time for activities that are more important and, more often than not, more pleasant.

Going beyond the PowerPoint presentation

PowerPoint is a great tool that saves us from having to construct our presentation materials from cardboard paper and markers. In fact, PP's latest versions do such a good job at that that any presentation still looking less graphically advanced than PowerPoint 2007 is dismissed by the public as not professional. In short, PowerPoint can be a great tool for organizing one's thoughts into a presentable product. With that said, the process of creating that presentable material can take an entire weekend or longer. That sounds like a lot of time. Yet, let's see what there is in the end of all that labor. The presentation makes for a solid visual support to your speech. It can help you stay on track and keep your thoughts organized and convincing in front of an audience. These uses for PowerPoint are the most obvious and they are the reasons why most people open PP in the first place. However, the best news of all is that the life of the presentation that took so long to make does not end after the lecture.

A sales management system on your desk

Think about some important components of a successful business. What comes to your mind? Some of our readers would mention reliable front desk staff, a team of trained salespeople or a solid website that attracts new clients. Maybe some will think of a referral-rewarding plan and a customer retention program.

Now that we have this list, I can see a pattern emerging. All of the techniques mentioned above target one area of business development: sales. This consensus is here for a valid reason. Sales management is simply the most crucial aspect of a successful venture, be it a mom-and-pop grocery store, an environmental activist organization or a multi-national corporation with headquarters on nine different continents.

True enough, sales may not necessarily be a particular organization’s primary goal (like in the environmental agency’s case.) Nevertheless, sales, be they in the conventional form of soda bottles sold, or be they in the more atypical form of donations raised, are crucial to the continued survival of any establishment that incurs expenses during the course of its existence.

Six (small) steps towards a paperless office

As members of a consulting firm, Nick and I get to see plenty of small and big businesses from industries that often have no connection with each other. Of course, every organization finds a unique path towards its goals. However, to paraphrase Leo Tolstoy’s famous opening line for Anna Karenina, all professional mistakes are alike; each successful business is successful in its own way.

7 Reasons to Go Paperless

Paperless office is very much like adopting a new technology: the only difficult thing about is transitioning from paper-based operations. After that, there are only benefits on the horizon. Just as a sample, consider these seven big and small business boosters that will appear as paper usage disappears.

1. Easier document sharing
There are often certain documents that are needed in several places simultaneously. This can be a client’s personal file that different offices of the same dentist may need to retrieve. This can be an unfinished flyer that you started at your office and want to edit at home during the weekend. In either case, relying on only a paper version of the document complicates the work process for you and your employees. Electronic documents, on the other hand, are easily transportable through the Web and programs like MS Access.

Five best-kept secrets about Outlook

Now that you know the basic functionality of the professional communication giant that hides behind the simple name Outlook, it’s time for us to unveil some tricks that can make the life of a busy person surprisingly easier.

1. Business Contact Manager
BCM is a powerful add-on to Outlook that allows any businessperson manage their business contacts and marketing campaigns, monitor sales people’s and campaigns’ performances, give order to one’s business opportunities and try out other ways to increase work efficiency.

Outlook: The Supernatural Inside Your Computer

If we were asked to name a single quality that one should always strive
to improve for the sake of success in the small business world, we
would, without hesitation, say: interpersonal communication. And when,
after that, we would be to pick one piece of software that would propel
one's communication ability the most, we would quickly and surely
respond: "MS Outlook."

If reading a software review makes you feel uneasy, do not fret: We
would not be recommending a particular program if we were not sure of
our choice. Just consider this: Nick and I counted how many separate
programs come together under one roof in Outlook, and found seven
disparate sets of functions comprising just the basic foundation of
Outlook. That's seven programs that would otherwise be scattered around
your computer and not connected into one secret communication weapon.

Let's review the basic functionality sets in Outlook and their meaning
to professionals today, so that next time, we can reveal some best-kept
secrets about using the entire program.

Is Sound Recording a Trick? It Shouldn't Be.

In our most recent articles, we discussed two rather distinct modes of
professional communication: flyers and video presentations, the former
dealing solely with a static image printed on paper, and the latter
encompassing dynamic images, sound, text, and other aspects that one
may include in a video presentation. Today, we are going to take one of
the complex components that make it up: sound recording.

Be Visual with Movie Editing Software

Last Sunday, we started our discussion of the ways of getting your message to its audience. We wrote about flyers, one of the more conservative methods of communication. They work with most audiences, and the technology behind them is relatively easy to conquer. However, because of their simplicity, flyers are exceedingly common, and sometimes this tool does not easily catch an audience’s attention. In those cases, a more complicated method of communication, like a video presentation, can do the trick better.
A video presentation? If that sounds complicated, you should reconsider your view of modern technology. Most computers today come with built-in video creating programs, Windows Movie Maker and iMovie being the more popular free video editing programs. Not only do they come free of additional charge, these programs were especially created for the beginning user: simple and easy to use. In this article, we’ll go through the basic steps of creating a simple video presentation that consists of images, text and a voice-over so that you are not all alone on this journey towards the ears of your audience.

How to Design a Great Flyer

If you already have a great message, it’s time to think about the way you deliver it. After all, a good presentation is essential to letting others appreciate what you have to say. There are plenty of ways to do that, and we are going to discuss one of the more conservative methods of professional communication: flyers.

8 Quick Ways to Enhance Your MS Word Documents

1. Text Formatting Styles
MS Word offers quick formatting buttons that let you pick from a set of professionally designed looks for headings, subheadings and normal text. You can choose from an array of styles that fit the overall tone of the document you want to create. Word 2007 and younger versions make a special improvement at this function, offering their users preset collections of text formatting styles that cater to various document types that also resonate with other formatting presets, such as front covers. This can be a huge enhancer of the document’s atmosphere, provided that you choose a proper style for your message.

Are you worried about the security of your computer? You should be because your wealth and stress level depend upon it.

A leak the computer’s protective system can reveal company secrets and expose any confidential information. Being proactive in keeping your computer secure can save you a lot of time and money.