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.

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!

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.

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.

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.