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Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Benefits Of Time Management Training For Profit Stressed Companies

Time Management Training Means Savings For Profit Distressed Companies

With so many businesses taking so many drastic cost cutting measures, it is strange to see how few of them really look deeply into the benefits of time management. Effective management of time is like effective management of any other resources – it can save your company a huge amount of money if it is properly implemented.

With the huge cost of outsourcing and moving operations overseas, it seems like every measure should be taken at home to improve efficiency before such a drastic solution is proposed.

Of course, performance management is nothing new. Although the modern understanding of the benefits of time management is a little bit different than as it was originally conceived, the concept still goes back about as far as Henry Ford and the invention of the assembly line.

Back then, workers were clocked to see how efficiently they were putting together cars. Various steps were taken to improve the program constantly, resulting in less work for the same product.

The benefits of time management are easy to see on an assembly line. In an office environment, however, time management benefits can be a little bit less apparent. This does not mean that they are not important! The benefits of time management will show up in the books, but it will take a while.

After all, the tasks that people have are usually a little bit less concrete. Rather than manufacturing a car, you have to type up financial reports, communicate with clients, and do other similar business tasks.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of time management is on the individual performance and job satisfaction of any particular worker. Without effective time management training, increased job duties can seem overwhelming.

After all, when a worker is used to getting a certain amount accomplished in a single day, adding additional tasks on is never welcome. To do that without giving them training on how to accomplish other tasks is not only unrealistic, it is also unreasonable and unfair.

The benefits of time management training are that they allow you to provide a way to ease workers into taking on additional responsibilities. If you provide them with adequate training, they will be able to cope.

If not, you can often lose some of your best, most seasoned employees to greener fields. No matter what employee benefits you offer, if you stress them out too much, or stretch their time too thin, they will leave for another company.

This has been proven over time . . . and downsizing puts unwelcome pressure on non time management trained personnel. If you want to keep these seasoned employees, help them adjust to the new priorities. Just my 2 cents . . .

Al Smith

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Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Promoting Your New Business Takes Time And Effort

After school and early on in my career, owning a business was the dream. I must have had 40 jobs in my early twenty's.

I spent so much time worrying about how to start a business, I didn't know what to do with it once I had one. I have some rather specialized knowledge now, but back then only having a high school education, I severely lacked real business expertise.

Then, I decided to go back to school nights and get my business diploma through a local college. That took three years of working during the day and studying and lectures during the evenings.

I wanted to be Self-employed. Although I knew that it would take a lot of hard work, I could make a lot more money in business and enjoy the freedom of making my own decisions. It seemed worth the sacrifice to be able to set my own hours and be my own boss. Unfortunately, I knew nothing about how to promote your business until I went back to school.

A lot of people take courses on how to promote your business, but I naively assumed that, since I understood what I was doing, I would be able to get clients. This was a very serious mistake. I did have a few connections, and that is key to promoting your business. However, those connections were quickly exhausted.

They were simply not enough to make a decent living for me. Some of the best strategies for how to promote your business were things that I was already aware of, but I wasn't putting them to use.

Ever since I had started a business, I had maintained a good web page with excellent keyword optimized content. I did get a fair bit of web traffic, but it didn't seem to be translating into clients. Then I figured out the problem: I hadn't used any niche marketing. My traffic was far too generic and looking for information only. They were not intending on buying.

Understanding how to promote your business starts with understanding the nature of your business. In my case, because I was a small player, I needed to have a small loyal, local market. When I marketed myself as an expert located in the area, the calls started coming in.

What people never tell you when they give you tips on how to promote your business is how much busy work there is. I put up flyers all over the neighborhood, made connections at local chamber of commerce club meetings, and even went door to door to businesses trying to interest them in my flyers.

It took me about a year, but at that point I finally had a steady client base. Getting to a critical mass of people is the key to how to promote your business. Once you have enough clients, word-of-mouth takes care of the rest – at least it did in my case.

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