All business starts with a sale, whether it be of your product or service. In the nonprofit world it may a donation to support your good work. Too often many believe that all there is to sales is a smile and strong handshake, but the best know differently. Shown below and linked to our blog are a number of concepts which can provide for greater success in the selling process.

• Don’t Make a Bad Hire
  Better Hiring  As our businesses and organizations return to a pre-virus status, our owners and managers are currently in a hiring mode. Because of the lack of applicants, one may be overly anxious to hire the first available candidate. Let us consider the cost and time wasted in hiring the wrong person and consider a better methodical approach. Consider the time and cost associated with finding and evaluating candidates. There are first the media costs, whether you use a publication, a website ...
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• Leadership During a Crisis
  Resilient Leadership You started the year with great plans and expectations, but sometime during the month of March, the work seemed to end. It was if your customers went into hiding and your telephone stopped ringing. If you are a retail business or retail store, you had to shut down. You had to layoff much of the staff you had hired and trained over a period of months and years. You found yourself disheartened and in a state of crisis. Stephen Covey ...
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• Trust at Work
    Trust and Leadership I believe at the core of leadership is whether the leader is trusted by others. Would you be motivated to believe and follow a manager who you did not trust? How would the staff work to accomplish the plans and goals put forward by that leader or manager? Whether you are the owner of a business, the leader of a nonprofit, or a government official, leadership starts with Trust. This is true not only in leadership, but in all ...
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• New Year Plan
  A Time to Plan This is that time of year when we reflect on the events of the previous year and begin to plan for the current year. Think back over the last year and think what you learned from your failures and successes. We hope to be lifetime learners and understand that much of our education comes from our practical experience. Therefore, let’s build our future with what we learned for the past. In thinking back over 2019 ask yourself: What ...
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• Effective Strategies for Employee Retentions
  Effective Retention Strategies  There is ongoing discourse in all sectors (public, private, healthcare and non-profit) regarding the need for retaining talented employees. And there is consistent agreement that doing so can be more difficult and challenging than hiring them. The retention of good employees is a human resources strategy that contributes in many ways to the overall performance of an organization. Effective employee retention results in lower turnover and associated costs, increased customer and employee satisfaction, increased productivity, improved product quality, and ...
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• Delegation of Responsibility
  The New Supervisor Susan is the owner of a profitable and growing service business. She has worked hard to grow the business, spent many hours away from family and friends. She has done most of the business management herself, dedicating only minor clerical tasks to others. Her strengths are in sales and marketing, but she is frustrated by being constantly  pulled away to supervise the work crews and address customer complaints. The conclusion is that she must begin to delegate some ...
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• Making Meetings Worthwhile
  Do You Hate Meetings? In his book Traction, Gino Wickman discussed the development of effective and meaningful meetings. He reports that surveys, where people were asked to rate the effectiveness of meetings on a scale of 1 to 10, the responses were in the 4 to 5 range. Over the last year, I have been involved in a monthly leadership meeting with a client and have observed that attendance had become a struggle. In talking to several of the participants, I ...
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• Seek to Better Understand
  The Challenge of Looking Past the Obvious When a business owner or manager is asked to describe their greatest challenge, the response is, too often, an obvious symptom. My competitors’ undercut my prices. I need to find a better location, but this is all I can afford. I can’t find good employees who will provide good customer service. These are the stated obvious issues, but they will not help us get past the obvious and lead to developing a plan for ...
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• Build Your Organization
  A Successful Organization Starts With You So often we hear from the owner of a business or the manager of an organization lament about the performance of employees or associates. They speak of it as though they were having an out-of- body experience in which they were completely separated from the activities of the group. When I hear these types of comments, I am reminded of an old Greek phase, translated to the fish rots from the head down.   Leaders often feel ...
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• Simon Sinek
  Leadership wisdom from Simon Sinek To be authentic is to be imperfect. Authenticity is about imperfection. And authenticity is a very human quality. To be authentic is to be at peace with your imperfections. Great leaders are not the strongest; they are the ones who are honest about their weaknesses. Great leaders are not the smartest; they are the ones who admit how much they don't know. Great leaders can't do everything; they are the ones who look to others to help them. ...
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