Over the years we have worked with a number of small businesses in the areas of planning, leadership, sales, team building, and customer loyalty. Shown below and linked to our blog are a number of specific projects.

• Successful Hiring
    Successful Hiring In our over 20 years of business coaching with both small businesses and nonprofits one of the main issues is hiring. So often the manager or owner involved makes a bad hiring decision. As a business coach we hope to make the hiring decision one which produces excellent employees in the majority of cases. We recommend a hiring process with a number of steps that provides  improved results. Here is an outline of those steps. The Job Specification A Job Specification ...
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• Building Great Leaders
  Businesses and Organizations Need Great Leaders As business coaches, one of our most important roles is the development of great leaders. Whether your role is company president, nonprofit executive director, department head, entrepreneur or even parent, leadership is key to your success. We defined leadership success as the continual achievement of your own predetermined goals stabilized by balance and purified by belief. Bruce Avolio author of Leadership Development in Balance: Made/Born states, Let us be clear, even if you are predisposed to ...
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• 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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• Focus on the Plan
  Staying Focused  So often we find that a business or a nonprofit organization has wandered into an area which might not be consistent with their Mission. They are spending time and energy addressing some idea that diverts them from the important issues which need to be addressed. Let me remind you that our business name is RLS Focused Solutions. One of the roles of a business coach is to remind the client not to lose their focus. Let’s consider an example. I ...
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• Hiring Motivation and the KASH Box
  The KASH Box  During several of our seminars we often project the illustration shown here on the right. Upon noticing it, the most common question is: “What is this?” This is referred to as the KASH Box and as we explain its purpose and meaning, the listener usually nods their head and smiles. They often said, “I’ve believed this for years, but I never saw it expressed this way. Seeing it reinforces what I’ve always known.” Consider the four sectors of the square ...
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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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