Connection Charts

4 Ways to Save with Your Business

January 21, 2008

Whether you own a home based business or a business that employs 1,000 employees, your goal is always to make as much money as possible. This is exactly why you’re in business. Just like your home expenses, a business is no different and in order to save money, it requires motivation and a lot of smart purchasing and negotiating.

If you’re like most business owners, your drive to cut costs on every end is always on your mind and in order to do so, there are many ways to save money. From saving money on gas to saving money on your employees, the list could be endless. Below are a few ways you can start saving money instantly with your business.

Research is key

Every time you make a purchase, you should be doing your research. IF you have a purchasing department, make sure that they know exactly how to buy an item and how to get the best price. If you have relationships with vendors, make sure you check out other prices every once in a while. Whether you buying a stapler or a thousand computer desks, make sure you check at least five places before you make your purchase.

See if leasing helps

Depending on your business, see if leasing your equipment will save you more money. If you use a lot of technology and you find yourself upgrading every two years or so, it might be better to just lease your equipment instead of flat out buying it. If you’re going to go this route, make sure that you check prices from at least five different sources.

Monitor the use

Everyone hates a stalker but when it comes to a business, sometimes you may have to go this route. If you have employees, they are there to make you money, not have fun and get nothing done. If you have the internet in your office, see if you can get filters to filter out the entertainment, etc. Make sure that you monitor your employee’s productivity. Studies have shown that this type of monitoring can increase ones production by fifty percent.

Go paperless - use the internet more often

If your business is still mailing out thing via snail mail, maybe it’s time to start either faxing items or possibly e-mail clients. Now, we know that some people can’t access a computer, that’s fine. Maybe offer some sort of incentive to people if they opt to take paperless billing, etc like a coupon offer or something to your liking. If you cut your mailing by half, just think of how much money you can save.

These are just a few ways to save money with your business. The list could go on forever. It’s your job to track your expenses well and not spend like a mad man. If you become creative with your spending and you stretch your dollar further, you will see so much more progress with your business. Remember a business that saves is a business that will succeed. - Tom Tessin

Lack Of Business Ethics In Online Marketing

January 16, 2008

It seems that whenever internet marketing is discussed, business ethics and moral issues form background issues. Starting an online business is well within the price range of every person who has a modem and a computer. The fact that its is so cheap to get in, many people have lowered the standard of the entire industry.

Their reasoning is that the fact that their customers are adults and can stand to loose that $19 or $7. After paying whatever the amount they will be handed over some huge unorganised data that will end up confusing them more or scare them into inactivity.

The goal is sometimes to make customer paralysed until expiry of the guarantee period. During this period the customer has the power if they bought through a trusty payment processor.

The ethics come into play from the minute the idea pops in the brain of its creator until the business closes down and the last share holder has been paid his or her share. There is no single place for integrity and ethics in a business just as there is no place for playing around in a business.

When a customer contacts you and wishes to demand an unnecessary activity from your business or employees, and they cannot be reasoned with. There is room to terminate contact with that customer and bar them from any further interaction with your organisation. This is also part of ethics towards yourself and your staff, because the customer may not always be right.

How do you deal with a customer who feels that the product was misrepresented? You ask them if they are happy with the product and make yourself or company available to support them until they are happy. FAQ’s and auto-responders are there to deal with frequent queries but ideally you should try to limit them down by improving the product or the delivery of that product so that the query becomes a irrelevant.

I have seen websites with FAQ’s that were pages long and they were actually proud of it. Who has the time to wade through all that mess and read some question that might not be related to them? If you disagree try and get assistance from that website and see how you feel when they direct you to their FAQ’s. Would you buy their next product?

The best marketing presentations cover all those questions that a customer might have before they buy. This is part of ethical behaviour in any type of venture. Unethical companies make up the majority of the failed start-ups between 1 and 5 year period. by:Thoriso Mashego

The End of Innovation?

January 3, 2008

Everyone knows that global innovation is increasing at a blistering pace, right? Well, maybe it’s not, suggests Jonathan Huebner, author of the paper “A Possible Declining Trend for Worldwide Innovation.” He argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, global innovation is actually on the skids. If he’s right, this may change the way many employers view and manage innovation in their organizations.

Huebner (2005a) contends that the rate at which human beings innovate - when measured in terms of important technological innovations per year per person - has been on the decline since the late 19th century or early 20th century, depending on which data set is used. Huebner bases his conclusion on two different analyses. First, he examined 7,198 important technology developments that occurred between the end of the Dark Ages and the present day, as listed in The History of Science and Technology. Using that data set, he found that the rate of innovation peaked in 1873. Second, he looked at the number of U.S. patents granted per U.S. resident over time. Using that data, he found that the rate of innovation peaked in 1916.

By following the curve of faltering innovation, Huebner extrapolates out to the year 2024, when, according to projections, the rate of global innovation per person will be no higher than it was during a period in the Dark Ages (which Huebner defines as ending in the mid-1400s). In other words, he thinks the modern world may soon hit a 600-year low in terms of its inventiveness.

Such a claim is likely to strike some as preposterous. After all, the world often seems flooded with new gadgets, ideas and services. But this impression might have more to do with sheer population than the rate of innovation. There were only about 425 million people in the whole world in 1500, compared with over 6.5 billion today (”World,” 2006). Even if innovation grew at equal per-capita rates during both eras, ours would still be 14 times more innovative based on population alone.

But some experts are unwilling to concede that innovation is actually slowing. Futurist Joseph Coates (2005) takes issue with Huebner’s analysis, especially with his technique of linking the number of innovations with world population numbers. Coates writes that “with the explosive growth of populations in India, China, Sub-Sahara Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia, which had little or no modern history of extensive creativity in science or technology, the denominator in [Huebner’s] valuations is simply inappropriate.” Theodore Modis (2005), founder of the strategic forecasting company Growth Dynamics, voices a similar reservation and predicts that the growing populations of developing nations will eventually become much larger producers of innovation.

Nonetheless, so far Huebner (2005b) seems to have defended his analysis well, sometimes even using data sets offered by his opponents to bolster his argument. If he is even partly correct, the question becomes, what would be causing the downturn in innovation? After all, people should be more inventive than ever thanks to today’s better-educated populations, the large sums being spent on research and development, and the increasingly powerful information tools that are widely available to researchers.

Huebner offers two possible explanations. First, the world may be approaching an economic limit to innovation, where each new major innovation becomes more and more expensive to develop. Second, we could be reaching a limit to the human brain. Human beings, he posits, are being “bombarded with far more information than they can process,” making innovation more difficult.

Prof. Benjamin Jones (2005) of the Kellogg School of Management offers a slightly different explanatory model that nonetheless supports the contention that we may be reaching the limits of the human brain. He points to what he calls “a rising burden of knowledge” that potential inventors must bear before they can create something new (Hayden, 2005). That is, humanity’s store of knowledge has already grown to such an extent that people must often spend years learning it before they can develop major new ideas themselves. Jones’s research suggests that in order to innovate today, inventors have to learn more first, specialize in more limited areas of knowledge and rely more heavily on teamwork. But these strategies for boosting innovation can be carried only so far. Jones suggests that if the burden of knowledge is truly rising, then this may be bad news for the long-term prospects of innovation growth.

Assuming Huebner and Jones are right, it’s likely that innovating has already become - and will increasingly be - an uphill battle. This has various implications for managers. First, major innovations could become an increasingly scarce resource in the future, raising the potential market value of each major step forward. As the value rises, so will the pressure to either innovate or find some other major competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Second, companies that wish to innovate will have to manage their knowledge workers exceptionally well. They will need to recruit highly knowledgeable and up-to-date researchers and engineers, people who have had time to assimilate the expertise in their fields. Then they will need to train these people to collaborate as well and efficiently as possible in order to maximize their group ability to innovate. Employers might also have to find ways of helping would-be inventors filter or otherwise assimilate information. - Mark Vickers