A weekly roundup of the best blog postings related to business issues:

Should CEOs Have Term Limits? - Transition of Power at Modern Magellans.

Estimated Tax: Self-Employed at glgcpa.blogspot.com.

Age and the entrepreneur, part 1: Some data at blog.pmarca.com.

Make Your Resume Pop With These Resume Writing Tips at The Frugal Law Student.

Tip: Measure Meetings With Action at Behance.

How Sales Managers Can Increase Participation in Sales Meetings at Landing the Deal.

Planning Your Career - What’s Important? at Alexander Hughes Selection.

Seven Deadly Sins of Leadership at BuildYourOwnBusiness.com.

What is Management Effectiveness? at Suite101.

The most meaningful way to say “Thank you” to your customers at Insightful Business Ideas.

A recent Yahoo survey says that employees who feel undervalued and boredom are wasting up to 20% of their time at work. Typically they are surfing the Internet or gossiping with fellow coworkers.

As a manager, the best way to combat this is to delegate more tasks to your employees and add some daily praise in the mix and they will feel more valued. Creating a culture of valued employees will raise the company’s morale and lead to either higher revenue or decrease costs. However you look at it, it will raise the bottom line!

To those employees who are wasting time, watch out, the majority of companies are watching when you surf online. For the most part, they have to do it because of compliance. If they did not monitor web activities, they could be found liable in certain court cases or be found to not have sufficient evidence if an ex-employee filed a complaint. Do not take it personally, consider it a business decision.

To you, if you feel like you’re wasting time at work it is your responsibility to ask for more tasks or go above and beyond on your current tasks. If you can do this, and you still don’t feel valued, it’s time to take your skills somewhere else where they may appreciate you and the work that you do.

Many companies outsource their fulfillment services to save time and money running their business. Most small and medium sized business do not want to hire an employee to run their fulfillment division because frankly, they don’t have that much to do. Unless that employee has other responsibilities, there should be no reason to hire a person to run your fulfillment duties. Outsourcing it is the most cost effective way to handle those tasks.

So, where do you start when looking for fulfillment companies to work with? First, you have to understand what your companies marketing strategies are and how a fulfillment service will benefit your company. You can find companies that can provide a complete turnkey solution to where they store, process, and send all of your company’s literature and marketing pieces. Some of these companies also offer marketing services so they can put together your literature and marketing pieces. You will have to have a realistic budget put together so when you’re locating your fulfillment business partner you will be able to decide if their services will remain under your budget.

Once you’ve done these two things, you should have a better understanding of the products, marketing pieces and the fulfillment services you will need.

Just with any employee you hire, you want to make sure that an outsourcing company understands your business and you can have a beneficial working relationship with that company. Too many businesses try to do too much and control everything. If you want your business to go to the next level, you will need to find quality partners to work with to ease the burden on yourself. Once this is done, you will be able to focus more on your expertise and the products you offer to clients. This in turn will increase your sales and bring in more revenue.

Copyright (c) 2006 Alicia M Forest and Client Abundance

You may be too busy during the holiday season to notice if
your business is slowing down a bit, but in case you’re
not, there are several things you can do to use this time
to your advantage as you head into the new year.

1. Review your website

Take some time to review your website and make any
necessary updates by removing old information and
freshening up the rest of your copy. If you have a photo of
yourself on your site, consider putting up a new one if
your current one is out of date.

And here’s a tip for getting more people to sign up for
your Free Taste (your free offering that invites people to
join your email list): place your opt-in box in the upper
right-hand corner - it’s been tested to be the most
effective.

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“Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you
have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be
careful lest you let other people spend it for you.” –Carl
Sandburg

While there are those who win lotteries, most of us will
have to invest some time in our pursuit of success.

We can look at time, and success, from two points of view.
First is the “time” that we put into our endeavors and then
there is the “time” that is required for them to grow to
fruition.

Let’s think about a garden.  Just as we are all different
and some will want a nice garden of vegetables, another
fruit, and yet another flowers, for each gardener to
achieve the goal, each will have to invest time to get what
they are looking for.  Each must take, or make, time to
perform regular chores; weeding, mulching, watering, and
each must allow time for the natural rhythm of growth to
take place.

Just as a seed dropped into the ground does not turn into a
tree or a radish overnight, simply setting up a business,
exercise program or other process for achieving success is
not sufficient.  No one would expect to become a champion
athlete after one or two practice sessions, nor would any
sane person expect to plant a seed and come out the next
morning and find a tree.  That’s only happened once that I
know of, and the fellow had to fight a giant as a result.

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Copyright © 2006 Dave Kahle

Good time management for salespeople has been an obsession of mine for more than 30 years. In the last decade, I’ve been involved in helping tens of thousands of sales people improve their results through more effective use of their time. Over the years, I’ve seen some regularly occurring patterns develop - tendencies on the part of sales people to do things that detract from their effective use of time.  Here are the four most common time-wasters I’ve observed. See if any apply to you or your salespeople.

1.   Allure of the urgent/trivial.   Salespeople love to be busy and active. We have visions of ourselves as people who can get things done. No idol dreamers, we’re out there making things happen!  A big portion of our sense of worth and our personal identity is dependent on being busy. At some level in our self image of our selves, being busy means that we really are important. One of the worst things that can happen to us is to have nothing to do, nowhere to go, and nothing going on. So, we latch onto every task that comes our way, regardless of the importance.  For example, one of our customers calls with a back order problem. “Oh good!” we think, “Something to do! We are needed! We can fix it!” So, we drop everything and spend two hours expediting the backorder.  In retrospect, couldn’t some one in purchasing or customer service have done that? And couldn’t they have done it better than you? And didn’t you just allow something that was a little urgent but trivial prevent you from making some sales calls? And wouldn’t those potential sales calls be a whole lot better use of your time?  Or, one of our customers hands us a very involved “Request for Quote.” “Better schedule a half-day at the office,” we think. “Need to look up specifications, calculate prices, compile literature, etc.” We become immediately involved with this task, working on this project for our customer. In retrospect, couldn’t we have given the project to an inside salesperson or customer service rep to do the leg work? Couldn’t we have just communicated the guidelines to some one and then reviewed the finished proposal?  Once again, we succumbed to the lure of the present task. That prevented us from making sales calls and siphoned our energy away from the important to the seemingly urgent.  I could go on for pages with examples, but you have the idea. We are so enamored with being busy and feeling needed that we often grab at any task that comes our way, regardless of how unimportant. And each time we do that, we compromise our ability to invest our sales times more effectively.

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Copyright © 2006 Deborah Torres Patel

Thorough meeting preparation alleviates anxiety. Good planning guarantees that meetings are relevant, don’t overrun and aren’t held back by uniformed, boring or disinterested attendees.  Follow these 19 timeless tips to keep your meetings on track and on time.

When preparing your agenda …

1. Identify the aim of your meeting

2. Put the most important items first

3. Establish a clear outcome for each point

4. Judiciously choose meeting invitees.  Ask yourself, “Who should attend?” “Should attendees be present for all or just part of the meeting?”

5. Place controversial points towards the end so the early part of the meeting can flow smoothly.

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Copyright © 2006 The National Learning Institute

You receive a phone call from the CEO who asks whether you’d be interested in taking on a special assignment.  In this assignment you would report directly to the CEO and participate in making some of the important strategic decisions facing the company.  This assignment would provide you personally with major growth and career opportunities.  The offer has only one catch; because the assignment is only part time requiring about one day per week, you would have to do your present job in the remaining four days.  Would you take the assignment?

Before reading any further please answer “”Yes” or “No” – Would you take the assignment?

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Copyright © 2006 Mary Foley

About a year or so ago the national news told us that scientists in Europe cloned a sheep.  As a watched the story I fantasized about cloning myself.

One Mary would take care of all the logistics to run my business like e-mails, phone calls, sending out packages, filing, bills, etc.  Another Mary would dedicate all of her time to networking, marketing, and following-up on sales calls.  When the story was over I was snapped back into reality.  The two additional Marys vanished and I was left with just myself to do it all.  And I was exhausted.

If you’re like me, one of the reasons you went into business for yourself was to feel more satisfied and fulfilled.  The constant feeling of never getting enough done or not having enough clients for cash flow doesn’t quite meet the satisfaction criteria.

Striving to be bodacious, I mustered the courage to be in charge of my life by trying to solve this problem.  Here are two important things I’ve come to realize:

1.  The feeling that you need more time AND more clients NEVER goes away in business.

It’s part of the package.  Or, better yet, part of the adventure.

In fact, these same feelings exist in the big companies of Corporate America.  They are always anxious about their sales revenues and always pushing the clock to get out the next product version or new model.

So, I’ve come to accept this tension as normal, and I’ve come to accept that it actually serves a purpose of pushing me to work smarter.  That’s where the adventure part comes in, which leads me to my second realization.

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Copyright © 2006 Gobala Krishnan

I went for that seminar too, the one where some guy bounces around preaching that the only way to become successful like him is to have a near-impossible dream and to work towards it vigorously by following a rigid daily time schedule. They call it time management. There’s only one problem - it didn’t work - for me at least.

Get up at 8.00am, have breakfast at 8.30, do this at 9.00 and do that at 11.45. Repeat every day. I tried so many times but it all ends after I’ve created a beautiful schedule and pinned it on my home office notice board. After two days it sort of blends into the board and I don’t see it anymore.

Has that ever happened to you?

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