Until We Meet Again part 1 | Peter Mehit

April 20, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

We all do meetings. We meet to status tasks. We meet to discuss strategy. We meet to make a decision. We meet to avoid making decisions. We…what? Meet to avoid making decisions? Yes, we do that, but that’s a different topic.

Meetings are part of business. They are among the most expensive activities a company can do, yet they aren’t viewed that way. Some simple math may convince you:

Weekly status meeting, 1 hour:

Position Salary with benefits

President $75/hour

V.P. of Operations $55/hour

Operations Manager $45/hour

Team Lead $28/hour

Buyer $25/hour

Cost for one hour meeting: $228/hour

Continue reading “Until We Meet Again part 1 | Peter Mehit” →

Get Better Leads: Improve the Quality of Your Sales Funnel | All Business

April 20, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Ah, leads. They’re your best friend and your worst nightmare. We’ve all wasted time chasing the wrong leads, so it’s understandable that thinking about them would cause some stress. But when they’re the right leads, life is good.

Let’s focus on a few strategies to get better leads into your sales funnel so you spend less time nurturing them to make a purchase.

1. Make Your Offers Irresistible to the Right People

Better leads starts with better targeting through your offer. Whether you’re giving away a whitepaper, a free consultation, or something else of value, make sure first that it’s a killer offer. You want people to jump on it and gladly hand their email address over.

4 Steps to Creating a Killer Marketing Plan Today | Small Biz Trends

April 20, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Marketing is one of the most critical components of your business’s success. You may have a fantastic product or service, but if customers are not aware it exists, there’s no point in continuing the line of work.

In order to make sure your product is exposed to your target customers, you need to develop a robust, killer marketing plan. Once you’ve spent time identifying the four Ps, start adding some elements and details to your strategy. Let’s look at the areas you should focus on when developing your marketing plan.

What Startups Need to Know About Regulation A+ | Business News Daily

April 20, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

After a lengthy holdup in Congress, it’s official: Nation-wide policies allowing any interested person to invest in a business through equity crowdfunding will go into effect this summer.

On March 25, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced its final set of new rules that will make it easier for smaller companies to access investor capital through crowdfunding, and provide investors with more investment choices. These rules, known as “Regulation A+,” update and expand the existing Regulation A, and are mandated by Title IV of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act passed in 2012.

How Online And Offline Communities Are Changing The Way That Businesses Succeed | Forbes

April 17, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

The word “community” has grown a great deal in the last decade thanks to the advent of social media. While we’ve always had local communities where we live, we now have online communities large, like the San Francisco Giants’ 2.8 million Facebook fans) and small, like scrappy groups of gamers trying to restore an incomplete game. However, the perspective on what an online and offline community is has grown exponentially.

For example, Assembly is a former YCombinator graduate that has created an online community (even a social network) that can easily turn into a software company. Products as early as a simple idea to fully-established projects can join Assembly and members of the community can follow and even join the company, eventually become owners of the company through any skill they have, including coding, design and product strategy. While it’s become common for social networks to include pages dedicated to companies to follow their projects, Assembly takes it a step further by integrating “followers” into projects so intimately that they’re effectively co-founders. This has led to random followers (as diverse as you’d find on Twitter TWTR -1.96% or Facebook) from all over the world helping them create a diverse portfolio of software projects.

3 Smart Ways to Root Out Your Leadership Weaknesses | Page 19

April 17, 2015April 17, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ 1 Comment

A great leader is always improving and learning. Here’s some top leadership advice for discovering blindspots in your abilities and transforming them into advantages.

It’s hard to address one’s own flaws, but as any great leader knows it’s a necessary step toward improvement. Why? Because most people have developed fixed ways of thinking over the course of their lives. These repeated, flawed patterns drive them into mental ruts and stagnate their progress.

Of course, that probably sounds like the last thing you’d want as a leader. It’s important to identify the blindspots in your conscious way of life that might be holding you back, and use them to unearth deeper opportunities for growth. Here are 3 ideas from Robert Bruce Shaw’s Leadership Blindspots for how to reach your blindspots, discover your weaknesses, and turn them into triumphs.

The Incentives That Really Motivate Your Employees | Inc.com

April 15, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

“You never say thank you,” young advertising copywriter Peggy Olson complains to her boss, Don Draper.

“That’s what the money is for!” he retorts.

This exchange from TV’s Mad Men perfectly captures one of the enduring challenges of the workplace: sometimes managers and employees have vastly different notions of which incentives really matter.

I would argue that-including in the case of Peggy and Don-there is a generational component to such differences. Don, a child of the Great Depression and a Korean War veteran, is a classic Traditionalist (the generation born in the 1920s and 1930s) for whom work is a transaction. As he says earlier in this exchange, “I give you money, you give me ideas.”

Infographic: Millennial, Gen X and Baby Boomer Device Preferences | Adweek

April 14, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Each generation uses digital differently to consume content and shop for products and services, and marketers need to understand these differences to target their desired audiences on the devices they are most likely to be using.

Millward Brown Digital surveyed more than 1,000 consumers in three generations (millennials, born after 1980; Generation X, born 1965-1980; and boomers, born from 1946-1964) to see how different age groups favored different screens for various activities.

“What the data demonstrates is that even with our advanced knowledge of digital today, advertisers and marketers can’t make assumptions about how various demographics and targets are using digital devices and mobile to access content,” said Joline McGoldrick, research director at Millward Brown Digital. “It is easy to stereotype and say the best way to reach millennials is on mobile, but that is not always true. As the analysis shows, device usage varies from generation to generation based upon what the activity is. There needs to be a more granular understanding of how activity and type of content dictates preferences for screen usage in order to make a truly effective and efficient marketing strategy.”

5 Benefits of Switching to a Paperless Office | BusinessTips.com

April 10, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

If you’ve been to a thrift store recently, you might have noticed a surplus of briefcases. Lots of people are getting rid of briefcases because they’re relics of a time before laptops, iPads, and smartphones ruled the workplace.

Briefcases made sense in the era when you hauled dozens of papers to work each day, but that era is over. So why hasn’t your business made the shift away from paper? There are dozens of benefits of a paperless office. Here are five of the most important:

1. You’ll diminish your environmental impact. A single sheet of paper might seem innocuous, but its production requires an incredible amount of energy. The papermaking process is resource-intensive. After trees are harvested — usually by machine — they’re taken to a factory and transformed into paper through a process involving harmful chemicals. The resulting paper is then bundled and transported to the front door of your office. Then it ends up in a recycling bin after it jams your printer.

Why the middle class is still getting snared by the ‘wealth tax’ | Money Cnn

April 9, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

You may vaguely recall that in 2012 Congress “fixed” the Alternative Minimum Tax — or what the Tax Policy Center dubbed “the epitome of pointless complexity.”

But that doesn’t mean the so-called “wealth tax” was simplified or eliminated.

The AMT is still alive and complicated. What lawmakers did was permanently tie the amount of income exempted from the AMT to inflation.

Those income levels, however, are still fairly low ($52,800 for singles this year; $82,100 for married couples filing jointly).

And the set of rules that governs what can and can’t be deducted under the AMT means it’s still hitting a fair number of people for whom it was never intended — those in the middle class and upper middle class.