Category: Tools and Information

How to Attract and Keep Great Employees | Inc.com

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I can’t imagine anyone saying they want to work for an “OK” company. As entrepreneurs, we all want to create a great company that people want to work for. But how?

A Great Place to Work, a global human resources consulting, research, and training firm, has identified and studied effective workplaces for 30 years in more than 40 countries. According to the firm’s website, its research “has shown us time and again that investing in a high-trust workplace culture yields distinct, tangible business benefits. Our studies of the 100 Best Companies show that great workplaces enjoy significantly lower turnover and better financial performance than industry peers.”

So if a great culture is something everyone wants and it improves overall performance, why are so many companies… not great? I recently asked China Gorman, the CEO of A Great Place to Work which is the creator of the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work for and the 50 Best Small and Medium companies lists about how she addresses these issues–and how her organization advises companies on creating winning environments for their employees.

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3 Tips for a Workplace Bullying Policy | Businessnewsdaily.com

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It’s rare to find a school that doesn’t have an anti-bullying policy nowadays. The modern workplace, on the other hand, hasn’t seemed to follow suit. While most companies have some sort of system to deal with sexual harassment, very few actually have a clearly defined policy for reporting and dealing with bullying.

“Bullying in the workplace is something that’s often overlooked,” said Jennette Pokorny, COO of human resources service provider EverNext HR. “People should come to work and feel safe. You don’t want to allow something minor to escalate.”

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3 Questions Amazon’s CEO Asks Before Hiring Anyone | Themuse.com

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Amazon has forever changed the way people shop online, but it wasn’t always the juggernaut that it is today. In fact, once upon a time it was just a tiny startup with a big vision. So, how did it end up as the giant online retailer that it is now?

It’s hard to say, but one thing founder Jeff Bezos was very intentional about was how he hired for the company. In fact, in his 1998 letter to shareholders, just four years after Amazon was founded, Bezos wrote, “It would be impossible to produce results in an environment as dynamic as the Internet without extraordinary people… Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of Amazon.com’s success.”

Since then, Bezos has charged his hiring mangers to hire based on three critical measures. And if you were to ask him, it’s these questions that have made all the difference.

1. Will you admire this person?

Bezos’ first benchmark was about admiration. He wanted hiring managers to admire the people they were bringing on to their teams, not just the other way around. Bezos extrapolated that admiration meant that this was a person who could be an example to other and who others could learn from. From this criterion alone, the standard for hiring is kept sky high.

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28 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make When Pitching to Investors | AllBusiness.com

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Entrepreneurs from early stage startups have to pitch to investors to raise financing, and many entrepreneurs are inexperienced or terrible at making the presentation. As a venture capital and angel investor who has heard many pitches, I’ve compiled a list of mistakes and things to avoid if you are an entrepreneur seeking angel or venture financing.

Mistake #1: Sending me your executive summary or business plan unsolicited.

Investors routinely discard or don’t read unsolicited emails. They get hundreds if not thousands of such emails, and they can’t spend the time sifting through them all to find that diamond in the rough. But what they will pay attention to is a referral from someone in their network — a lawyer, an entrepreneur from one of their portfolio companies, or a fellow venture capitalist.

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  Virtual Office Assistant – a Life Saver | Getentrepreneurial.com

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The mere articulation of the saying “Virtual Office Assistant” is a most recent agitation which has hit the search engine platforms. It can make an entrepreneur ecstatic or apoplectic-all relying upon their experience with this increasingly well-known administrative help. Being a business visionary, you are prone to wear numerous hats to keep up the accomplishment of your business.

There are insufficient hours in a day, and you can’t pick to do everything on your own. The key course of taking your business to new heights – the focus ought to be on your customers, clients and how to get a greater business from them. Effectively dealing with all the core exercises, stress and requiring some investment for yourself is vital to keep away from wear out and the disappointment of your business.

Along all these lines, why are you in any case still clutching the directing wheel so firmly? Let another person handle the preparatory exercises.

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Microscope on Mobile Phone or Tablet | CoolBusinessideas.com

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The Catalyst Frame Microscope turns your smartphone/tablet into a versatile digital microscope. It combines with your camera’s digital magnification with native 30/50/170x or 30/170/340x to get a range of magnification from 30 to over 1000x. No need to manually hold focus, focus it once with the knob, and then it’s as easy as holding your phone. Use it to take photos, videos, panoramics, slow-mo, or even time-lapse! Optics click into alignment, samples are held down with a clip, and the illumination is built in using an energy efficient LED with two AAA batteries for hours of battery life. Finally the sample doesn’t touch the lens, which always keeps the lens clean and your samples pure.

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Healthy Heart Needs More Than Pinch of Salt, Study Finds | Bloomberg

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People who eat the least salt may be hurting their hearts, according to a study causing controversy because some of its findings clash with public-health efforts to lower sodium consumption.

The results published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine showed the expected link between heart complications and high levels of sodium, which is known to boost blood pressure and cardiovascular risks. Those at the lowest end, as measured by the amount of sodium in their urine, were also at greater risk — a 27 percent increased chance of heart attack, stroke and death from cardiovascular causes, the study found.

“There is a sweet spot for what the optimum sodium intake is,” said Salim Yusuf, senior author of the paper and director of the Population Health Research Institute in Ontario. “The message is very simple: Moderation in salt intake. Avoid high and low levels.”

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7 Ways for Businesses to Leverage Customer Surveys to Their Advantage | Inc.com

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checklist-1940x900-2_35266Surveys can benefit your company, your current customers, your potential customers, and the industry as a whole through usable information that might otherwise be lost.

Among the many techniques businesses use to engage customers and improve services, few remain as effective as the customer survey, according to GetResponseblogger Pam Neely.

What do customer surveys have to offer?

Measurement and analysis of customer satisfaction (or, in some cases, dissatisfaction). Companies can render a sample set of this information by reviewing sites such as Yelp or Angie’s List, perusing blog comments, and checking out social media commentary–and they should.

Beyond this, customer surveys offer a business the opportunity to choose which information it seeks. Many customers, especially the unhappy sort, will express their chagrin without quantifying it or explaining why they’re dissatisfied with your product or service.

Surveys offer specifics and the opportunity for subsequent synthesis by company personnel and marketers.

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Nine Strategies for Fixing Common Budget Problems | The Simple Dollar

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Budgets are an amazing tool for getting a clear picture of your financial situation and for planning for the future. They make it possible to see, in one overall place, the exact state of your monthly spending. You know where every dime is going. You know why every dime is going there. You can also see exactly where your financial situation is headed if you stick to that budget.

Sarah and I used a very tight budget during the first few years of our financial turnaround. It provided us with a very specific plan for how we should spend our money, how much we could put towards debt every month, and so on. Along with our debt repayment plan, our budget paved the way to debt freedom.

We still budget, but it’s not as tight as it once was. Mostly, we use it as a guideline and as a way to model our expenses and savings into the future. Of course, budgeting isn’t always that easy. It can be a challenge – particularly at first – and there are many potential pitfalls along the way. Here are nine of the steepest challenges we’ve faced while budgeting and the solutions we use to make sure that they don’t happen again.

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