Looking to Business

Investing in Your Own Development at Work

Daniel M. Wood — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 22:36:12 +0000

Todays article comes to us from Cornerstone. I think you really will enjoy it since it teaches multiple important lessons about how to invest in your own personal development.

Good Luck!

//Daniel

Every single day, we divide our time up into the necessary processes; strategy and thinking, production and delivery, and of course, communication. No matter what industry you are in or what position you are within your company, these are the areas we invest our time into, day after day. We invest our time into building relationships, perfecting teamwork, streamlining processes and just about everything else. But are we investing in our own development?

Investing in yourself in the work arena is something that can help you grow rapidly in your role and it will give you a huge advantage when things become competitive.

What is Personal Growth All About?
Personal growth is not about building up more qualifications or attending business seminars. Unless there’s a gap in your CV and those seminars are really of use to, the most important thing when it comes to personal development, is you.

Developing yourself requires an investment of your own time. In order to grow yourself at work, you need to be able to do the following:

• Challenge yourself – raise you targets and see how much more you can achieve.
• Challenge your beliefs – does what you believe in help you succeed at work?
• Have patience – you need time and patience to challenge, act and review your own actions.
• Run with change – be ready to make changes and be willing to do things differently.

How Do I apply this to My Work?
If you are serious about personal development in the workplace, you need to take the lead when it comes to setting goals and targets. Just as you would deliver KPIs to your seniors / team members, you need to be able to set yourself some monthly or annual objectives. Within this, you need to break it down into weekly or daily targets that you should always look to reach or exceed.

Being able to discipline yourself in a goal-orientated mentality will give you the drive it requires to succeed in your line of work.

Not only should you start to set objectives for yourself, but it’s important to be hands on with problems. Take ownership of projects, push projects, pitch ideas and take the lead if you believe that something can be improved. Self starters and self motivators are always noticed for their proactive attitudes and this can open up many doors for role changes or promotions.

Personal Development and Appraisals
Whilst appraisals can seem like nothing more than a piece of paper to some – if you take your personal development seriously enough – you can turn your appraisal meeting into an opportunity. Appraisals are the ideal time to review how far an employee has come in developing not only their areas of work, but also themselves.

3 key things that you should bear in mind with appraisals are; being specific with objectives, making sure what you’re doing is measurable, and agreeing with your manager what your targets should be for next time.

If you would like to find out more about personal development programmes and learning management systems, please take a look at Cornerstone Learning Management Systems and contact them with further questions.

If you want to learn more about how to make your goals reality, join our email newsletter “Your Path to Your Dreams” and you will receive tips and advice, and even a free copy of our e-book “How to make Selling Easy” and “The Beginners Guide to Success”.

Photo Credit: Kevin Dooley

Get your bonus copy of my book "10 Motivational Tips to Keep You Going"

The Life Cycle of a Business

Daniel M. Wood — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 14:28:45 +0000

Today I have some big news, we will be publishing our first ever Guest Post. Todays post comes to you from Axis Partnership and is about the stages of running a business.

In the future you will be seeing a lot more guest posts here at Looking to Business. Our goal is to provide you with the best, timeless advice about living a great life available on the internet.

If you run a blog or want to publish a post on Looking To Business, please contact us using the form on the contact page aboce.

Kind Regards
Daniel Wood

The Life Cycle of a Business
Every business starts off small, perhaps just one person with an idea, and goes through developmental stages. Not every business will go through the stages mentioned here, and this does not necessarily equate with failure or success. Once you understand the lifecycle of a business you can prepare for any eventualities that you may identify.

Pre-Start
Deciding to go into business is a big decision that can affect your entire lifestyle, not only the money that you earn, but also how much time you’re able to spend with friends and family. It takes entrepreneurial ability, drive and skills to make your business work. You should think about whether the skills you have are suitable for the industry that you want to go into, and whether you have the necessary business skills needed to make it work. Do you feel confident in the thought of running your own business, or do you not know the first thing about it? Consider a course so you can close the skills gap, or perhaps a job in the right industry.

Start-Up
This is the planning stage. After deciding that your business idea is possible and you’ve been brave enough to go ahead, you need to create and craft your business plan. Good planning is essential, and many businesses don’t get much further than this stage. You need to think about marketing, tax, insurance, premises, any legal aspects and intellectual property. If you’re buying a business or a franchise, you need to find the right one to suit your needs and interests.

Managing Your Business
This is the make or break stage. The business will begin by growing very slowly; making negative profit, but with the right management it will break even and eventually make profit. Managing your money effectively will mean good business, but conducting business in a transparent, ethical way will mean that you don’t exploit anyone, anything or the environment. Honesty and integrity are the best ideals to manage your business with.

Growing Your Business
This requires planning and preparation. Expansion means having more customers, but also being able to supply those customers with what they want. Your business must be secure and there are no doubts of its survival. You could think about franchising your business to offer your business in a different location, as well as exporting or importing products to expand the services that your business offers.

Exiting a Business
Every owner of a business will at some point have to at least face the prospect of leaving the business. Depending on your business structure, you will be obliged to think about the entitlements of your employees, legal and tax procedures and authorities that will need to be notified. You can plan for a successor, sell your business or shut the business down for good.

Axis Partnership can give you advice on selling your business as it can be a very difficult procedure to navigate.

Get your bonus copy of my book "10 Motivational Tips to Keep You Going"

10 Books That Will Make You Successful

Daniel M. Wood — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 05:13:47 +0000

1. How to See Yourself As You Really Are
It is a book on Buddhism, about realizing how we exist and the interdependency in which we live.
I haven’t read much about Buddhism before, not more than we were forced to in school, but what I learned in this book was a great place to start, it was in many ways a beginners guide to finding the clarity Buddhists are after. Read more

2. Finding Flow The Psychology of Engagement With Everyday Life by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
“It is not length of Life, but depth of life.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

This quote really sums up the meaning of this book.
Mihaly teaches the value of finding flow in everyday life.
Flow is when you are completely immersed in a subject and can focus completely.
Read more

3. The Secret

The Law of Attraction
At its core it says thoughts attract.
It builds upon the old saying “Thoughts become things” or as the Buddha said it “With our thoughts, we make the world”.
Read more

4. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
Stephen Covey has a gift with words and a gentle way of challenging us to see the better in ourselves and to take responsibility for our actions and our lives.

He has split his book into 7 parts, habits, that start you at step one and move you from dependency to independence to interdependence.
Read More

5. The 8th Habit by Stephen Covey
It is about finding your mission, your purpose and about helping others find theirs.
The trip it took me on helped me become a better leader and a better person.
Read more

6. Building Social Business: The New Kind of Capitalism that Serves Humanity’s Most Pressing Needs
Muhammad Yunus is the man who saved the lives of millions of people around the world by introducing micro loans to poor people, giving them a chance to build businesses and give them a chance to thrive.
This feat won him the Nobel Prize.
Read More

7. What to do When You Become the Boss by Bob Seldon
I have found to be the best way to improve is to go back to basics.
Starting at the beginning and learning the basic techniques helps you plug holes in your knowledge and abilities.
Read More

8. Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy
In his book Eat That Frog he shares his advice on how we can cure procrastination.
Large tasks tend to intimidate us and make us avoid them.
Even small tasks can feel daunting at times and we will try to avoid them.
Read more

9. Getting Things Done
It is a very complicated explanation of a simple and effective system.
The system David has created is very effective and I have in fact incorporated it to my own time management system.

The problem with it is that it doesn’t capture activities you have to do every day, it is build around projects, ideas and unexpected events.
Read more

10. From Good to Great by Jim Collins
I am very disappointed that I just read this book, I wish I have read it years ago.
The lessons I learned where extremely valuable and not just when running a business. Just like Jim Collins says himself, the rules they found go for all development, he just uses organizations to illustrate it. Read more

“How to See Yourself As You Really Are”.

Get your bonus copy of my book "10 Motivational Tips to Keep You Going"

The Importance of Service in Sales

Daniel M. Wood — Mon, 28 May 2012 05:22:06 +0000

Find new customers costs, in time, effort and money, 10 times as much as selling to a recurring customer, your goal should be to create as many recurring customers as you can.

Getting an overview of your customers
If you are going to create more high value customers it is important that you learn how your pipeline looks today, how many recurring customers do you have? How much do they buy? What are they worth to you? What industries are they in? Who are your contacts within the companies? Is there any more or different products you would like to sell to your customers?

By learning as much as you can about the customers you already are working with you will find a lot of potential upsells and you will start to define your ideal customer.

In my work I have about 40 different products I can sell to customers, my concern is not therefore what type of customer I am talking to, more important is how much time and effort will they take to handle vs. how much can I expect to sell to them every 12 months.

My goal is to find customers needing 4-6 meetings/year and worth at least 30 000 dollars/year in sales.

Since I know exactly what the customers I work with today buy, I know what future customers might be interested in. When I find a potential lead I do a calculation, what needs will they have, what will I recommend and what will they be worth? From that I decide if I am going to work with them or if I should hand them off to a colleague.

Creating a path for them to follow
As I mentioned my goal is to build a customer to a value of at least 30 000 dollars/year and setting up systems so that we only meet once every 2-3 months to follow up on their results and tweak what they are doing to further increase their output.

This is the goal I have for each customer; after I start working with them and have made a good needs analysis with my customers I make a plan for what products I want them to have, in what order I will recommend them and what we will be charging for each.

Then I move them one step at a time towards the goal.

Living off of happy customers
What is important is that you take care of your customers and set up systems so that you have a clear idea of what you want to do with and for each of your customers.
If you do this and keep improving your systems you will not need to call on new customers ever again, you could if you wish, but only because you want to further increase your sales, not because you have to.

Get your bonus copy of my book "10 Motivational Tips to Keep You Going"

Getting Your Own Office

Daniel M. Wood — Wed, 09 May 2012 05:18:14 +0000

When starting a company one of the most loaded questions is;
“When should I get my own office?”
Should you get it at once, should you wait until you want to start hiring?
When should you get your office?

In my opinion there is only one way to answer this question – when you get a positive Return on Investment from having an office. As soon as your increased income from having an office is more than the cost of the office it is time to find one.

How do you calculate the ROI?
First, you need to know how much the office would cost per month that is your baseline, the figure you need to beat to be able to afford moving into an office.

To calculate your increased income you have to take a lot of different things under consideration.

- Will you be more efficient at the office? How much more efficient? How much more will you earn because of that efficiency?
- Will you be able to invite customers to your office? How much of an increased income per month could that result in?
- What other added benefits are there from having your own office? How much money (quantify it) are those benefits worth.

Hiring
If you are going to have employees you cannot invite them to work from your home.
Either you work without offices, letting everyone work out of their own homes, or you get an office.

- What are the benefits of letting your employees work from home?
- What are the benefits of having them work out of the office?
- What is the difference in monthly income for your company?

Now add all the different increases and decreases in income together, to calculate how much extra you will earn because you have an office, did the income supersede the costs of an office?

Then it is worth it!

What if you need to get an office long term, but in the short term it is a bad investment?
If you have properly created a business plan and your long term goal you might see that you need an office to reach your goals. If you by using the above calculation got the result that is wasn’t worth it to move into an office, you either made a miss calculation when calculating the value of the employees you could hire or you need to revisit your business plan.

If you are looking to get new offices with room to hire maybe 2 new employees and the value created by those 2 employees isn’t enough to sponsor the office, you need to find ways to increase your margins.

There is no reason to get an office just to have an office, the whole point of moving into an office is to increase your income and make more money.

If you cannot afford it?
You need an office and can calculate a positive ROI, but you cannot afford it, what do you do?

There are two things you can do, the first is to take a risk and get a loan so that you can afford your offices, the second is to wait, keep growing your business out of your home and when you have more money you move into the office.

That decision I leave to you.

Get your bonus copy of my book "10 Motivational Tips to Keep You Going"

Storytelling in Goal Setting

Daniel M. Wood — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 05:22:11 +0000

Goal setting is one of the most important parts of success, if not the most important.
Setting goals helps you focus your efforts, it gives you a target, opens you up to new ideas and unlocks your creativity.
The classic advice is to be brief when writing down your goals, it should be in the positive active form with a deadline e.g. I have 12 million dollars in the bank by the 31 of December 2014.

This way of writing goals activates the subconscious, since you are telling it that you have already achieved the above statement. By giving yourself a deadline it becomes a goal instead of a wish, you know when you will have completed your goals so you start asking yourself the word “how”, the word “how” opens up your creativity and gives you idea after idea.

Storytelling
What is even more powerful than just stating your goal, is imagining it.
Visualizing your goals is what really empowers you and builds your future.

We humans are created with a huge amount of creativity, we have the ability to dream and imagine.
The most powerful way to set a goal is to not only see exactly what you want, but to tell yourself the story, write down the story.

In the book and movie “The Secret” they give an example of a man who liked to paint pictures of beautiful women, looking away from him. His creativity went into creating an image of women looking away from him. Sadly the same seemed to happen in his life. He was a single, good looking man, but he couldn’t get a date.
When prompted to try painting pictures of the women fawning over him, he did and he put all his creative energy into creating the truth in the painting and in his life. Before long his life had changed and he was dating multiple women. After a while he decided that he wanted to settle down with one woman, so he painted it and before long he was married, happily.

Most of us aren’t painters; storytelling is just as, if not more, powerful.
Start by deciding what you want in the 4 major areas of your life; Health, Relationships, Career and Finance, and writing it down, now you have the goal of your story, you know where it is leading.

Then start imagining how your life will look when you have achieved your goals, what will you do, how is a day in your life – Write the story of a day in your life when you have achieved all your goals.

Tell the story of your success
When you have a clear picture of your life as it is when you have achieved all you dream about – start writing the story about how you got there.
This takes more imagination and a lot more work. Have fun with it though – it doesn’t matter if it is completely correct. You are answering the question “How am I going to achieve my goals?” you are unlocking your creativity and putting it to use.

Once you have finished your story you have a guideline, you know what you should do to start on your way – all you need to do is make sure the story begins today!

If you see that unforeseen circumstances changes the path you will take – rewrite your story, re-answer the question “how?” and keep yourself moving forward.

Get your bonus copy of my book "10 Motivational Tips to Keep You Going"

Passion – How to Find it and Nurture it, in Yourself

Daniel M. Wood — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 12:46:52 +0000

For managers the most important trait they are looking for in their employees is passion.
People with passion get noticed; it opens doors and opportunities.

But what if you don’t feel passionate about your job?
What if you haven’t felt passion in any job you have been in? If you don’t really care about the work you do during the day?

3 Steps to Becoming Passionate

1. Start by reading this article about setting your goals

Without long term goals, without a reason to perform, passion is very hard to find.
Once you have set your long term goals, evaluate how your job can help you reach your goal.

“The biggest mistake we ever make is thinking we work for anyone but ourselves” – Brian Tracy

The reason you are working for your employer is so that you can realize your personal goals, by over performing where you are now, you will get opportunities to rise, both within the company or by being headhunted into competitors. You might be looking for career advances or salary advances, or both!
Both doors will be opened by over performing and being passionate about your job.

2. List everything that is good about your company

Does the company provide value to customers?
Does your employer offer you opportunities?
Are they helpful in society?
How is the social climate at the company?

See if you can find anything within the company that resonates with you, that is something you care about. If you think about it long enough, two things are all that can happen – Either you find something or you don’t!

If you find something, focus on that; use that to channel your focus and your passion.
If not – well if nothing in the company resonates with you and is something you can care about – maybe it is time to find new employment…

3. Fake it till you make it!

Even if you set your goals, work your current job into the plans, find something in the company that you can really care for – it doesn’t always make you passionate overnight.

It takes time to build passion, to take a small spark and fan it into a flame.
The above two steps can create the spark – the third is all about fanning that flame.

Work as if you were passionate, talk as if you were passionate, work as if you are passionate.
In everything you do – be passionate!
Before you know it you will be feeling that passion – you will realize that you aren’t faking it any more, you are truly passionate.

Remember this advice can be used for any of the 4 major areas of your life “Health, Relationships, Finance or Career” – Just switch the work company.

Get your bonus copy of my book "10 Motivational Tips to Keep You Going"

Success is Right There – You Just Have to Reach Out and Grab It!

Daniel M. Wood — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 08:00:11 +0000

I don’t know how many times I have been told this, and given this advice myself.
Last week I realized the truth and the false in this statement.

Think of when you are standing in the shower.
You have soap in your eyes, you cannot see and you want to pick something up.

It is right there in front of you, you reach out your hand, and miss.
You reach out again and end up pushing it away. You grab for it again and you find it!

It is the same way in success.
Success is right in front of you, but you cant see it.
The ones who succeed are those who try, try and try again until they are successful.

Get your bonus copy of my book "10 Motivational Tips to Keep You Going"

Sorry for my absence and Merry Christmas

Daniel M. Wood — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 15:34:24 +0000

The last month I haven’t posted much on LookingtoBusiness.com, I apologize for this.

The reason is that me and my wife chose to move home to Sweden from Norway. I have changed jobs and had a lot to do with the move.

Sadly this has left little time over for studying psychology or sharing what I have learned about personal development.

I will be taking a break for christmas but as the new year enters I will be back 100% working on new techniques and sharing tips on how to improve your efficiency and become more successful!

Merry Christmas!
In the mean time I just want to wish you a merry christmas and a happy new year. Make the best of it and take some time off with family and friends.

Hope to see you all soon again here on LTB after new years.

//Daniel

Get your bonus copy of my book "10 Motivational Tips to Keep You Going"

Choosing Your Business Idea – Market Research and Your Business Plan

Daniel M. Wood — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 08:55:32 +0000

Almost everyone I speak to has an idea of a great business they could start.
There was a period of my life when I was being fed ideas from all around, people working in companies seeing the company missing target markets, producing the wrong products or just people with plans to create completely new products and opportunities.

I am sure that if you think about it, you could come up with at least 5 good business ideas.

The question is, which one is right?

Market Research
Before you start it is important to learn what the size of your potential market so that you know if your company can support itself in the future.

Is there an interest among your potential clientele?
Is this something they need?
Is this something they want?

If you can find a product where people answer yes to all three of these questions, you have a potentially good business, if the market is large enough.

How to do market research
Start by identifying your target market, who are you selling to?
Make a demographic picture of your customer, age, gender, geographic location, income, family situation and so on.

Then explain them in the terms of their wants and needs, why would they want your product?
Why do they need it?

Survey your guesses
Now that you know who your customers are, ask them if they would be interested in the product you are thinking of creating.

You could start by using focus groups; gathering a group of people from your target market and have them discuss the potential product, its pros, cons, why they might want it, why not, pricing and so on.

Next I suggest you create a survey as a result of your focus groups discussion to see if what the focus group discussed and felt is what the larger market thinks.
If you can try to survey at least 100 people, you can do this by asking around town, by creating an internet survey or by finding a place where these people gather like a sports organization, a book club or a business association and ask if they could survey their members for you.

Your business plan
As a result from all this market research you will know a lot about your customers wants a needs, now is time to write your business plan.

This should be both done as a financial statement showing how much you will have to initially invest, what expenses you will have over time and how much you need to sell at what price to be profitable.

It should also include a marketing plan on how you expect to sell your product, how to become profitable, what your key selling points will be, how much you plan on working, and a timeline for when different parts of your plans will be implemented.

Get started
Once you have created your business plan all you need to do is get to work.
Keep your plan close, it will need to be updated many times as your business grows and how the reality of the world proves that your initial assumptions were incorrect.

The fact that you have a plan though will give you something to update, something to work from and a frame of reference when you evaluate new opportunities and ideas.

Get your bonus copy of my book "10 Motivational Tips to Keep You Going"