Why You Should Focus on Brand Reputation Rather Than Marketing

by murika Comment Closed
When you're building a business, your reputation is all you have. While flashy marketing campaigns or persuasive sales materials can help you close a deal, they're not going to be strong enough to keep your customers coming back to purchase again. As an entrepreneur, it can be difficult to separate these two ideas. If you're putting all your energy into attracting new customers, you might forget to give a customer who has purchased from you your best work. Unfortunately, if the customer isn't happy with what you've done for them, they'll not only move on to a competitor, but they might tell their friends, family, co-workers and acquaintances about their bad experience. If that happens too often, you develop a bad reputation -- the kiss of death in the business world. ...
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5 Effective Strategies to Grow Your Retail Business

by murika Comment Closed
It has never been easier to start a retail business. Whatever your interests are or whatever the market you want to serve is, a wide range of developments have made it possible to launch a retail business much more efficiently than say, 10 years ago. First, white label manufacturing has grown exponentially. You can get products of any type made and shipped to you without any branding so you can put your materials on them and sell as your own unique product. If you want to build a completely custom product, you can do that by outsourcing the manufacturing. You can also utilize drop shipping if you’d prefer to focus on marketing alone, which is something that social media and online e-commerce platforms have made very efficient....
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Why Investing in Procurement Makes Organizations More Resilient

by murika Comment Closed
For decades, we’ve placed efficiency at the center of strategy: We’ve run operations as close to full capacity as we can. We’ve ordered from suppliers in ways that are tightly aligned with our production schedules. We’ve worked hard to minimize costs, “sweating assets hard” under the guidance of the CFO, and we’ve delivered financial returns on a quarterly basis. In many ways, this is a system that has worked remarkably well. But as the COVID-19 pandemic has made painfully clear, it has a major flaw: It doesn’t help firms develop resilience. That’s going to have to change. To survive times of crisis and thrive over the long term, firms will need to shift their strategic thinking from just-in-time to just-in-case....
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Why We Need ‘Dadpreneurs’ to Step Up Now

by murika Comment Closed
There’s no doubt that it’s a challenging time to be an entrepreneur. Unprecedented changes in the way that we work and live have upended the best laid plans of most business owners, regardless of what stage of business development their venture is in. For entrepreneurs who are parents, however, the challenges they face are even more daunting. They are now tasked with managing fragile businesses while also overseeing home-schooling, 24/7 childcare, and housework without a break in sight. Not surprisingly, parent entrepreneurs are feeling overwhelmed, frustrated, and exhausted....
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3 science-backed strategies to manage underperforming employees

by murika Comment Closed
Managing employee underperformance is one of the most difficult tasks a manager faces, leading most of them to avoid having the necessary difficult conversations. COVID-19 only adds to the complexity of the situation as more employees are working remotely. We recently conducted a study of leaders who had successfully managed underperforming employees. Three practical strategies arose from the data that can help current managers in this situation. The common theme among our study participants is as simple in theory as it is difficult in practice. Each treated their underperforming employee as a person, rather than a number, or an object. This mindset made all of the difference for these study participants in their ability to help their struggling employees. We think it can make a difference for you to help your underperforming employee as well. ...
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What to Say and Do When Your Employee Has Another Job Offer

by murika Comment Closed
It’s normal to get a sinking feeling when one of your employees says, “I have something to tell you.” No manager wants to hear that someone on their team has another job offer in hand. But how should you actually respond to the news? Should you counteroffer? Or just accept that they’re moving on? And how can you tell if the employee is just bluffing to get a raise? What the Experts Say The reality is people leave jobs — and not always on the schedule you’d prefer. Instead of panicking, make the most of the situation. “Whether or not the employee ends up taking the other offer, this is a rich opportunity,” says Dick Grote performance management consultant and author of the HBR Tools on Goal Setting and Performance Reviews. It should be a moment of self-reflection for you as a manager, adds Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, a senior adviser at global executive search firm Egon Zehnder and author of It’s Not the How or the What but the Who: Succeed...
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Google’s New Feature Solves the Most Annoying Thing About Zoom

by murika Comment Closed
A few months ago, most people had never been on a video conference. Now, it's how we do pretty much everything. Specifically, most of us do all of it on Zoom, which many people had never heard of unless they happened to work for a company with a distributed workforce. Team meetings? Zoom. Kindergarten graduation? Zoom. Celebrating grandma's birthday? Zoom. It's why I wrote a few months ago that Zoom had, almost overnight, become the most important software in the business world. It's how companies that suddenly had to figure out how to manage completely remote workforces stay connected with both their team and their customers. ...
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How Should You Handle Criticism? Take a Cue From Dave Chappelle

by murika Comment Closed
As DeForest recounts, Chappelle "started educating people on the history of black people and police." Rodney King. The Watts riots. Emmett Till. Trayvon Martin. And John Crawford III, a black man who was shot by a white police officer in a WalMart near Dayton, Ohio, while holding a BB gun he had picked up from the store's shelves while shopping. (A grand jury later decided not to indict the police officer.) Chappelle then told a story about getting pulled over while driving in Ohio, where he lives. As Chappelle put it, "I may be white on paper, but I'm still black. So I'm nervous." ...
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Why Does It Take A Crisis For Companies to Change?

by murika Comment Closed
The COVID-19 global crisis has forced thousands of companies to switch to a digital first working model — almost overnight. This dramatic rate of change, while painful, is by no means serendipitous. Most companies have had, over the past decade, provided most of their employees with the pre-requisite tools to work from home (like smartphones, laptops, cloud powered shared drives, collaboration apps and chat channels), but neither employees nor leaders in these companies found the will to make the switch to what is arguably a more efficient way of working — until now. Digital transformation change programs, which have historically held failure rates as high as 70%, are seeing a renaissance as success rates have crept up in a time where everything else seems to be falling apart....
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Why It Matters That Microsoft and Amazon Will No Longer Sell Facial Recognition to Police

by murika Comment Closed
A growing list of technology companies are banning the use of facial recognition tools by law enforcement agencies. Microsoft and Amazon joined IBM, which previously said it was exiting the business of making the technology altogether. Facial recognition software has become an increasing part of our daily life as our smartphones, tablets, and many laptops use the technology to secure or unlock. It's also become an area of focus for companies wanting to leverage the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to automate processes that used to take large amounts of time and had to be done manually. ...
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In an Experiment, 255 People Changed Their Own Personalities in Just 2 Weeks

by murika Comment Closed
Do you ever wish you could change your own personality? New research shows you can, and it's surprisingly quicker and easier than you might think. In a new study from the University of Zurich, researchers found that people who wanted to become more self-disciplined could achieve that change in just two weeks, using a smartphone app that sent them twice-daily reminders. The same process also worked for people who wanted to be more open to new experiences. You can use this information to make changes to your own personality and habits. Researchers have known for a while that your personality isn't fixed throughout your life, explains psychologist, author, and personality expert Benjamin Hardy in a Psychology Today post. Instead, he says, it's useful to see personality as points along a spectrum, where you may be more or less extraverted, or more or less agreeable, for example, and that these traits may change over time depending on your experiences. And he says personality is a skill that can be learned. ...
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Three Ways to Have Difficult Conversations With Your Team

by murika Comment Closed
A few months ago, we were all having conversations about the importance of avoiding touchy subjects with family during the holidays. As a nation, we were all interacting with a level of practical political correctness that helped everyone avoid conflict. Then, the rapid spread of Covid-19 around the world sparked conversations about social inequality, specifically identifying race and essential worker disparities. Then, we all watched in horror of the tragedy in Minneapolis, Minnesota of George Floyd, and the world again confronted injustice. ...
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How to Recover Costs Fast If Your Business Has Been Looted

by murika Comment Closed
When Cary Williams learned on May 30 that the paint store two doors down from her Santa Monica, California, boxing gym had been looted, she raced from her home to try to keep her own space safe. She was too late. The windows of her gym, the Stables, had been smashed. The gym gear was gone, along with the video equipment she'd recently purchased to host virtual classes during the lockdown. In total, Williams estimates, there's between $12,000 and $15,000 worth of damages and stolen goods. Even worse, she soon discovered she didn't have the proper insurance to cover looting. ...
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