Why Every Business Must Render a Service

 “A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.” ~ Henry Ford

Money is an exchange for a product or service. If you want to succeed in business, you must set out to render a service first and money follows as a consequence. When your business makes nothing but money, you are in a very poor business. A business must first and foremost find a way to make people, shape the environment, and help the economy before it considers making money for the owners. Mr. Ray Kroc advanced this argument more succinctly when he wrote: “If you work just for money, you’ll never make it, but if you love what you’re doing and you always put the customer first, success will be yours.” This is the order of priority our civilization expects.

"There is no investment you can make which will pay you so well as the effort to scatter sunshine and good cheer through your establishment." So says Orison Swett Marden. Your team always likes that and people in the team show appreciation by working harder. When you build your people, they will help you build your business in return. If you make your central policy the building of people, making money becomes a given when the people you have built begin to help build your business. There are limits to what you can do as a person, but what a team can do is limitless. That is more so when the team is well built, dedicated and motivated.

Get busy right now because…. “No pains, no gains. To get the prize, you must pay the price.”

Small Business Solution: Don’t Handle All Performance Issues Same Way

As a small business owner, there is no other way you can measure progress without being able to track your performance. As the business grows, it is inevitable that your workforce will grow along too. As your team grows, you might opt to create a Human Resources department to deal with hiring and other employment related issues. That is a direct and logical way to go in expanding but handling all performance issues in the same way is not advisable. Issues relating directly to employee performance are very sensitive and should be handled differently. If not well handled, you risk hurting employee feelings thereby experiencing even more issues that could impact their work performance.

Granted that your HR department is responsible for employee performance issues, it is not advisable to send all matters relating to employee performance to your HR department. You get better and quicker results by empowering team leaders to speak directly and right away with associates who are experiencing performance issues. This is because many workers always feel that all poor performance matters referred to the HR department involve disciplinary measures. Having your managers or team leaders speak with them directly to see if they need any help always allays such fears. Showing them some support outside the HR department can often help workers more than going right to some form of generic disciplinary action which many HR departments are notorious for.

5 Ways to Lead Your Business from the Front

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To be an effective business leader is no tea party. You must train yourself sufficiently and be ready to take responsibility at all times. That is about the only way you can expect to be effective while every other member of your team can have the confidence to look up to you to provide leadership. You can’t do so effectively and efficiently if you stay on the side or behind. The best place to lead from is in front.

Here now are 5 things you can do to position yourself to lead your business from the front.

01. Dress and act the part. To be a leader, you must be able to dress like a leader. You’ve got to dress to influence and not to impress. That way, your appearance will always be consistent with your personal and professional brand. Your employees will take a cue from you if they are impressed. That gives your leadership authority.

02. Demand and act on feedback. Not many employees willingly give feedback to their bosses. If you encourage them to willingly give you feedback, such information enables you to lead exactly the way they expect you to. If for example some worker tells you they believe you'd be more effective by communicating more clearly that no doubt will help you to work more to improve your communication down the line.

03. Always walk your talk. Any time you tell someone you’ll do something, be sure you do it. Never make promises you're not sure you can keep. Nothing kills your credibility quicker than a breached promise or unfulfilled expectations. If everyone in your team knows you to walk your talk, they tend trust you more. That confers real leadership legitimacy on you.

04. Support your employees to support your customers. Leading by example is one credible way to lead from the front. If your team members see you treat customers and other persons shabbily, they tend to take a cue from you. For example, asking your team to be courteous to customers and being a jerk to them yourself is not only incongruent but also hypocritical. The way you treat people is always a very clear barometer for everyone on your team.

05. Grow yourself to grow your team. The world we live in is rabidly dynamic. That affects all our businesses too. As a leader, you can’t afford to be in a rot when it comes to acquiring knowledge for personal improvement. Many of your employees will do as you do, if they admire your leadership position. That way, you are leading from the front. Ultimately, there are only two credible ways to effectively grow your business. You must be able to grow yourself and grow your team. Those are the two ways. All told, as you and your team improve, so do service levels, operational efficiency and everything else. Leading from the front can’t be any clearer.

Suitable Languages to Build Your Team With in SFI Business

Let me say straightaway that SFI business is not a business built with the limitations of language and environment as barriers. It appears the founders recognized these limitations right from the outset that is why they built a business where languages will not be barriers. For that and many other reasons I will come to shortly, I can say with all amounts of confidence that it is better to go beyond your spoken language and environment boundaries to build your team. Here now are some more reasons why it is better. 

 
1. SFI business is built mostly on the Internet which is not limited by spoken language or environment.

2. It operates 24/7 and never sleeps.

3. SFI business has inbuilt language translation tools.

4. The business of the future is on the Internet which is where SFI is.

5. Online communication is instant and not limited by language or environment.

6. The wider you cast your net, the better for your team building efforts and the Internet provides that wide world.

7. The Internet provides apps today which enable you to communicate with anyone live and real time irrespective of wherever they are in the world.

From the foregoing, I believe you will agree with me that it is not better to build a team within your own spoken language and environment alone. Rather, it is better and more beneficial to go beyond these boundaries when building your SFI team.

 

Effects of SFI Co-op and Starting a Blog

Creating your own SFI co-op and starting a blog are both very useful to your SFI business but in separate ways. While your own co-op helps more to maintain your team and your business, a blog brings more exposure, traffic and leads to the business.

 

Specifically, your co-op adds value to your business by:
1. Creating an atmosphere for group efforts for individual benefits.
2. Helping weaker group members to tag along with substantial benefits.
3. Helping to keep all team members motivated.
4. Leaning on one another for collective benefits.
5. Helping to pool little resources together for bigger benefits.
6. Learning from one another as co-op members.
7. Creating a competitive spirit among team members.
8. Helping to build a formidable team by collective efforts.
9. Helping team members to achieve more than they would have achieved by individual efforts.
10. A co-op is a veritable way to help team members remain in SFI as a business.

Whereas when you start a blog, your business benefits by:
1. Having something of value to share online.
2. A blog creates an atmosphere of expertise which attracts the much-needed traffic/leads to your business.
3. A blog attracts to your business more PRMs and PSAs which are very valuable to the business.
4. A blog helps to build respectability and trust in your business.
5. It makes people want to relate with you and do business with you because they benefit from what you are sharing.
6. A blog gives the business owner a sense of usefulness and fulfillment because others rely on him/her for expert help.
7. Your business commands a lot respect online when it has a good blog. 


 
While a co-op helps to maintain your business in a profitable course, a blog attracts more traffic and leads to the business thereby helping to grow the business in exponential ways. On balance, I believe a blog provides more value to your business than a co-op.