Changing Exchanging

Friday, June 18, 2010

CTV News Website - Florence's article "Learn Lessons from Failure, but Do it Fast"

So a while ago Darren Dahl from the Sauder School of Business asked me to chat with him about some lessons that every start up owner should know or may have experienced and be able to relate to.

I had just gone through an entire revamp of my website and made a decision to severe our ties with our old system, essentially incurring significant sunk costs. It was worth it though, and a lot of times entrepreneurs hang on to poor decisions just because they feel like they've vested time into the process. Doesn't work that way - you can't turn a poor decision into a great one by sinking more time and effort into it.

Here's the article where Darren and I discuss some key things about mistakes in business and how to make sure you keep getting up when you hit your face on the pavement in business.

Learn Lessons from Failure, but Do it Fast
(Source: CTV News)

Thursday, June 17, 2010

The Three Roles of Great Entrepreneurs

I've shared this link on Facebook already (see below) and when I read it I can agree with the fact that our list of to-dos just pile up everyday, but entrepreneurs start out getting all frustrated about why they can't finish everything on the day that they planned for it. THEN, we realized that out of all of our to-dos, there are multiple ways to deal with it, I think my different categories just off the top of my head include:

1) Priority - if I don't do this today it's the end of the world
2) Leave this end of day in my one hour of time to work through it at superman speed
3) Get someone else on the time capable of doing an awesome job to handle it
4) Not worth my time right now - this includes spam emails, emails that have no point, bad sales pitches, etc. You know what I mean

The article's a quick read and summarizes, as it states, the 3 roles of great entrepreneurs. Rarely is an entrepreneur good at everything, so use this as a quick moment to reflect on what you're good at. Just because you are the leader does not mean you're Superman/Superwoman - often times it means you are SUPER at picking out great people that can do amazing things - ie. Joe is great at managing financial ops, Susan is spectacular at customer service and sales, Mark handles the entire company's treasury operations in the morning within 10 minutes before the breakfast meeting (all fictitious names but I wish these people existed my company right now!)

So have a read, everyone has strengths and weaknesses, realize yours - and realizing it isn't enough - DO SOMETHING about it.

The Three Roles of Great Entrepreneurs

Thursday, June 10, 2010

"How to Give the Best Performance Reviews to Your Team and Employees" - a PeerFX Power Tuesdays Webinar

Here we go again!

Our team has been traveling the country to bring on board quality salespeople, and met some interesting businesses that I thought we could feature in our webinar series.

I came across Rypple, and I see it as an online collaborative platform that makes performance reviews, an exercise that most managers dread and most employees hate because it's vague and fluffy, easier and more cost efficient.

It's not just for large corporations, Rypple has actually tailored its platform to small teams and growing businesses as well. This fits right in with PeerFX's user base, and that's why their Head of Community and Sales will be sharing some tips on how to give better performance reviews, what trends are in the market today and a quick demo of the Rypple platform to show you how they can make your life easier. It's free to try so WHY NOT?

Register for your seat today at this link: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/150007648

We look forward to seeing you online next Tuesday!

Thursday, June 3, 2010

Positive "Networking" = GIVING FIRST

I think within over the past 2 days I've had this same conversation with 4 different people. How do you network? How do you build your network?

I have to say that I rarely think about how I'm expanding my network, because I think what I do is build relationships instead. Some people still like to tie it to the word networking, hence the term positive networking.

The way to do it is just find out about the other person's business, what they are involved in, and how you can help them with your services or connect them to other people within your own network. GIVE something first and don't expect that they will or can reciprocate right away. Just know that when they do come across something that relates to your business, they will think of your first. The power of building business relationships instead of just having a network of acquaintances is so, so, SO important in business.

I found all of my advisors, employees and investors through this type of relationship. If you don't genuinely care about the other person's business, why should they care about yours and want to help you?