Business Profiles & News

Are you as effective, efficient and productive as you could be? Here are three steps to help you be even better this year! Step 1: Identify Priorities If someone asked you what your job was truly about, what would you say? What is your purpose? If you don’t know what you’re there to do, how […]

Here are eight New Year’s resolutions to help you to strike a better work-life balance and increase your business success. 1. Learn to delegate and do more of it You don’t have to do everything yourself. Let someone else do some of the tasks for a change. Delegation is the key to a healthy work-life

In order to be in control of what you achieve, you must manage your time. For many people however, it seems that there’s just never enough time in the day. How many of the following 15 statements resonate with you? 1. The tasks I work on are the ones with the highest priority 2. I

I remember listening to a couple of parents bemoaning their offspring’s football team performance: ‘There’s nothing worse than losing!’ commented one mum, and she’s right of course, isn’t she? Well… Not exactly. None of us likes to lose, but I’m going to suggest that to set yourself the personal goal of winning every time is

Which country do you come from? To help us understand our fellow humans, motivational speaker, Mark Gungor, imagines that all people came from four very different countries: 1. The country of Control This population just wants to get things done; their favourite vehicle is the bulldozer! They want to be appreciated for what they do.

We generally think that growth is good – but it may bring with it the need to hire more staff, find bigger premises and upgrade your machinery. But these are all risky investments – so how do you know when the time is right? I can’t make that decision for you – that’s your job

Procrastination: that dreadful curse of putting off important things until later. It never helps, but we all do it, even when we know it’s wrong. And we keep trying to justify it to ourselves. Sometimes we do it because the task appears difficult or scary. Maybe we’re hoping that, by putting it off, someone braver

How do you start in business? Let’s look at three well-known successful entrepreneurs. • Alan Sugar started by selling car aerials out of the back of a van. Less than 20 years after starting Amstrad, he sold it for £125 million! • Teenage Richard Branson started a student magazine, with a loan from his mum.

Business contacts are important – networking should be a key part of any SME’s marketing. If like me you find it hard to begin conversations in a room of strangers, here are some useful opening lines I’ve gathered. “Have you been here before?” • Useful at regular weekly/monthly meetings – if they haven’t, you can

Decades ago, I spent a holiday based in a granite farmhouse on the edge of Dartmoor, with nothing to read except old copies of the Readers’ Digest. I still remember one of the reader’s letters – and it went something like this: At an army base, the day before the big Passing Out Parade, everyone