Do you have a quiet place to relax? A place where you can be just yourself without the mask imposed on you by society?  Increasing in coaching we come across not only the lack of balance in our life/work but also the lack of balance in our relationships within both areas and the realization that we need to enhance that to better the relationship.

Some strategies we help implement are:

Time management – helping you learn and apply decision making, prioritizing and effective tracking and planning of your limited tool – Time!

Blocking out quiet time – in either your business or personal time to be just you and to do the things you want to do.  A time used for enjoyment, reflection and spiritual interaction.

Communication Profiling – participating in a fun communication tool which easily and effectively helps you recognise your communication type and also become clearer in identifying how others you communicate with regularly are wired and want to partake in communication.  Get a free communication profile at www.facematrix.com.au and let me know what you think via email. (P.S. also enter in the facilitators’ code of FF001AU.

Getting into a Support Triage – Have you got a support structure for your own sanity?  Do you have regular meetings with business colleagues’ or friends where you can get impartial input into your challenges and decisions knowing that they will be open, honest and share willingly whilst respecting your privacy and confidentiality?

The implementation of these strategies is to get you walking in the sunshine enjoying your life as it was intended.

As your business grows you will be faced with challenging functions that you either have no or a limited skills set in. This could be marketing, accounting, financial invoicing, form design or any other business function.

A basic thought process for good outsourcing is looking at whether you can delegate, eliminate or leverage the function.

A good starting point is asking yourself where your skills set places on a 1-10 scale for the function required to be most effective and efficient.

Secondly, are you wanting to do this function?  Is it something that you wish to learn more skills for?  Is it something that having that skills set will be part of your long term role and business goals?  Do you need to know just a little more before you delegate or outsource the function?

Answering these will quickly show you your attitude to the function and will allow you to emotionally move past “hanging onto that function”.

Delegating

Can you delegate the function to someone else within your business? Is this time and resource effective?

Can you delegate to outside contractors either within the local area or via ecommerce outsourcing such as ODesk or eLance?

Are you prepared to be very specific as to what you expect and to set the boundaries and KPI associated with that function?

Eliminating

Can you eliminate the function altogether?  Scary thought, but sometimes we do things because that is how they have always been done and no-one has ever questioned if it is necessary to the end product/service or if there is a better way of doing it.  There have been cases of 12 page documents being reduced to 2 pages and obtaining the necessary information to do the required task.  Sometimes we just have to get out of the forest to see the trees.

Leverage

The most common way to leverage is by allowing someone with these skills sets to do the function much more effectively and efficiently that you ever would.  In doing this you pick up a larger time period, reduce your stress and actually make money to offset the outsourcing or delegated tasks.  The most common example is bookkeeping, artwork and form design.

The effective use of your skills set to concentrate on your passion and talents will quickly be rewarded.

Should you create an entire system, HR support etc for functions that aren’t the core of your business or leverage your time and resources by contracting a business who specializes in that area. e.g. Information Technology, Marketing, Graphic Design etc.

John Burkhardt – Amplio Business Solutions

As is usually the case in coaching, most clients have 3 main goals to work on and in nearly every case 1 or 2 of them are personal goals on health, fitness or weight loss etc.

The main challenge with getting fit is breaking the emotional and physical habit of doing nothing or little for so long.

Bite it off in little chunks.  If this week you can manage at least one 30 minute walk (and survive) then we can repeat that and build on it.

The same goes for drinking more water, reducing snacks etc. A little bit at a time.

Massive change will put the body into stress and also flight mode to push you back emotionally into your comfort zone (the habit you have formed)

ACTION STEPS

Working with a Coach or a Consultant makes a difference!

Make the effort to record where you are now, where you want to be and the gap that separates them.

How are you going to achieve it?

John Burkhardt – Amplio Business Solutions

Just not sure whether the answer is Yes or No, or just maybe?

Here is some simple advice given to me years ago by a Lady that had survived a divorce, the death of her new husband which lead to bankruptcy of their business, a new child with DS and the loss of her first three children to her first husband overseas.

There are always decisions and choices to be made.  It is simply a matter of Yes or No.

Yes, I have all the information necessary to make the choice in front of me and I am happy that in hindsight I won’t beat myself up if its the wrong choice.

No (also hidden as maybe), I don’t have enough information to make this decision and I have to say no.  Do I want to get more information (i.e. I’m a maybe) or am I a  no due to the information I already have.  And, I won’t beat myself up in hindsight either.

When life sometimes gets you down, in business or privately, it is more important than ever to reduce your choices to Yes or No!

It really is that simple!

John Burkhardt - Amplio Business Solutions

Always swamped with emails and how to manage them?  Got no idea where that email is that you are looking for?

Here are some simple email tips to make you and your time more productive!

1. Learn Outlook or your email program.  The training in the help function and online tutorials is well worth the effort.

2. Match your Inbox folders up to your business structure.  If you haven’t created sub folders in your Inbox, make a point of learning how and doing it. i.e. set up an Accounting folder with sub folders for the government body (ATO, IR etc) and sub folders for the book keeper etc.

3. Follow up your Inbox sub folders with automatic rules and alerts.  Control where the emails come in and the folder they get stored in.  If all else fails you can click on the Unread Mail icon to get all of them up.  This is also a good way of scanning through the incoming emails.

4. Have all emails come into specific email addresses.  This can be info or manager or the department name.  However you set up your business structure, carry it through into all things you do electronically.

5. Send all your emails in the same format. In the header of the email set it up such as AMPLIO – new blog entry or something that highlights who the client is and what it is about.  If it is an internal email to a broad email address then put the persons initials in front of the header entry such as JB – AMPLIO – new blog entry.

6. You can change the header entry on any emails you receive simply by opening them and then altering the header and saving that email.

7. Get a teenager to show you how to do some stuff!  Surprisingly, they sometimes know tricks even we can’t come up with!

8. Experiment, experiment, experiment.

9. Document what you have done and the rules

Have fun out there – in email land

John Burkhardt – Amplio Business Solutions

Maybe one of the most forgotten steps in any business naming or change of naming a business is the customer.  All too often we get caught up in our little piece of the world to stop long enough to ask what the customer sees as the perception of our business, its name, its product or service and also asking them for referrals (another subject)

At a breakfast meeting the other day, a professional business had re-branded to move into a similar service.  The move had been planned and the business platform was now established, but they were lacking the growth to fill up the platform.  Most of the discussion evolved around marketing and client management which is correct, but no one had actually been back to the customers to ask them what they thought of the new business branding, the service levels and also what they thought the new branded business actually offered as services now?  (Don’t ask them for referrals either, you will grow too fast!)

From the discussion (and without talking to the customers), there seemed to be a doubt as to whether the existing customers actually cared about the branding (they were after the same or improved service levels) and were they really aware of the extra services now offered?

Our suggestion was to get back and ask your existing client base about their perception of the business and then hang onto the ride.  Follow that up with asking for 3 referrals off everyone and hang onto the ride!

More shortly. John Burkhardt – Amplio Business Solutions

Part of the reality of dealing with any business is that a lot of times, you come across a gatekeeper.  Someone whose role or assumed role is to control access to the decision maker.  Unfortunately these relationships need to be handled with kid gloves.

Ever tried to contact someone in an organisation and been stonewalled at the reception level or personal assistant level trying to get to the decision maker.

The first part of the process is to start to build your trust and relationship with the gatekeeper.  Irrespective of how much power this person wields, they can make life really difficult for you even if you get to the decision maker.  Lost or late messages, misplaced invitations, emotional blackmail to the decision maker and the list goes on.

The building of trust with this person will allow you to gain uninterrupted access to the decision maker in the future and will also be with their blessing, so any decisions coming back the other way will usually be gratefully actioned within a realistic time frame.

This relationship building however may take some time.  You may even wish to back off and spend some energy elsewhere before tackling it again.  It is amazing how backing off on a prospect can sometimes tip the process in your favor.

The key to building a relationship with a gatekeeper is to take a genuine interest in them, their work, their hobbies, bring them coffee and genuinely respect their time.  The most common wall will be “I’m too busy” or a similar response.   Be patient, make sure to leave a favorable impression each time and tell them when you will be next calling or visiting, put it in your diary in front of them and move on.

At the end of the day, don’t let them upset you.  They are just doing their job (perceived or not).

Sometimes you just have to be creative to get to the decision maker!

An alternative look at this is:

Not dealing with gatekeepers or someone else who is too stupid to engage professionally.  Why butt your head against the wall? Move on!

John Burkhardt – Amplio Business Solutions