Having good relationships with your clients is critical to overall business success, making it important that everyone you’re directly associated with sees you as a ‘people person.’ Despite this, being too nice can lead to low productivity and smaller profits.
Have you ever buried your head in the sand in an attempt to ignore a problem or evade an angry client? We’ve all tried it. But does it ever work?
It’s vital small business owners find ways to get a helpful second opinion, Rick Mapperson blogs.
“One of the greatest lessons I have learned in the 20 years of running my own business is to never hesitate to get a second opinion. Just because we may be experts in our chosen field of business, it does not mean that we are competent or have expertise across all aspects of our business.”
Rick Mapperson blogs about the danger of entering into a price war with your competitors.
“As a general rule, the only person who ends up winning in a price war is the consumer. Competing on price or reducing your prices, even if spending is down, is not always the answer.”
Rick Mapperson blogs about finding out the hard way it’s vital you take good care of yourself.
“Have you found that if you are working long hours trying to get through a large task, that if you put it aside until you have had a good sleep, that you can complete the task in half the time?”
As a small business owner it can look as though you’re a superhero, and sometimes you can even feel like you’re superhuman. The cold and hard fact is you’re not.
Rick Mapperson blogs about tackling those big business decisions.
“Decisions involving money or long-term investments are always hard. For you that might mean increasing your business’ marketing budget, purchasing property, altering your budgeting or spending, agreeing to take out personal insurance, committing to an ongoing donation to a charity or taking on a new project.”
Rick Mapperson blogs about the risks to business of a heavy reliance on technology.
“Ask yourself an obvious question: ‘If the technology that I use in my business were to suddenly become unavailable, for whatever reason, would it affect my ability to do business?’”
Rick Mapperson explores the danger rash decisions pose to your business.
“We need to understand our own emotions and how we operate so that we don’t make a decision that we will later regret.”
Rick Mapperson blogs about how our natural reaction to sales pitches may mean we’re missing valuable business opportunities.
“Sometimes a bad sales pitch is in front of a very good business.”
