How to Engage Anyone....

In business you will have to engage and charm anyone and everyone. You have to know how to speak with people. You have to get employees to follow your vision. The media to pick-up your idea. You have to sell clients your concept or products. There is a lot of work to be done in the person-to-personal intercommunications realm. So, how do you do this effectively? 3 simple steps.

1. Treat others as they want to be treated. Don’t treat everyone nicely or how YOU want to be treated, treat them how they want to be treated. If someone hates candy, why send a box of candy to all of your clients during a holiday season? Be personal. Call people by name, remember minor details and use them.

2. Say goodbye to your smartphone for two days straight. Yes, two days. Why? It will help you focus on people. When you do this, you will see exactly what I mean. After you do this, and you see the positive results, you will be able to tuck that phone away during meetings and other important events. Showing up is important and you can’t fully do this – or engage anyone- if your head is engaged with your own phone as the primary distraction.

3. Know the difference between a fact and an opinion and use this properly. Don’t talk about people using opinions and don’t talk about business without incorporating facts. Only offer your opinion when you feel it will help someone and never say anything negative about anyone to anyone. It will come back and bite you. Be factual and helpful, not a gossip or a know-it-all.

Until Monday,

Twyla Garrett

Save Your Company Money

We've all been there. We had one great year and then the economy took a plunge. Many of us are still recovering. Well, for you fellow business owners out there- I have some great money saving tips!

1. Shop around for health coverage. If you have to pay for health benefits, do your comparison shopping and do it often. Don't just "spam" the offers that arrive in your email. Forward them to your assistant and set-up an appointment for consideration. You never know what money you could be saving if you don't look at every offer on the table.

2. Mortgage. If you own your business' office space take time to speak with the bank. You may be in a position to refinance and get a better interest rate. It is very possible these days. Don't discount refinancing based on what the news is saying about it. Always speak with your bank about your specific circumstances.

3. Go paperless and help the environment Paper costs tons of money, hurts the environment, and takes up lots of office or storage space. Plus, going paperless can save on ink costs. There is money to be saved here and the environment will benefit. Take a look at your paper and ink costs combined with file storage costs. How much could you be saving right now if you turned to the cloud for storing files and obtaining electronic signatures?

4. PPC campaigns. These are the worst! Pay-Per-Click advertising doesn't work like it use to. Why? Well, we have social media now and blogs. We don't need to pay someone to advertise for us. We can do it ourselves or invest in a great copywriter! Either way, PPC campaigns are expensive and don't covert to a ROI.

5. Shop for new providers on everything. Remember item number one? Apply it here- but to all things business. The janitorial service, the overnight mail provider, phone provider, Internet provider, hosting service, domain service, company party venue- anything item that can be provided by another business, ask! Get quotes from everyone / business that you use on a day-to-day basis. You may not have to switch providers to get the best deal!

Have these tips worked for you? Let me know!

Twyla