Identifying the Bottleneck In Your Business!

Do you have a bottleneck in your business? Can you identify exactly what that bottleneck is? Do you know how to reduce or remove the bottleneck? These are some of the questions I would like you to consider today particularly for those of you who are in a new, small or medium business. Sometimes we may be a single person enterprise or have a team of helpers who may be direct employees or partners. Either way it’s usually us who must deal with the strategic elements of our business. We need to be able to look ahead to determine what is coming up, however, the day to day running of our business can sometimes take over, preventing potential bottlenecks. This is fine of course if we can ‘see’ the bottleneck coming up! As we know things happen when we least expect, and with the best will in the world we

It’s Relationships That Get Us Through Isn’t It?

After the tragic and traumatic events of last Friday imprinted images are embedded in all our minds. We all left reeling with waves of varying emotions within us, from anger, frustration, sadness, confusion and many more. Like any senseless act which takes innocent lives, it makes us wonder what in the world are we coming to when we all live in the same ‘place’ and should be living in harmony and peace and not war and hatred. Today, however, I wanted to focus more on how we manage dealing with ‘events’ that may affect us directly and indirectly, and how we might manage to work out how we process what has happened, move forward, working through our feelings, thoughts and memories of that day. We are a social animal, and as such need interaction with others, particularly in the aftermath of something that affects all of us in many ways.

Is Your Problem Child Your Business?

As a business owner, I find it interesting hearing other business owner’s thoughts and views about being a business owner, what it’s like and how it feels, particularly compared to their previous ‘lives’ as an employee and the difference from being in a corporate world and being self-employed. We have this dream about being a business owner, conquering the world; being the best at what we do. We dream of being our own boss, no-one telling us what to do, choosing the hours we want and working the days we choose. Then of course reality kicks in and hits us just where it hurts! The business we set up and grew, isn’t growing as we want it to, or going in the direction we saw it going. Perhaps the clients we expected to come knocking at our door are looking elsewhere. The dream ‘child’ we imagined as a business owner,

Finding the RIGHT way – Do it YOUR way!

You probably recall the song by Frank Sinatra ‘My Way’ which came out in 1969? I’m not going to talk about the song but about doing things the right way or your way! The song talks about the end being near, facing the final curtain, living life to the full, travelling each and every highway, having regrets, planning a chartered course, taking careful steps along the byways, biting off more than he could chew, facing up to things and standing tall, laughing and crying, and having his fair share of losing. Wow! That’s some list isn’t it? The song, and its lyrics made me think about how we spend our days often doing same or similar tasks, trying to find better, easier and more productive way of doing things so we can get more out of each day. I’m sure like me you’ve had family, friends or colleagues who have

Sometimes we just need to be shown how!

Sometimes we just need to be shown how! Reece Witherspoon once said, “With the right kind of coaching and determination you can accomplish anything.” Often, we are so determined or stubborn that we want to work things out for ourselves no matter what. To ask for help may not be in our psyche, nor receiving offers of help, support or guidance. Pride sometimes becomes our block preventing us from seeking that help. There are various reasons why we might not think about asking for coaching or help, and often this is dependent upon how determined we are. This reminded me of something that happened to me years ago and I often tell the story over and over to many people as an analogy of how coaching can really help us all and save us time in the long run. I used to play pool many years ago and used to

Coping with Disappointment

There’s a saying “The measure of success is how we cope with disappointment” which made me wonder how true this is. I know there have been times when I’ve been bitterly disappointed with things that haven’t materialised or something that I’ve missed out on. However, did I feel how I dealt with it was a measure of my success or not? For me, how we deal with any setbacks in life reflects on what our outlook is, whether we take the optimistic view that everything will be okay, or whether we take the pessimistic view of, this is really bad news and will affect me badly. You could argue that always having a positive outlook, not only is healthy, but by reflecting on this with a good attitude will surely start us in the direction of thinking of options on how we can fix this, or what we can change

Choices, Chances, Changes

There’s a saying ‘The 3 Cs of life’: Choices, Chances, Changes – you must make a choice to take a chance or your life will never change. I came across this again recently, and it got me thinking about how these 3 Cs are woven into our everyday lives without us really thinking about it. For some, this might come easy and seem almost unrecognisable, whilst for others it is obvious these three things need to happen but are avoided due to fear or lack of confidence. We can often feel that we don’t have any choice sometimes, but if we are honest with ourselves we always have choices with everything we do. The trouble is we often don’t see them because we are focused more on the problems than the opportunities, or if we do see we have a few choices, we offer good reasons why we can’t make

Get Ready – Get MIND Set – Get Go PACE

Do you often feel like you’re in a race, or that the race is the wrong one for you, or you’ve started the race on the backfoot, or the race is never-ending and can’t find the finish line? I have! Have you? I have recently undertaken to participate in a local Park Run. The Park Run is 5kms and I am not a runner, I don’t particularly like running; walking YES, running, NO! I part jogged, part ran on my first race. For the second race, I decided to use a different strategy. I would jog faster, with fast walks in between. My time was no faster, in fact slower, ending up finishing completely out of breath and more tired than the first time, as I was unable to sustain the fast walks between jogs. I decided yet another strategy was called for in my third race. This time I