The Hiring Scorecard

We’ve long maintained that your staff is one of the chief differentiators that separates your business from the rest in the competitive landscape. As we wrote back in 2017, “having a great staff will empower your business to offer great customer service, to offer a personal touch that seems so…
VIEW FULL POST

How to Compartmentalize

Considering that most managers work in excess of forty hours each week, it’s no wonder that separating work life from your home life is such a challenge. How can anyone avoid mixing the stresses of one with the other? No one wants to take a tough day at work home…
VIEW FULL POST

Workplace Harassment

Harassment is an uncomfortable subject for business owners. No one wants his or her employees—or customers, for that matter—to feel violated or objectified. Because most of us live by the golden rule, that we ought to treat others as we want to be treated, we feel a deep empathy towards…
VIEW FULL POST

Managing Your Productivity: Striving for Zero

We’ve spent the last couple of weeks delving into how to improve your productivity with the processing and organizing workflow described in David Allen’s Getting Things Done book on the subject. One of the concepts we covered was the notion of an inbox, at which time we described this as…
VIEW FULL POST

Managing Your Productivity: When to Say Yes

As we established last week, your time is a limited resource, so you have to wisely invest it into the tasks that matter the most. Returning to David Allen’s Getting Things Done workflow, let’s take a look at the “Is it actionable?” step to see what we should do when…
VIEW FULL POST

Managing Your Productivity: When to Say No

Your time is a limited resource and you have to decide what you’ll spend that currency on. There aren’t enough hours in the day for you to do everything, and to be completely fair, when you split your attention among multiple tasks, none of them are going to be done…
VIEW FULL POST

Shake It Off

Our friend Steve Beck has a book titled “Leave Your Funk at the Door” in which he extolls the importance that salespeople and customer-service agents not bring in their personal baggage when they start their workday. (His advice applies to everyone in everyday life, really.) Putting on a happy smile…
VIEW FULL POST

Your Invisible Product

Service That Sells posted a great article at the end of last month that we want to spotlight today, titled “Why Do Restaurants Fail?” As they explain, “The bottom line is that restaurants fail because they couldn’t sell enough product to cover their costs.” That may seem obvious on its…
VIEW FULL POST

The Value of Roleplay

Roleplay has long been used a training tool in the world of sales and customer service. In fact, one of the first articles to come up if you search the topic is an article from the May 1987 issue of the Harvard Business Review. In fact, this concept originates with…
VIEW FULL POST