Grow Your Brand and Your Business in 10 Seconds

Grow Your Brand and Your Business in 10 Seconds We have all been standing or sitting next to someone who looks at you and says: “What do you do?” or “What business are you in?” or “Not seen you at this event before; what made you come?” This is an invitation to make a great impression. This person may need exactly what you’re in business for, or they may know someone who does. Their question gives you two choices, you can: Say something obvious, that produces an “Oh, thanks.” Or you can say something that makes them sit up and
Read More

Self-Managers Wanted: Here’s What to Look For

Self-Managers Wanted: Here’s What to Look For The “perfect” employee isn’t one who does whatever you say, but someone who knows what to do without having to be told. It’s someone who performs the job without constant prodding, someone who can manage himself or herself with a minimum of interference from you. Here’s what to look for in a self-managing employee:  Goals. Look for people who set their own objectives and push themselves to achieve them. Instead of accomplishing the bare minimum, they stretch to do a little bit more, or a little bit better, without anyone else telling them
Read More

Build Team Spirit in Your Workforce

Let’s Build Your Team Spirit! Employees don’t work in isolation, whatever their jobs are. They’re part of a team, large or small, and your efforts to motivate them should be team-based. Emphasize the connections among individual employees and between employees’ home and work lives. Here are three ways to accomplish this:   Build high opinions of one another’s skills and strengths. Encourage your staff to praise their colleagues at meetings with questions like, “Who helped you out this week?” Public praise from peers redirects focus away from the boss/worker relationship and extends accountability to the entire team, which in turn
Read More

Be a Better Listener

Being a good listening is essential for every business! Read on for tips!  Tax Season is a time when we tend to take more appointments than normal. Being a good listener is vital, not only to services, such as tax preparation, but to the long term relationship with our clients. Do you give clients equal talk time or are you a conversation hog? Pay attention to how much time you spend talking. What is your talk-listen ratio? Being a better listener is key to providing Out-Of-This-World Customer Service.  Here are some tips for using your ears to the advantage of
Read More

Hire Team Members Who Are Committed to Out-Of-This-World Customer Service

Recruit Team Members Who Deliver Exceptional Service! Attitudes are contagious and bad ones are like the flu bug: You don’t want it going around the office! One of the great things about Out-Of-This-World Customer Service is that it creates happy attitudes. When you set clear expectations and give team members the power to make clients happy, they will love their job. Team members with great attitudes can make filling a position easy. Why is that? They will tell like-minded friends and acquaintances when you are adding a team member. They won’t refer people with bad attitudes who won’t be committed
Read More

3 Ways to Maximize Client Retention

Customer Retention is Easier than Getting New Business All your marketing is paying off. You have tons of new clients at your door. You want to make sure they remain your clients. Repeat patrons are how you build a successful business. Retaining happy clients is far less expensive than constantly earning new clients. You don’t want them going to the competition, you want them to be loyal to your business. So, how do you retain your valuable repeat business? Keep close tabs on the competition: Being a business owner is a tough job. It is easy to get absorbed in
Read More

Suffering from a Messy Workspace? Five Benefits of Being Organized to Boost Your Potential

Declutter Your Messy Workspace to Save Time & Money! Being surrounded by clutter is unpleasing. Maneuvering around your office is like participating in an obstacle course, you have business updates tucked into the contact book, and you can’t locate the flyers you swear you already printed. Let’s face it, being unorganized puts a damper on more than just your workspace appearance. It affects your time, you mood, and your wallet. Being exhausted after a long day is understandable, but taking the time to straighten things out will benefit you more than crashing on the coach with a frozen dinner to watch the premiere of
Read More

Want a Successful Business? Delegate

Delegating is Key to Running a Successful Business It’s easy to get in the mindset that if you want things done the right way you have to do them yourself. But that isn’t always the best approach at work, even if you firmly believe you’re the best person for the job. There simply isn’t enough time in the day, especially if you have a business to run. Like it or not, you must learn how to delegate work to your employees. Here are some helpful hints: Develop a game plan. Start by deciding which tasks to delegate and which employees
Read More

Keep Your Focus on What You Do Best

Focus on Your Strengths! Practice management is one of the hardest parts of running a small business. All of the infrastructural elements that large corporations have to manage, such as data security, finance, customer service, and legal documentation, are still on your to-do list. But managing all of those elements without the large employment force that big businesses can bring to the table is a challenge that seems unending. If you started an accounting practice because you wanted to focus on certain types of accounting services, you can still do precisely that. Here’s how: Make a list of what requires
Read More

5 Pointers to Grow Your Practice by Networking Effectively

Networking Effectively To Grow Your Business You grow your client base in a lot of ways; networking is one of the most common and least expensive. But as with the elevator pitch, which we discussed in an earlier blog, there is the effective way and the way most people do it. Effective networking brings in new business for a number of reasons; one of them is because when you network effectively you stand out from the crowd, and that is always good in any crowded marketplace. The other is because you actually do it well, you are welcomed and seen as a valuable source
Read More