First Step Marketing

The following advice may be used for any occasion at which you need or want to market yourself and your business. The 15 essential elements of successful networking are: Read the rest of this entry »

The art of management once prescribed that a boss or manager should rule with an iron grip. Both employer and employee knew who was in charge. And the employee went along with these terms. But more often than not, the sly employee managed to get away with things whenever he could, did only what was expected of him, and never did anything more. Read the rest of this entry »

1. What are some favorite things you like to do in your spare time?
2. Name a time when you’ve seen another person making a living by working with one of your favorite hobbies. Could you adapt it in a similar fashion? Read the rest of this entry »
   

One of the biggest risks in running a business is that you will simply run out of time: time to complete a particular project, a time frame in which you have projected that your business would begin to show a profit, time to keep up with the often insurmountable paperwork. In the jam-packed days that most Americans put up with today, time is the most precious natural resource you have. Read the rest of this entry »

Flexibility

Nothing about running a business is predictable. People who tend to thrive as entrepreneurs are those who were bored as employees because they knew exactly what they would be doing when they got up in the morning.

There are chaos junkies, and then there are those who view life through a rigid viewfinder. Somewhere in that vast middle are entrepreneurs, who need to borrow a little from each side. Read the rest of this entry »

Cool negotiation

The ways and means of your doing that lie in three simple steps — the Three S’s of Cool Negotiation. These tell you that you need to:

• Spot what’s happening
• Step away from the anger
• Speak assertively. Read the rest of this entry »
  

Negotiating and stress go hand-in-hand. You’re anxious that you will lose; you don’t want to be ‘taken for a ride’ or ‘ripped off’ by an aggressive and manipulative opponent who’s out to get his or her needs answered at your expense. You’ll get upset, frustrated, put out if you don’t get what you want. Even when things are going well, you can feel frustrated because the other side is slow to respond to your proposals or because they are unable or unwilling to acknowledge or recognize the compromises that you’re making. All of these emotions are perfectly natural. After all, you’re a human being and human beings do have feelings. Read the rest of this entry »

When you hear about negotiations in the newspapers or hear about them on TV or radio programmes, they are often described as having ‘winners’ or ‘losers’. In high profile industrial disputes or in compensation cases, it is a victory for one side and a defeat for the other. But negotiating is something that you do with someone — not to them. This means that, in reality, these sorts of negotiation generally consist of discussions between professional negotiators — discussions that are aimed at reaching agreements, agreements to which everybody involved is a party, agreements that contain benefits to both sides. Read the rest of this entry »

But it tries to remember that this isn’t a treatise on negotiating by numbers — you don’t have to do it exactly this way. Try and pick out the principles involved and use them to find your own way of doing it.

The behaviours observed fell into two broad groups:

• those that were used less often by skilled negotiators and more often by less skilled or average negotiators
• those that were used more often by skilled negotiators and less often by less skilled or average negotiators.

These I’ll call the ‘Don’ts’ and ‘Do’s’ of skilled negotiating. Read the rest of this entry »

Space, somebody once said, is the final frontier. But, as far as your negotiation is concerned, it’s the first frontier. The ways that you use the space around you when you negotiate are as individual, distinctive and particular as you are. We all, for example, have what is known as a ‘personal space‘. This space is roughly circular in shape with us occupying an off-centre position - with more personal space to our front than to our rear. The size of this circle depends upon our personality, age, gender and status. Read the rest of this entry »