Growing a business is hard work. Customer acquisition and retention isn’t an event. It isn’t a new program. It is a way of thinking about customers. It is a way you go about business. It takes the right attitude, continual effort, and constant monitoring.
The question that should really matter in whether you are going to retain your customers (more…)
Blogs can be both incredibly easy and quite complex to set up, depending on the software and functionality you use. If you can arrange it, your best bet is to have a programmer or technical person assist you, especially during the setup phase. You may also need the assistance of (more…)
The blogosphere is riddled with stories of employees who lost their jobs because of what they were posting on their personal blogs — though the actual numbers are not that high, the shocking stories were passed quickly via, what else, blog posts. In the early days of the Web, a company’s employ-ees were typically more Web-savvy than its management and felt safe in post-ing what was obviously inappropriate material (more…)
You’ve probably heard of Peter Senge’s work (The 5th Disci-pline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, 1st edition. New York: Currency Doubleday, 1994) even if you’ve never heard his name. His breakthrough thinking at MIT’s Sloan School of Management in the late 1980s proposed the systems thinking method to help a business become (more…)
What do I mean by culture? I’m not sure I can define it, but I know it when I see it. For me, culture refers to an underlying set of values, beliefs, standards, priorities, and attitudes. When tallied, the sum of these parts becomes your unique culture. It permeates everything that you do and everyone you influence. In the end, your (more…)
In reviewing many retirement plans, I find that many times too little thought is given to life insurance as a retirement benefit. Too often, pre retirees do not even engage in life insurance planning at all. Why bother? Life insurance is about dying and not about living, they think. On the other hand, most people want to take care of their spouse after they die, but without the proper insurance (more…)
At the end of 1999 I visited an investment club as a guest speaker. After explaining asset allocation, I had a feeling that they had missed what I was saying, because most of them were falling asleep when I spoke about buying stocks that were out of favor. Because the members seemed very pleased with the way their portfolio had grown quickly, I sensed that it was loaded with large-growth stocks. Certainly these people did not need to (more…)