Personal Business Plan clarifies what you want the future to be and how you are going to get there
Are you business owners tired of racing from one action item to another? Are you running to get a business license at city hall, and then rushing to create a new checking account and then calling potential clients on your cell phone while driving in crazy rush hour traffic?
Stop if you do not have a personal business plan. A personal business plan clarifies what you want the future to be and how you are going to get there.
This advice might feel overwhelming and just another item on your already full to-do list. A personal business plan creates a view of the future. It provides focus on critical activities needed for success. You can not start a business without a written picture of what success might look. When you launch a business you need to know your destination.
You might think that you don’t need money from bank or from a venture capital group so you don’t need a business plan. A personal business plan does not create a document that impresses the financial community and is never used again. A personal business plan is your vision of the future and a specific roadmap for how you want to step into your future. You use it to plan your day.
Spending time writing down your business dream on paper will make it “pop” for you as you recognize “Yes—that is what I want to do with my life.” Your pulse will quicken as you recognize the impact you can make. When you have a clear vision of the end results of your business, you’ll be inspired to press through to the finish line. When you’re at a family picnic, you’ll share in a way that relatives “get” what you’re doing vs. just act politely to another eccentric family member. When you’re falling asleep at night, you’ll notice that the panic in your thoughts won’t be there because you understand what you can do and can not do at this time.
Critical Elements of a Personal Business Plan.
Your will create your business vision. This is your desired future. You can create a business vision by writing down what you want the business to be. The vision must identify the customer, the geographic scope and your product or service.
You will clarify your business mission. This is the vision of the business that you share in your business communication on your website, and in your sales and marketing literature.
You will construct critical success factors. These are your business priorities that you need to focus on to create a powerful brand that customers love.
You will compose business results needed for profitability. These are your measurable outcomes. Business results are your goals and objectives.
You will complete project plans for critical activities. These are your plans to get the results you want.
Create a personal business plan to clarify for you and your customers what you want the future to be and how you are going to get there.
Delivering Value and Individualized Customer Service
By: Ray Whitehouse, Co-Owner & Agent at Johnson-Pohlmann Insurance
When it comes to delivering the best customer service and value for your customers, you always want to put your best foot forward. Every interaction you have with a customer gives them an impression of your company. Are your customers happy with their decision to give you their business? Are they having some regrets? Check in from time to time to see how clients are doing and gauge how satisfied they are with your agency.
At Johnson Pohlmann, we try to ensure that our customer service representatives know as much information as possible about the customers that are calling to ask about their policy. Many of our local Kentucky residents will call in with questions about their policy. We believe that our CSRs should be able to answer any questions our clients may have regarding their Kentucky auto insurance, home owners, boat, life or any other policy that a customer may have.
If you are not already, you should be using these tactics to improve the service you are offering your customers.
Take the Temperature of Your Customers:
Say Ahh! When you have established a relationship with your customers ask them to fill out a customer survey to give you direct feedback on how they perceive their individual level of customer service. Take the information and find out where you can improve. As an independent insurance agency, your customers do business with you because you can offer them a better customer service experience than large carriers. Make sure you are delivering what your customers are looking for on your end. A short survey with numerical values rating your performance is a simple way to get some informative feedback.
Use Metrics to Drive Your Service:
You are spending time gathering information from your customers so why not use it to improve your overall customer service strategies? Collecting data is an aimless task if you do not ultimately apply it to improving your business. Keep statistical data on everything from the average time spent with a customer on the phone, common questions and concerns, and the overall customer satisfaction numbers. How many customers gave you high service ratings?
Try Harder to Understand Your Customers:
Many times it can be easy to forget where a customer is coming from when they call you to ask a question regarding their policy. Typically when someone calls customer service they are looking for a brief to the point answer to their question. The last thing they want to do is sit on hold for 10 minutes to get a simple answer to their question. Ask yourself, how can you streamline this process? Do you notice any bottlenecks in the process? If several customers contact your CSRs with very similar questions, maybe you should add something to your Facebook page, or website answering the question on a Frequently Asked Questions page.
An Online Risk Survey is a low-cost and highly effective way to identify and assess Business Risks
Conducting an online risk survey is a low-cost and highly effective way to identify and assess business risks. In our highly competitive and fast changing economy, business executives and Board members should consider conducting an online risk mitigation survey annually. What you will learn can save your business significant money, avoid a hit to your company’s reputation and strengthen your sustainability. It may also save your company from bankruptcy or failure due to a catastrophic incident.
Many businesses have little or no resources focusing on identifying and assessing the risks facing them. Of those companies that do have a risk assessment program, or at least some emphasis on risk management, a significant number focus on a small number of the obvious risks including the typical insurable risks.
In reality, most businesses either are not aware of or are ignoring a wide range of risks that can significantly hurt their bottom line, reputation, and the health and well being of their employees, customers and community. A robust approach to identifying, assessing, managing and mitigating risk should include the ongoing assessment of a broad list of at least 50 – 75 potential types of risks. The approach should also include the assessment of both the potential impact and likelihood of occurrence of each risk type.
The best approach is to gather information from managers and other key employees at all levels of the organization. Some companies also gather input about risk from their Board members. An online risk management survey is the fastest and best way to gather information, insight and suggestions about risks from many people. To that end, each question should include a comments fields. Comments enable responders to say why they believe specific types of risks are or are not likely to occur and why their impact is potentially high or low. Responders can also make suggestions about what can be done to mitigate risks.
Unlike many other types of employee surveys which should guarantee that responses are anonymous, responders to an online risk survey should not be anonymous. It is important to be able to follow up with responders to get additional information and to clarify their answers where needed.
The starting point is to design a comprehensive online risk mitigation survey. It is beneficial to use a survey company with significant knowledge and experience in this area. They will save you time and provide useful reports without the need to spend days using Excel to create your own useful reports.
Give people enough time to send in their responses. Three to four weeks is typically an appropriate response period. Make sure to include enough of the right people as participants in the survey. Include all managers and supervisors in your organization and other employees that are in key positions with the knowledge about customers, suppliers, business processes, contracts and regulations, and other risk-related points.
It is important to thoroughly and objectively analyze the responses, including the ratings and comments. This is another area in which an experienced survey company can add significant value.
The final steps include to creating an action plan to manage and mitigate the key risks, communicating the assessment and implementation plan with all appropriate people and then focusing on effective implementation. Implementation may require financial and other resources, and it will definitely require strong visible support from your company’s senior management.
Given the fast-changing pace of most businesses, it is useful to conduct online risk reduction surveys annually to track progress and trends, and to identify new risks that surfaced in the past year.
It is mandatory you attend the Counseling before entering Bankruptcy Process
Debts and loans can ruin your daily life and this is not the end, they leave a permanent mark on your credit reputation due to which is becomes very difficult for you to avail loans in future. Even though the process of bankruptcy helps you get out of debt, it will still badly affect your credit report. However, as a process, it is mandatory that you attend the counseling before entering bankruptcy process. This is a part of the debt management process that implies that the customers are well educated about handling of credit cards and loans.
If you have made up your mind for going with bankruptcy process, you should be very careful to monitor each and every activity of the creditor. The main reason behind counseling being mandatory for the customers is to make sure that the customers do not fall into such situations in future. According to experts and financial advisers, it is very essential that all credit card users take these counseling and find their ways to deal with the situation. In these counseling sessions, you will be given a brief idea of the process and other methods available to deal with the situation.
Apart from this, you will also learn about the advantages and disadvantages of each of the methods. It is very important that you know the implications of such methods since you will have to select any one among them. Unless you are well aware of the methods and the back end process, you will not be confident of the outcome. Added to this, in these sessions, you will also learn about different ways to handle such plastic money and use them effectively. Being a customer, you should always be open to such sessions since it will be life time learning experience for you. Once you know the concepts and the implications of the different methods and the best practices in handling such cards, it will be rare for you to end up in troubles like these. So, take up these sessions and try to make the best of it so that you can not only save the current situation, but also be prepared for future.
An Order Fulfillment Center Helps You Capitalize On Every Sale!
Do you know one of the biggest reasons why companies don’t meet their sales quotas? They have problems with order fulfillment. If you’re not in the loop, order fulfillment is simply the part where the product is actually prepared for shipment to the customer. However, for every business there is a different fulfillment process. A company that needs orders filled on the fly might need to have CDs automatically burned with data and then packaged in bubble mailers for shipment. Other companies might have a different setup. Either way, order fulfillment is a pretty big issue.
Just because this is something other companies stumble over doesn’t mean that you have to suffer the same fate through your company. You just need to make sure that you get the right tools and resources on your side. Not sure what to get first? Well, contracting the services of an order fulfillment center is definitely a step in the right direction.
You see, instead of having your best people worrying about order fulfillment, you are essentially contracting that task to a company that does nothing else except handle this facet of the sales process for its customers. This can let your best people focus their strengths elsewhere, which could drive sales even higher. Some small to medium businesses have some of their top talent handling both sales and fulfillment, which might not be the most effective way to use that talent. It’s a lot easier for a top salesperson to focus on sales than it would be for them to try to divide time between sales and order fulfillment.
An order fulfillment center can not only prepare your product for shipment, but make sure that your brand is in place as well. So, if you’re really looking for ways to maximize every sale, you will definitely want to think about turning over this key part of your business to a trusted outsourcer!
