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| Hear How We Help Our Members |
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| Event Details |
Upcoming Seminar
Execute Your Successful Life Plan
Robb has been asked to speak on achieving personal goals. Specifically, In just two hours you'll hold the keys to:
- Creating a crystal clear personal vision for your life
- Developing concrete time-bound goals on what really matters to you
- Focusing on the essential core strategies to achieve your goals
- Accessing the vital resources you need to implement your strategies
- Managing the multitude of activities and actions to achieve your goals
- Creating vital reinforcing mechanisms to reward yourself for success
- Establishing a leadership council to help you hold yourself accountable.
This seminar is being presented by "A New Impression". Find out more, and register, at:
June 2, 2009
6:00 PM to 8:00PM
Location: North Scottsdale Chamber of Commerce Conference Room 14201 North 87th Street, Suite 131 Scottsdale, AZ 85260
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| Quick Tips |
Create a Bucket List
Creating a bucket list is a useful exercise to help define goals and provide long-term focus. It's a good idea to review the list on a periodic basis and may also be beneficial to have your spouse create a list to compare the results. The types of items on the bucket list will change over time, depending on a person's stage in life.
TAB Winnipeg Board
Winnipeg, MB
Google What?
I use Google Alerts ( www.google.com) to track activity of my clients, prospects or those industries relevant to my business. These snippets of information, emailed to me daily, are an invaluable source of new product, trends, events, etc. which can be used in my sales or marketing conversations. Deborah Elms Imprinted Originals Smithtown, NY |
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| Tab in The News |
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For a full listing of press hits, please visit our In the News page.
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| Now Available: Click on the above book cover to order your copy of The Wall Street Journal business book best-seller the 9 Elements of Family Business Success by Allen E. Fishman, Founder and Chairman of The Alternative Board®. |
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New Website for Business Owners in Greater Phoenix Area |
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To help connect business owners to one another in the Greater Phoenix Area, we helped found a new Website:
This Website was developed to be a resource center for connecting Phoenix business owners to the information and business contacts that will help them grow their businesses. You can also connect with these businesses by joining the group on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and more! Check it out by going to the site. And while you're there, sign up for the 2009 Phoenix Business Owners' Summer Pentathlon! |
| Client Spotlight: BSSI |
(Each month, for the next several months, we will be highlighting local businesses that may be of value to you. These are vibrant Phoenix businesses; each one is committed to serving and supporting the local Phoenix economy.)
Minimize Cost of Bookkeeping Services
Before you invest time and money into hiring or training your own bookkeeper, check with QuickBooks® (QB) Advanced Certified Pro Advisor professional Bette Rolland.
Here is an outline of good indicators to gauge when you should outsource...
* You hate doing Bookkeeping tasks!
* You don't have solid accounting, bookkeeping or computer skills.
*You would like to focus more on your business' sales, marketing and/or production, rather than bookkeeping.
* Your accounting reports do not give you meaningful information.
As an experienced bookkeeper and QuickBooks® trainer, Bette brings 12 years of being in business for herself, along with 25 years of business and accounting experience. BSSI is prepared to step in to ensure their excellent service meets all of your business needs.
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Recognized as the most valuable and beneficial business advisory organization in the world, The Alternative Board® has been featured in leading business news sources from the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, the Washington Post, CNN and many others.
The essential and critical counsel and value The Alternative Board® consistently delivers to small and medium size businesses, and the immediate impact it brings to its clients organizations is an essential element for any organization that intends to thrive. |
| Layoffs |
When business fluctuates, layoffs can damage morale. We deliberately hire with the intention of doing 12 percent of our production using overtime. When things get temporarily busy, we can increase to 25 percent overtime (10 hours a week) without adding staff. When business slows, we can cut our capacity by 12 percent without cutting anyone.
Jeff Garvens, Acme Holdings, San Antonio, TX |
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| The Rule of 30 |
| As an architect, my partner and I manage multiple projects from the initial design to completion. Each project operates within a budget and our ability to complete the project at budget is critical to our relationship with clients. After each project closes, we conduct a detailed comparison of the actual cost versus our estimated cost to identify opportunities to improve.
Over time, we have learned that 30 percent of our projects with the greatest variation from the estimate provide the greatest learning. Projects completed at a cost closest to our estimate (the remaining 70 percent), provide limited new insight. By focusing on the 30 percent with the greatest variation, we have accelerated our rate of improvement.
Carl Winnekins, Architects Group Limited, Green Bay, WI
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| Payment Collections |
| Create and send official looking payment coupons-somewhat similar to a car payment coupon booklet-to people who owe you money. This should be used for the clients you KNOW are not in a position to pay off their balance in full anyway. Because of the situation, rather than turning it into an unsolvable dispute, receiving coupon booklet payments is better than writing off the debt. I was surprised to find something so simple to implement actually worked.
Ronald Cook, Law Firm of Ronald Cook, Smithtown, NY |
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| Improving Your Company |
In order to improve your company, you should always be recruiting to replace the bottom 10 percent of your employees. Sometimes a poor performer is personally popular with co-workers, making them distressed about the termination. When that happens, just tell them, "We were sorry to let them go, but their performance wasn't up to our standards and we didn't feel it fair to ask you to work harder just to make up for them". We've never had an employee object after hearing this.
TAB Board 401, San Antonio, TX |
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| Delegate Responsibilities, Not Work |
One of my personal objectives includes delegating more effectively. I recently began to appreciate the distinction between delegating responsibility versus delegating work. When I delegate responsibility, my employee is accepting an on-going obligation to ensure that some business function is efficiently managed and controlled. When I delegate work, the obligation ends when the task is completed.
Andy Meyer, Lake-Aire Auto Service, Oshkosh, WI |
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| Focus and Resolve |
Sometimes all that's needed to resolve a problem is to get one or more of my employees to focus on it. I recently grew tired of constantly having to remind my warehouse crew to promptly take care of our surplus inventory. I got their attention. I went to a sporting goods store and picked up small pistol targets. I began taping a bull's-eye to any piece of excess inventory I passed in the warehouse. No need for dialog or angry words, the bull's-eye gets their attention and gets it done.
Herm Bloom, Home Mattress Centers, Wilmington, DE |
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| Ask Customers for Hidden Service Issues |
To get a more complete view of our performance, we send our customers a comprehensive service survey in the form of a quarterly report card. The report card is designed so that it can be circulated to the key departments within our customers' organizations: sales, purchasing, warehouse and finance. We ask that each department rate our performance, because it helps us understand how to correct problems that might not be visible to our usual contacts. By paying attention to the whole relationship, we keep our company on the list of our customers' "favorite" suppliers.
Grace Schmidt, Life Industries, Charleston, SC |
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| Your Client's Clients |
To better assess your business outlook, try to ascertain how your key client's clients are doing. If your client's business is holding up, then your prospects are also good. If all your clients have customers whose revenues are falling, you could expect the same for your clients and begin to plan accordingly.
Beth Chase, C-3 Consulting, Nashville, TN |
| Communicating With/Motivating Key Staff |
| We often mistake what motivates us with what motivates our staff. Ask your staff to let you know specifically what aspect of what they do feels the most rewarding. Utilize this information to acknowledge and help motivate them to a higher level of performance within their job responsibilities.
Leyla Pinarli, One Source Document Management, Inc., Ronkonkoma, NY |
ABOUT THE ALTERNATIVE BOARD®
The Alternative Board® is comprised of members who are business owners, CEOs or presidents who run businesses in non-competing fields. During a TAB Board meeting, you receive the benefit of the collective experience of the board members, who offer practical solutions to your problems-not theories.
You can learn more about TAB, which has been helping business owners succeed since 1990, by visiting TheAlternativeBoard.com
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