So you have decided to become a business owner now you have a couple options. You can take on a franchise or set up your own business from the ground up. Both have benefits and downfalls.

Pick up a business magazine and your will find lots of franchises for sale. Many companies you use are probably franchises, from restaurants to cleaning services. Franchises are typically founded on a tried and tested business model. When you buy into a franchise, many aspects of the business including marketing are taken care of off. There are many different franchises available. Some will give you the business name, equipment and everything you need for start up, others only give you the basics and you still have to buy or lease a location, purchase equipment and the inventory you will need.

The negatives of buying a franchise however are that they are typically inflexible in terms to making it your own, and of course the initial outlay. Visit the Key Mergers website for more information or if you would like to f you would like to buy a business or even to sell one.

Starting from zero and building a you very own company however means that you can grow the business organically over time, you can limit your initial outlay and you can be as creative with the direction of your business as you like. Depending on how novel your new enterprise is, it is possible that your will have a steep testing curve and will have to make all of your own connections.

At the end of the day, the decision whether to buy a franchise or start a business from scratch are multi-dimensional Its a choice only you can make.

Starting your own business is a great undertaking but running the day-to-day aspects of your business is the true challenge you will face as an entrepreneur. Do you find that the business you started to suit your lifestyle somehow taken over your life and home? If this sounds familiar, then your business is running you. Learn how to run your business again with these top five warning signs and helpful tips.

Stop Complaining And Take Control.
A common lament of the entrepreneur or SOHO business owner is if they knew then what they know now, they’d never have started their own business. The truth is that if they thought then about what they’re buried in now, the story may have been quite different. It’s never too late to take control. Here are five signals that your business is running you - with a quick tip to combat each.

1) You Find Yourself Ignoring Your Inner Voice.
You know, the one that keeps saying, “I’m too busy” or “I’m swamped”. Listen to your inner voice. It’s usually got a clearer handle on things. When you make a plan to change things you’ll feel more in charge. Clients entrust you with their business daily. Learn to respect yourself and your clients by delivering on your promises.

2) Your “Creative Space” Has Become Your Procrastination Pit.

Creative space is a great thing. It’s the zone where you develop and brainstorm new ideas. Next time you’re procrastinating, do something useful. Go for a walk. Make a call. Play with your children. Don’t acknowledge procrastination and it will cease to exist.

3) Hearing Your Cell Phone Ring Is Annoying.
The same goes for the other bells and beeps in your busy life like email or call waiting. These technologies are all very well, but you need to establish boundaries. Set-up reasonable times for your own life and stick to your decisions. Boundaries are only respected when people know they exist. Raise your boundaries and you’ll raise your standards.

4) You See Clients As Alien Invaders.
If you’re not relating well with clients, you’re probably not working with the right people. Getting clear on your ideal client is pivotal to creating a business you can love. Go through old records and note the characteristics and attributes of the people you enjoyed working with. How can you attract these types to your business? What do you need to change?

5)You’re Reading The Want Ads.
Let’s face it, not everyone can run their own business, but since you’ve read this far let’s assume you want to stick with it. First you need to acknowledge two simple facts: You’re only one person and you can’t do it all. Accepting this simple fact can be the key to formulating a new and productive business pattern.

Outsourcing As A Solution.
Sometimes the best solution is the obvious solution: hire more help. However as a small business owner, this may not be the best answer financially. Hiring an employee requires overhead. The solution is to hire an assistant but not an employee; hire a Virtual Assistant. By outsourcing, you can control costs and pay per task basis. Some of the things that can outsource include appointment setting, marketing, writing, web design, customer service and research.

Take Heed And Good Speed To You
So now that you know the warning signs, take note and heed them. By using our quick tips and in combination with outsourcing, you can gain control of your business, become more productive and be happier while running your business.

© Yvonne Thompson, Assistance For You All rights reserved. Permission is granted to use this article, as long as the entire article is posted and the “About the Author” section and all links remain intact.

About The Author
Yvonne Thompson owns and operates Assistance For You, a Virtual Assistant Support Service where our motto is: Run Your Business, Don’t Let It Run You! For more information visit http://Assistance-For-You.com

Every organization is looking for the holy grail of performance enhancement, that one thing that, if it were changed even slightly, would push the productivity of a company way beyond the current level.

Over the years there have been many solutions offered to the performance conundrum, from process improvement and process re-engineering to rightsizing and quality initiatives. All of which have had varying levels of success.

One area that is perhaps overlooked when organizations undertake productivity and process improvement programs and that is the behaviors of their employees. Often the only time behavior becomes a focus in an organization is when there is a problem employee that must be dealt with.

Studies have shown that there is a 5-fold difference in productivity between a top performer and a mid-tier performer. The top performer is 5 times as effective as his colleague who performs as the organization would expect.

This study has been undertaken by a number of organizations in varying ways and all with similar results. The skills and experience of the individuals are comparable and the processes and procedures are the same so what makes the difference? The main difference between the top performer and the capable performer are their behaviors both on and off the job.

A number of key behaviors have been identified as desirable and can be seen within those who are peak performers in any organization and are the attributes that organizations on the whole try to recruit. However organizations often forget that many behaviors are learnt and that existing employees, with the right encouragement, can adopt these behaviors as their own and in the process see their effectiveness rise.

The 5 key behaviors for peak performance are:

Pro-active - Looking for things to change and making change happen. Much is talked of pro-activity however often it is difficult for individuals to be truly proactive within an organization as change can be actively discouraged by management who believe ‘they know best’.

Goal oriented - Set themselves targets to aim for. The key here is that they set themselves goals, often for just about every part of their lives. The peak performer in business may well be a marathon runner outside, or be a keen learner setting themselves targets to accomplish within certain timescales.

Willing to fail - Are ready to take calculated risks. The top performers in life are willing to try something even if there is a chance of it failing; often they see failure as a learning experience. Organizations who wish to improve their performance need to adopt a calculated risk policy and follow the quote of Tom Watson ‘If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate’.

Passion - Willing to stand up for what they believe in. The top performers will be passionate about the things in their lives, they may be passionate about sport, or their family or even about work. The important behavior is that they are willing to put everything else aside for their passion and have a total focus on what is important to their passion.

Emotionally Mature - Not swayed by the emotion of the moment and able to think beyond a reactive approach. Often organizations make the assumption that the most vocal individual is the one with the greatest ability; mainly this is due to the self promotion of the emotionally immature. This is recounted by the axiom ‘promoted beyond their level of competence’ where an individual is recognized not for capability but for self-promotion.

Many people have one or two of these behaviors and often they are context specific. The major difference between the average performer and the peak performer with regards to these attitudes is that the peak performer uses more of the behaviors in a work context.

The important thing to notice with all of these behaviors is that they can all be learned and therefore anyone can have them. And if anyone can have them then anyone can be a top performer. Which means that any organization could improve their productivity dramatically without touching a single working practice.

Now that really could be the holy grail of performance development.

More information regarding Organisational Change, Coaching and Performance Development can be found at http://www.achievinggreatness.co.uk

2005 © Achieving Greatness Ltd. All rights reserved.

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PERMISSION TO REPUBLISH: This article may be republished provided attribution is provided to the author, and it appears with the included copyright, resource box and live web site link.

L Stuart Avery is the Managing Director of Achieving Greatness Ltd, an organisation dedicated to raising awareness around personal and management behaviours. Achieving Greatness specialises in offering advice and support to organisations going through change intitiatives and looking to enhance the performance of their staff. It provides training courses, facilitiation services and coaching to business leaders on Leadership, Management and Strategy.

Stuart has over 20 years of experience across a wide range of industries including Government, Charities, Retail, Travel, Insurance, IT Services and Logistics.

For more information visit http://www.achievinggreatness.co.uk

“In real life, the most practical advice for leaders is not to treat pawns like pawns, nor princes like princes, but all persons like persons.”
James MacGregor Burns

What can happen when you work for an uninspiring leader? Frankly, it can’t be good. Let’s explore the leader-follow relationship in organizations. I was blessed to work in a research-oriented organization at the beginning of my career. The work was wonderful but my supervisor wasn’t. His staff had seasoned professionals except for two people. When I accepted the job, he informed me that if I wanted to do well I was not to bring him any problems. I had the opportunity to change jobs and get promoted. I asked this supervisor what should be done. He said, “Stay put. Down make a move.” You can imagine he wasn’t very helpful in my career development.

Unfortunately, this leadership style can wreck a leader-follow relationship. Scholars call this style laissez-faire leadership, while others would argue that it’s non-leadership. Hackman and Johnson, leadership experts, explain that laissez-faire leadership involves leaders’ withdrawal from their followers and their tendency to offer little guidance. Initially, I often felt undervalued because my supervisor didn’t care about my career. However, I soon took advantage of this situation. I knew I could take risks and make major decisions for my organization at my entry level. I was amazed. I found myself rarely asking him for any guidance. I walked on faith during this process. Therefore, employees should stay positive even when working for an ineffective leader. Keep a positive attitude. Start today!

Reference:

Hackman, M. and Johnson, C. (2004). Leadership: A Communication Perspective. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc.

© 2006 by Daryl D. Green

When was the last time you played? I’m not talking about watching TV game shows or playing in some game at work where stress and humiliation are skillfully masked under the guise of motivational fun. I’m talking about an enjoyable activity with no agenda, no timeframe and no anxiety about how messy you get or how foolish you look. Something you choose to do, not have to do. Playing to play, not to win.

Often on the journey from childhood to adulthood, we forget how and why to play. One day we wake up…grown-up! It’s as if there’s some mysterious inner tour guide in our head saying, “It’s now time to leave Barbie and her pink camper behind and enter the real world of serious thinkers and doers”. And hence, a long stretch of all work and no play begins. (Remember the psycho Jack Nicolson became in the movie, The Shining, when that happened!)

But we don’t have to give up on our inner child so easily. One day, while I was walking by a park near my home with Joe and our dogs, we repeated a dialog we had a number of times while passing this park.

I said, “I used to love to go on the swings when I was a kid.”

He said, “So why don’t you?”

I said, “Me? Here? I would look silly.”

But on this day, all the swings were empty, and when he nudged me again, I decided to go for it. I sat my butt down on the flexible seat (hmmm, a lot cushier than my childhood swing set consisting of hard metal seats with steel posts loosely anchored to the ground by a chunk of cement that dangerously lifted off the grass when you went high). I started the motions of bending and straightening my legs, gradually adding height and speed. (It’s like riding a bikeyou never forget.) Within seconds, I was engulfed by that familiar rush of wind in my hair and tickling in my belly. As I got higher, I started laughing out loud and yelled down to Joe like a five-year-old, “Look, I can touch the sky!” When I was ready to come down, I gently scraped my feet on the soft brown bark below me, slowing down just enough for a flying dismount. I could still do it! I was young again. That was my first of many visits to my neighborhood swing setjust for the fun of it!

Play is so easy to do (after all, kids can do it 16 hours a day) and it doesn’t have to cost much. Next time you’re in a toy department, spend a couple bucks and buy a brightly colored, or perhaps striped hoola-hoop. It’s guaranteed to provide loads of laughter either by yourself (watching in a mirror, of course) or when your friends come to visit. It will take you a while to get the hang of it again, so here’s a hint: angle it lower in the front and make the first swing slower than you think you need. Then let the gyrating begin!

A Goddess is never too old to play. Remember Cindi Lauper’s 1983 hit song, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun?” In 2003, at fifty years old, Cindi was still performing that song on tour. I happened to catch her on a VH1 “Divas Live” special in 2004; she was a delight to watchstill singing, dancing and smiling…still having fun.

5 Ways to Play:

• Take a break to play with your kids whether it’s a board game, bicycling, running around the back yard or jumping in rain puddles.

• Try to make ordinary household chores playful (sing silly made-up songs while you’re doing them, have a pillow fight with your bed making partner).

• Make a list of your favorite childhood games or activities and commit to doing one of them weekly.

• When you’re especially stressed at work, distract yourself for a few minutes with something mindless (doodle, walk outside, pick a flower).

• Once in a while, honor your inner child by playing first and working later.

Excerpted from the book: The Goddess of Happiness, A Down-to-Earth Guide for Heavenly Balance and Bliss

Debbie Gisonni, aka The Goddess of Happiness, is an author (The Goddess of Happiness: A Down-to-Earth Guide for Heavenly Balance and Bliss and Vita’s Will: Real Life Lessons about Life Death & Moving On), speaker, happiness expert and columnist for iVillage.com. Contact: http://www.goddessofhappiness.com

Copyright, All Rights Reserved, Debbie Gisonni