If you want to focus on your core activities, outsourcing your not-so-confidential tasks like administrative jobs or customer service is a viable option. Recently, we cited the benefits of outsourcing. This time let’s go deeper and find out the important factors to consider before outsourcing:

Choose the Right Partner

Finding the right firm or people is very important because you are, in a way, allowing them to take control of your business operations. Brand Curve cautions entrepreneurs to watch out for subcontractors who can destroy your brand reputation. To avoid this situation, you should first look in your own personal network. Don’t hire people because they are your friends. Be objective and consider their expertise always.

In case your personal network leads to a dead end, the internet offers a large pool of talents across the globe. Pay a visit to business networking sites like LinkedIn, Craigslist, or Indeed. Make sure you thoroughly evaluate the references first and as much as possible, run a test to validate their claims.

Make it Binding

In business, being paranoid is better than being too trusting. Don’t believe people when they say their word is stronger than oak. Make it formal through legal contracts and specify all the responsibilities included in the agreement. This will give both parties protection against fraud.

Inspect Quality

Even if the other party has a proven track record and you’re protected by a legal contract, you should still monitor their performance from time to time. You have a lot to lose if they don’t do their job because the whole company identity might be severely compromised.

Many small businesses consider excellent customer service as their main competitive edge to convert the neglected customers of the big players. Despite the importance of this function, many entrepreneurs are still baffled about the right training for their customer service agents.

The good news is that a new study published at Strategy+Business has discovered the subtle signs [requires free registration] to be aware of that will help boost the effectiveness of your customer service operators:

Successful operators, it turned out, speak little and listen much. When they do speak, their voices fluctuate strongly in amplitude and pitch, suggesting interest and responsiveness to the customer’s needs. Operators who speak with little variation come across as too determined and authoritative, but by speaking invitingly, being responsive but not pushy, a skilled operator can let callers find their own way to a sale. “Like a mother speaking singsong to a baby,” says Pentland.

It means we should take a holistic approach with regard to our customer service. Too often we are busy with “major” activities, such as writing the best script for our agents or crafting wonderful loyalty programs. Unknown to us, we can achieve victory in small ways like adjusting the tone of our voice and taking time to really listen.

Via Business Pundit

Business experts are one in saying that your employees are your greatest assets. They are the movers of your ideas and contributors of great insights. That’s why selecting and hiring new employees are very important tasks for many entrepreneurs.

Equally important is measuring how well they are faring compared to their assignments as well as their relationship with other employees. Also, employee performance reviews offer a glimpse of their satisfaction level with your company. To make each review more productive, here are some things you should do:

• Be ready. Gather all information you have and read it carefully before talking with an employee. This will give you enough time organize your thoughts and handle the discussion.
• Criticize the performance not person. Avoid any personal attacks and do not provoke your employees. Be objective and highlight both their high points and low points.
• Probe on the job satisfaction level. Most of the time, poor performance is strongly related to poor job satisfaction level. Make the evaluation a two-way communication and find out what you need to improve or change to improve satisfaction.

It is advisable that you have a formal system to evaluate your employees. You can read a comprehensive guide from Seeds of Growth on how to implement a performance management system.

Before deciding on who should write for your business blog, you might still be wondering whether your business website should even have a blog. My general answer is yes. Companies with a business website can benefit from having a weblog for a multitude of reasons, including staying fresh in the search engines. Here are some other perspectives:

1. Customer Evangelists offer 7 reasons to business blog.
2. Rohit Bhargava points 5 lesssons he learned while building up his blog and getting a million impressions in a week. Also check out his article 5 ways to improve your blog.
3. David at xfep asks if blogging is a skill worth having.
4. Des at Business and Blogging suggests that it is worth having, since blogging is a transferable skill.
5. To drive home the importance, Mack says that blogging is a strategy for companies, not a fad.

At the very least, a blog for your business can help you establish some authority in your industry. You don’t have to update it every day, but some consistency of posting schedule helps.

If you’re not convinced, feel free to comment here. State your concerns, what you’re hoping to achieve.

Can’t think of any good ideas to improve your business? Brainstorming might be of help to you. It is basically a team activity starting with the listing of ideas to unlock your imagination and discover the different solutions to your problems. In some cases it also advisable to have a brainstorming session alone.

All you need is a poster-size paper, pen, and coffee to boost your minds. Invite your reliable and outspoken employees to participate. You can either facilitate the session or assign one of the members to do it for the team. There are two ways to kick off your brainstorming session:

Pinpoint the Problems

A traditional trigger is listing down all recurring problems encountered by your company. This may come from your friendly customer service, sales, and marketing group. You may want to divide the problems according to process or department. For instance, late deliveries are categorized under distribution while annoyed customers are strongly connected to customer service team.

Word Association

If you are brainstorming specifically to write an advertising tag line, using word association is a more effective approach. This will help you link several keywords you can use that will strongly appeal to your market. You can visit the website WordAssociation.org to practice word associations and learn the most popular associations to common words.

You might also be interested to download a PowerPoint presentation on how to run a successful brainstorming session at Scribd.

One of the problems with running a business online is the pressing need for fresh articles on your company website - else risk stagnation of search engine results. Writing was hardly a requirement of most business owners, even in the first decade of the Internet. Now, with blogs so popular and so many people saying a business website should have one, you are probably considering it. A good blog can be an ideal branding tool for your company. But who should write for your business blog, and what should you write about?

Maybe you’re too busy, and you may not have a PR department, let alone people with writing skills. What about a comments moderation policy, handling comments, or commenting elsewhere? Should all this be handled by executives, C-level management, non-management employees, or a hired blogger?

If you decide to have a blog, these are concerns you must deal with. Basically, it boils down to this. If you don’t have someone capable of writing regularly - even short summaries - at least 3 days per week, you should either hire someone capable or put the decision to blog on the backburner.

Recommended Reading

Here is some recommended reading:

1. Chris Garrett’s How to business blog without being unprofessional, which is aimed at bloggers who blog for businesses. It’ll give you the perspective of any blogger you might hire.
2. Also check out the Bloggers for Hire blog, run by Jim Turner and Tris Hussey, who run One By One Media. Jim and Tris communicate with a lot of business owners and help them find suitable bloggers. Particularly read Hiring bloggers gaining steam.
3. David Dalka’s Where are the C-level people? which points out that having a non-blogger manage blogs might not be in your business’ best interests.
4. Marshall Kirkpatrick’s Introducing good bloggers and companies to hire them, which is referenced by all the articles in #1-3 above. Marshall writes about how he is currently getting a lot of requests to help hook up bloggers and business owners, and how he’s helping.
5. Liz Strauss’ Successful Blog talks about blogging, developing conversations, and in a general sense is about business blogging.
6. Debbie Weil’s BlogWrite for CEOs offers advice for executives who blog. She’s also the author of The Corporate Blogging Book.

Summary

I know everyone above except David and Debbie, and I know that most of them can help you in some consulting capacity. Some of them are even available for blogging. You can also drop comments in this post, and I’ll do what I can to help you find a blogger, or can point you to resources. (Your email address will not appear in the comment unless you actually put it in the body of the comment.)

We’ll cover what topics your blog should cover in a subsequent article: What is Your Business Blog About. Don’t forget to check out our sister Design blog, which covers various aspects of developing websites and weblogs, including general blogging issues for any type of blog.

There’s a saying that two heads are better than one. That is why teamwork is very important if you want to get things done efficiently in your business. Can you honestly say that you have an effective team now? Take time to visit Leadership Turn first to know the secrets of successful teams.

A bigger challenge now is how you can use your team to help resolve the big problems in your company. You can start by building what I like to call a “Solutions Team” with members coming from the different departments in your company. Do not limit the solutions to a specific department for this is very similar to running a company-wide marketing campaign – you have to involve everybody.

The objective is simple – identify the root problem and find the best solution among many alternatives. Coming from different background, you can be sure that all angles are covered and every perspective is valuable. In the corporate setting, this is called a cross-function team.

Start by choosing your best guys from the departments connected with the problem. Limit the number of members to at most 6 people. To make this team very effective, all members must be considered equal regardless of their current position. This will eliminate the power play, increase motivation, and intensify focus on solving the problems at hand.

Business risk or uncertainty is natural in all businesses, big or small. As entrepreneurs, we must be on the lookout for new trends in customer behavior, technology, and market forces.

One of the best tools to manage uncertainties and spot opportunities in our business is scenario planning. Basically, it is like predicting the future based on different assumptions and trends. A classic case of poor scenario planning is the death of beepers or pagers. A powerful technology called SMS text messaging changed the business environment, making beepers obsolete. Their failure to anticipate and adapt to this trend resulted in their eventual death. Do not let the same thing happen to your small businesses.

Scenario planning can be done in these simple steps:

Develop Scenarios

Set a brainstorming session with your colleagues. Based on your knowledge about your competitors, new opportunities, changes in government regulations, emerging threats, and upcoming technological advancements, you create situations or predictions about the future of your industry. Do not discount even ridiculous scenarios for they might make sense later on.

Prioritize

In your pool of scenarios, identify which will likely happen soon and those that might happen in the long run. Your aim is to limit most possible scenarios where you can focus your efforts and resources

Craft Action Plans

Cover all your bases by planning your next moves if these situations happen in the future. You have different strategies for scenario A, B, and C. The bottom line, there will be no surprise in the future and you will always be a step ahead of competition.

If you want a more detailed scenario planning guide, go visit Small Business Information.

Every entrepreneur must realize that innovation is often essential to survival. We live in a very chaotic business environment where the market is changing fast and customers are more demanding than ever.

Implementing some changes on your products or services does not necessarily mean you are making some innovations. Every change you make must always have a corresponding value before you can call it innovation.

The time is now for you and your team to think outside the box and look beyond your current business practices. You can also experiment with new methods like crowdsourcing. Start innovation now by following these simple steps:

Step 1. Identify the Problem Areas

Review every angle of your business to identify the most common problems encountered such as high inventory, poor cash flow, or inefficient customer service. Brainstorm with your team, talk to some customers, and run a simple survey to verify the problems pointed out.

Step 2. Benchmark

Compare your performance against recognized leaders in your problem areas. Initially, you can compare your process with your main competitors. However, you may need to go beyond that and learn the best practices from other industries as well.

Step 3. Implement and Monitor

This is the hardest part of all. Motivate your people to embrace these changes and reward them for doing a good work. Their commitment is the foundation of innovation.

Want to learn the secrets of top Swedish Innovators like IKEA and Ericsson? visit Endless Innovation for details.

Starting a business is a very exciting yet awfully challenging venture. Your passion is overwhelming and you have this great idea that you want to make a reality! Suddenly, reality sets in and fear is now taking over. Are you really ready to start your own business?

There are some issues you need to assess objectively before you quit your job and venture in entrepreneurship. It includes:

Winning qualities

• Do you have the much needed self-determination and self-confidence to turn ideas to realities?
• Are you a self-starter? This measures your ability to work alone, fine tune ideas, and take some risks.
• How much are you willing to sacrifice to succeed in your endeavor? This is not all about money but also time and effort. There are times when you have to work long hours and give up some leisure time.

Business Know-How

Setting up a business is a lot easier if you have knowledge and business skills in people management, sales & marketing, financial planning, and strategic planning. Do not be discouraged if you do not have all these skills. The important thing is you are aware of your capabilities and what skills you need to delegate to other people.

Personal Matters

Some entrepreneurs started out as office employees. The transition can be very shocking to you and your family. Yes, you must involve your family in this big decision because this will have a strong impact on your relationship. More importantly, are you ready to accept that if you fail your whole family will suffer?

In case you are not ready to jump off the cliff and become a full-time entrepreneur, check out Young Entrepreneur’s tips to make this big leap less scary.