Monthly Archives: December 2015

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What I Learned in 2015 And Why It Is Critical For Your Business And Your Family

I am going to make this post a little more personal than I have in the past because I think there is a principle here that many business owners ignore but every business owner needs to understand and apply without exception. If you fail to apply this principle to your business, it will end up costing you, and potentially your family, a lot of stress and money.

The principle is very simple:

Every business must be set up and operated in a way that allows it to be easily packaged sold at any time.

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12 Game Changing Books in 2015

I believe that a lifetime of focused learning is critical for everyone but especially critical for those that want to be successful business leaders. There are many ways to learn but one of the most cost effective and impactful ways to learn is to develop the habit of daily reading.

I tend to read one to two books a month. Most of these are business related books but I do read a wide variety of books so that I am always expanding my worldview as much as possible.

The key with reading a book is to take a few principles out of each book and apply them to your life or business. Don’t just read a book, put it on the shelf and walk away. Take something from the book and apply it so it adds value to you in some way.

What follows is a list of twelve books that I have read this year that have had an impact on how I do things. I have provided a brief description and my biggest personal take-away from each book.

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What Does Your Business Canvas Look Like And Why Should You Care?

Every business is based on a business model. You can debate whether the model is well defined or undefined or whether it is realistic or crazy but every business has a business model. This model sets the high level direction for how the business functions and interacts with its stakeholders and, consequently, the business model determines the level of success that the business will achieve.

I was recently assisting a non-profit organization with some business related issues and uncovered that they had not spent any time defining their business model. They definitely had a model, or more accurately, they had a number of models all mashed together. To say that they were not operating very efficiently or effectively is an understatement. What they failed to realize is that their mashed up business model was a lid on their success.

As business owners and leaders it is critical for us to understand all components of our business model and how each component of the model interacts with and impacts the other components and the organization’s stakeholders.

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How To Reduce Your Workload And Get More Done

“Automation is to your time what compounding interest is to your money.” Rory Vaden

 

How would you like to significantly increase the time that you have available in any given day?

I think most of us would jump at an offer like this. Think of all the things that you wish you could fit into your day but you just don’t seem to have enough hours to get them done. Whether it is work related, family events, time at the gym or personal down time, there are always things that get sacrificed because there are just not enough hours in a day.

This has always been an issue for me. According to the StrengthsFinder profile system, one of my top talents is Achiever. If I am not taking on and solving issues everyday, I tend to get frustrated and demotivated. It just kills me when activities that I consider to be low value consume my time so that I cannot “achieve” my goals for the day, week or month.

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46 Key Indicators For Successful Portfolio Management

A portfolio can be defined as a group of related or unrelated businesses, projects or programs managed by a single management executive. Based on this definition, are you or your business managing portfolios of projects or businesses?

What key indicators are you using to manage them? An extensive study on portfolio management was completed and published in July 2014 by research team RT303 of the Construction Industry Institute. In this study, the research team identified 46 separate indicators that should be regularly monitored by a portfolio manager.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the 23 Questions To Improve Project Delivery. In this post I listed 23 questions that a portfolio manager can ask project managers to better understand the health of the projects in their portfolio. The post today takes a higher level approach and identifies the key indicators that a portfolio manager should be monitoring every month. These key indicators can also be used to generate your custom set of questions as you take a deep dive into your portfolios and projects each month.