Tag Archives: waste

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How to Plug the Gaps and Stop Bleeding Money!

Most organizations are bleeding away profit through holes they don’t even know they have!

That’s right! If you are not periodically and systematically looking for inefficiencies, gaps, old processes, or broken systems, chances are, your business is bleeding profitability.

These holes that are bleeding profits from your organization are generally not a result of a deliberate or malicious act. They just form slowly as the marketplace shifts and as technology changes. These shifts and changes create holes that must be “fixed” in the same way a pothole in a road must be fixed!

$156,000 Timesheet

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How to Stop the Email Madness and Save a Boatload of Money!

There are literally billions of emails sent each day and many of them are simply not needed and result in “make work” projects. This is a huge productivity drain on your business!

According to a Washington Post article the average worker spends 4.1 hours per day doing email while this Forbes article suggests 2.5 hours a day per person for email!

If you have 50 staff working for you at an average cost of $50/hr and they are each wasting 2.5 hours a day on email, you are losing $6,250 dollars a day. This is $31,250 a week or $1,625,000 a year just because you don’t have better systems in place for business email!

So, what can you do about it?

Here are 12 tips that you can implement in your business to stop the email madness and reduce the flow of money down the drain!

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How to Focus Your Business and Make More Money

Most of us are totally unaware of how much our lack of focus impacts our lives and our businesses yet the impact is huge!

Among many things, lack of focus:

  • Damages relationships
  • Results in missing sales opportunities
  • Increases our cost of doing business
  • Derails us from our vision
  • Impacts our ability to achieve goals
  • Results in increased work hours and workload

Essentially, lack of focus is, at best, a drag on our business and, at worst, will bring our business to its knees!

I think all of us can recall a time in our lives and/or businesses when our lack of focus cost us something. If not, maybe some of these examples will jog your memories!

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Relentless Cost Cutting Will Kill Your Business

Eliminating waste and unnecessary cost inside your business is critical to its long term growth, profitability and success. However, primarily focusing on reducing cost will eventually kill your company.

As Gordon Bethune said, “You can make a pizza so cheap, nobody will eat it. You can make an airline so cheap, nobody will fly it.” The king of corporate turnarounds, Greg Brenneman, supported this with his statement “a maniacal focus on trimming cost can lose you more revenue than you gain.”

This was certainly my experience back in 1998 when I was brought in by a client to redo engineering work that another contractor had outsourced overseas. The contractor was looking to reduce their engineering costs by sending the bulk of their engineering to a lower cost country. Unfortunately, they did not control this work close enough. When the engineering was submitted to the customer, not only did it not meet expectations, it caused the client to loose so much confidence in the contractor that the contract for the work was pulled and awarded to another engineering company.

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7 Simple Steps to Restore Function to Dysfunctional Meetings

Everyone is familiar with dysfunctional business meetings! The meetings where the people around the table or on the conference call are partially, if not completely, disengaged. You have people on Facebook, people texting, trading stocks, surfing the web, day dreaming and even taking cell phone calls in subdued voices like the rest of the people there can’t hear or see what is going on!

It is the most bizarre thing but we have all been there! Check out this hilarious video for some great examples.

I remember attending a meeting where one of the participants literally fell asleep with their head back and their mouth wide open! It was the sort of wacky thing that you would only expect to see on an episode of The Office . . . Except it wasn’t on TV it was in my meeting!

I have been in other meetings where the meeting leader was doing their presentation and a participant’s cell phone rang and they answered it at the conference room table like they were the only one there!

Why do these things happen in meetings?