Work From Home or WFH as it has become known is one of the few positives to come from the pandemic, but is it effective? There is no doubt that in many cases WFH is very efficient and productive but because extremes are rarely a good idea and humans have…
I love honey bees. My other business is a honey farm and I have over six million of them flying around making honey. Because of the waggle dance where the scout bees communicate to the hive where the best pickings are to be found everyone assumes that honey bees are…
Cost / price and value are not the same thing. There is an old phrase “he understands the price of everything and the value of nothing” and that’s why effective people understand value. Reducing cost is easy, reduce headcount, outsource, use cheaper materials the options are endless. Anyone can do…
Top line income, be it sales or salary is meaningless, it’s not what you make, it’s what you keep. Effective businesses and individuals are not interested in sales figures or gross income but in net income after tax. Looking at top line figures is just plain silly. Which would you…
Effective management is about continuous improvement and that’s why performance drivers really matter. It is very easy to get bogged down in the numbers. Actual v Budget, trends, forecasts, feed forward, feed back etc. etc. But effectively control the drivers and you effectively control the performance. This all began with…
Freelancers have a real problem – how to increase freelance income. The problem with most freelancers (myself included) is that the “product” sold is usually time and the problem with time is that no matter how much the demand, the supply is fixed. The great Seth Godin has the answer.…
Businesses and individuals tend to consider past costs when making decisions so to them why are sunk costs important? It’s a psychological thing. A sunk cost is any cost that has already been made or committed to in a way that cannot be cancelled. You hear all the time: “We…
We live in difficult times where many businesses are looking to preserve margins or just survive and so we can see why bad businesses cut training first. Training costs come straight off the bottom line, they are a revenue expense. It’s just one of the ways that the accounting profession…
In the world in which we find ourselves it has to be said that open questions are the work of the lazy and uncaring. If you want to impress don’t ask open questions. Many years ago information was difficult to obtain and so questions like “tell me about your business”…
How often do people complain they have too much to do and too little time? More than at any time in history time management is seen as a problem. Stress through having too much to do is at an all time high and following the pandemic certain areas of the…