Tips

“That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet” – Shakespeare

As the holidays progress this season, some may be wondering how your business can give back to the community and to your employees.

While the holidays offer plenty of fun and cheery spirit, it can also create a lot of stress for everyone – both at work and at home. Getting involved in the community as a team can help keep your employees motivated and engaged during the holidays.

Here are a couple of ways your company can give back this holiday season:

1.  Partner with a local toy drive

Another large business is in the headlines for having the data of over 500 million users hacked. This includes names, phone numbers, dates of birth, email addresses, passport numbers and credit card numbers. These are the keys to our digital lives. Having this information stolen means there’s a high likelihood it’s available for sale. That means essentially the keys to the front door of your personal identity* are available to the highest bidder.

It's the first week of December. We’re in the last month of the final quarter of the year. For some small business owners this time of year can be a crazy, shopping-filled, party spree of a month. 

Why you ask?

Good question! Because...

If sales and profits are up, like they have been for many this year, you may be sitting on a fair amount of cash that shows up as Net Income on your P&L. 

You need to hire in a tight labor market. How can you recruit the right candidates to apply? First, brainstorm what knowledge, education, and professional skills you need from your ideal employee. To help with this brainstorming, you might consider the ideal employee’s experience or career so far.

Sometimes, I joke that bodybuilding gave me enough (and sometimes a false sense of) confidence to do the MBA program. Also, that it humbled my ex-full-time-yoga-instructor-self about the “ease” of yoga. Both statements are actually 100% true, for which, I am extremely grateful.

Undoubtedly, we all know there are tons of health benefits from exercising. Examples include (but are not limited to):

A lever serves to amplify a force. Plyers, wheel barrows, boat oars, and even our own arms and legs amplify an input force to create an even greater output force. This is the essence of leverage. In the financial world, leverage is more narrowly defined. In business financing, leverage is a strategy that revolves around borrowing money (debt) to create a disproportionate return than you could have created with your own current asset base.

I first came across the book Different by Youngme Moon in my MBA Marketing Strategy class, and I will admit, it was a required reading. However, it provides a new perspective on how to view competition in a business setting and provokes thinking about your own business differently.

Part III in a three part series on the Basics of Mananging a Business