Improving Productivity

It is common to feel unsatisfied when a work day ends, due to non-completion of work. It is difficult to stay productive and feel satisfied at the end of each work day. Productivity helps you add hours to your work schedule and here are some ways to increase your productivity:

1. Complete the most difficult tasks in the morning, while starting your day at work. Do not leave them for the last. Leaving them for later would simply drive your intent from pursuing them. Always take up the difficult, lengthy tasks in the morning and the shorter, simpler ones in the evening.
2. One of the most important factors behind not feeling productive is lack of love for one’s work. If you do not love what you do, chances are you will never feel charged up and inspired to do it. Always choose a profile of your liking.
3. Don’t think too much about the tasks given to you. Just start the work without giving it much thought, or without getting dreaded to complete a certain task.
4. There will be times when you wouldn’t be as productive and efficient as other days. Think of it as normal and don’t get too worked up thinking about it.
5. Try to stay away from the Internet. Of all things leading you to an unproductive day, the Internet is one of the biggest culprits.
6. By making a list and prioritising your tasks, you would be much better off in handling them than going ahead without any written plan. Feel in control of your work and don’t fret.
7. Half of the generation today is sleep deprived. Make sure you get enough sleep before starting your day. Sleep away to glory on weekends and make do for the time lost on the weekdays.
8. Find time to exercise daily, even if that means spending ten minutes stretching your muscles at home. After a eight- or nine-hour shift, our bodies need oxygen. And only a good night sleep and exercise can guarantee that. Stay in shape and say bye-bye to lethargy.

These are some of the suggestions that can make your life sorted and work easier. Follow these on a daily basis to increase your productivity at work and also at home. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to write and add on to the list.

How-To Series: Managing Strategy (2)

2/2 (contd…)

Brainstorming

Brainstorming is a technique undertaken by various organisations to help solve organisational or other operational issues, or to help encourage creative thinking, or to generate any idea. There are three stages to brainstorming: preparation, the session and the evaluation. Starting from the preparation stage, entrepreneur-managers should first select the problem or the opportunity to be discussed about or brainstormed. The next step should be to define in your mind the structure it would have, like what exactly you are looking for the participants to answer, other than the discussion’s aims and objectives. Choosing the facilitator comes next. You will have to choose someone who everyone can openly address to, someone who is open about his thought and knows how to engage a group of participants. He will have to keep it interesting.

Then, it is the location! Where you will discuss is another very important factor one should consider before initiating a brainstorming session. The session stage of brainstorming focuses on the actual topic or subject that needs to be talked about. The evaluation is the last stage and it entails the scrutinising bit and picking up a person with most votes. Other than that, it will also help you see whether or not the solution zeroed in on is feasible. Discourage dominant individuals do most of the talking and appreciate the quiet ones to come forward so an equal flow of opinions and ideas can come to the table.

Choosing a Growth Strategy

The growth path can take you places and is limited only by your imagination. As the most important person behind your organisation, you need to start by understanding the major growth strategy options. Growth is not limited to going national or international, but in its strength to be dynamic and adapting to the changing market scenarios. You need to start by building your brand. It is not only size that will make you dynamic, but a right mix of quality, reputation, prestige and profit margins. You also need to figure if you want to focus on the one thing that your brand is known for or diversify into providing various other products or services.

Whatever the decision, the technological developments of the market need to be taken into account when growing, other than selecting a growth strategy. When choosing a growth strategy, understand that change is inevitable and your business will have to adapt to the changing market scenarios. Nurture your business and know if you need innovation or use of new technology in promotions and customer relationships. Pay attention to communication, teamwork, your office culture and most importantly, funding that you will need to power your growth.

Managing Strategy

Managing strategy is all about how the entrepreneur-managers analyse their organisations, and develop and implement strategic plans and options for the overall development of the business. You start with understanding what the culture of the organisation entails, to carrying out strategic analysis, to implementing it, and measuring and evaluating its success.

The Chartered Management Institute, the only chartered professional body in the UK dedicated to promoting the highest standards of management and leadership excellence, in its Checklist Series on Managing Strategy talk about the understanding behind organisational strategy. This particular book focuses on empowering the managers by helping them understand their organisations. In this article, we cover three action-oriented checklists for our entrepreneur-manager reader base: Understanding Leadership Styles, Brainstorming and Choosing a Growth Strategy.

Understanding Leadership Styles

Everything from what an entrepreneur says, to how he says it, to how he leads with example, to how he keeps his reputation, etc., greatly affects his relationship with his colleagues and co-workers. There could be many leadership styles entrepreneurs get their learning from or get inspired from, but staying true to their original personality is what gives them that edge. A difficult leader may be bad for the organisational growth because he will end up discouraging employees. As an entrepreneur, you need to invest in your staff to get the best out of them. A good entrepreneur would know how a poorly trained employee can cost the company even more that what he is worth.

Motivating employees is an equally important component for ensuring your business’s growth. That can make all the difference! If you expect your employees to perform as you want them to, you have to work toward motivating them. Whenever taking a major strategic decision, take care to inform and invite suggestions from the lowest in the hierarchy. The employees feel a sense of togetherness when they are shown that their suggestions are valued. All the entrepreneurs should be flexible in their approach toward their employees and should not restrict themselves to just one style, because every individual you are going to work with is different from another.

(To be continued. . .)

Promoting Your Restaurant.

In a franchise situation, the brand owner will take a lot of the responsibility of the promotion, including the creating of marketing collaterals, general advertising and a degree of local advertising specific to your location. However, as a business owner it is always important to ensure that promotion for your restaurant is being done adequately.

Promotion can start anytime, but it should begin in earnest and in a planned manner with scheduled activities from the date the final launch has been planned.

Your promotion strategy depends on the type of restaurant you will be running and the catchment area for your customers. As mentioned earlier, QSR and cafes have more of a local clientele – customers who are already in the area. Casual and fine dining restaurants attract customers from further afield. Naturally, the promotion efforts for the first two formats need to be more locally focused and the promotion efforts for the other two formats should have a wider spread.

Localised efforts are cheaper to promote and restaurants that have a wider appeal would attract the lifestyle writers of city-based and national publications and hence, knowing your targeted clientele and choosing the right promotion strategy is very important.

A web presence is extremely important too. You need to have a dedicated website, and presence in all popular social networking sites. The Internet is the best way that customers can easily find all the important information regarding your restaurant, including operating hours, exact location and the menu. In the era of smart mobiles, access to people on the move is equally important.

Getting yourself talked about is the most important objective. The appeal of the concept and the experience of your restaurant is the only way you can ensure that you are talked about in pleasant terms. That is the challenge of word-of-mouth marketing.

It would be best to work out your promotion campaign through a thorough marketing plan. The following points need to be kept in mind while preparing it:

1. Design Fresh and Consistent Communication
2. Build a Public Relations Strategy
3. Do Effective Advertising
4. Drive Social Media Conversations

You can add to the list by writing in to us.

Launching Your Restaurant.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle in his classic book Politics quoted a proverb – “Well begun is half done.” The launch of operations in the restaurant business epitomises this saying. Reputation matters more than anything else in the restaurant business. Reputation is built on how past performance is perceived by people. The success of your restaurant greatly depends on how the experience of your early customers makes them into your strong supporters and advocates. Today, the power of word of mouth has been multiplied many times through social media networks – be it restaurant review sites, blogs, Facebook, Twitter.

A useful analogy is to look at your restaurant launch as the staging of a theatre performance that is scheduled to run for years. Staging a theatrical performance calls for intensive preparation so that the opening day performance is perfect. Think of the Republic Day Parade held every year since 1950 on 26^th January. Has there ever been a less-than-perfect performance? Your launch has to be well planned and well prepared.

In terms of a broad checklist your launch plans should not be finalised until you have the big three elements of your restaurant in place – great concept, great location and great food. To this add sufficient financial resources to run operations till break-even point is met. Finally, it is recommended that the main team should be in place at least 4 to 6 weeks before the launch date so that the team can be trained in all operations. All menu items should be tested out. Systems and processes for all customer-dealing situations need to be worked out and drilled. Think of this in terms of conducting rehearsals before the opening day.

It would be useful to think of launching your restaurant operations as a project. The final objective of the project is to create stable operations generating enough revenues, which will help you meet the break-even point on schedule.

The first project task would be to start promotions as soon as you can lock onto a final launch date. Training schedules need to culminate into a soft launch that can be viewed like a final dress rehearsal. Invited non-paying guests should be welcomed to your restaurant for a full service meal.

The launch project should look beyond the launch date and design a process of getting the house in order by ironing out the minor issues that will emerge in the early days of operations. Finally, you should target on ways to increase revenues to ensure you meet your financial targets.

After operations and revenue flows stabilise at acceptable levels, you can explore how to maintain the excitement in your restaurant by building novelty, innovation and improvement.

What do you think about the launch of the restaurants? Write in to Quitters and share your views.

Lean In

How to unlock the potential of women entrepreneurs

Author Sheryl Sandberg

Publisher W H Allen

Price: 499

Pages: 232

A recent survey reveals that even though India has a higher percentage of entrepreneurs than most developed economies, the percentage of women entrepreneurs is lower than the global average. Women entrepreneurship thus holds tremendous unlock potential for new enterprises in India. But what is holding women back?

The chief operating officer of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, has followed up her 2010 Ted Talk on “Why we have too few women leaders” with a book that explores this question in greater depth. This book is a must read for both men and women. Some truths are difficult for men to understand as they live in a different world from that inhabited by women. For many women, the extent to which the world of men has been accepted as the norm, places on them success criteria that is not only difficult to achieve, but the very achievement is also a form of discredit. Sheryl talks about how success and likeability go hand in hand for men, but in the case of women more often than not success leads to dislike.

While acknowledging the great progress made for women’s equality, Sheryl goes through statistics and examples to show how much more needs to be done across the globe. Drawing examples from her own life and from the lives of other women, Sheryl shares the challenges that women face in the world of business and simultaneously talks about strategies that can help overcome them.

The title of the book Lean In is a message to women to work against the characteristic response to “hold back” that they have been conditioned by society to have, and to actually lean in and make themselves counted in all situations. While most of the advice is relevant for men and women, the crucial issues of childcare is dealt with forthrightly.  Sheryl urges women to creatively explore possibilities of combining the responsibilities of raising a family with running a challenging business assignment. The book has received a negative response from many people who see Sheryl’s “solutions” as simplistic and placing too much of the onus to change on individual women. But as a book, Lean In has succeeded even if its only achievement is starting a conversation on the issue of how to unlock the true potential of women.

In India we are blessed with relatively inexpensive childcare services, but women still need to make their “Partner and Real Partner.” The saying is true across both sexes – behind every successful person is a supportive partner!

Team Small Medium Entrepreneur

What Good Does Fear Do?

This particular post has been taken from Take Charge, Building an Entrepreneur Mindset by Gaurav Marya. And it has been written from the perspective of an entrepreneur.

Fear is a basic emotion; it remains with all of us. All of us face the same fears whether we have two lakh, two crore or two hundred crore rupees. We are afraid of losing status, reputation, market share, people, opportunity…. These are real concerns. We all have played a high-stake game while dealing with an obtrusive government administration, crumbling infrastructure, unreliable suppliers, uncertain market environment. . .All is cause for worry.

The fear is the same, yes, but the scale differs. For an individual, our family’s wellbeing rests on our decisions. For an entrepreneur, the wellbeing of those entire dependent on his or her enterprise rests on the decisions made.

For entrepreneurs, carrying on an enterprise set up by an earlier generation, the stakes for failure are higher. The spirit of entrepreneurship is burdened by the legacy of past success and often the second generation, and sometimes even an early entrepreneur, settles within the relative comfort of jobwork, for fear of losing what has been gained. These entrepreneurs fall into the ‘guardian’ role – living in the fear of failure and loss.

Fear is not all bad, it has its positive impact. Fear teaches us caution and keeps us away from complacence. It is fear that gets us on that early morning flight, fine-tuning our presentation on that cramped airplane seat, for that appointment with the difficult client. We could have just turned off the alarm and snuggled back warm in bed. So let us own our fears and search for the fun that makes life worth living.