by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Dec 30, 2012 | Entrepreneur, Small Business
From the time I was little, I can always remember my parents preparing meals from scratch. I don’t think I had ever seen a “box” of anything used as an ingredient or a starter. From the cooking to the presentation and even the table setting, everything was not only visually beautiful, but divinely delicious. Whether it was a holiday, family celebration or a simple dinner, they expended great effort, love and care in every morsel! This love and passion for food represented more than merely the building blocks for a gastric feast, but generated a powerful role model for each of their children’s drive for success, character development and yearning for business acumen.
To this day, everything I make is from fresh, whole ingredients. Last week I was boiling a chicken carcass to make homemade soup and as I watched it simmer, it was one of those Ah Ha moments realizing that being an entrepreneur is similar to cooking. If you want the best flavor from your soup, you must simmer the bones in chicken broth for about two days to extract the flavor of the marrow, chill the soup, remove the fat, pull the meat off the bones, add your vegetables and fresh herbs and simmer again. It is a much longer process than simply popping open a can, but if you want the best outcome, then begin with the making the time and incorporating top ingredients. There are no shortcuts or quick fixes to build the company of your dreams. It requires an extensive amount of dedication, commitment and full-time effort. My soup exploded with flavors, great pride and passion for doing my best.
“Build it and they will come” will not propagate a thriving business. When you choose to become an entrepreneur, you not only commit to yourself, but to your stakeholders as well. You have a responsibility to them to grow and generate the best company you can and this requires a 365 day a year dedication and perseverance. It is not just a whim or a hobby. It is a perpetual cultivation process of business development, goals, service, leadership, insight, customer experience, troubleshooting and so on to ensure prosperity and success on all levels.
Your eyes are not fooling you. The image above is not my chicken soup, but my father’s famous cheesecake which takes 2.5 days to create and you will NEVER find any other cheesecake as richly and sinfully phenomenal.
Serve your business with the passion and all of the time it deserves.
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Dec 26, 2012 | Entrepreneur, Time Management
What impedes your productivity? For many, it can be outside distractions or lack of dedicated focus. Here is a quick exercise to help you learn where you may need to improve.
When you find your mind straying or you wander off task, make a hash mark # on a piece of paper, noting what you were supposed to be doing and how much time you allowed yourself OFF task. At the end of the day, review how many times you were distracted and how many hours you squandered on non-core activities.
What did you fully accomplish or complete? Any work that is not advancing you toward your professional or life goals should not be counted as “work.” These activities account for many wasted hours during your day. Much of the busyness that usurps your time may give you a sense of productivity, but being busy does not mean you are being productive or effectively contributing to your life’s work.
Part of being effective during your work hours is the discipline to spend time on what is truly important even if other things try to steer you off course. During your review of the hash marks, where did you spend most of your time? If you end the day with several half finished projects or other important activities that merely were pushed to the back burner because Facebook, text messages, Twitter or other more “fun” interactions, you may want to re-evaluate your focus and productivity levels.
Efficiency is learning about your awareness to, acceptance of and ability to determine your real work, the actual tasks and projects that propel you forward versus time suckers, bad habits, procrastination or other low payoff activities that take you away from your personal and professional aspirations. It is a continual building process and without a strong sturdy foundation, you may find yourself with a few cracks, leading to disaster, lost time or missed opportunities.
How will you commit to improving your productivity and limiting your distractions?
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Dec 18, 2012 | Entrepreneur, Life Thoughts
Feeling like you live in a shadow but dream of success requires that you don’t merely step out of your comfort zone, but you LEAP, JUMP, SCREAM or otherwise take some real concrete actions to ensure your aspirations become realities. Sitting on the sidelines with an “oh poor me” will NOT take you to the mountain top.
You must decide what is it that you truly want! Something definitive and tangible.
If you have been floating within mediocrity, feeling just reasonably comfortable but suddenly realize there is more. YOU WANT MORE! Well, what are you willing to do for it? What will you commit to?
There can be some harsh revelations during the eye opening beginning. Learning what you did wrong, to teach yourself what you can do right.
What you can do better!
Some of us may not want to admit mistakes or past errors, but until you see the failures, it is more difficult to plan your successes.
You may see other industry colleagues thriving, flourishing, while you are only treading water. You know your legs are tiring from the constancy of monotony.
Your recognition needs to act as a positive upsurge, your motivator. Create your strategy; your plan to achieve your goals.
Envision your end result and work backwards with a detailed outline of how you will make it all happen. Record timelines, players, procedures, activities and any other structures or elements that will drive you toward your end result.
- Make a vision board
- Partner with your task force
- Seek a mentor
- Create a daily schedule/To Dos
- Write out your processes
- Enlist “industry experts
- Enhance your skill-set
- Measure or track your successes/failures
- Have a deadline
It is your playing field and if you want that touchdown you must write the playbook to score.
Now get in the game.
Learn the action steps, the stakeholders and commit to creating the life you want and deserve.
”Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes… but no plans.” –Peter F. Drucker
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Aug 28, 2012 | Entrepreneur, Life Thoughts
Timely commitments speak volumes about your intentions. If you are consistently missing time limits or deadlines, delaying outcomes or otherwise just holding off on completing promised projects, what message are you giving to the recipient?
“When you find someone who you think is an ‘A’ player and effective, you should go back and see if they were an A player and effective previously. And if you can see that he or she was accountable, collaborative and inspiring in his or her previous work, you can expect the same kind of performance going forward.” Jim Schleckser
As business owners, we are inundated with unlimited requests for our time and expertise but when you overcommit or plainly don’t back up your word with actions, you are shortchanging yourself, your clients, partners or colleagues. Consider the nonverbal communication you are sending when you don’t deliver the promised results in the appropriate timeline.
Meeting your demands in timely manner is good service on deliverables. It demonstrates your committed resolve to get the job done; a dedication to responsibility. If you can remember a time of disappointment or frustration when you were waiting for a response, final product, contract or any other form of collateral and you perceived an extensive delay, what thoughts consumed you about the contributor?
“Do unto others as you would have them do to you.”
As said in the Freelance Switch article 14 Essential Tips for Meeting a Deadline, “Your reputation as a freelancer is pretty much the only thing you have to go on — your bread and butter.” As we continue to build and foster relationships, both online and off, your reputation will become a predictor of future business and partnerships.”
While we may hit a few roadblocks in the process: technical issues, data requirements, brain-cramp, logistics, team members faltering, with proper planning, insight and time padding, you should meet or beat every deadline, whether explicitly implied or merely an unspoken exchange of expectations.
When you evaluate your “proficiency” for meeting deadlines, you must also review your level or reasons for procrastination. Putting something off only perpetuates additional anxiety and stress. We all may procrastinate on occasion. It could be a chronic issue for some while for others; it’s only a problem in certain areas of their life. Procrastination is continuously frustrating because it creates a domino effect in wasted time, lost opportunities, disappointing work performance, and generally a bad perceived feeling of self.
Procrastinating allows less important tasks to usurp your time and space when you should be more focused on projects that take a higher precedence. Most people don’t have a problem finding time for the things they want to do, but once a task is presumed challenging, time consuming, or boring, procrastination takes over.
If procrastination produces negative results, then why do we allow this behavior? Procrastinating actually reinforces itself in two ways. 1. It is difficult for most to institute change or accept that a real change is required. We tend to divert our attention away from a task to do something we want to do, something that is more desirable. 2. Procrastination can help to feed ego when the deadlines are met at the very last minute and you or others pat yourself on the back for getting it done. If the project isn’t as acceptable as you had wanted, you blame it on time restraints. Either way, you are reinforcing the habit of putting things off.
University of Cambridge states: “Often we try to disguise our avoidance by being very busy doing things that may be interesting, and even useful, but don’t contribute towards the main goal – even doing something we normally hate – rather than writing, for example, just before an essay deadline!”
Recognizing your behaviors and tuning into the purposes will guide your future actions and reactions. Learn what drives you and if change is needed, then start with simple steps. Persevere, knowing that change is a positive tool affecting your personal and professional relationships.
- Honor your words, unspoken guarantees and anticipated recipient results
- Plan your time and projects with dated action steps
- If required, seek assistance early on, don’t wait until the last hour
- Over deliver
- Don’t keep someone waiting or wondering
- Correspond and update as needed
Harvey Mckay: “Deadlines aren’t bad. They help you organize your time. They help you set priorities. They make you get going when you might not feel like it. And meeting deadlines successfully is one of the best motivating factors out there.”
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Aug 8, 2012 | Entrepreneur, Guest Blogger
And One More Thing… Be In 2 Places At Once by Clemens Rettich
Every small business owner, regardless of what goals they are dreaming of must do two seemingly contradictory things: focus on the future, and be completely in the present.
You cannot be successful in growing a small business if you do not keep your eyes on the future. You know where you are going, or go nowhere. You must create your own future as much as you can, or live a future created by others.
You must also be fully present or miss everything that matters right now. You will run off a cliff because you were too busy looking at the sky. Each moment you are not present for, you will not live at all.
So how do you focus on the future and live in the present? How do you plan and execute simultaneously? How do you remain grounded and fly at the same time?
The answer lies in the concept of the Great Performance. A Great Performance in sports or the performing arts is based on 3 fundamentals that business owners could learn a lot from.
Practice for 10,000 hours.
Being really good at planning for the future and at acting with intelligence in each moment is the product of one thing: experience.
10,000 hours of experience.
This has implications for growing a small business.
You must have the resources to be patient. If you create a financial plan that has you hitting maximum net income in 24 months, and you are betting the existence of your business on that timeline, you could be in trouble. Make sure you have the resources to go the distance.
Master The Script
Great performers spend the time between performances practicing the fundamentals of their discipline over and over and over again. They rehearse the script or score or choreography until they have absorbed what matters on a cellular level.
In growing a small business this means:
- Write a simple story. Create a simple and compelling vision for what next year, or the next decade looks like. If it is longer than a page, shorten it.
- Master the five fundamentals: finances, human resources, marketing, operations, and management. Read, attend seminars, and take courses. When you come across a gap in your understanding make a note of it and look it up.
- Build a team. We talk about the team in business a lot. Drive it deeper by thinking ensemble or band. A band is incomplete without a drummer. An orchestra is incomplete without a brass section. In your business focus on developing specialists each with a set of skills required for a whole Great Performance.
- Embed everything. Commit to the two fundamentals of great operations: publishing and training. Write everything that matters down. Then train, meet, talk, rehearse, practice, and train some more. Recording what matters embeds it into the documents of your business. Training and practice embed it in the people of your business.
Let Go
When your 10,000 hours are up, and if you have spent them in learning, recording, and practicing, it is time to let go. Letting go involves trusting yourself and your team enough not to over-think the details, to micro-manage, or study threats and opportunities to death. Act.
Trust and be present. Show up clear and rooted in the present, not weighted or distracted by the past, or fearful of the future.
There are 4 components of letting go a business owner must tend to.
- The never-ending conversation. Great business owners don’t ever stop learning through conversation. They talk to everyone and listen to everything. The experienced business owner connects those thousands of points of information or the energies of thousands of relationships to her decisions in subtle and nuanced ways.
- The never-ending dues. You are never too good or too old to acknowledge your debts, to invest in more learning, to continue your practice, or plan your next step. At the letting go stage the practice focuses on deeper skills of leadership and communication; the planning is more strategic than tactical.
- The conductor’s baton. Put down your violin and pick up the baton. The orchestral conductor is concerned with the success of the performance. Her job is to be present to the largest picture possible: the performance of the entire piece, the experience of the audience, and the energies and dynamics of a 2-hour performance. I tell my clients that if they are spending more than 30% of their time focusing on operational concerns, we have not yet reached the stage of letting go and must continue to work towards that.
- The continuous present. This is the heart of mastering the Great Performance in business: the ability to see the whole performance, the past, present and future of your business as one single point. That is the true resolution of the question “How do you live in the moment and plan for the future?”
Business leaders who have earned this position see the details on the shop floor and the strategic objectives for the year as the same thing. Both are the product of one vision and a consistent culture. They don’t see yesterday’s economic news and tomorrow’s plans to enter a new market as isolated points. They deeply understand their intimate relationship.
The future is the natural extension of things done right in the present. The present is the only place where real decisions can be made and real action taken. It is in the present that the vision for the future is created. The future is the present anticipated.
The greatest performances come from a place of understanding you cannot control everything. The weather happens. Period. You trust you have the foundations to make the best of whatever happens. And if you don’t, that is not a problem for the future; it is a problem for right now.
Guest Author: Clemens Rettich
Business Coach, Writer & Workshop Leader
Twitter: @ClemensRettich
Clemens Rettich Business Consulting Ltd.
Designing for Great Management & Business Growth
Follow his blog: Small Business Fundamentals
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | May 29, 2012 | Entrepreneur
Follow your passion. We all hear that but what does it take to make your dreams come true?
Blood, sweat and tears. Oh my!
As children we may have dreamed the biggest dreams, the treasures of life and what we wanted for our future. As our life unfolded and we matured, that may have evolved into a different vision. Our personal lives and experiences, shaped and molded us on our journey, helping us to discover what we are truly made of. We learned lessons along the way, accepted what we could not change, while continuing with additional drivers toward our goals. We saw what we wanted and we took every step, every measure, to ensure our pot of gold was within reach.
Steve Jobs: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
Richard Branson: “My biggest motivation? Just to keep challenging myself. I see life almost like one long University education that I never had – everyday I’m learning something new.”
Oprah Winfrey: “Every time you state what you want or believe, you’re the first to hear it. It’s a message to both you and others about what you think is possible. Don’t put a ceiling on yourself.”
Robert Collier: “The great successful men of the world have used their imagination? They think ahead and create their mental picture in all its details, filling in here, adding a little there, altering this a bit and that a bit, but steadily building – steadily building.”
Brian Tracy: “Personal development is your springboard to personal excellence. Ongoing, continuous, non-stop personal development literally assures you that there is no limit to what you can accomplish.”
Linda Chandler: Think P.I.G. – that’s my motto. P stands for Persistence, I stands for Integrity, and G stands for Guts. These are the ingredients for a successful business and a successful life.”
Anita Roddick: “I have always found that my view of success has been iconoclastic: success to me is not about money or status or fame, its about finding a livelihood that brings me joy and self-sufficiency and a sense of contributing to the world.”
Warren Buffett: “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
Jim Rohn: “Formal education will make you a living, self education will make you a fortune.”
Michael Gerber: “The entrepreneur is not really interested in doing the work; he is interested in creating the way the company operates. In that regard, the entrepreneur is an inventor. He or she loves to invent, but does not love to manufacture or sell or distribute what he or she invents.”
Biz Stone: “Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success.”
Walt Disney: “All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.”
What are your motivators?
