Last week was National Procrastination Week so it inspired a theme for some of the articles in our monthly newsletter (which ironically is one week late.) That is just dripping in irony. For years, I have been a proponent of time management and organization. But I can and do procrastinate when there is something I simply don’t want to handle. Whether it’s that grumpy customer or an employee issue, the situation isn’t going away. It’s best to deal with it head on. The hard things you

[caption id="attachment_4711" align="alignright" width="300"] Is it legal to monitor employee emails.[/caption] Last week I got an interesting email from a client regarding the legality of monitoring and reading employee emails. There were some internal issues that were causing concern and they wanted to know what tools to use and how to go about implementing the process. Before looking into tools, I wanted to ensure that it was legal at all. The answers I found turned out to be a bit more

Many business consultants and books promote the theory that people buy from people they know, like and trust. It follows that to be successful, you should do things that will build your likability and trustworthiness. In this issue of our PEC newsletter, we have outlined many ways to express gratitude to your customers by keeping in touch via phone, social media, or just emails and other methods. All these methods of communication and staying in touch help build your relationship with your

Our newsletter theme this month is giving thanks (appropriate with November right around the corner). Each of us was challenged to create an article about gratitude, thankfulness, and how to say we appreciate our customers. Since I love social media, I decided to focus on that and how it can help you engage your customers and provide a way to say thanks. Companies talk all the time about maintaining loyalty from their customers but I think they tend to forget it's a two-way street.  Yes,

Lifehacker.com says, “Mind mapping is one of the best ways to capture your thoughts and bring them to life in visual form.” Mind mapping allows you to capture your thoughts or those of a group in a very unstructured way and then tie those thoughts together as you go along. It is great for brainstorming ideas without the structure of outlines and notes. According to Tony Buzan, “A Mind Map is a powerful graphic technique which provides a universal key to unlock the potential of the brain.

For those of us in service-based businesses it is important to track the time we spend on various projects. A contact manager like Act! is great for tracking appointments and to-dos, but as our lives get busier and more complicated, we find we need a more fluid system. That is why I went searching for an application to track my hours in real time. I began with a simple Excel spreadsheet – as I imagine a lot of people do. Once I started using this spreadsheet I realized a couple of limitations

As a small business owner, you just spent a lot of money to purchase new business-critical software and the hardware to run it. How much of that investment may be wasted because it is not used it to its potential? Did you just load the software on workstations and say, “Just figure it out. How hard can it be? - Oh, and by the way, get all your regular work done too.” Have you given your staff members the tools they need to use the new technology more effectively? Do your business processes

Recently I got back from a much needed vacation and was lamenting about how much work and emails had piled up in my absence.  Yes, I have an amazing crew who handled the majority of the calls, but they too were very grateful we were back because we as the owners were the ones with some of the answers or who several of our clients insisted were the only ones to talk with. Sigh. That’s when you start asking yourself is it worth it as a small business owner to take a vacation because of