Improve My Business

If you pay close attention to the blog posts, you may note that Barret has been writing many of our posts - he’s done a great job, and provided a different perspective to the posts that I would have (which is never a bad thing, imho)…

He’s moving on to greener pastures - literally - as he embarks on an internship at a winery.  He came to us from a winery, and to a winery he will return… in the interim, we’ve been blessed with his insight, his humor, and his unfailing “can do” attitude - as well as several thought-provoking, funny, and well-researched blog posts.

We’ll miss ya, Bar… and wish you the best!

Technorati Tags: mcdonald consulting group

Last night at dance class our instructor was talking about efficiency of movement and encouraging us to reduce the distance we move our center of gravity with each step. In general keeping steps smaller allows you to be quicker and is essential for dancing to faster tempo music. It got me thinking about efficiency in business expansions and wondering if similar principles apply.

To understand where I am coming from first think of your core business competencies as your business’ center of gravity. Now we can see that any expansion of our services or product offerings is a slight, or not so slight, shift of our center. Now similar to dance, the further away from our core competencies we get the more we are moving our center of gravity and the harder it is going to be to recover and change directions. In business this means that if we expand our offerings too far outside our core competencies it becomes increasingly harder to recover and we may wind up overextended. Sticking to expansions that are smaller steps away from our core competencies will allow for more speed and precision in our movements and also make it easier to recover should we decide that the expansion wasn’t a good idea.

With the pace of innovation and change we are seeing in the economy today it is becoming clear that going forward one of the key factors for business success is going to be agility. Those business that are able to most easily adapt to new changes in the marketplace are the ones that are going to survive. So think like a dancer when considering expansion and only move your core competencies as much as you have to. Don’t overdue it or you may get behind the beat and that’s never good in business or dancing.

Technorati Tags: Business, efficiency

I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t able to make it to the Sustainable Brands 2010 conference, so I have been loving this resource that is a summary of blog posts and other thoughts coming from the conference. If you are interested in sustainability and want to see what other business are doing to improve their sustainability this is a great resource. Sustainable Brands focuses on bringing together companies that are leading the push for sustainable business practices so they can share there ideas and findings with the greater business community. Whether you are looking for ideas to help your business, or just trying to keep up with whats going on, I highly recommend reading through some of the information on this summary, you can find it here.

We are all about trying to help you improve your business, whether that means improving your personal efficiency at work so you get more done, or helping you find ways to attract new customers. Today I want to talk about one of the easiest ways to improve your business, cost cutting. Cost cutting isn’t always easy, actually it is often very difficult to find areas to trim the budget because everything seems important. However, there are some often over looked steps we can take to help control costs without affecting anything we do in our business. One major one is power usage.

Did you know that many electronic devices continue to use power as long as they are plugged into the wall, whether the device if on or not? By simply plugging these chargers into a power board that has an on/off switch you can make it easy to insure that all of your devices are truly off when you want them to be, simply flip the switch on the power board. It is also important to remember that chargers for things like laptops and cellphones will continue to draw power as long as they are plugged into the wall, even if the chargers aren’t charging anything. Making sure you turn off/unplug all devices and chargers in the evenings and one weekends is an easy way to reduce the money you spend on utility bills and the best part is, during the day it can still be business as usual. I told you cost cutting could be easy!

Here is a brief list of things to look at for cutting out phantom power drains: Things with remote controls, anything that has a blocky looking plug or inline block converter (think laptop charger), things that have quick on features, anything that displays a clock. For further cost reductions you can also look for energy star approved electronics when making your purchases, this will ensure that you are getting the most energy efficient products you can and just by being a little more aware you can improve your business. The best part is you are also improving the environment at the same time. Not only will reducing phantom consumption cut down on the amount of coal and natural gas burned to create electricity, lowering our over all demand for power will help make transitioning to renewable resources a more feasible option.

Technorati Tags: Business, enviornment, improvement

Its the first Friday in June, which means funny Friday here on the blog. This month I came across this nice Dilbert cartoon about ISO 9000. Hopefully none of your organizations take this approach to their ISO certifications.