Your employees are job hunting. As the "jobless recovery" starts to create more opportunities people who have stuck with you through the tough economy are going out and looking for greener pastures. The May 24th Newsweek reports that, "In the first quarter of 2004, 4.2 million people posted their resumes on Monster, the online job board, up 44 percent from a year earlier; this year "confidential" postings (usually made by people trying to hide job hunting from their boss) are up 13 percent. At the Five O'Clock Club, a New York-based career-counseling firm, half of new clients already have a job but are looking for a new one; last year most new members were unemployed. In Fresno, Calif., … [Read more...]
Strategic Priorities
Looking for New Markets As the economy has declined from it's height the office furniture business was particularly hard hit. As the size of the market shrank, each of the players fought harder for the business that remained. Margins have declined and may never rebound. One of the leading office products dealers in the Chicago area approached Anchor Advisors to help them to develop strategic alternatives to this trend. The project began with an analysis of the company's sales by customer for each of the previous 3 years. The trends that emerged helped our client to identify their most profitable customers and tailor their offerings to more effectively reach those segments. We also … [Read more...]
Starting Off on the Right Foot
Starting a new business can be a daunting process. When Peter's professional services firm had survived its first year, he wanted to pause and look at where he was headed, and develop some systems and processes to make the back-end of the business more efficient. He called Anchor Advisors to help. This project was executed through a series of coaching sessions twice a month for several months. In each session we took one phase of the client's business and analyzed its efficiency and effectiveness, looked at its scalablity and whether there was someone else who could better accomplish it either inside the firm, or through outsourcing. This review enabled the client to get a clean look … [Read more...]
Feed Your Mind … The Rest Will Follow
When you are a business owner, it's easy to fall into a rut and feel a little blah on occasion. But the problem is, when the business owner is in a rut, the whole business generally follows right behind him or her. There's no time for this! As much as we love business, even business advisors can fall into a rut. Sales calls, proposals, meetings ... there are days when these can become a grind. But just as we were feeling a little uninspired ourselves, the book The Inner Game of Work by Timothy Gallwey came into our lives. This book yanked us right out of our doldrums by providing us with a lesson in balance. Gallwey wrote that there are three measures of satisfaction in work: … [Read more...]
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