Business News & Trends

The idea of being customer service and customer satisfaction oriented is not a new paradigm in the business world.  Even in businesses that are not directly working with the public, the idea of structuring the company to satisfy the needs of the people that make it possible for the company to stay in business – it’s customers – is a core value for a large percentage of businesses, especially those that are successful.

But there are segments of every business that have no contact with customers so it is difficult for them to develop a customer service mentality.  And if the business itself is not structured to deal with the public or have conventional “customers”, that approach to the business world can be lacking in the workplace.  That is why a big business trend in all type of business settings is to change the work ethic internally so that workers view those who use their work as customers.

When properly implemented, each employee actually begins to view each other, their bosses and especially people who rely on their work in other departments as customers or clients. In theory, this approach has as its objective to build that customer service mentality even in workers for whom the outcome of their work is only for internal
departments or other workers in the company.
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Its one thing to show up at your business meeting prepared mentally for the meeting and with all of your business needs at your fingertips.  If that was all business travel entailed, that would be challenge enough.  But to carry off a successful business trip, you have to think about your personal needs, medical needs and everything you might require.  The ability to travel light on a business trip is truly a refined skill that takes into account the ordeal you might go through at the airport, the potential for lost baggage and what you really do need once you get to your destination.

Many travelers have a firm ethic about not checking bags.  The result is you see almost a comical effort by travelers to drag huge bags onboard and jam them into overhead bins.  As a business traveler, your ability to relax and pass through the airport system with little fuss is paramount.  When you take bulky bags on board on an airplane, you exchange the time at baggage claim for a huge hassle in getting your bags on and off that airplane.

It’s best to balance what you really need at your destination with the problems of taking too much on board.  To reduce your anxiety about baggage claim, leave plenty of time between your travel plans and your business appointments at your destination.  If you have several hours or a day before you must make your business contacts, you can relax and go through the baggage claim process without anxiety.

The other problem with baggage claim is lost luggage.  So to assure you will have the basics when you get to your hotel, lost luggage or not, pack a very small bag to take on board.  In that bag, only take your basic requirements.  Include your medications, contact lens supplies, sample sizes of toiletries, underwear and one change of clothes.  Then you have what you need for one night and the next days meetings while your baggage catches up with you.

To pack light, do a good inventory of what you really do need.  There are some economies you can utilize to greatly reduce the bulk of what you are going to take without sacrificing your needs and ability to look good when you make your business contacts.

*    Wear a basic outfit.  If you have a suit or other garment you know will be your anchor piece, wear it on the plane.  You can also wear a coat or jacket that you might need there and then fold it and use it for a pillow on the plane thus keeping it out of your bag.  That coat is not considered part of your carry on but it helps you reduce your baggage bulk.

*    Economy of space in your bag.  Compress what you pack and use every empty space.  Pack socks into shoes and roll your clothing rather than lay them flat to squeeze the empty air filled space out of them.  You can always iron and get pressed any outfits that get wrinkled in route once you are at your destination.

*    Mix and Match.  Take outfits that can be used over again with a different pant or shirt combinations.

*    You can get it there.  Don’t take anything that won’t get guaranteed and frequent use.  If there is something you might need, remember, you can buy it there in a drugstore or nearby store.  So don’t let anxiety make you over pack.

These steps can reduce your packing problems and result in a workable travel system that will reflect that you are well organized and ready for the road.  And there is no better feeling than to come home and realize you used everything you took and needing nothing else while you are on that important business trip for your company.

It’s not something we like to talk about but bad things happen to good people, even good business people who are just out on the road to pursue the prosperity of their company.  But in some cases, there may be some real travel threats on your route to your business destination.  This is especially true today in the age of terrorism where a trip to Europe or the Middle East can mean some very real danger may loom as you travel.

It is our job as responsible adults to think about the dangers that could happen on an upcoming business trip and assess that danger and either approach the business objective differently or prepare accordingly.  The first step if you suspect that your next business trip may be hazardous either from political unrest, bad weather or other reasons, is to do an honest review of the importance of this trip.  If you can accomplish he goals of the trip without putting yourself or your business associates in harms way, that would be preferable to a potential disaster on the road.

If it looks like the trip is still a go, be sure you learn all you can about your destination, recommended safety precautions and the nature of the potential danger.  The US State Department keeps their web site up to date on the nature of potential security risks at http://www.travel.state.gov.

The next step for preparing for a business trip that may be hazardous is to double and triple secure your documentation.  You can make copies and scanned images of your important personal documents such as your passport, visa, driver’s license and other crucial identification cards that you must have overseas.   By leaving copies of these at home where a contact person can access them and uploading digital copies to a public folder that you can access anywhere you can find the internet, you give yourself a safety net should those documents disappear.  Also review the status of your travel documents and get y our renewals done now if there is any chance one of them will expire as you are out on the road.

If you are traveling to one or many foreign countries, make yourself familiar with the location and phone numbers of the US embassies in those countries.  By having that information on your person as you move from country to country, you are ready to move swiftly should you need to call on them to help you out of a jam.

If you do encounter trouble and require medical help, you should have on your person your crucial personal data that can be used to quickly get you help.  You can print up a card with your name, names of who to contact in an emergency, blood type, medical details such as allergies that should be noted, important medicines that you may have that can help you if you are in physical need and anything else a lay person might need if you are in a far away place in critical need.  For even more security that this card is able to communicate your critical data, you can have it translated into the language of the country you are visiting so there is no delay as local health or public service persons work to get you help.

The more you do to prepare for your trip, the better prepared you will be to respond to trouble or even avoid trouble entirely if it occurs.  By understanding the local customs and what to do in an emergency situation overseas, you can respond calmly and quickly to crisis and secure yourself, your business associates and property early and quickly.  Then if danger does rear its head, you will be well prepared to lesson its impact on you.

When we say something is “virtual” in modern terminology, we are almost always talking about something related to the internet.  So Virtual Dating is dating using the internet.  “Virtual” does not mean something that does not exist.  But it implies you are replacing a normal physical entity with a real but for the most part unseen entity that lives online.

The trend in strategic business planning is to incorporate an aggressive “virtual marketing” plan with your traditional plans.  So it makes sense that eventually the move to virtual resources would reach human resources with the availability of virtual employees.

In the last two or three years, virtual employment has taken off and become a very real resource for businesses wishing to tap into valuable experience and subject matter expertise that cannot be found locally.  Agencies such as Team Double Click and Rent-A-Coder provide an army of ready to work professionals that can step in and get a job done quickly and efficiently for an employer.

The obvious first application of virtual workers is to subcontract to an online employment agency certain task specific projects that have a short beginning, middle and end.  Building a new function into a web page is a good example of a project that can be packaged into an understandable project and signed over to a virtual consultant to perform the work and return to the online employer.  The handling agencies collect funds via escrow so neither the employer or the consultant are at risk and the handling company claims a percentage of the fee as part of their pay for facilitating the partnership.  Everybody wins.

But the concept of virtual employment is going beyond providing another variation on outsourcing to a consultant.  Many virtual employment agencies provide administrative assistants, sales support and many other functions normally associated with a full time employee but those services are done “virtually”.   A virtual office manager can have calls routed to his or her remote phone, emails redirected and conduct office meetings and negotiations with vendors via email or instant messaging.  Using these modern tools, a virtual assistant can provide almost every function an on site assistant might be able to do but do so at a lower cost to the employer.

The virtual employment trend in business has obvious benefits for businesses that are in need of qualified help.  It opens the door to recruitment sources that can supplement the local talent pool.  Many times virtual staffing agencies may have on their “employee roles” people with a specialized background or skill.  The agency is skilled at defining exactly what their client businesses need and matching up the right virtual employee to the job so the business has the right skill sets where they need them, when they need them and only for as long as they need them.

In addition to the benefits that virtual employment has for businesses to fill needs for skilled workers, it’s an excellent resource for talented workers who want to make a contribution to the business world on their own terms.  Virtual workers almost universally work at home or where they chose to work.  Often the work is task based with a deadline so the worker can select the hours that fits their family and personal schedules best.  And, like working for a temp agency, the employee can build a resume with the agency that improves the quality of work they get over time.

Virtual staffing is a trend that has been a success for all involved as it has matured in the last few years.  We can look for this twenty first century methodology for bringing in talented workers to continue to grow as more and more businesses get comfortable with staffing their employee ranks “virtually”.

At first glance, it is a bit surprising when you see how much some powerful and prominent businesses in every community bend every effort to court public favor.  Almost any community of significant size in the country has a business section in the paper.  And subscribers to the local news see their ability to stay in touch with what the strongest and up and coming businesses in town are doing as an important part of their business awareness.

Sometimes it’s good to read the business news in your local paper both for information and with an eye on the question – “Did the business being discussed work to get this article printed about them in the paper?”  In some cases, it is blatantly clear that the business went to great lengths to get noticed.  Many businesses actually employ public relations and advertising professionals to tailor how they will be viewed in the press and to court public favor by romancing the right kind of press coverage for the business.

There are some solid business reasons behind such aggressive work being done by the business community to have good press coverage.  On the surface, it might seem like the intent of managing public approval for a business is just a desire to be a good citizen and so that public opinion is favorable and everybody thinks of that business as a bunch of “good guys”.  But the motivations for courting public favor for a business are far more complex and entrepreneurial than that.

*    A good reputation means better sales.  Public opinion is a funny thing.  If a retail company gets a bad reputation in a community, it will have a tremendous impact on their bottom line.  But the business that is well regarded at the neighborhood level will be one that sees strong customer loyalty.

*    A strong reputation makes for better business dealings.  Running a business means entering into dozens of business relationships, making deals and drafting contracts with other businesses in town.  If your business is well regarded in the public eye, that will reflect favorably when you need a deal to fall your way at the negotiating table.

*    Investors like to see a good public image in a business.  Investors like to know that the business they are interested in partnering with will be able to complete its business goals and endure year in and year out.  Part of that stability means that the business can live up to its mission statement and its statement of values.  When the business the investor is interested in has a strong public image, that reflects that this is a business that conducts itself with integrity, is interested in the public good as well as private profit and is looking for the long-term gain as well as the short-term profitability.  These values translate directly into dollars in an investor situation.

*    A strong relationship with city and state government is important to long-term business health.  Many businesses seek concessions or to enter into a relationship with local government so they can have a clear path to get building permits or conduct other business that impacts the public good.  A local or state government can be a businesses best friend or stop your projects in their tracks and keep them stopped.  But the thing that pleases the political world is public opinion and the public good.  So if your business has a good public profile, that translates to votes for the politically minded people at city hall.  And that means influence which can help a business go a long way toward completing its long-range plans.

*    A good public image impacts recruitment.  When you put an advertisement in the local paper to recruit talent, how you are viewed by those looking for jobs will directly influence if they will respond to your recruitment efforts.  Many a business got a bad reputation locally and saw dismal responses to recruitment efforts which can mean a less talented staff and poor performance of the business in general.

These are solid reasons for a business to put some energy and capital into courting a good reputation in town.  Whether that means a strong representation on United Way weekend or holding blood drives once a month, the business that has a reputation for reaching out to the community will be a business that prospers.

In many companies, most of the company seems to operate by a completely different set of rules and communicate in a different language than those the IT or computer services sector of the business.  This division is somewhat artificial and partially maintained by the IT people themselves because of a certain culture technical people have about their specialized knowledge and application areas.  But at heart, those strange people down in IT have the same goals as every other business person which is to succeed both personally and corporately in shared projects.

But those of us on the business side of the corporate landscape depend on the computer folks to let us know how things are going with that highly valuable asset that we have in our IT systems, hardware and software.  Most medium to large businesses run very high capacity computers or multitudes of computers connected through a network and those systems must perform at top capacity each day to accomplish the goals of the business.

The upgrade and maintenance budgets for the computers that run your business no doubt represents a fairly sizable percentage of the corporate budget each year.  But because those systems are what make you competitive in the marketplace, that investment is worth the money to assure that the mission critical jobs those powerful systems do get done on time each week and month.
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Without a doubt the single most influential agent of change in business trends in the last ten to twenty years has been the internet.  There is virtually no business segment or market that has gone unchanged by this powerful force.  But of all of the various businesses impacted by cyberspace, the music industry has to the one that has seen the most dramatic change and the greatest challenge to keep up, adapt and survive an onslaught of change unprecedented in its history.

The first major challenge that cyberspace brought to the music business was a complete shift to how music would be sold to music fans worldwide.  In what can only be described as an avalanche, the music buying public virtually abandoned conventional record stores and retail outlets and took the majority of their music purchasing business online.  But this mass influx of business could not be tracked to any one web site that was executing the revolution.  Because of a revolution in how bands and Indie record labels do business online, the music audience followed and began buying their CDs and even concert tickets directly from artists or record labels online and getting those products instantly via downloads.

But as drastic as the market changes this paradigm shift in consumer behavior represented, it was nothing compared to what the internet had in store for the music world.  The next wave of change represented a threat to the music business so serious that it had the potential of putting the music industry out of business forever.  When music consumers began to share digital music electronically over the internet using file sharing software such as Kazaa, Limeware and BitTorrent, suddenly it was possible for a music customer to access all the music they wanted for free by simply downloading this music from another internet user’s computer.
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There is a public mythology concerning the oil markets that has been fueled by a sharp rise in oil prices in the last few years.  That perception is that the oil companies whose job it is to acquire the raw materials to make petroleum products, including gasoline for transportation, are the source of the rising prices.  It is easy for the public to pin the blame on big business.

The truth is that those on the inside of the oil business know full well that the oil business is tremendously cyclical.  That means that the old adage, “whatever goes up must come down” definitely applies to the oil markets domestically and around the world.  The current high prices are more a reflection of problems with refineries and with supply due to tension in the Middle East than it does with the profit objectives of the oil companies involved.  In truth, oil companies have to cope with sweeping shifts in supply and demand and it impacts how they plan their economic futures as much or more than it affects the average consumer.

This upswing in the price of gas is not the first time the oil business has seen huge profits and gains in their returns.  And anyone who has been in the oil business for a few decades knows full well that the current high profitability economy which is benefiting oil companies tremendously will turn the other direction at some point.  Just as there is a shortage due to problems with repairs or temporary shut downs at the nation’s refineries, there will come a time when all refineries are producing at full capacity and there will be a glut on the market which will drive prices down.
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A good Ad agency can take a business and propel its success forward in ways that few other business partners can do.  If the business is one that will benefit from promotion or advertising, the right AD agency bring to the table the talent, the creativity and the resources to put together just the right advertising campaign and then to deploy it in a way that is a perfect fit for the business’s marketing objectives and for the market that the business serves.

But for every success story of how an AD agency took a business to the next level of success, there are plenty of horror stories of terrible advertising campaigns.  A bad advertising strategy not only fail to escalate the sales and success of the business, it may damage the business in the eyes of the consumer and cause damage that could take years to fix.

There comes a time in the life of any business when the decision is made to either employ the business’s first AD agency or to change agencies to find one that can fit the marketing objectives of the company.  To be sure that this process results in one of those success stories and not one of those horror tales, some precautions are in order such as…
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One of the most important talents any management team of a business can have is to be able to detect changes in the marketplace and adjust how the business operates to function in that new market.  Some call it “thinking outside the box” and others refer to this talent as “working with a new paradigm”.  Whatever the term of the day is, without the flexibility to change as the market changes, a business is destined to fade away.

Of the many business and market trends that have changed the paradigm by which business is done in the new century, internet marketing ranks near the top of the most drastic and sweeping change that virtually every business has had to adapt to in order to survive and thrive in the new business world.

At first, most in the business world considered the internet to be a toy and perhaps a good communication tool.  But in the last decade, the power of internet marketing and the need to compete in that marketplace has never been more evident.  And just as business learns new marketing and communication methods when they enter a new market such as learning to do business overseas, the internet has brought with it entirely new tools and weapons that the modern business must learn to use skillfully to succeed in a cyberspace business environment.
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