Do you have employees who need to work together as a team? Or perhaps you need to work as a team with your customers and vendors. When people of different backgrounds get together for a common goal, there are often four stages they go through before they become a true team or family. Four Stages of Teams In 1965, Bruce Tuckman noted that there are four stages in which teams evolve: forming, storming, norming, and…
Read MoreA great way to speed up your cash flow is to get paid faster by customers who owe you money. One way to do that is to examine your payment terms to see if you can accelerate them. First let’s talk about what payment terms are common. Then I’ll share a study that showed which payment terms generate the fastest payments. English, Please Traditional payment terms are spoken in the following format: Percentage discount/(Days due…
Read MoreOlder marketing methods like direct mail and cold calling just don’t work as effectively as they did a few decades ago. There are two reasons for that: The trust level between people has dropped more than 20 percentage points in the last few years; people are more skeptical and untrusting of each other than ever before. The amount of marketing messages we receive on a daily basis has increased exponentially, to the point where most…
Read MoreGoogle Drive, which used to be called Google Docs, is a great way to collaborate with team members and stakeholders that are in a different location than you are. Here’s a quick introduction (or refresher) on how to use this powerful collaboration tool. Google Drive is a browser-based application that allows you to create documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and other documents that reside in the cloud. They can easily be shared with others, and both of…
Read MoreDoes Your Accounting Department Have Holes in It? You’ve got someone to do your federal and state income tax returns, and you have a bookkeeper. So that’s all that a small business needs when it comes to having an accounting department, right? Wrong. Large companies have many functions in their accounting departments, and small and mid-sized businesses need many of the same functions as well. They just won’t need as many staff to handle them.…
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