Online Advertising Marketing

Archive for the ‘Management’ Category

At some point in your business’ life, you might be contacted by someone in a far-away land who’s heard about your business somehow (probably through the Internet). This will be your first encounter with the international market. For many businesses, once you’ve conquered your local area and done business by post or email with other areas of the country, dipping a toe into international markets seems like the next big step.

Preparing to Export.

When you’re preparing to export your products, there are quite a few things you need to do. Firstly, make them as light as possible for the purposes of international shipping. Check that you’d be able to get the things you’re selling to the place where you plan to sell them without it becoming prohibitively expensive. Next, check if there are any customs requirements — you might find that either your own country or the target country has laws that will require you to register what you’re sending and perhaps pay extra taxes. On the other hand, selling internationally may mean that you don’t have to charge your own country’s sales tax.

Obviously most of these things don’t apply to non-physical products. One thing that you still need to be careful about, though, is currency fluctuations — how stable is the currency you plan to start trading in? If it has problems, you might want to price products in your own currency instead.

Look for Niches All Over Again.

When you’re trying to sell things to international customers, you need to make sure that there is a market in each country. Something that is very useful and in-demand in your country might just cause confusion abroad — or, likewise, something that’s only moderately popular where you are might be seen as revolutionary.

If you’re not sure, you could talk to a few local businesspeople about how they think your product would be perceived, and they may be able to suggest a suitable target market for you. As always, research is key.

Produce Internationally, Supply Internationally.

If you’re going to start exporting, you might want to consider importing as well. If you buy in bulk, you can generally get things far cheaper from developing countries, especially the ‘Asian Tiger’ countries like China, Taiwan, Indonesia and South Korea. Give it a try — you could be delighted to find that they can make your product for a fraction of what it costs you, and all you have to do is a little quality control.

I understand that this approach is particularly useful for clothing products, which are labour-intensive yet can be produced cheaply and well by these countries. Note that you’re unlikely to be exploiting anyone — the country you’re importing from simply has a lower cost of living. To be extra sure, shy away from offers of having things made in developing countries or dictatorships.
Read the rest of this entry »

November 2005. Winter is just around the corner here in Western Michigan. The leaves are literally raining off the trees. Just this morning at breakfast as I looked into the woods and I could see a steady stream of golden brown, red and yellow leaves heading towards the earth.

Last month I talked about keeping your quality improvement changes in place—using a manual that you develop of SOP’s, standard operating procedures. By the way, if you missed that issue, you can find it on my website, and several earlier ones too.

This month I want to address starting a quality improvement project. That is, how do you decide what project to work on? What issue or process is causing the most waste, is doing the most harm, is most affecting the bottom line? Maybe you are a leader at your site and you have an idea of what is generally causing problems. For instance, you may think that patients with catheters are getting a lot of infections. Perhaps, checking patients in at your site is taking too long and creating a bottleneck. Maybe patients are complaining about having to wait too long at check in at a doctor’s office. It could be that certain departments are running short of supplies too often. There are many other possibilities. The probability is that unless you are directly involved in the contentious process, you probably are not aware of what the exact problems are and are not aware of possible solutions.

This leads us to the conclusion that in order to discover the many problems facing every organization, especially in terms of wasted effort, time and money, there has to be in place a mechanism for the problems to surface to the leaders from the front lines of the organization. There has to be a way for the leaders to hear about the problems from those who are directly involved. For instance, does anyone in your organization know what ideas the cleaning staff has for making the organization better? When I say that there has to be a way for the ideas to surface, I don’t mean that the only ones with a voice should be nursing staff and other professionals. Rather, as in the Baldrige Improvement Plans, the entire staff is involved in quality improvement.

I know of a few hospitals where the leadership—president, CFO, COO, etc.—go out several mornings every week to talk to staff at all levels and patients to see how things could be better and to get some positive feedback about what things are going well. Perhaps at your site you want to start something like this. As time goes by and as suggestions are implemented, staff will feel safer about making suggestions.

Leadership needs to make sure that staff feel safe about making suggestions, no matter what the method of suggesting changes is used. Perhaps you might want to use an anonymous survey for collecting initial suggestions. After some of the suggestions are acted upon, the staff will feel like the leaders really want good ideas and will feel safer making them known. Perhaps you might want to use a consultant in Lean Healthcare (many of these ideas I suggest come directly from Lean Healthcare) to teach the staff the principles and processes of Lean Healthcare and other tools as may seem fit. This approach will help a large organization start making many positive changes quickly, rather than using the idea of slowly spreading the means of change throughout an organization, as some prefer.
Read the rest of this entry »

The title of this article may sound a little strange. What did I mean by located and faced for prosperity?

I must warn that this is not a typical business article. It has nothing to do with marketing, sales, productivity or even the internet.

It is about a branch of Chinese Metaphysics called Feng Shui. Feng Shui, which literally means “Wind Water”, is an ancient meta physical science that studies how our surroundings can support us positively or negatively in our pursuit of our endeavors.

Business tycoons in Taiwan, Hong Kong and other parts of the world where there is a significant Chinese minority pay a lot of money to professional Feng Shui practitioners to help them get it right.

In this article I will show you how you too can apply Feng Shui to support your endeavors. Feng Shui is a very large subject with many systems and practices.

I will get you started with a very basic but effective Feng Shui formula called the “Eight Houses”. In this system, all of us have a Kua number which is derived from our date of birth and sex.

Click the link below to to find out what your Kua number.

http://www.henryfong.com/kua.htm

Depending on our Kua number we are further classified into one of two groups namely the East or West group. If your Kua number is 1,3,4 or 9 then you are a member of the East Group and if your Kua number is 2,6,7 or 8 then you belong to the West group.

For the East group, the favourable directions and sectors are North, South, East and South East while for the West group the directions and sectors are North West, South West, West and North East.
Read the rest of this entry »

People who work for and who belong to institutions have one thing in common: they all wear uniforms. Uniforms are dress codes, usually distinct in style, clothing and even color that can make the wearer easily identifiable not only to his peers but also to other people.

Take for example the military personnel who are all clad in fatigues, except for some who have their own distinctive brand of clothing like those in the navy or other branches of the military. But no matter what, most of them can be identified through the use of fatigue or what they call seven colors.

Then there are those who belong to the medical profession who generally wear white not only for their laboratory coats but for their daily hospital wear. Doctors and nurses all wear white but nurses are given more freedom in wearing other colors.

Even students of particular schools are required to wear uniforms to make them identifiable as students of a certain school. So why do people generally wear uniforms?

People are required to wear uniforms because it is a sign of conformity or being one within a certain group. Conformity means the person who wears the uniform is a bona fide member of such group and he abides by the rules and regulations of the group.

Wearing uniforms have psychological effects among the wearers and the people around them. Civilians who see military personnel in their uniforms are most often awed by the authority projected by the uniform. Doctors earn respect when people see them wearing their white laboratory coats because such uniform is identified with saving lives.
Read the rest of this entry »