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Showing posts from June, 2015

5 Great Tips For Visiting Trade Shows

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I am pleased to welcome back Janet Torley of Events forBusiness . Janet was with us a few months ago sharing her top tips on networking. Today she is drawing on her experience and an event organiser to shed light on how to get the most from visiting trade shows or business exhibitions.Watch the video or keep reading.   As well as the tip in this blog you may find the following books useful. If you are interested in buying The Beermat Entreprenaur by Mike Southon take a look at my blogpost based on his tips for the perfect Elevator Pitch .            Be Prepared First up is really an obvious tip but one that always seems to be forgotten by at least a handful of visitors to every trade show. Be prepared. If you have the opportunity check who the exhibitors are and try and find out a little about each of them. Whether you are looking for suppliers or potential customers you may prefer to target those who are geographically close to you so check out where each busin

5 Great Tips To Grow Your Business

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Today I have invited Duncan Tannahill to share his 5TopTips on Business Management techniques to help grow and develop your business. You can either watch the video or skip ahead and read the post. When it comes to helping your business grow and develop there are a number of things that you should be addressing. Have a plan You must plan and set out clear goals for what you want to achieve and when you want to achieve the goals. Failing to plan is planning to fail. Goals need to be specific, measurable, achievable, and relevant to your business. Also set a timeframe for achieving those goals, if you do not you run the risk of putting off taking action until tomorrow and ultimately failing to achieve your goal. Avoid the Time-Trap You cannot manage time but you can manage how you use time. Time is the most important resource in your business, perhaps even more important than money.  Tasks you undertake have two dimensions, namely, importance and urgency. The

5 Great Tips To Develop A Top Business Team

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If your business is to thrive you need to put a good team at the heart of it. Unfortunately that is easier said than done, especially if you are in the early stages of developing your business when you have a hundred and one things that need to be done by yesterday. The truth is that the sooner you have that top team in place the more time you will have to work on the strategic aspects of your business,. In other words time to work on your business rather than in it. Today’s blog is based on Duncan Tannahill’s 5TopTips of How To Develop A Top Team, which you can watch just below or you can read on. Duncan Tannahill is Managing Director of The Tannahill Partnership , a company that delivers business coaching to SME businesses to enable them to gain real competitive advantage. Here are his five top tips on how to motivate and develop a top team. The Right People Start by recruiting the right people. It may seem obvious but if you get this wrong you will end up frustrated

5 Great Tips To Write The Best CV

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Usually my blog and 5TopTips videos are intended to help businesses however there are exceptions and this post is one of them. The subject of this post is How to write a CV or Curriculum Vitae, so if you need help with CV Writing read on or watch the video. Our expert on writing CVs is Certified Professional CV Writer Magda Tomaszewska from  CV-World  in Stirling so without further ado here are Magda’s 5TopTips. First Impressions Count Make sure you make the most of the headline in your curriculum Vitae. Use it to brand yourself and to convey very specific information about the value you can offer. You are crushing it if a business owner or HR manager will invite you for an interview just after seeing the start of your CV. Do not let it be a wasted opportunity, make that headline count. Does it read well Keep your writing simple, concise and to the point. Avoid cramming in too much information in any one section because the important detail will disappear

5 Great Tips For Business Networking

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Today I have invited professional coach and trainer, Jill Simpson, from DEVA Training in Kilmarnock, to share her 5TopTips on business networking. Watch the video or keep reading for Jill's insight into how to make networking more enjoyable and effective.  If you are a networking newbie and not a natural extrovert then the prospect of walking into a room full of strangers is likely to be a daunting and intimidating prospect. But like most new experiences, once you get started you will probably relax and enjoy yourself. Just forcing yourself to do it is the major issue. To effectively get over that barrier it helps to be prepared so keep reading and you should pick up enough to not only enjoy networking but also make it effective for your business. For more networking tips check out my post featuring Janet Torley from Events for Business. Looking for books on business networking? These Amazon links may help, otherwise keep reading.               No one goes ne

How To Increase Your Profit

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Today’s post is based on a recent presentation by Duncan Tannahill Managing Director of the Tannahill Partnership and former CEO of Glasgow Chamber of Commerce. You can watch an abridged version of the presentation in the video below or keep reading. ProfitBuilder Very often businesses give away profit and opportunity without necessarily being aware of it. If they systemised their business their teams could run the business more effectively and generate larger profits. To achieve this Duncan Tannahill uses a model called ProfitBuilder that looks at Leads , your Conversion Rate , number of Sales , the Average Sale Value , and your Margin . When you multiply all of these separate factors you arrive at your Gross Profit, as you can see in Duncan's graphic below . Now the left hand column is a bit like looking at equations in a maths class so in the right hand column we'll put in some numbers to make it look real. As you can see we have 2000