The Thriving Small Business

What Are Critical Success Factors?

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Whether you are managing a restaurant, boutique or insurance agency, it is important to know that you are focusing on those things that help the organization achieve its mission.

Anyone who manages internal processes understands how challenging it can be to balance daily responsibilities with monitoring how well the organization is performing. Read the Full Article →

7 Tips for Your Benchmarking Efforts

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Learning from others is how we all improve.

Organizations use benchmarking to compare themselves to others and learn.

Benchmarking is the process of going outside an organization to look at how high performers are doing things in other industries.  The concept is to identify and learn from best practices.

Organizations use benchmarking as part of their Quality Management System in an effort to gain insight into ways to improve what they do. Read the Full Article →

Cash Handling Policy Example

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Any organization that works with cash should have clearly defined cash handling policies and procedures to help protect that money. Use this example cash handling policy to ensure your cash is safeguarded.

The fact is, cash is simply too tempting for many people – particularly people with a financial need.

And, it is management’s responsibility to ensure an organization safeguards its cash assets. Read the Full Article →

10 Ways to Protect Your Organization from Employee Fraud

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Employee fraud costs businesses billions of dollars every year.

According to a 2008 report by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE), 994 billion dollars is lost every year to employee fraud.

This equates to businesses losing a staggering 2.7 billion dollars every day!

ACFE defines occupational fraud as:  “the use of one’s occupation for personal enrichment through the deliberate misuse or misapplication of the organization’s resources or assets.”

“Fraud is now so common that its occurrence is no longer remarkable, only its scale. Read the Full Article →

7 Keys to a High Performance Team

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Team success is crucial for organizations that use groups of people (teams) to accomplish business goals.

There are many dynamics when working with groups of people.

This is because we are all different, and when you get more than one person in a room, you have the potential for conflict. Read the Full Article →

3 Reasons You Need to Manage Employee Performance

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Having a strategy for business growth is imperative to success.

And, creating SMART business goals are the best way to achieve those objectives.

However, goals and objectives are only as effective as the people who have responsibility for completing them.

Managing employee performance is how work gets done and goals are accomplished.  Read the Full Article →

7 Steps to Creating a Customer Service Strategy

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Effective managers help employees understand the importance of the customer experience. And, a customer service strategy can help create a service culture.

Organizations should incorporate customer service into their business goals.  As well, those strategies should be incorporated into employee goals to ensure the organization reaches their customer service objectives.

Employees only perform at the level they are managed and it takes great leadership to help employees understand the importance of the customer experience.   Read the Full Article →

4 Ways to Keep Focused on Your Goals

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I don’t know about you but I am in a constant battle with trying to get the day to day tasks accomplished and accomplishing my goals for the year!

Anyone who manages a business understands the challenges of keeping the vision, strategy and business goals moving forward.

The day-to-day management issues associated with people, processes, facilities, equipment, etc. Read the Full Article →

5 Forms of Coaching Employees

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Coaches can have a positive affect on the development of employees.

Many organizations encourage their leadership team to coach employees in performance,  skill development and career planning.

We all come from different backgrounds and have differing frames of references.

Some people are taught professionalism growing up and others have never been exposed to proper business protocol or etiquette. Read the Full Article →

What is a Vision Statement?

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A business should be able to articulate what it is trying to achieve and the basic purpose of its existence.

Successful organizations understand the importance of investing the time to define its vision, mission and values. This simple step helps to provide long-term direction for employees.

This philosophy supersedes the notion that organizations simply exist to make a profit and focuses on identifying the customers that will be served and investing in a long-term approach to serving that customer base. Read the Full Article →

9 Areas Your Organization Should be Auditing

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More and more organizations are using an internal auditing process to identify improvement opportunities.

Internal auditing is an independent, objective assurance and consulting activity designed to add value and improve an organization’s operations.

Businesses use policies and procedures to maximize efficiency and create consistent practices. However, policies and procedures are only as effective as an organization’s ability to enforce them. Read the Full Article →

Its About The Process – Not The People

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Organizations are responsible for creating systems and infrastructures that support employee performance.

A speaker at an IHI Conference once said:

“every system is perfectly designed to achieve exactly the results it gets”.

This is so simple – yet so true.

Good employees, who are forced to work with bad internal systems, often fail. Read the Full Article →