Hiring Staff: When and Who
Learn about hiring staff, the decision about when to hire your next member of staff and what positions to consider first. This article is aimed, primarily, at owners hiring their first few staff members. But additionally, it suggests a thought process and habits that will be useful even when your small business becomes larger. Yellow Belt […]
Solo & Micro Business Growth Resources
Welcome to our Solopreneur & Micro Business Resources Catalogue (1 to 4 Staff). This is a collection of our resources that are relevant to growing your Solo or Micro Business in a Sustainable fashion with minimal stress For us, a sustainable business has acceptable: Rewards for the leader (salary, benefits and profit) Stress levels (cash […]
C3.0 Introducing Grow your Business in 365 Days Course
The third of our signature 12Faces courses is a Growth Strategy Over One Year. This course builds on the rapid optimisation carried out during the course C2.0 Optimise Your Business Enterprise in 100 Days (Optimise100). This Growth Strategy is designed to work with the various types of enterprise we service: For-profit, Public Sector and NFP. Each of these enterprises […]
How to Prioritise Business Plans
When you are planning the next steps for your business improvement, there are usually several changes that you could choose from. You believe all these steps will improve your business on your path to Sustainable Business Success. The problem is, it can be very confusing to decide which, of the many things that you could potentially do, is actually the next best step to do. This article provides a method for you to work out which is the best next step. Yellow Belt
How to use Time Management Skills Tools
There is one thing that every business person will tell you they are short of. That is TIME! Time Management Skills are a way to drive a wedge into, and free up, more time. So much so that you will, rather bizarrely, find yourself with nothing to do from time to time. Part one is Yellow […]
How Kanban Improves Work Flow
Kanbans are a tool for structuring how work flows into the work-in-progress queues so that workers do not get overloaded and can use their time most effectively. Kanbans, and variations on them, are widely used in software projects (e.g. Scrum and Agile) and manufacturing (e.g. Lean and Six Sigma). Blue Belt
How the Plan/Do/Check/Act (PDCA) Cycle Builds Important Routines
The business world is full of uncertainty. Many managers cross their fingers, build the planned addition to their business in its entirety, or their start-up, then launch it and pray. The most common outcome from this approach is – failure or, at best, mediocre success. Starting with the auto industry and then moving to the start-up industry, smart managers are dramatically reducing their risk by doing a series of experiments that let them “fail fast” and cheaply if their idea does not have legs. This approach substantially speeds up the migration to a profitable new avenue for the business. Learn the process of the PDCA Cycle This is a Yellow Belt (Introductory) article.
Manage Workflow and the Local Optima Problem
It is a very widely held belief in managing workflow for business that each station in a production line should be working as hard as it can in order to maximise its efficiency. This might be a car assembly line or an accountant’s office processing tax returns using several different stages in the accounting process. […]
Business Success With Sprints
Speeding Up Success Business success is about innovating and reducing problems as quickly as possible. Traditionally, this has just been a journey with no clear end and no intermediate points where you check progress and reconfirm the direction is still correct. The software industry found this approach led to frequent delays and over-budget problems. They […]
LB3: Quick Goal Setting for Time Poor
Goals for your business are critical, otherwise, how do you know where you are heading? But, if you are not used to setting goals for your business, the first few times can be rather overwhelming. There is a lot of advice on what they should look like. The range of choice in targets and directions can be so overwhelming that you just never get started! This article walks you through a very simple way to get started with goal setting that will see 3 year, 1 year and quarterly goals set in under 1 hour!. Yellow Belt