Business Blog KnowledgeBase: Category List

How to Grow Revenue

Revenue is the life blood of any business.  Learn how to increase revenue, it gets a lot of attention from 12Faces. Are you struggling to grow your business revenue? Are you hesitant to increase prices? Learn how to do this with knowledge rather than blindly increasing the prices. Know the estimated outcome prior to going ahead. There are four main levers you can pull to support and increase revenue.  12Faces has collected need-to-know materials on these main levers to get you started on growing revenue. Learning how to grow your revenue will lead you to Sustainable Business Success.

Methods to Improve Business Workflow

Every business needs workflow management.  Every business has a workflow, even services! Are you in a service industry? Do you think that workflows are only for businesses that sell products? Think again. Orders come in the front door and require processing to turn them into a finished product or service. The efficiency of this workflow is a major determinant of the sustainable success of your business. Having a documented workflow is an advantage when hiring new staff. Processes are in place to guide them as they understand their new job. 12Faces has assembled materials under this catalogue to help you understand the mechanics of improving workflow management. The resources will guide you along the path of an efficient workflow, watch your business productivity blossom.

How to Boost Leadership Skills

Many business leaders are technically skilled but are not as experienced with leading the staff in the business.  But, your leadership skills are essential.  You are the main leadership asset in your business.  It will not thrive without you.  There is a saying "the fish rots from the head".  This means if you are not a good leader, no one else will be as effective as they could be.  12Faces has collected materials, within this catalogue, that will will help you become a better leader.  In turn, you will experience the benefit of the Sustainable Business Success opportunity for your business.

How to Use Systems in Your Business

Good systems make running a business much easier.  The amount of work can be reduced and it can often be done by more junior staff following "the system".  Also, a good "system" can dramatically reduce mistakes because staff follow a well tested formula. Are you having problems with staff carrying out tasks in different ways, creating confusion? Are some tasks taking far too long, re-creating the wheel each time they are carried out? Start working through this catalogue. 12Faces has collected a wealth of knowledge for you to improve the flow of your business. This in turn will improve the profit and sustainability of your business. New staff members will slot in seamlessly as they follow the systems. Outcome - less stress for you and your staff.

How to Manage Staff and Other People

People as staff, managers and customers, are a vital asset for any business.  They also tend to be one of the most perplexing aspects of a business to manage. Are you having problems with staff motivation? Could you have better relationships with your suppliers? Do you have too many difficult customers?  12Faces has tools to improve your people management skills. Learn to manage the workload of you and your staff. Find out the dangers of multi-tasking. Improve the productivity of your staff, motivate them with incentives that are a win, win. Customers will love the organised flow within your organisation. People management will become a breeze for you. This is another step to your goal of building Sustainable Business Success.

How to Problem Solve and Use Decision Making Strategies & Skills

Business leaders need a 'toolkit' of skills to help with problem solving and decision making when there are many alternatives and unknowns.  Are you inundated with business problems? Drowning in demands on your time? Would you love someone to brainstorm these problems with? Learn about the 80/20 principle to make decisions. This strategy will assist you to prioritise the problems you are facing. Learn about the 5 Whys and 5 Hows.  Know which decisions are the vital few that sum up to the best use of your personal time. 12Faces provides you with those skills here.

Learn to Manage Your Business-Life, Time and Stress

Every business leader needs to learn how to manage time and stress. Are you time poor? Stressed that you can't complete your commitments? Is business life becoming a drag? You know that it can be better but can't find a way? Learn time management skills and turn your business life around. Do you dream of being in the situation where you have nothing to do? It is possible to go from time poor to having time to spend with family and friends. Not all work was created equal. Learn how to decipher what your work is and how it fits into 1 of 4 categories. Then apply the 80/20 principle to push the non-urgent tasks to the bottom of your list. Start immediately and be amazed at the difference in your work life. 12Faces gives you practical advice on all of this and more, based on experience.

Learn to Plan Your Business and Execute the Plan

Do you really need a business plan, you ask? Every business leader must take control of the design and implementation of the direction for their business. Don't have time to put one together? Have one but feel it is too hard to follow? Is your business fast growing or in troubled times? Are you thinking of selling? Are you ready to transition to retirement? Make it easier for your staff to make key decisions. Follow our online template to quickly build and implement your strategy - less than 1 hour! 12Faces offers valuable insight into both the creation and the execution.

When fixing business problems, 12Faces helps you drill-down to pin point the information you are looking for right now.  We do this via a series of menus that suggest solutions. Don't know what is causing the problem? Start on the Symptoms path. This path will help you clarify what the problem is that is causing the symptoms. Then access treatments for those problems. You know what the problem is but not sure how to fix it? Follow the Diagnostics path to clarify solutions for your business problems. The paths cover include the areas of Sales and Marketing, Production, Profit, Inventory, Cash flow, Time Management, Business Growth, Business Sustainability, Staffing, Suppliers, Business Finances, Productivity, Operating Costs, Planning, Brainstorming and many others.  

Many business owners what to grow their business but it's often not a straight forward job. Many small business owners are good in their professional arena but lack experience with the management theory and practice behind successfully growing a business. The Mission of 12Faces is your Sustainable Business Success. We have developed a process for making your business growth as straightforward as possible by reducing your learning curve and just letting you get on with business growth.

Not all business can grow. Some are in heavily constrained industries where growth means big, expensive, replication of infrastructure. Business growth is a walk before you run process as you move from Solopreneur though to a business of 25 staff or more. This section walks you though those business growth preparation issues.

Many businesses are failing! Up to 50% fail in the first year. Just like the first step in building a healthy person is to clear up any lingering problems, we want to stabilize a business before trying to grow it. The resources in this section cover our materials and processes for stabilizing a failing business and getting it ready for business growth.

Learn how to optimize business growth! Over time, boats left in the water build up a layer of barnacles. While doing little direct harm, they slow down how fast a boat can progress once it starts sailing. It is the same with your business. While you are fairly stationary, the poor and redundant work processes and system that have gown up over time may have an acceptable impact. But once you start growing, they will start to drag on your progress and make your growth slower, and more expensive, than it would be if the business barnacles were first removed. This collection of resources provides insights into common business barnacles and how to remove them. You are encouraged to optimize your business for growth before launching into a growth phase. You will save time and expense in the medium term; and get better results.

You can just launch into executing your growth phase but very likely you will quickly find yourself working on many fronts and your ambitions for growth will start to stall. But it doesn't have to be like that! High growth industries have developed methods to keep the business teams focused on the comparatively few things that are highest priority for progressing your business growth as fast as possible. The materials in this category introduce you to business growth best practice and will help you get down the growth path as fast, and painlessly, as possible.

Tracking business growth is important. Growing a business is a risky process! You can easily overextend your finances, outgrow your staff and introduce inefficiencies from dead ends you experiment with, then reject, along the way. Your steady, successful, business growth needs monitoring systems to reduce the risks from growth. This category of resources provides insights on how to reduce and monitor progress and risks when growing your business. Your business growth tracking and monitoring systems don't have to be complex. Less than a dozen statistics are needed to alert you to unfavourable trends in your growing business.

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