Using the KnowledgeBase

Using the KnowledgeBase presents business wisdom in a manner that allows you, the business owner to quickly review what they do and don’t know about a particular issue they are facing and then ‘drill down’ to solutions to your problem.

The solutions exist in either:
Course Categories – Campaigns, Skills Modules and Leaders Briefings present ever evolving distillations of the huge range of business advice confronting, and often overwhelming, the business operator.
DIY Business Problems Diagnostic – register for FREE and work through the Diagnostics – this will assist you whether you know what the problem is or not.

Layers of Wisdom

Not all management wisdom will have the same impact on your business.  

And some wisdom is best understood and implemented before other wisdom is used extensively.

We envisage these layers as a pyramid.

First, Where To

At the very top is the knowledge that contributes to developing a sense of the direction that the business is to take.  This is classically the goals of the business.  There seems no real point in running a business if you don’t know where you want to take it.  There is no guiding sense of “where to” to let you make sensible decisions about alternative management paths.

For this reason, most of our Menus (our suggested sequence of steps to address an issue) always start with a Goal Setting step so that all the work to follow in the process is focused on taking the business in the agreed direction.

Then Optimise

The second layer in our pyramid is to ‘tune’ or optimise what you already have operating.  By optimisation, we mean determining how best to reach the goals defining the business’ preferred direction.

We have some standard optimising tools grouped under the ‘optimisation’ heading including:

• Time Management Tool
• SM2.0 80/20 Sales Growth; Double Sales, Triple Profits – Skills Module
• Find the Hidden Dangers of Multitasking
• Theory of Constraints (TOC) – Skills Module

Once again, we argue that there is little point in implementing management systems until what you already have is operating as efficiently as possible.

Then Cover the Essentials

Once these two steps are done, you can start to implement improvements and systems drawn from the various essentials required to run any business including such things as:

• HR.
• Accounting and financial planning.
• Sales & Marketing.
• The specialised industry skills necessary in your business (e.g. plumbing, tax accounting, clothing retail etc).

As a smaller business operator, and particularly if you own the business, you need to have some understanding of every one of these specialisations – because no one else is likely to know and care as much about your business as you!

Finally, the techniques

These are specific actions and topics within the essential areas of your business you must cover.

For example, if you are improving your HR area, you might use various techniques to;

• apply a bonus strategy
• recruit better staff
• motivate staff

In 12Faces, you will tend to access these techniques via the KnowledgeBase and searching for the topic or using a 12Faces Menu to draw you to the information you need.

 Controlling the Flow

 Sending you information by way of a book is simple.  You start at the start and read till the end.

It’s also very inefficient.

Often you are reading stuff you already know so you have to waste a lot of precious time to sieve a lot of “chaff” to get to the required “wheat”.

12Faces wants to point you quickly and efficiently at the information you need.

This is a little more complex than you might think.

You are probably familiar with the matrix:

12Faces has three main goals.

First, when you “know what you don’t know“ it will help you drill down to the answers to your questions.

Second, when you “don’t know what you don’t know“, it will present a menu of things you can do that are designed to show you some of the hidden issues that, when addressed, will make your business operate more effectively.

Third, we know that there is plenty of business wisdom available but it is no good at all if you don’t implement whatever wisdom you feel is relevant.  So our mission goes beyond just showing you what can be done.  We want to also show you how to actually do whatever you find valuable.

We started out with the goal to distill out the “nuggets” of information that a time-poor business operator needed asap.

Go to the Diagnostics Menu: DIY Business Problems Diagnostic – Free Registration

Information sliced and diced

So you never have to read the same information twice, we capture information as Tools, Appetisers, Sauces or Recipes.  Just like cooking, these are the basic elements of (in our case) knowledge. They are linked to from all over 12Faces . So, if you are reading one thing and come across a reference to something you don’t know about, you can click on the link and it gets parked in a new browser tab where it stays till you get to read it.  If you already know that information, you can safely ignore that link.  This means no more repetition in your reading!

Because there will be knowledge that you should be aware of but aren’t yet, (the “don’t know what you don’t know group”), we steer you towards what else you might need via Menus, “Belts” and Industries.  

The break up of management knowledge we have developed to speed up your access is:

• Belts are our indication of how advanced the topic content is; Yellow, Blue or Black Belt.
• Industries are the various types of industry like services, manufacturing and professions.
• If you already know what you want, try the Search function in the top right-hand corner on every page.

It doesn’t matter too much where you start the search process 12Faces will direct you to a solution.

More of the same

Our mission is to alert you to your alternatives so our information is heavily summarised.  Inevitably there will be topics that you would like more detail about.

At the end of each article, we suggest further web, video and reading resources that we have reviewed to efficiently direct you to useful resources.

You can read more about our approach at 12Faces Leads Sustainable Business Success