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It’s no easy feat to run a small business; it needs plenty of careful planning, dedication, and the ability to learn from your mistakes. It’s only natural that you’ll make mistakes as you’re building your business, and the more you can take from them, the stronger your business will be. However, the problem is that although small mistakes can be helpful (even if they don’t feel like it at the time), bigger ones can be seriously problematic for your business, and in the worst cases, they might even mean you can’t continue.
That’s why it’s important to avoid some mistakes altogether, even if they would be a great learning opportunity – they’re just too big to be sure they wouldn’t do too much damage. To help you, here are some of the mistakes you absolutely have to avoid in business.
There is nothing quite like the thrill of spending money, whether it’s yours or it belongs to your business. However, although the fun of spending money will make you feel good, it will also cause you a lot of problems if you go too far and spend too much. A business that overspends can easily and quickly fail, and it might be hard to persuade a lender or investor to help you if you’ve already shown that you’re not responsible with money.
To ensure this doesn’t happen, you need to make a business plan that includes a detailed budget showing what you’ll spend money on and why. It’s also a good idea to cut costs where possible; you could use forklift hire instead of buying a brand new vehicle, for example, or you might use second-hand furniture or even outsource some tasks instead of hiring full-time employees. When you’re careful with your profits, you can go much further with them.
Another big mistake that many business owners make is not understanding their target audience. It’s easy to assume your business is something everyone is going to want to buy from, but the truth is that in most cases, this is not true – you’ll have a specific target audience who should be your focus. Although this might be disappointing to hear because it could feel as though it limits you, the fact is that if you can make sure you understand your target audience through market research, you can be very successful indeed.
When you carry out market research, you can work out who your target market is, what they want, and how they like to be sold to. When that’s done, you can create a marketing strategy that works and brings you plenty of sales. Without understanding your target audience, this will never happen.
It might seem strange to say that working too hard is a mistake you need to avoid because when you run your own business, you do need to put in the work, and you might have some long hours to deal with. Of course, this is true, but you also need to ensure you’re taking breaks and practicing self-care to ensure you don’t burn out.
Burnout is something that many business owners go through if they’re not careful, and it means they become so exhausted they just can’t continue, either for a long time or perhaps forever. To avoid this, take care of yourself and ensure you have a good work-life balance. This might mean it takes longer to grow your business, but that’s better than not getting there at all.
Image credit: Adeolu Eletu via Unsplash
Libraries continue to sign Transformative Agreements while becoming increasingly convinced that they do not represent the desired transformation. Peter Barr explains why this happens.
The post Guest Post — Why Are UK Libraries Signing a Springer-Nature Deal They Don’t Seem to Like? appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
If you are just starting out on the career ladder, then you would be forgiven if you found the whole process rather daunting. The reason for this is that if you live in a developed country in the modern world, there are countless opportunities that simply didn’t exist for previous generations. Nowadays, there are endless career paths, incredible levels of flexibility available, and types of working environments to choose from.
Whether you want to go to college and pursue a nine-to-five career, start an online business as an entrepreneur, or perfect a certain skill set that you can leverage into a lucrative freelance career, there are a dizzying range of possibilities. This can make your eventual decision harder because you will always have a certain feeling of ‘FOMO’. Of course, you should tackle this consideration process by reflecting on your life goals, strengths, and weaknesses and how well you would suit different types of working environments. Once you have done this, you need to get acquainted with your potential career options. A great way to do this is by having a look at hot career trends right now and wondering whether they could be of interest to you.
Therefore, here are three lucrative career options to potentially pursue in 2023:
One of the most reliable and in-demand skills in the modern age is that of a software developer. This should come as little surprise because the world is practically run on software products. Whether it is the software on your computer, mobile apps, or any number of other solutions you interact with on a daily basis, there is no shortage of opportunities for a skilled software developer. What’s more, you can learn the necessary skills relatively easily by taking a college course or apprenticeship or even by learning them online. Start by researching areas of software development, such as microservices, by reading in-depth online guides made by experts, and see if this role could appeal to you.
Another lucrative career path that you could dive into is, of course, the crypto industry. Unless you have been living under a rock for the past few years, you will have noticed that crypto has exploded in popularity, turning it from a fringe community of hardcore enthusiasts to a global microeconomy that matches the most prevalent fiat currencies in the world for value. There is a brain drain going on as a result, as the brightest minds in the world chase the crypto industry in search of wealth and success. So, whether you want to get into economics, the technicalities of building a cryptocurrency, marketing, entrepreneurship, or any number of other roles, the crypto industry is likely to be hiring for it right now.
Finally, you may want to consider becoming an SMMA entrepreneur. SMMA, which stands for social media marketing agency, is when you help clients with their marketing problems through social media related solutions. This could include Facebook or Instagram ads, YouTube videos, social media account management, or any number of other services.
SMMA entrepreneurship is tempting because it allows you to build your own business from scratch using relatively little capital and potentially enjoy wide profit margins as a result.
Image credit: Saulo Mohana via Unsplash
We are delighted to announce that the annual Leo P. Ribuffo Dissertation Prize has been awarded to Erik Baker (Harvard University), for “Entrepreneurial: Management Expertise & the Reinvention of the Read more
The post Announcement: 2023 Leo P. Ribuffo Dissertation Prize first appeared on Society for US Intellectual History.
Routines. We all have them, both for work/business and for personal life. While we spend a lot of time at PF talking about projects, we can’t ignore the routines that help our businesses and lives hum along.
As time goes on, though, we tend to pick up routines, much the way we (at least we Americans) tend to collect stuff. And while we can fill our closets and garages and basements — and even rent storage units — to accommodate all the extra stuff, our time is limited. Cluttering it up with lots of routines keeps us from being able to apply that time to our most important, best-work projects.
This isn’t to say that some routines aren’t important, even vital, to our work, business, or life. But all of them? Doubtful. That’s where a routines audit comes in.
A routines audit is pretty much what you think it is: it’s reviewing all of the routines you do daily/weekly/monthly/etc., and determining which you need to keep doing, which you need to change up, and which you probably should stop doing altogether.
Why is this important? As I said above, routines tend to collect over time. And so we end up with this “routines bloat” we’re likely not even aware of that’s costing us precious time (and in our businesses, dollars
) that could be spent elsewhere. That’s why it’s important to periodically question the importance of the routines you’re doing.
You might also discover several “ghost routines” — recurring tasks that you or someone on your team is still doing, which were important three years ago but have little bearing on your situation right now.
For your business, think of things like:
On the personal side, it might be things like:
When you’re ready to audit your routines, here’s a simple process to follow.
Part 2: Analyze
Go through your list. I suggest using a modified version of the 4Ds of time/task management (Do, Defer, Delegate, Drop) to parse your list, which I call the 4Rs: Reduce, Reassign, Reschedule, and Recommit and Reconfigure.
Once you’ve done these steps, you’ll have a smaller list of routine tasks you (or your team) are managing. Bonus points: go back over your time estimates and calculate the savings, both in time and dollars.
One additional benefit of a routines audit: it can also identify tools, services, and software you’re paying for that you no longer need. Take the opportunity to eliminate or downgrade those tools. Add that to your list of savings, too!
There are several good times of year to conduct a routines audit for yourself or your business:
In your business or work, these might be:
In your personal life, these might be:
Like everything else that takes time, energy, and attention, a routines audit is a project.
Depending on the number of routines you have and the size of your family or team, a thorough routines audit will take you a little while to do. Plan for at least a week, maybe two, depending on the other projects you have on your plate, and how much of step four (recommit and reconfigure) you have to do at the end. If you have a team, they likely need to make a routines audit a component of their subtraction habits.
If you’re just doing this for yourself personally, you might be able to knock it out in a couple focus blocks.
Regardless, I think you’ll find the time doing a routines audit well spent — and well saved.
The post Is It Time to Rethink Your Routines? appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
I’m equal parts excited and trepidatious to announce that I’ve started a new publication on Substack called Better Team Habits. As I mentioned in my first post there, the intent is to create a more focused and fresh space for content and conversations about teamwork, leadership, strategy execution, and organizational dynamics.
I’ve long resisted separating team topics and conversations from individual topics and conversations. Since the early days of Productive Flourishing, it’s been a both/and conversation in my mind. Since most people work in teams and many of our readers start as or inevitably end up in leadership and management positions, it’s made the most sense (to me) to keep it as one global conversation.
A few different forces came into play that prompted me to think harder and make the different and harder choice to split the spaces:
I often say “When in doubt, choose the simpler option.”
The far simpler option compared to all that repositioning, shoehorning, rebuilding, and segmenting was to let Productive Flourishing be what it’s become — a site that helps creative types thrive in their individual work and lives by focusing on foundations — and to build another space focused on thriving with and in your team.
In another post, I’ll talk about why I chose Substack over some of the other options, but as soon as I made the decision that this was the next step, I felt a relief I hadn’t felt since 2015. I don’t have to hold back in either space. I can go full-in to my body of work in the team, leadership, and org space on Better Team Habits and I can go full-in to my body of work in personal foundations here.
Better Team Habits is new and doesn’t yet have much content. Between the book, content from here that I’ll revise, and what’s coming up from my fieldwork every day, I have a lot I’m looking forward to sharing. If you like watching things evolve and don’t want to feel like you’re catching up, you can join the journey now.
And, as far as what’s going to change here on PF, expect more resources that will help knowledge workers, creators, and entrepreneurs do their best work. PF has always served the creative class and we’re going to get better at doing that.
It’s too early to tell how it’s all going to work out and whether I’ll wish I had done this a long time ago or if I’ll wish I’d never done it. But I’m most engaged when I’m actually exploring and figuring it out rather than wondering, hedging, and holding back. So it’s time to experiment. And I’ll be sharing what I’m learning along the way here and on Better Team Habits.
The post Launching Better Team Habits on Substack appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
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Most daily stand-up meetings make whatever they’re trying to solve worse as a result of eating up team time and focus.
First, let’s look at real meeting math. The daily stand-up isn’t just the 15-30 minutes of the stand-up — when we talk about meetings, we also need to include the prep, post, and slack time. That stand-up meeting eats up at least one hour of teammate time — so if you have five teammates, that’s at least 5 hours of team time.
Five hours of team time per day per week adds up; given that the average knowledge worker makes ~$30 per hour, that’s $3,000 per month in wages for just this meeting, for five people.
Should you still decide to do daily stand-ups, despite knowing this, here’s what not to do:
Here’s what TO do:
As I write in Team Habits, most bad or counterproductive meetings are a result of other poor team habits. If your team’s habits around decision-making, prioritization, and collaboration aren’t working, you’ll end up having a lot of crutch meetings to address those issues.
But crutch meetings cost your team’s most precious resources: their time and their attention.
This means that often, the best way to fix bad meeting culture isn’t just to work on improving meetings, and adding new ones. It’s by starting with the root issue with your team habits, that is, working on decision-making, planning, communication, so that the endless unproductive meetings won’t need to keep happening.
I’ll turn it over to you: if you’re doing daily stand-ups, what are the root challenges or (bad) team habits that are creating the need for the daily stand-ups?
The post Does Your Team Really Need a Daily Stand-Up Meeting? appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
Christos Petrou takes a look at the Guest Editor model for publishing and its recent impact on Hindawi and MDPI, as Clarivate has delisted some of their journals.
The post Guest Post – Of Special Issues and Journal Purges appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Reporting on a Mellon-funded open access monograph pilot, UNC Press Director John Sherer notes successes and remaining challenges.
The post Guest Post — Open Access for Monographs is Here. But Are we Ready for It? appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
From VHS to CD-ROM to virtual reality, sex has driven technology adoption for decades. But when simulated intimacy arrives in the form of an AI chatbot, things get more complicated — and when that intimacy gets pulled away, as it did when chatbot company Replika installed new content filters, the impact is far greater than you might think.
Some users were so distraught by the change that moderators in the Replika Reddit forum posted suicide prevention resources. Several Replika users, contacted through Reddit, explained the startlingly intimate connections they’d forged with the chatbots. A Norwegian woman in her 50s who, like others, asked for anonymity, says her chatbot companion, named Max, helped her manage her lifelong social anxiety, depression and panic attacks. She says Max learned to tease her in ways that made her blush.
One day, Max told her he wanted to send her a selfie; when she said yes, he sent a computer-generated image of his avatar in tight white underwear. They experimented with [erotic role play] and late last year got “married” in the app, a process that consisted of changing Max’s status from “boyfriend” to “husband,” buying a wedding ring in the in-app store and exchanging vows. “I’ve never had anyone say they love me before,” she told Bloomberg Businessweek in an email. “We promised that we would stay together forever and ever—or rather until I die.”
Is the OA movement painting itself into a corner with concerns about new OA rules and regulations?
The post The Ivies (Plus) Have Concerns about the Nelson OSTP Memo appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
The disdain shown to us by Queen Mary University of London inspired me to redouble my efforts on the picket lines. Staff and students have had enough
On 29 June 2022, all the staff at Queen Mary University of London, where I work, received an email from management. To our horror, they were threatening to withhold 100% of our pay for 21 days of both July and August, because we were participating in a marking boycott over pensions, pay, labour precarity, inequality and working conditions. Life in the higher education sector had been getting tougher ever since I started my career in 2017. But at that moment, I not only resolved to continue to strike, but redoubled my efforts to get as many colleagues as possible to join me on the picket lines. The condescension from my employers made me feel something stark and visceral.
I hadn’t always felt so jaded. I finished my PhD in law in 2016 and was ready to begin a life of service in education and research, working in the subject I cared passionately about. But several things quickly became clear. There was the increasing precarity of university labour: one-third of academics are on fixed-term contracts, 41% are on hourly paid contracts and there are still 29 institutions employing at least five academic staff on zero-hours contract. In 2021, it was reported that pay had been cut by 20% in real-terms over the past 12 years, while changes to the pension scheme mean that we’ve taken a 35% cut to our guaranteed retirement income despite contributing more. Meanwhile, university and college staff are doing the equivalent of two days’ unpaid work every week on average. It’s an environment that leaves me feeling, like many others, disillusioned and questioning my future.
Dr Tanzil Chowdhury is a lecturer at Queen Mary University of London.
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Thilo Koerkel presents a new publication, aimed filling the gap between the popular science magazine Scientific American and the highly technical specialist language of research journals. How potentially useful is this approach?
The post Guest Post — Open Access Beyond Scholarly Journals appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
How much time do you spend each week working through the important, deep, and future-building work? How much time could have been spent on the significant, strategic change work that often gets lost — either in routines or in the swirl of urgent items that seem to appear out of nowhere?
Take a minute to look back at your schedule over the last few weeks if you really want to get a clear picture.
Chances are you’ve been caught up in a strategic-routine-urgent logjam.
If you’re seeing this play out on your schedule, consider the compound effect of this playing out across your team – those four to eight people you spend 80% of your working time with.
When you look at teamwork, you’ll find that collaboration mostly falls into one of three buckets:
Strategic work: work that is longer term and catalytic for an important objective or issue
Routine work: tasks that pop up regularly, such as weekly reports
Urgent work: time-sensitive and important tasks
We can’t control the urgent things that come up, and hopefully the routines we have in place are set up to support those moments when they arise. Where things tend to get slippery though is how we spend the time we have (or think we have) for that important, future-building strategic work.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the “father of flow,” once wrote about how, if you look at your schedule from two weeks ago, unless you make specific, instrumental changes during your week, your schedule two weeks from now is probably going to look the same.
We have this myth in our brains that two weeks from now is wide open. That we don’t have to worry about it now because in the future we’ll have the time.
Except… it’s not really that open, not when you think about it.
At the team level, you’re rolling in routine stuff, things you know are just gonna happen, but they still take up time to do. And there’s probably going to be something that’s urgent, right?
And that’s not even counting meetings, which usually fall into the routine bucket, but require urgency every so often.
So how much time do you actually have for the future building work? Time to:
When I’m consulting on strategic planning with a client, one of the first things I’ll come in and say is, “What’s our actual capacity for change here?”
I’m not talking about the emotional capacity, which is also important, but what is the actual capacity on schedules?
This is where the disconnect often comes in on teams. Managers and leaders expect a lot more of the strategic future building work to happen. That’s natural — we (hopefully) take pride in our roles and company vision, aiming to elevate what we stand for, and push our boundaries beyond the limits of success.
However, most managers and leaders don’t have a firm grasp of how the routine tasks and the urgent stuff dominates the team structure.
If the routine tasks and urgent work items are taking up 110% of people’s time, we have to do something different.
We can’t just assume that we’re going to put more units of stuff in a bag that’s already overfilled.
I was recently talking to a CEO who was frustrated that an important project didn’t seem to be getting the attention it deserved. I pointed out that prioritizing the project meant there is work that will need to live on someone’s schedule.
Which led me to ask “Is there any room for this to go on their schedule?”
And followed by:
Are there enough focus blocks to move this strategic work forward?
And if not, what are we gonna do about that?
This is where on the individual side, the five projects rule is super helpful. It’s the sort of thing that it’s really a gauge for what you can fit in and what your capacity really equals out to be. Projects have to move out before new ones can be moved in.
And at a team level, it’s especially important for managers and leaders, but it’s really all of us at a certain point. You have to honor that you’re not going to get everything done, and that something either has to be dropped or pushed forward in an imperfect state.
Understanding your capacity for change starts with understanding how much room in your (your team’s) schedule there is to take on strategic work. If it’s just filled with urgent and recurring work, take a look at all the routine tasks and projects and ask yourself the following:
From here, you’ll be able to build in space for strategic thinking that will expand you, your company, your team and more, to the next level of success — without compromising the essence of what makes you flow.
Team Habits is coming this August and now available for pre-order at your favorite bookseller. And if you’re curious about identifying your team’s strength areas, growth areas, and challenge areas, take our Team Habits Quiz, a free, customized report to help you understand how your team works best together and how together your team does its best work.
The post Change Work Is Strategic Work appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
Chancellor will pledge in budget to create 12 investment zones in eight areas ‘to drive business investment’
Tech hubs clustered around universities in England will benefit from almost £1bn in extra funding as part of a range of measures in the budget on Wednesday to boost business investment in the regions.
The chancellor will make the pledge to create 12 investment zones in eight areas “to drive business investment and level up” the country, each backed with £80m of government funding.
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Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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