Author name: Marco Soares

People arriving late for meetings, team members not doing the things that they say they’re going to do, sloppy work being consistently produced… What are you going to do about it? This week I wanted to explore some of the common challenges that a lot of business owners face. People not being fully prepared for […]

This week on “Mind Your Own Business”. Finding your sweet spot. I want to share a cool concept that I created to help my clients understand strategy more effectively and it’s called “the sweet spot”. It’s all about the effective allocation of your company’s resources in order to be able to create sustainable competitive advantage

This week on “Mind Your Own Business” the importance of pacing yourself when it comes to setting goals. It’s that time of year, where everybody is talking about the goals that they’ve set themselves, their New Year’s resolutions and I just wanted to share a concept with you that I think is really relevant to

This week, we’re talking Management Information or M.I. Now come on stay with me I will keep it top level and interesting, I promise It is really important that you have a specific M.I. pack that you’ve agreed with your finance team and it’s also really important that that M.I. pack is delivered to you

What goes up, keeps going up. This week on mind your own business I want to talk about increasing costs. At the moment it feels like an assault from every single direction. You’ve got wage costs going up which has been exacerbated by a recruitment shortage. You’ve got material costs going up and that’s been

This week we solve the mystery is the grass really greener on the other side? I had a conversation with the clients earlier in the week that felt that they weren’t achieving the goals that they wanted in their business and they felt that it was time for a change. This business owner was just

So here are a couple of questions for you to think about. Number one, do you have a proper process in place to deal with complaints? Do your team members understand it, and do you test them on it? Next up, do you have some sort of a system for recording your complaints and have you used that information to improve your training or your processes?

Complaints are really useful because it helps you do better business. So let’s get to the meat of the conversation. You need a proper framework for being able to deal with customer complaints in a way that helps the customer feel heard and that you are on top of whatever issue that they have. Here’s a really cool framework that one of my clients uses, and it’s worked really, really well for them, and I think it could work really well for you.

I want to talk about progression. You’ll have people in your company, the bright stars out there who are very ambitious and want to grow and want to develop and want to be able to earn more one day. The challenge with some of those people is that they are all preconditioned to think that the only type of progression is a vertical progression where you become a line manager. That is not obviously the case. There are other ways of being able to progress, and that is horizontal progression. Horizontal progression is all about expanding somebody’s area of responsibility, so that’s about giving them more responsibilities or more important responsibilities.

This week, poor internal hiring decisions. Great news, your business is doing really well, and as a result, you’ve got additional seats opening up on your bus. But don’t worry, you don’t need to go externally in hire, because you’ve got somebody internally that’s doing a great job in the seat that they’re in, and they would make a great fit for this role. So what you do is you bring them into the office, you give them a high five, you tell them they’ve been doing a brilliant job, and then you say to them, do you want this new job, but what the person’s really heard is, do you want some more money? and of course, they say, yes, then you bring them into that role.

As a small business, it’s unlikely that you have the resources and the skills and the capability to be able to deal with all of the different things that everybody wants, so what you need to understand as you grow your business is what type of customers do you really want to build your business on and therefore what kind of pies do they like to eat so this is a general value pie as you can see these are all of the different things that a customer might perceive as important in their decision-making process.