"It's who you know, not what you know" might be an age-old business cliché, but it still bears an element of truth. Business success is often linked to your ability to build meaningful relationships with your clients, prospects and contacts ...
While it's certainly preferable to the alternative, an economic recovery can create its own set of challenges for businesses ...
Businesses must become "Asia-literate" or miss the growth opportunities of the Asian century, according to the Australian government ...
Business plans are a dying breed. That's the claim of some advisors who argue that the speed of modern innovation and markets makes planning and preparation too slow ...
No business can survive without winning clients, yet pitching for business and trying to close sales is something that many businesspeople find uncomfortable, frustrating and time-consuming. Nonetheless, it doesn't matter how impressive the product or service you're offering is - if you don't have a good system in place for generating leads and converting them into sales, your business will not prosper ...
Like being too rich, it's impossible to be too successful, right? Curiously enough, the only thing more threatening to a business's continued existence than not doing well is it doing too well, something that's evident from a quick perusal of ASIC figures ...
Business owners tend to go to two extremes when it comes to business plans. Either they throw their business plan in a bottom drawer and largely forget about it once it's served its purpose of impressing bank managers and / or potential investors, or they turn it into a holy text and convince themselves that deviating from it in any way will guarantee instant ruination ...
Untapped markets are the Holy Grail for businesses, promising a glorious future of exponential growth and enormous profits created through attracting new customers or better servicing the needs of existing ones ...
Despite all the lip service paid to innovation by corporate leaders and the worship showered upon 'ideas men' such as Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, the harsh reality is that most people and organisations simply aren't innovative ...
While it's often tempting to succumb to Pollyannaish optimism when listing goals in a business plan, nominating improbable business milestones is likely to create problems down the track, especially if investors expect you to meet those wildly ambitious targets ...