Electronic Village: Business

Showing posts with label Business. Show all posts

January 3, 2014

Village Tip: 10 Ways to Screw Up Your Networking Efforts

Our blog will continue to provide information that is useful to entrepreneurs and small business owners. Frankly, we hope that these 'Village Tips' are useful to many of you! I have shared tips on 'The Art of Networking' in the past. In fact, I recently shared 15 ideas on improving your networking results.

This time I thought that it would be worthwhile to point out ten things that many of us do to the detriment of our networking efforts. Here are 10 things you should *NOT DO* if you want to make your networking work!

Do not abuse your network. Word of mouth will kill you.
Do not abuse your contacts. Always honor their right to privacy.
Do not burden your network with your problems, but, be willing to listen to advice when you ask for it.
Do not develop a reputation for calling *only* when you need a favor.
Do not ever thing anything can replace real competence.
Do not expect anyone to work harder for you than you are willing to work for yourself.
Do not expect your network to find you a job.
Do not give a referral without first calling ahead to alert your contact.
Do not offer negative feedback callously.
Do not talk excessively about yourself. Learn how to get your network to do this for you!

These are some ideas on how you can maximize your positive results from networking. Have you learned the 'hard way' about any of these ten networking errors in the past? Do you have other suggestions that we may have missed?

I will continue to share these Village Tips on a semi-regular basis!

September 7, 2009

Our Focus is Out of Balance: And the Result is Weighing Us Down

by Melvin J. Gravely, Ph.D.
The Diverse Business Dialogue

On the scale of what we have and what we don't have, what we don't have seems to weigh more heavily. Whether it's money or time to go to college or number of bedrooms in the house or opportunities to do business or financing to get a business going, the list of those things lacking just seems longer.

OK, I realize it's human nature but it is so unproductive and I'm hearing it more as it relates to minortity business development. There are not enough educational opportunities, access to decision makers, nor enough "qualified" minority firms.

My new favorite questions are how many should there be and how many do you need? No one can answer the questions with anything other than, more! These two questions expose the reality, there is likely enough for you to succeed. There are enough qualified minority firms for you to increase your spending. There are enough entrepreneurial training programs for you to develop your skills. There is enough access to decision makers for you to grow your business. Shouldn't we lean more toward how we can and less on why we can't?

Read the rest of Dr. Gravely's article.

June 21, 2009

Maybe Supplier Diversity Isn't Worth It

Dr. Mel Gravely is the author of seven books including, Getting to the Next Level: Business, Race adn Our Common Goal to Be Competitive. He is also the managing director of the Institute for Entrepreneurial Thinking.

In this month's Diverse Business Dialogue, Dr. Gravely wonders if supplier diversity is worth enough to really commit to it.

I am still hearing comments I used to hear 20 years ago. "We can't find them", "What is the ROI", "We are not willing to sacrifice quality". On the surface it sounds like organizations are saying they don't know how-to. In most cases (of course not all) what organizations are really saying is they don't know how-to with the level of investment they are willing to make. It's like saying you don't know how-to eat healthy or you can't figure out how to lose weight. Are you kidding; with all of the health information available today? My problem with eating more healthy and losing a few pounds is not that I don't know how, I just keep looking for a way that requires less commitment. The reality is the route of less effort doesn't exist. To lose weight and be healthier I have to understand the basic "best practices", be intentional with my efforts to change my behavior and stay at it until I get the results I want.

Read the rest of the article here.

What are your views on supplier diversity? Is it worth it?