MONDAY MORNING BLUES: Overcoming the butterflies that spoil the start of the work week- By Victor Emmanuel (ACIA)

THE WORKPLACE AND YOU (17) - By @VicEmmaConsults

The worst part of the week for most employees is Monday morning.

Why? For a myriad of reasons which usually include; attending that senseless weekly meeting with that horrible boss  at the head of the table reeling out statistics that confirm your non performance, relating with those pretentious colleagues who more than everything else wish you would drop dead so they can take your desk, waiting in trepidation for those obnoxious customers who never seem to be satisfied with your service delivery, reviewing your actions last week to ensure you are still in the good books of management in order to keep your job....

Monday morning will always be a scary day for any paid staff who approaches his occupation as an appendage of his/her life. For God's sakes, you spend close 12 hours of your life in the office and you still think you can compartmentalize your emotions between happy time and sad time? Come on, you need to adapt! How?

Train your mind to become a detached observer-participant; imagine your boss as a clown entertaining you when he fumes and pants and drools as he tries to belittle your contirbutions, tag along with your colleagues in the chess game of office politicking and look out for when you will expose their treachery, build an alliance with a few persons in senior management who will show empathy and solidarity if and when you breach company policy, and keep in mind that even Monday has only 12 hours of work time which will surely end.

Do everything in your power to make Monday an interesting part of your work week because how you feel on Monday usually determines how the rest of the work week goes.

Victor Idem  (ACIA) (c) 2016

HOW TO WRITE A BUSINESS PLAN: STEP BY STEP GUIDE Written by Stan Edom

How To Write A Business Plan: Step By Step Guide

Stan Edom May 30, 2016 How To Write A Business Plan: Step By Step Guide2016-05-30T22:35:16+00:00Business Plan No Comment

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How To Write A Business Plan: Step By Step Guide

It’s ideal to write a business plan before the start of any new venture. Whether you’re starting a business, running a business, or about to expand a business, having a business plan as a road map to follow is crucial to your success.

Writing a business plan will help you easier achieve your entrepreneurial goals. It will give you a clear and concise path to follow through the course of your business executions, and will keep you focused on your target. Irrespective of achieving your entrepreneurial goals, having a business plan can be a great element to securing a bank loan and getting funding from an investor. You can find 10 strong reasons to write a robust plan for your business here.

That said, here’s how to write a great business plan that’d set you up for success and build investors confidence in you.

1). Executive Summary:

This comes directly after the title page. The executive summary is the general overview of your business plan. It tells the reader exactly what you want to achieve. In a broad view, the executive summary’s purpose is to list out your business goals and expressively describe your company profile.

It’s always advisable to study an existing executive summary example to understand how, and in what depth, you should craft yours. Expressly copying an executive summary template is wrong, but getting an intelligent stance on how yours should be written can be achieved by studying an executive summary example.

2). Business Description:

Your business description is an explanation of what your company does, the industry your business is operating in, and what differentiates your business from others. It should also contain a more detailed information about your company profile.

When writing your company description, it’s important you talk about the current trends in your market and how you expect the future to turn out. You should talk about the widespread markets operating in your industry, and how some diverse products or services can benefit or affect your business.

3). Market Analysis & Strategies:

Your market analysis is going to contain a comprehensive research of your market and the competitors in your business industry. When you do a thorough market analysis, you become very familiar with the market, and find it easier to narrow down who your immediate target customers could be. With this information, your business can be well positioned to claim a good percentage of the market when you start out.

If you’re finding it difficult to carry out a market research on your own, you could employ the services of marketing research firms to help you out in your market assessment. They wouldn’t just provide results, but would also outline a marketing plan you could follow, which covers diverse marketing strategies to get a good percentage of the market.

4). Design & Development Plan:

Here you provide your potential creditors and investors, information about your product design and development plan. You’d show your product development strategy, business development plan, and how the business will reach it’s goals by creating a development budget.

5). Organization & Management:

The business organization and management will show what business structure your organization is going to adopt. Since every organization is structured differently, picking the right organization and management structure that would aid you in achieving your goals is important for your business plan to be concise.

6). Service or Product Line:

Here you outline your product line, services you offer, and your general product ideas. You’ll describe how your product lines would benefit your customers, and also show the layout of the product lifecycle.

You’ll list your product line pricing, slightly talk about your product’s market research, your product development process and strategy, and your service line.

It’s important that at this phase, you tell the complete story of your company’s product line, so that anyone reading through can understand a lot better and easily connect with the message you’re trying to pass.

7). Sales And Marketing:

Your sales and marketing will cover how you intend to market the business and eventually turn a profit. Here you outline your marketing strategies based on the information gotten from your market research and analysis. You’ll also outline how to reach your target customers, your marketing strategies & promotional tactics, how you’ll price your products and/or services, and how you intend to position the individual brands of your products and/or services.

8). Funding Request:

Here you’ll state all your financial needs. If the purpose of your business plan is to get business funding, then you should include the total amount it would take to run the company, and how you expect to reap strong financial gains from it in the short or long term.

Getting a grant or seed funding through your business plan can sometimes be tricky if you don’t know the real expectations of the institutions you plan on getting it from. But detailing your business funding request in the most promising and realistic financially rewarding way for the funding agencies to digest, would be your best bet.

9). Financial Projections:

Your financial projections have to be detailed in the most cost-effective manner. This becomes more important if you’re seeking funding from a financial institution. Find out the full information you need to include in your financial forecast for your funding request to pull through or look more feasible. If funding is not the reason for creating the business plan, then you still need to be very realistic in the preparation. Any assumed or exaggerated figure can lead to utter disappointments.

10). Appendix:

The appendix part of your business plan is optional. It usually contains your:

• Patents, licences, and permits 
• Contracts
• Letters of reference
• Legal documents
• Book references

And a lot more.

You can research the full information your appendix should need; especially based on the region you come from.

MANAGING YOUR TIME FOR SUCCESSFUL LIVING' SEMINAR COMING UP SOON!

A PAID HAND IS A PAID HAND By Victor Idem (c) 2016

THE WORKPLACE AND YOU - A PAID HAND IS A PAID HAND

Nature is a good teacher if a person chooses to learn at its feet. Every living system gets born, grows, gets old and redundant and dies off to make room for something new. So it is with an employee's work life cycle. You get hired, get trained , grow in the profession, get stuck at management level where your experience rather than initiative is valued, get redundant (no matter the training and retraining courses attended), and get laid off or throw in the towel to collect your gold wrist watch for long service.

That is the natural course of events, even for the Managing director of a Multinational corporation. Sadly, we have too many people in the workplace who cling on to the job, to a particular office, to a particular office resource (company car, desk, work space, even staff), to a particular procedure or process and to a particular mindset, that impede organizational growth.

Have we not witnessed members of staff who falsify their qualifications, marital statuses, medical records and other critical personal information and or pay bribes (in cash or kind) to ensure they remain in a department, location or get promotion so as remain in the comfort zone that ensures their survival in the corporate jungle? And for what, to stay a little while longer in the system?

Ultimately, every employee will leave paid employment no matter how invaluable he/she might be. So instead of spending time scheming to be indispensable to the company by means other than putting in dedicated service for the number of years you remain a hired hand, a discerning employee should develop skills, aptitude and knowledge that would position him to be able to become an external consultant/resource person for his current employer and or industry when circumstances present itself for him/her to either resign or be retired.

A paid hand is a paid hand, no matter how long you work for, or what level you rise to within a corporation.

Victor Idem (ACIA) (c) 2016

VALUE ADDING EMPLOYEE: An asset to the company- By Victor Idem (c) 2016

THE WORKPLACE AND YOU: Bec

ome a value adding Employee

The greatest service I think employers should do for their members of staff is to educate them on corporate finance; the anticipation for, acquisition of, and allocation of financial resources within the organization. Such knowledge will  help workers understand how their jobs add to the bottom line.

Most often, employees start to  agitate for salary increment  and payment other financial emoluments without consideration of the fortunes of the company. They see so much activities going on and misconstrue them to mean that the business is profitable. They fail to connect the dots between revenue and expenses (depreciation on tangible assets, overheads, taxes, pensions, trainings, marketing etc) and feel all the monies accruing to the business should be used to 'settle' them for their time.

It becomes more amazing when you hear some members of staff who have stayed so long on particular designations or ranks, doing the same tasks year in, year out, lamenting  about the need for management to pay more for doing the same thing just because they have been around for a while longer. These set of of people are usually lethargic and clogs in the wheel of a company's progress as they forment problems and propagate a philosophy of 'more-money-for-less-work' amongst the workforce.

Every job in a company has a connected line to the company's profits. And a company's profits determines how big the pie baked to accomodate salaries, allowances and bonuses becomes.

So as an employee, devote time to add value to yourself, to your job and ultimately to your company's profitability. Only then can you confidently ask for that raise.

Victor Idem (ACIA) (c) 2016

IS YOUR TEAM HELPING YOU TO SHINE? By Victor Idem (c) 2016

THE WORKPLACE AND YOU (7)

From the 1990s, the 'Team approach'  to achieving organizational goals became a corporate strategy. It has since gained currency in firms operating in the organized private sector in Nigeria. Not much can be said as to its adoption in the public sector.

Interestingly though, much as as this has become the swan song of Management , it has been observed that the application of policies that should engender the team spirit in the workplace are usually not done with consideration to the skills sets and competencies of the individual 'team members'.

Unlike in a football team where each player has his distinct role and usually doesn't have to overlap to function in a position where he has little proficiency, 'team mates' in the corporate environment are indoctrinated to think they can jump into roles at the drop of the hat and perform excellently. Usually, the skill set expected from such members is what Management term 'multitasking'.

Unfortunately, the results of this strategy can be observed as companies that invest resources to teach elephants to fly remain average performers. Rather, corporates that define a team by a collective and agreeable mission statement and then allow individuals to play to their areas of strength get to actualise their vision(s) better.

The team approach is only as good as to the extent it allows the individual competencies of team members to be harnessed and rewarded. Where sterling attributes of team members are stifled to allow the weaker links in the chain to 'look good', the organization will be bogged down by a mediocre workforce.

Victor Idem (c) 2016

THE ENTITLEMENT MENTALITY SYNDROME: Employees rights or privileges?

THE WORKPLACE AND YOU (3)

It is only human nature to become complacent and enter a comfort zone when a person becomes  accustomed to his environment. So naturally, employees gravitate to a psychological level of expecting, even demanding privileges as though they are rights.

Have you ever met a colleague who laments about an inconsiderate boss who queries him for being a frequent latecomer?

Have you witnessed a fellow staff use office resources (official car, computers, stationery, subordinates) for unofficial purposes, claiming that such acts are perks of his office?

Have you circumvented company policy to further a personal ambition, propelled by a justification that your employers is taking more from you than they are offering in return?

Such 'entitlement mentality' syndrome is unhealthy and ultimately affects am employees performance and sabotages the organization's goals and objectives.

You were employed to work. Do just that if you cant do more. Doing anything less is counterproductive.

My name is Victor Idem (ACIA) and I just want to make commonsense.