Key Success Factors in Business

This article is based on a talk I gave to some budding entrepreneurs at Sussex University’s Enterprise Thursday meeting last week. I called it Key Success Factors in Business but really it’s called Some Things I’ve Noticed Which Really Work. The students liked it, so I figured you might as well.

The 10 Minute Team Meeting

I like to share some of my bag of tips and tricks which I use with my clients, so here’s one which I suggest regularly.

Doing a Pomodoro

I’ve noticed something about the way that I work. If I can concentrate on what I’m doing, I can get a whole day’s worth of work done in about an hour. Millions of items (well, about 3 or 4) can be ticked off the to do list when I’m in the zone. But if I’m not focussed, my productivity drops dramatically, and my day disappears. So I’ve been trying a new time management technique – the pomodoro technique.

Why do women want a female business advisor?

I’ve noticed over the years that about 60% of my clients are women business owners. But this is far higher than the proportion of female business owners generally – about 15% of businesses are owned outright by women, and another 20% of businesses are co-owned by women. So why do I get more women than men?

Avoid wasting your own time

Lots of my business support clients are busy people. We’re all busy people. But sometimes being busy stops us getting things done. There are lots of resources out there for managing your time better and I don’t want to just duplicate those, but to encourage you to do something other than work on your business for a change.

Scaling Up Your Business

One of my lovely clients is ready to scale up his business model. Until now, he’s been the only full-time person in his company, and has been using freelancers whenever he’s had a big job on. Over the last 6 months he’s had an upsurge in business, mostly due to taking my sound advice to get out networking in his industry and to build a much better website to demonstrate all the great things he does.