Archives for March 2015

Making Richly Scheduled a Reality With 8 Divine Time Management Tips

March 16, 2015 by Katie

Last Tuesday, I posted a blog reflection of Anese Cavanaugh's Women's Leadership Summit presentation in regards to becoming a more effective leader. The first tip within her presentation was to ban busy.

Being busy is not a badge of honor nor does it make anyone more successful than other, rather it is usually one of the faster contributors to burnouts and poor leadership.

Therefore, the direction of this post is to identify 8 Divine Time Management Tips that will aid in banning busy and creating a richly scheduled reality.

1. Let go. One of the hardest things to overcome is the need to feel busy. The need to feel busy has been ingrained as the right way of knowing you're on the right track, however, that track often turns into the turnpike leading to burnout central. It is okay to let go of your emotions, mindsets, and attitudes toward the perception that busy is a good thing. The key is not to become lazy, but to identify, accept, and thoroughly make it a part of your new way of life that there is a difference between “busy” and “richly scheduled”.

2. Identify. Identify your biggest contributors to success. This can come in the form of identifying your biggest outcomes. Your “biggest” outcomes may vary depending on your industry and line of work. Identify the largest rewarding outcomes then work your way back from there. The term “rewarding” could be financial, spiritual, operational, etc. – whatever, but each outcome should be identified.

Making Richly Scheduled a Reality With 8 Divine Time Management Tips

Automating the mundane, redundant and repetitive. | While building our business, we used many tools available from the software industry. Tools such as SalesForce, ACT!, Jeffrey Gitomer’s Ace of Sales, Excel spreadsheets and enough other items I could name – that right now are making me ill thinking about. We are business minds first. We found Infusionsoft as our solution to our problem. We have become Infusionsoft experts, by building our business with this amazing tool, our certifications only reinforce it. Infusionsoft is a type of sales and marketing software that helps owners of small businesses to track their leads and stay organized. We work with you to help you develop the best plan with your business and help you get set up with these services, optimize them to fit your needs and give you any other assistance you need to get started. You can either have us help you implement your Infusionsoft strategy or let us take the keys and do it for you.

3. Organize. You just identified your biggest outcomes that need to happen daily. Awesome. Now, you need to organize those outcomes. This may require compartmentalizing outcomes. The reason I bring up outcomes instead of activities is because outcomes are what you need to achieve. At the end of the day it is the outcomes that matter, not necessarily how many activities that lead to achieving the outcomes. This also services as a great starting point to evaluating the key activities that will support obtaining your daily outcomes.

4. Prioritize. Prioritize your outcomes. Depending on your personality you may want to get your biggest outcomes done and out of the way first thing. This helps to maintain focus and consistency of getting those outcomes completed right off the bat. For others, you may want to prioritize with the smaller outcomes to build momentum making you feel that you're getting way more done because of the ease of those outcomes. Whichever works best with your mindset is the method that you should choose.

5. Commit. Commit to your method of scheduling your outcomes. Identify the best times that works with your personal level of productivity. Put it on your schedule.

6. Track. Identify, track, and measure your key performance indicators per outcome. Track it. Review it. Tweak it to you reach your peak level of performance that fits you. This information will identify your successes, hangups, and other areas to consider to help you to proactively tweak your daily outcomes. The key is to track your progress to ensure that you continue what works best to promote the best richly scheduled way of life.

7. Implement. The only way this can work is by action. Staying committed to the outcomes that you've identified that need to get done and you get them done. It is essential monitor the time it actually takes to get it done. You'll be surprise how much time you actually save when focused. You save time because you're not dealing with distractions, interruptions, or letting your day run you. You have structure, outcomes, actions, and accountability. The hardest part after identification is actually doing it. It is easy to get distracted. Distractions also open the door for “busy” feelings and additional activities that impede on outcomes. So, get focused, structured, do it, and hold yourself accountable.

8. It's a Habit. Banning “busy” isn't a one day kind of thing. It is a habit. A habit that is formed with purpose. The purpose to provide a more structured, richly scheduled personal and professional life. The ability to shift your mindset to understand that “busy” is not a badge of honor, nor does it make you more successful is essential. Letting go of that mindset helps you embrace the “richly scheduled” lifestyle. This lifestyle identifies specific outcomes that are necessities. Helps you to organize your day to achieve those outcomes in a manner that fits your life. You prioritize these outcomes however you see fit. Switching the mindset, identifying, organizing, and prioritizing your outcomes are essential, but even more important is action and accountability. You have to put forth the action and hold yourself accountable to achieving the outcomes, daily. The focus, structure, and follow-through will aid you in banning “busy” for good and embracing the “richly scheduled” lifestyle. This lifestyle will aid bettering your personal and professional relationships.

Thanks for reviewing and cheers to rocking out your outcomes and banning busy!

by Katie Doseck, PhD MBA

Chief Visionary and Strategic Ace Up Your Sleeve | Viral Solutions LLC

Dr Katie Doseck, MBA, PhD Viral Solutions

Katie Doseck, PhD MBA | Chief Visionary & Strategic Ace Up Your Sleeve. I catapulted my experience with extensive education, trainings, and personal coaching; earning a PhD in Organizational Management with a specialization in Human Resource Management, MBA in Organizational Leadership, and BA in Law & Liberal Arts. Subject Matter Expert (SME) areas: Human Resource Management, Employment Law, Organizational Change, Change Management, Resource Planning, Strategic Planning, Talent Management, Selling & Sales Management, Training & Development, Decision Making Models, Project Management, Customer Relationship Management, and Motivation. Dr. Doseck is based out of Logan, Utah.

Filed Under: Analytics

Ways to Keep Your Employees Happy in Your Company

March 13, 2015 by Christine

A big problem for small businesses is managing to keep their best employees for the long haul. While there are plenty of benefits to working with a smaller company, it’s hard to ignore the kinds of pay and benefits that come with a position at a larger company.

So how can you keep your employees happy in your company so that you can prevent them from getting poached by larger competitors? Here are a three quick tips:

Create a positive business culture. If you want to keep people around at your company, you need to make sure that you’ve established a positive, friendly culture. People should
Automating the mundane, redundant and repetitive. | While building our business, we used many tools available from the software industry. Tools such as SalesForce, ACT!, Jeffrey Gitomer’s Ace of Sales, Excel spreadsheets and enough other items I could name – that right now are making me ill thinking about. We are business minds first. We found Infusionsoft as our solution to our problem. We have become Infusionsoft experts, by building our business with this amazing tool, our certifications only reinforce it. Infusionsoft is a type of sales and marketing software that helps owners of small businesses to track their leads and stay organized. We work with you to help you develop the best plan with your business and help you get set up with these services, optimize them to fit your needs and give you any other assistance you need to get started. You can either have us help you implement your Infusionsoft strategy or let us take the keys and do it for you.

never dread coming into work. You should focus on hiring people who mesh together as people as much as they do as professionals. You should keep lines of communication open at all times, and keep business processes transparent. And finally, you should make sure that you offer perks that will keep them around, like the ability to travel or work from home.
Develop relationships. You have to play to your strengths as a small business. While you probably won’t be able to outbid other companies, what you can do is actually build meaningful relationships with your employees. Listen to them, get to know them as people, be attentive to their needs and desires and act on those. Give your employees the kind of personal attention they’ll never find at that larger company that’s courting them. You’d be surprised at how much that can matter when employees are considering making a switch.
Offer opportunities for growth. At larger companies, there’s not as much of a chance for employees to jump into leadership roles early on in their tenure. Not only do smaller companies offer more flexibility, but they offer more growth opportunity as well. Your employees have the chance to move up the food chain much faster. Make sure you’re giving them plenty of opportunities to be creative, take on new challenges and lead new projects.

Again, keeping your best employees is all about playing to your strengths as a small company. Know what you do better than larger competitors, and make sure that is your focus for keeping employees aboard your team.

by Christine Kelly

CEO and Queen Bee | Viral Solutions LLC

Prior to joining Viral Solutions, Christine held executive leadership roles at some of the largest small business consulting firms in the USA. Her experience includes leading direct reports of over 130 remote sales agents who generated $38mm in annual revenue. She obtained her Marketing degree from British Columbia Institute of Technology. Bring her C-Suite experience to your small business. Although our company is virtual, and we can work with you wherever you are located, she is located in Denver, Colorado and owns a second home in Vancouver, BC Canada.

Filed Under: Analytics Tagged With: culture, employee relations

Methods of Driving Traffic to Your Website from Around the Internet

March 12, 2015 by Christine

You could have the best website in the world and it wouldn’t matter at all if you weren’t able to get anyone to visit it. Therefore, it’s extremely important that your company does everything it can to work on ways to draw in new inbound traffic to your site from all over the web.

Here are some methods that will help you to accomplish that:

Social Media Marketing. Nobody has a traffic problem. If you feel like you need traffic, you just need to go to the traffic store! You need to drive traffic from the traffic store to you
Lifecycle marketing. | With these unique services, we teach our clients about the Seven Stages of Lifecycle Marketing and how they apply to their businesses. You will learn to ask questions such as: What is your perfect customer? Where in your lifecycle do you gain or lose customers? These questions and others will help you to gain more insight into your business and how you can continue to grow.

quality content. The best traffic store is via social media channels. Post, comment, respond, engage, promote and advertise to drive traffic via social media.
Search engine optimization. SEO, as we used to know it, is for the most part – dead as a traffic generator. SEO is not to be confused with keyword stuffing, an outdated practice that now gets you punished by Google’s algorithms. It’s the process of doing everything you can to get your site ranked higher on search listings. However, more importantly it is a systematic process that helps others find you. Back-links, the proper use of keywords, promoting your site elsewhere on the web — these are all practices that you should familiarize yourself with. You can also edit your site’s Robots.txt file to control how bots and web crawlers pore over your page to send information back to search engines.
Content. To be found, to receive hits to your site, you need to be an expert in your field. Content, as in hundreds of quality articles, is how you get found and receive hits and scroll downs from perfect prospective future customers. This is how the internet judges you, determines if you k now your stuff – or not.
Going local. Create a local business listing on Google if you have a local or regional focus. Not only will this help your search rankings, but it will also give a lot more information about your company right on the search results page, including location, hours, contact information and reviews.
Social optimization. The kinds of content that you post on your social media pages can have a big impact on how many visitors you get to your website. For example, right now there’s a huge demand for video content by social media users, so leveraging that kind of content in a smart way can be a huge way to increase engagement on your social media platforms and draw people to your website.
Email marketing. While email marketing can be difficult in the sense that messages don’t always get opened by your recipients, if you allow users to opt in to email newsletters and make sure to open with engaging subject lines and headers you will see much better results.
SMS marketing. What is better than email marketing? SMS marketing! It is really simple. Just ask yourself how many times per day you check your smart phone. Careful – know the laws of the TCPA first! Lastly, this is not a place to sacrifice quality.

These are just a few ways that you can increase traffic to your website. Are you struggling with any of these areas, or in need of additional information? Work with our team today at Viral Solutions for help.

by Thomas von Ahn | Chief Elephant Slayer

Watch out elephants! This slayer of business challenges comes with 30 years of record breaking sales, marketing, operations, training and leadership experience . He has worked face-to-face with 100’s of small business owners as well as large firms. His love of creating, communicating, developing and executing results for clients shines with each project, publication and training event. His entrepreneurial spirit, passion, industry experience, education, problem-solving prowess, charismatic personality and been-there-done that attitude leads his client focused approach.

Filed Under: Analytics Tagged With: attract traffic, drive traffic, seo, website traffic

Forcing Yourself to Believe in Yourself

March 11, 2015 by Christine

Have you ever felt like you aren’t qualified or capable of running a successful business? Throughout my career I’ve seen so many business owners that could have achieved even greater levels of success if they’d just had a little bit more confidence in their abilities.

The thing is, none of us start off a business feeling like we’re completely capable of turning it into a success — it’s just something you sort of pick up along the way. The ones that do succeed, though, understand that there are ways you can set yourself up for success so that believing in yourself becomes a whole lot easier.

Here are a few ways you can overcome your self-doubt as an entrepreneur:

Adjust your mindset. Fear and excitement tend to produce the same kind of physical reaction. The jitters, the butterflies in your stomach — rather than
At Viral Solutions, we understand the trials and tribulations that many new owners of small businesses face in the early going. The commitment of time and resources that is necessary at the outset can leave many business owners frustrated or exhausted. We’ve experienced this ourselves in our own business operations, so we know just how unpleasant it is and how it can come close to crushing the motivation you had that led you to start the business in the first place.

interpreting that as fear, think of it as excitement instead. It becomes a whole lot easier to prepare yourself to tackle the challenges in front of you with a more positive mindset.

Keep expectations reasonable. One of the biggest problems with people who feel incapable as leaders is that they’ve set standards for themselves that are practically impossible to achieve. While it’s good that you hold yourself to a high standard, those standards should always be reasonable. That way, when you find yourself meeting those standards even after it’s been somewhat of a challenge to attain them, you’ll get a huge boost in your confidence.

Move on from failure. People who lack belief in themselves tend to have a big problem with accepting and moving on from failure. There’s this innate belief that many people have that if they were truly competent, they wouldn’t have failed. But this couldn’t be farther from the truth. If you want to get better with failure, you can practice it in small ways through new hobbies or honing new skills.

Fake it ‘til you make it. Sometimes when you act as though you have belief in yourself for long enough, you truly begin to develop that confidence for real. That advice might seem overly simplistic, but give it a shot!

Attitude is everything in the business world, and a lack of self-confidence can be crippling to your potential for success. See if you can work on these ways to force yourself to believe in yourself, and watch how that affects the way your business works.

Thomas von Ahn | Chief Elephant Slayer | Viral Solutions LLC

Filed Under: Analytics Tagged With: confidence

Effective Strategies to Become a Magical Leader: Ban Busy. Get Present. Create Growth.

March 10, 2015 by Katie

The purpose of this post is to get straight to the meat and potatoes of a dynamic presentation by Anese Cavanaugh, founder and CEO of Dare to Engage shared with her audience at Inc. Women’s Leadership Summit.

The purpose of her presentation was to share three quick tips to become a magical leader. Likewise, the purpose of this post is to provide with those tips and analysis of key actions that you can implement today to aid you in becoming a more magical leader.

Teach, Train, Mentor, Lead, Develop, Implement and bring Results. | Our small business experts can consult or coach on a wide variety of important business topics, including sales optimization and management, sales training, automated relationship marketing, eMarketing, strategic planning and much more. Our thought process is very simple. First we seek to understand, before we seek to be understood. When the team at Viral Solutions brings their minds to your business, you are getting all of our collective experiences. We will not sugar coat the reasons behind our input. We will not withhold our best solutions. We will not limit our implementation strategies. We will tell you exactly how we see it. The results you experience will be the sum of your strategy, your defined target audience, your commitment to serve your customer and our process of delivery. That means we are an integral part of your team!

Ban Busy. How many of you get so excited and energized when you hear “how busy are you”? My guess is that that most have the opposite. You may feel stressed or drained after hearing that question or hearing others talk about their “busy” schedules. Today’s business culture it is common that people become so “busy” with their day to day activities and lives that they forget to make a life. Being busy isn't a badge of honor, but rather a mindset of survival from one thing to another. Just because you are busy does not make you more important, valuable, or successful. It is just makes you more tired. How you perform and interact with others is significantly impacted by your level of leadership presence with yourself, peers, team, and clients. Your “busy” factor impacts that presence. It can have a profound impact on the team, organizational culture, retention, acquisition, and general effectiveness of a firm. A great place to start is with an evaluation. Practice a self-identification brainstorming session of why you’re so “busy”. This brainstorming session identify professional trouble spots that you’ve long avoided dealing with that contribute to your unhealthy level of “busy”. Examples of common self-identification issues: having a problem saying no, taking on too much work, ineffective time management, lack of organization skills, and so on. Next, get specific, organized, and energized. Things will certainly need to get done and the key is to ditch “busy” and become more “richly scheduled” – listen to how even a simple change in the terminology influences the state of mind of hearing it. Repeat that a couple times and watch it change your state of mind. That change in terminology can also impact the state of mind of among peers, teams, and others.

Get Present. A cultivation of leadership presence is a dynamic skill. Letting go of a “busy” presence will help you significantly in actually getting present. This is because when people are in a state of “busy” they are constantly thinking of all of the things that they need to do and are missing the opportunity of being present. This impacts the perception and effectiveness of leadership. This moment may serve as the right time to ask yourself how active you are in working in the present moment. How are you with being in the present moment? If you work in the present moment, you’ll notice there aren't the emotions associated with “busy”. Being in the present moment requires focus, attention, and gratitude for that specific moment. It requires turning off internal and external distractions. Granted, at some point in time, it may be difficult to practice being present 24/7. However, some practice is better than no practice. Furthermore, practice of being present can aid in creating the lifestyle of being present. Such practice can shift your entire personal and professional energies. Cavanaugh noted that such a shift in internal and external perspectives can have a profound influence on leadership influences, outcomes, and life. Start small by first identifying areas that take you from being in the present. Remove those distractions. Get focused on what you need to do. Then take that on one item at a time but be fully engaged in that activity. It is also essential to allow yourself time and flexibility -if you’re constantly putting yourself under unnecessary scheduling chaos – remove it. Create the schedule that works best for you. Doing so will help you get present. Getting present will help you become a more magical leader to your team, peers, and clients. It may also help immensely in your personal relationships.

Create Growth. Removing the “busy” and “distractions” that take away from being a present and richly scheduled leader tends to provide leadership with more opportunities. One of those opportunities is the ability to create growth. Creating growth can come in many different forms for each person. The objective of creating growth is to design, implement, do, and monitor the things that will grow you professionally. For example, if you know that you struggle with taking on too many projects or getting too easily stressed out, then perhaps an opportunity to create growth would be to attend a seminar or get a mentor. The growth can be personal, professional, physical, mental, spiritual or whatever other areas you would like to improve. The idea is that with creating this time for growth is that you actual do it and that those actions lead to growth. As a leader, growth is essential. Likewise, overcoming obstacles is also essential. It is often easy to neglect such growth due to everyday “busy” activities. Therefore, it is essential to set aside the time to identify growth opportunities, craft your strategy for growth, do it, and watch your magical leadership garden grow.

In conclusion, Anese Cavanaugh, founder and CEO of Dare to Engage captivated her audience at Inc. Women’s Leadership Summit with key points about banning busy, getting present, and making time for growth. Three straightforward approaches to becoming a more magical leader. These tips can provide leaders with the opportunity to evaluate their level of busy, level of being a present leader, and identify growth opportunities to improve leadership skills, capabilities, and influence.

by Katie Doseck, PhD MBA

Chief Visionary and Strategic Ace Up Your Sleeve | Viral Solutions LLC

Filed Under: Analytics