Every retailer needs to advertise and market their business to ensure customers know they exist. Life used to be easy. All you had to do was to place an advertisement in the Yellow Pages and in the local newspaper and customers would flock to your door, well it may not have been that straight forward, but it was a lot simpler than it is today.

Newspaper sales, phone directories and magazines are all losing their impact in society and as a result it is harder to get your message across using these media formats. I am not suggesting you stop doing this form of interruption marketing, but you do need to spread your massage a lot further using different media. (more…)

In my last article I discussed what some of the top traits of an entrepreneur were. This was based on my own award of Entrepreneur of the Year for W.A. in 2009 in the Small Business Champions Awards.

The challenge to you, is do you want to be an entrepreneur and if you do, what do you need to do to kick start your journey.

Entrepreneurs are leaders, not managers. Leaders inspire people to do things, whilst managers tell people what to do. There is a big difference between leading and managing your business. Leaders therefore understand their team members better than managers. (more…)

The fastest growth ever seen in communications is the development of social media communications. If five years ago I’d mentioned MySpace, facebook or YouTube I would have had queried looks from every reader of this article. Today, they are mainstream communication tools in the community. Communication is changing rapidly and as businesses we need to run rapidly just to keep up.

Over the last few months I have been fully aware that social media is a huge marketing opportunity and the way of the future, I needed to understand it and how to adapt it to business. Erik Qualman and his book “Socialnomics, how social media transforms the way we live and do business” (John Wiley & Son Inc) has been a great help to me in understanding how a business can benefit from social media.

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I think that the most important key figure is the first line manager. The first line manager – the level of management between the non-management workforce and the rest of management (Cole.K 2005).

The importance of the first line manager is that he / she is the face of the organisation to all employees, subordinates, and various relevant outside contractors. If this role demonstrates poor planning skills and poor organisational skills, the morale and work performance of the employees of the company can be lost or diminished overnight.

The first line manager needs to communicate and understand very well the intentions and direction of the middle management, and also then be able to communicate very well with his / her subordinates, and work with them as a leader and coach / teacher. (more…)