new year's resolutions business success tips

Business Tips: New Year’s Resolutions for Success

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The end of 2016 is almost here – can you even believe it? This year has seemed to fly by! While the end of the year is a great time to focus on family and friends, it’s also a good time to reflect on how your business if going and the way you’ve progressed over the past year.

Now it’s time to plan how you want your business to develop in the new year! Whether you’re interested in increasing the success of your business in the upcoming year or you want the chance to enjoy the success you’ve achieved more, here are some New Year’s resolutions that are designed to help you do both! These business tips will drive a better work-life balance while also increasing your business success in 2017.

Delegation

Learn how to delegate and do more of it. When running a small business, it’s easy to feel the need to do everything yourself – but that just leaves you exhausted with barely any time to do anything else. If you let someone else take care of some of the tasks on your to-do list, you’d be surprised how much it helps! Delegation is key to creating a healthy balance between your work life and the rest of the things you like to do when not at work.

Promote your Business

In order to attract new customers, it’s important to promote your business regularly and consistently. Embrace social media, start a blog, utilize YouTube… these are juts a few of the ways to do so; all of which Infinite Reach specializes in! If you’d like to create a marketing plan for your business, we’ve got you covered.

Network

There’s nothing like talking to other business owners or other business people to spark new ideas in you, improve old ones, and simply make new connections. Our team personally loves attending our local NAWBO (National Association of Women Business Owners) which really gives us a chance to chat with likeminded leaders in the business world! Try and find a group specifically designed for networking, or another organization or monthly event that takes place and is dedicated to a particular type of business that interests you. Being a part of a group will boost you and your business.

Need Something New?

Is there a piece of equipment in the office that’s hindering your success? Is there something that you lack that’s also making your work life a bit harder? Don’t try to make do; go out and get something new! Maybe it’s buying that new fax machine or hiring a new employee to help lighten the workload. Whatever it may be, don’t put it off if it’s something that you know you need! Let the new year be a new start.

Setting Realistic Goals

There are many benefits of setting goals for your business – just determine that these goals are attainable rather than unrealistic dreams that might be ultimately out of reach. This is a valuable habit to get into, especially for the new year.

Re-Evaluate your Mission Statement

Every so often, especially with the start of the new year, it’s a good idea to look at your mission statement and overall goals and review them. If your business has been around for a few years, chances are things are different now than when you began your business. It’s possible that what you originally set out to do isn’t exactly what ended up with, which is completely okay! That’s why you take sometime to assess these aspects of your business.

Ask for Feedback

Resolve to ask for feedback, and listen to it. Your employees, board members, advisors and clients alike will appreciate that you asked for their feedback on your business and the improvements or changes they think might make you more successful. There’s room for criticism that you may not be prepared for, but all feedback can be good feedback!

Consider customizing your questions to each of your audiences. For instance, your employees’ feedback will help you forecast client growth and troubleshoot and problems inside the office. Board members’ or advisors’ opinions can bring that outside perspective that you need, which can be very valuable to your business as a whole.

Realizing what’s going good and what might not be working for your business can help you see past any challenges and potentially find solutions, and also help you envision long-term fulfillment.

To a Better Year

By making your New Year’s resolutions, you’re giving yourself a goal to achieve. So as long as you aim towards your goal throughout the year, you can consider your New Year’s resolutions a triumph! If you apply these somewhat simple yet effective New Year’s resolutions to your business throughout the new year, you’ll feel better personally and have more energy to put into your business and make it the most successful year you’ve had yet!

Infinite Reach Tips for Becoming a Better Leader

4 Tips for Becoming a Better Leader

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Being a good leader has to do with a lot more than being a good manager. Managers direct people in how to go about doing their everyday duties, whereas leaders shape the future of an organization by having a vision of the future, and inspiring her team to share that same vision. For a long time, the universally held belief was that leaders were born and not made. Well, that old adage no longer rings true. Becoming a better leader is easy, it just takes a little work. if you are interested in becoming a better leader, these tips will help.

1. Know Who You Are

The most important thing a leader needs to know, is herself. When you know who you are, it is easy to imagine where you are going. To be a great leader, you must get people to follow you, and how can you do that, if you do not know where you are going? To be a truly successful leader, you must know who you are, and demonstrate that to your team.

2. Learn How to Listen

A great leader knows that listening is one of the most important skills they can have. When building relationships with your team, it is important to really listen to them. When you are having a conversation with someone and they are not truly listening to you, you can tell, and your team can tell when you are not listening to them as well. If your team feels like you don’t care about their input and ideas, they will stop sharing. Take the time to listen to your team and you will become a better leader.

3. Treat Others How They Want to be Treated

Everyone knows the old adage that you should “treat others as you would want to be treated”. In today’s world, in order to become a better leader, it is more important to treat others as they would want to be treated. Today’s work environment is a diverse mix of people and cultures, and it is more important than ever to get to know each person on your team as an individual. In order to become a better leader to your team, you need to find out who they are, what makes them happy, and what motivates them. That way you can tailor your leadership style in order to make the most of each person’s potential.

4. Don’t Remain Silent

In order to become a better leader, you have to learn to speak up. When you lead a team, whether formally, or informally, they are expecting you to protect them. I know it is sometimes tempting to sit by and say nothing about what is happening around us. But when you lead a team, that is not an option. Your team is expecting you to defend them; they are expecting you to keep them safe and secure. They need to know that, no matter what, you have their backs. This includes speaking up for them when necessary. Be vocal in organizational meetings, make sure everyone knows the value of your team, and never be afraid to question the circumstances when they affect your team.

There are many ways to become a better leader. If you are trying to improve your leadership skills, focusing on knowing yourself, learning to listen, treating others the way they want to be treated, and speaking up for your team, will help you get a great start.

Good Luck!

confident at work

Want to Sound More Confident at Work?

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Like in almost all areas of life, you want to convey how confident you are to those around you. In relationships, you’ll want to have healthy self-esteem because that will help improve your relationship as a whole. In business, if you have great ideas, you need to know how to communicate them and project them with confidence.

Some challenges that women specifically face in the workplace are bad speech habits that have been conditioned in us over the years. Even if we aren’t consciously aware of it, these tendencies can potentially damage our confidence levels, which can ultimately negatively impact how we’re perceived by our coworkers.

“Body language is a great way to assert control and communicate strength and power, but it can also tell the opposite story.” While far more subconscious than anything else, your body language can have a huge impact on how you’re viewed by others, particularly in a professional setting.

Next time you’re in the office, notice how you’re carrying and expressing yourself to others. Watch out for these subliminal body movements and learn how to adjust yourself so that you can convey nothing but confidence.

  • Crossed arms
    • While crossing your arms is usually out of habit, your boss may see this as cynical, distrustful and sometimes even angry. Instead, stand with your arms straight down by your side to show openness and confidence to those around you.
  • Seeming disinterested
    • Nonverbal communication actually speaks very loudly! The way that your body is angled toward someone tells a lot; when engaging in conversation, you want to have your whole body angled toward them to show that you’re listening and actively engaged in what they’re saying. If angled away from them, it shows disinterest.
    • In order to avoid not seeming distracted, subtly mimic their gestures and nod for reassurance.
  • Nervous gestures
    • I’m guilty of these myself and I know that it’s a habit I must break. These gestures are motions that you do when you’re bored or just nervous, including touching your hair, touching your face, biting your nails and shaking your leg/foot.
  • Eye contact
    • Maintaining eye contact shows that you’re confident and certain. Eye contact is one of the most important nonverbal gestures to show that your respect, appreciation and interest.
  • Smile
    • I love to smile! Smiling not only makes us feel better and more confident, but it makes those around us feel comfortable with us. If you don’t already, make a habit of smiling at the beginning and end of every conversation you have.
  • Handshake
    • A handshake is an example of appropriate touch in the workplace. When you have a strong handshake, there’s a sense of confidence and trustworthiness.

With social media and smart phones becoming so predominant in our lives, face-to-face communication is becoming rare, so it’s crucial to make the most out of it when it does occur. Spoken communication also has the ability to be misconstrued to emit lack of authority and low confidence, so your nonverbals can help make up for that.

It’s not about “acting like a man” or being aggressive, it’s all about tapping into your inner courage and channeling it for more confident communication.

Body language is just as valuable as verbal communication and it’s important to understand that your subtle gestures and motions can impact the way others see you. Body language can make or break how you’re seen in a professional atmosphere.

Phrases to Avoid to Sound Confident

If you want to sound more confident, you’ll also have to eliminate some words from your vocabulary. Here’s a few to look out for:

  • “I can’t”
    • This phrase sacrifices control over your own actions. “Can’t” means that you don’t have a particular skill to do something, which in most cases, isn’t true. Usually when someone says this phrase they really mean that they don’t want to do something.
    • “I can’t” implies fear of failure or lack of your will to try, so it ultimately limits you and allows fear to win. In the workplace and in all areas of life, you want to try and give something your all before deciding you “cant” do it.
  • “Just”
    • Using this word can damage your credibility. “I’m just following up on…” or “I just wanted to check in,” can be code for “Sorry for bugging you” and “Sorry for taking up your time.” To avoid feeling like we’re asking for too much we use this word. It’s not a good idea to use this word too often in the workplace.
  • “I’m no expert, but…”
    • Because some women feel they’re treated differently than men in professional settings, we come up with qualifiers in order to avoid sounding arrogant or to cover up our fear of being wrong. Saying “I’m no expert, but…” undermines your position before you even had the chance to state your opinion.
  • “What if we tried…?”
    • It’s a good idea to state your ideas and be straightforward instead of asking them in the form of a question. Masking your ideas as questions is a way of polling, which indicates that you don’t think your ideas are valid unless someone else thinks so.

There are so many ways to feel more confident in the workplace and convey that to those around you. Be careful of subtle language cues that can belittle people’s perceptions of you, your confidence and professionalism. By paying close attention to your body language and word choice, you can sound more confident every single day!

Infinite Reach Agency Happy Employees Blog Feature

Happy Employees Are Important To Your Business

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You may think that your employees disposition is of no consequence to your bottom line, but nothing could be further from the truth. Happy employees are not only important to your business, they are iInfinite Reach Agency Happy Employees Blog mportant to every other employee as well. Happiness, or the lack there of, is a contagion that can spread like a wildfire.

Your business is undoubtedly your baby. You nurtured it from the very start. You spent countless sleepless nights up worrying about what would happen to it. So why would you then turn it over to people who are unhappy with it? The chances of them caring for it like you do and taking care of it are nil.

Trusting your baby to happy people is just smart business. Therefore, understanding the benefits of happy workers and knowing how to keep them happy are extremely important to both your business and the well-being of your team.

The Benefits of Happy Employees

There are several benefits to having happy workers, some of which may surprise you. One of the most impressive benefits of a happy worker is that they are, on average, 12% more productive than people who didn’t identify either way. On the flip-side, unhappy workers are 10% less productive. An increase of 22% efficiency simply by being happy is pretty impressive, the possibilities are mind-boggling.

Another thing that might surprise you about happy employees is that they are great marketing tools. If your team is happy and love their jobs, they are going to tell everyone. They are also going to treat your customers better. Your customers will then tell their friends and colleagues and before you know it, everyone is talking about how great your company is.

Happy workers are not only more productive; they are more creative as well. When your team is happy, they are more likely to share their ideas and be receptive to new ones. Happy people have an easier time freeing their minds which allows them to come up with new and innovative ways of doing things.

The list of benefits that comes with having happy employees is endless. In addition to being more productive and creative, they are also more sociable and generous. They are also healthier and more energetic which translates directly into better work habits and less sick days.

Happy employees are also more likely to stay on the job. In most businesses, the cost of on-boarding and training a new employee can run into the tens of thousands of dollars, so it pays to keep employees as long as possible. I could go on and on about the benefits of happy workers, but the bottom line is this. Happy employees are more reliable and better at their jobs than unhappy ones and we should make a decided effort to keep them happy.

Ways to Keep Your Employees Happy

You may think that the only way to make or keep your employees happy is to give them a raise but this is not the case in most instances. A majority of workers will respond more favorably to perks and rewards than they will to more money. There are several ways to boost team morale and spirit that don’t have to cost a lot of money.

One of the best ways to promote good feelings without spending any money is with hand-written notes. This is something that our Co-founder, Kristi Church is great at. She is always giving us little hand-written notes of encouragement when we need it, or praise when we do something good. Not only that, but she gives us notes of appreciation once in a while that let us know that we are special and valued members of the team. I absolutely love my job and those little notes are part of the reason.

There are so many ways to reward your employees. Everyone loves food. Team lunches and company picnics go a long way towards unity and happiness. Surprise pizza parties and ice cream on hot summer days can spread a surprising amount of good will as well. You could also consider introducing coffee and fresh fruit or Danish to your morning creative meetings. Having food at creative meetings fosters a more open atmosphere and people will feel happier.

The most important thing to remember when trying to decide what to use as a reward for your employees is to keep your employees in mind. Make sure the reward is something that they will give value to. The idea is to be sincere in your attempts to keep your employees happy. If you are not sincere, your employees will see right through it and the whole thing will backfire on you.

Keeping your employees happy is not only easy, it is important to your bottom line. Happy employees are more productive, creative, and reliable than unhappy ones and they are terrific brand ambassadors for your company. With so many ways to keep your team happy and engaged, there is no reason not to have happy employees.