Tanpola Articles Directory

One of the objections I often hear from people is “I don’t have time to network online!” but do you have time to

* Professionally Network
* Find a new friend
* Share your ideas
* Build your business
* Market yourself
* De-stress?

What about:

* Elevate yourself as an industry expert
* Establish connections in other industries
* Increase the efficiency of your networking
* Offer introductions to your niche-experience on a daily basis?

While online networking is not the “end all, be all” of making personal connections, it has one valuable strengths that very few real world venues have- economy of scale.

If you have the time to introduce yourself to one new person a day, wouldn’t it make sense from a business perspective to take that same amount of time and be introduced to fifty?

When I write this article or post to a forum, my thoughts are communicated to dozens of potential contacts, perhaps even thousands. If I went into a coffee shop with the expectation that I would have to say the same phrase over and over again to a hundred different people as I look for a good connection, it would take me days of effort. I would spend the entire time trying to expand my network with little result. In my best real world opportunity, I would attend a networking event where I may have the chance to meet people in groups and who are willing to listen to my message.

Considering how much time I wasted in the real world trying to connect with a hundred people as I restated my statements and repeatedly asked for permission, the basis of networking online is that readers have given me permission to talk to them and they assemble in groups for me. If I am sharing thoughts of interest, they are actively engaged with what I am saying. I don’t have to approach them and get a cold shoulder, its more like I am talking to a group of people at a cocktail party and they come into the conversation by their own choice.

The beauty is, this cocktail party is happening 24/7, 365 days a year.

That has amazing relevancy. Readers choose to join the conversation. I don’t bend their arm to listen. If they find value, they start talking. If they don’t, they move on. For decades marketing has tried to force the idea of “opt-in mailing lists” for physical and electronic mail, as well as frustrating us with the need of “do not call” lists to maintain our sanity on our personal phones.

Case in point- Right now, I have no control over whether you are reading.

As an industry expert, imagine the power of sharing your ideas and thoughts. People who are interested find little bits and pieces of inspiration and insight, and they either join the conversation or move on. Blogging attracts people as it is one of the only true “opt in” medias. If you don’t like what I’m saying, go Google someone else!

If you are interested, join my conversation.

Take Biznik as an example of “economy of scale”. There are 10,000 members browsing through the site and pondering different ways to connect. If I had to assemble 10,000 people in real life, my first challenge would be to actually listen to all 10,000 people.

30 seconds per introduction X 10k members = 80+ hours of introductions.

When I think about that time, I realize that my elevator pitch needs to be refined to an exact art and that I need to remember to pack a few bottles of water.

Now compare that to writing on the community forum or blogging this article. It took me thirty minutes to write this. Over the next few weeks several hundred people will read it.

Every single person who actually strikes up a conversation with me after reading it is pre-screened and wants to have a more in-depth discussion. On top of that- they can look at my existing social media testimonials to discover even more about me, and when they do contact me they have taken the burden of responsibility to find out who I am, rather than me taking the responsibility to tell them.

By taking the time to put myself out there in the online world, every real life interaction coming from this conversation is pre-qualified and interested in what I do. As time goes on, every introduction I have online becomes a growing archive that adds to who I am. Unlike a conversation I had over dinner last night, this very article will attract interest from readers six months later. Even when I am sleeping peacefully, someone may be introducing themselves to who I am.

Whether or not you find me personally or professionally interesting, I have no control over. Yet I will never know until the introduction has occurred.

My question to you-

Will you take the time to give me the information I need to find an introduction to you?

Barry Hurd is President and voice of http://123SocialMedia.com – Business Social Media. He has a history of over fifteen years working on numerous innovative efforts with online business models: past projects included NIKE, REI, TMP Worldwide, Monster.com, Superpages, Intuit, and RIS Media.

Chicago is one of the largest and richest cities in the world. The job market is so diverse that the city has earned a reputation for a very balanced economy. In addition to being varied, those companies are also plentiful. In fact, Chicago is home to the second largest central business district in the United States.

With businesses playing such an important role in the city’s economy, it shouldn’t be surprising that many employers are willing to invest in Chicago team building activities for their employees. After all, teams make a company much stronger than it could be when individuals work independently because teams are capable of greater productivity and creativity. This is true for several reasons.

First of all, it is easier to complete large tasks when several people are working on the same project because it can be divided into smaller pieces. This prevents putting too much strain on any one person. Second, teams also have the capacity to capitalize on individual strengths and compensate for weaknesses within the group. And third, teams provide an atmosphere where relationships and trust can form. And all of these things increase employee satisfaction and productivity.

Even though teams can yield these kinds of results, the ground rules for team work need to be established before the work begins. Sometimes those ground rules and channels of communication are difficult to create in an office setting though. That’s why team builders in companies, athletic facilities and schools are starting to incorporate games in their team building efforts.

Professionals have learned that games naturally stimulate competition, conversation and a friendly environment. And, in this kind of setting, friendship and trust begin to form as well. Coincidentally, these are all key ingredients for team work as well. Games don’t need to be complicated or expensive to be effective team building tools, but they should involve everyone in the group and cater to people with different interests and abilities.

Team building activities that are available in or around Chicago include everything from sailing excursions on Lake Michigan to scavenger hunts around local neighborhoods, museums and attractions. Sailing will definitely get the group out of the office environment and teach your employees about the value of team work, but it might take longer than you would like. Scavenger hunts, on the other hand, can usually be completed in an hour or less and they draw on the strengths of the team as a whole. Since many of them take you through the city, the experience will be fresh in their minds every time they come to work.

If you are looking for some exceptional Chicago team building scavenger hunts, visit Watson Adventure’s website (http://www.watsonadventures.com/chicago.html). They showcase all of Chicago’s most popular attractions with creative and challenging clues. The author, Art Gib, is a freelance writer.

Imagine what would happen if you had dozens of architects and hundreds of contractors all working on your business. Now image if there was no master plan and each individual spoke his or her own unique language. It’s not hard to imagine that you would have something that would resemble the Winchester House – the now-famous 160-room house that was cobbled together over a 38-year span with no master plan. The house is notorious for stairs that go nowhere, doors that open to a 2-story drop, and a maze of rooms, hallways and doorways that can perplex even the most seasoned of navigators.

Losing site of the big picture can happen to even the best of businesses. When short-term business challenges inevitably arise, decisions can be made in haste to address them. Without a master plan, those seemingly innocent decisions can begin to create a burden for the company in the long run. Independent and uncoordinated business initiatives can result in processes that don’t connect, systems that don’t play well with others, and departments that develop their own unique business lingo that is not universally understood by others.

Like the Winchester house, each individual project may seem like the right solution at the time. However, the compound affect of numerous independent and uncoordinated projects and solutions can result in an Achilles heal for the company: True change becomes increasingly hard to accomplish; integration and sharing of key business data slows to a crawl; and enabling cross-functional processes (aka end-to-end processes) becomes nearly impossible to accomplish. Each function may seem content, but the business as a whole can begin to suffer due to inflexibility, knowledge hoarding, and turf wars.

Indicators that your business may suffer from the ‘Winchester House’ syndrome:

1. Process Indicators: Business processes are not well defined or understood and each function prides itself on simply doing whatever is necessary to get the job done, even if it requires winging it now and then. Each functional area designs, develops, and manages its own unique processes with little or no sharing of best practices across functional areas.
2. Technology Indicators: Each functional area has its own set of business applications and data. Applications often don’t work well with others and data is not consistent across departments. Key business information is fragmented and stored in multiple locations and collecting data to conduct company-wide analysis is a long, difficult, and largely a manual process.
3. People Indicators: Individual functional areas have very specialized people, and it takes years to train new employees to learn the ropes of the business. Employees care only about their functional area, have their own set of performance goals and metrics, and don’t understand how or why other functional areas get things done.

Unfortunately, when companies lose sight of the bigger picture and become a victim of the Winchester House syndrome, the customer experience invariably suffers. Customers can be inconvenienced by inconsistencies between touch points, lack of integration between channels, and absence of a meaningful relationship between customer and company. The company’s internal processes, policies, and infrastructure often get in the way of providing the customer with what they want: an emotional connection to the company powered by great service.

SEE THE FOREST THROUGH THE TREES

Businesses that want to avoid this fate can and should establish, adopt, and diligently adhere to an enterprise customer experience blueprint; a holistic model that defines how every component of the company should work together in a seamless and consistent manner to enable and optimize the customer experience. Furthermore, the enterprise blueprint can help a business to develop a detailed master plan for where the business is today and where it is going.

An enterprise blueprint can help any business to avoid the Winchester House syndrome by serving as a detailed model for how the customer experience is influenced and enabled by the compilation of people, process, and technology assets. A comprehensive enterprise blueprint will consist of a detailed definition and model for each major component that comprise the business. This model can be invaluable for identifying any current deficiencies as well as charting a future course for the business.

A comprehensive enterprise customer experience blueprint includes several key dimensions:

1. Customer Experience Lifecycle (Customer): A formal definition of the customer experience lifecycle process from the customer’s perspective. The process includes a complete end-to-end view of how customers are attracted, acquired, facilitated, served, and cultivated well after the point of purchase.
2. Enterprise Business Process (Process): A formal and detailed enterprise process model that defines all major processes, sub-processes, and activities that comprise the enterprise. Ideally, the process model should be defined as a hierarchy to allow both low-level analysis and optimization as well as executive-level roll-up of detailed activities into larger process areas.
3. Enterprise Systems Architecture (Technology): A complete information technology model that identifies and defines key IT capabilities, applications, data, and infrastructure. Ideally, the components of the IT architecture model should be expressly linked to the customer, process, and people dimensions of the blueprint.
4. Enterprise Organization Chart (People): An enterprise-wide organization chart that includes an up-to-date definition of the reporting structure, roles, and responsibilities.
5. Enterprise Business Metrics (Value): A standardized definition of all key business metrics that includes a definition of how the metric is calculated and where key data is sourced from in the enterprise.
6. Corporate Strategy (Strategy): A clear and well-defined strategy that sets the long-term goals and directions for the company. The corporate strategy should include components to define specific strategies for areas such as the brand, market, product, service, price, promotion, channel, and customer experience.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE BLUEPRINT – IT DOES YOUR BUSINESS GOOD

Businesses that are seeking clarity to their current and future business environment can develop their own customer experience blueprint by identifying and analyzing their key business assets:

1. Assemble available business artifacts: Gather all available customer experience processes, business processes, technology architectures, organization structures, business metrics, and strategies that are available for the business.
2. Identify gaps and inconsistencies: Evaluate the existing business artifacts to identify what is missing, where inconsistencies or duplications occur, or where additional detail is lacking for each of the major dimensions (customer, process, people, technology, value, and strategy).
3. Create standard definitions and assemble the blueprint: Create and agree to a common set of standards to accurately define and describe each dimension of the blueprint and close any gaps that are identified. Consolidate and summarize all artifacts into a comprehensive enterprise customer experience blueprint and keep them up to date. Use the blueprint as a management tool to guide the business going forward.

Developing and using a comprehensive blueprint has its benefits; businesses that define and maintain a comprehensive enterprise customer experience blueprint can improve their return on investments, increase productivity, and improve the customer experience:

* Improved ROI: Initiatives that are better aligned with the enterprise blueprint can result in fewer conflicts and duplication of efforts. Furthermore, short-term efforts can be better aligned with long-term goals so that all resources are rowing in the same direction.
* Increased Productivity: Business can run more smoothly and produce more for the same or less effort by leveraging common resources, speaking the same process and business metric language, and by using a common and consistent set of information. Furthermore, businesses can make better decisions based on a more holistic and consistent view of enterprise-wide capabilities, issues, risks, and opportunities.
* Improved Customer Experience: Businesses that have aligned their people, process, and technology components are better equipped to provide meaningful customer experiences. When aligned and consistent, the business infrastructure can serve as a true enabler – rather than a hindrance – to powerful customer experiences.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Over the course of the lifetime of a business various business challenges, opportunities, and issues will arise and be solved by numerous and seemingly innocent business decisions; decisions that result in new processes, organizational structures, and systems. Without an overarching blueprint to guide these decisions, however, the legacy of various and uncoordinated initiatives can be crippling. As more and more independent decisions are made, the weight of inconsistent processes, duplication of duties, and incompatible systems can burden both the company and the customer.

Business that want to avoid this fate can and should establish, adopt, and diligently adhere to an enterprise customer experience blueprint; a holistic model that defines how every component of the company should work together in a seamless and consistent manner to enable and optimize the customer experience. A comprehensive enterprise customer experience blueprint includes several key dimensions including a 1) Customer Experience Lifecycle Process (Customer), 2) an Enterprise Business Process Model(Process), 3) an Enterprise Systems Architecture (Technology, 4) an Enterprise Organization Chart (People), 5) Enterprise Business Metrics (Value), and 6) a Corporate Strategy (Strategy).

If your business were a house or building, what would it look like to your employees and customers? Would it be structurally sound, open, and inviting? Or would it be cluttered, broken up and difficult to navigate?

Having the right blueprint can make all the difference.

Robert Howard is the Founder and Chief Executive of ClearBrick LLC, a leading provider of customer experience business solutions, research, and advice.

ClearBrick can be found online at http://www.ClearBrick.com.

When creating an LLC as a single member LLC, the business owners gains 4 significant advantages over a sole proprietor business structure. With the costs of starting and maintaining a limited liability company being so minimal, most lawyers and CPAs would advise on the use of the single member LLC. . . it is a protection vehicle and does not create any added complexity when it comes to operations and taxes.

PROTECTION FOR THE MEMBER OF THE SINGLE MEMBER LLC

A limited liability company provides a legally enforceable shield protecting you personally from the obligations and liabilities of your business. If anyone ever wanted to file a lawsuit against your business, then you would not be personally liable just because you are the owner. If you run your business as a sole proprietorship, you are inextricably part of the business and so you become the target of anyone who has a claim or wants to make trouble for your business. You cannot avoid this personal liability in a sole proprietorship. You need a single member LLC.

Do not think that given the nature of your business, a lawsuit is unlikely. Business lawsuits are now an epidemic in America. The more your business interacts with others, the more likely there could be a claim.

So, any third party, whether it be a customer, a service provider, contractor, employee or anyone who just visits your business is a potential threat..
Now, you can start to think through the chances of who can sue you but instead, try to understand what lawsuits are all about. They are about money. If your business becomes successful, your chances of lawsuits are higher because you will be getting and keeping more assets.

Instead of justifying or hoping you never get sued as a sole proprietor, it is better to ask whether paying the few hundred dollars to create and maintain an LLC each year is worth having this protection. Check with your specific state to see what specific fees apply when it comes creating an LLC and maintaining it on file each year.

NO ADDED COMPLEXITY WHEN IT COMES TO OPERATIONS OR TAXES

From an operational perspective, a single member LLC can operate his or her business in almost the same way as a sole proprietorship with a few exceptions.
When creating an LLC, the entity should have a simple operating agreement in place but otherwise, there are no legally required formalities like meetings and written approvals as there are with corporations. Maintenance is minimal.

When conducting business, it is very important to make clear to all parties that it is the LLC that is the business. This usually means including your LLC business name in all your written material (marketing material, advertisements, contracts).

For a single member LLC, there is no difference in how the business reports and pays federal income taxes . A single member LLC is disregarded by the IRS for tax purposes only and so you pay taxes using the exact method of rules for sole proprietorships. By operating a single member LLC, you get all the advantages of the limited liability company as a business vehicle without any added difficulties when it comes to income taxes.

PROFESSIONAL AND TRUSTWORTHY IMAGE

Customers today are skeptical when it comes to choosing who to do business with. One method in which they distinguish a legitimate businesses from others is when they see that a business is being run through a formal legal entity such as an LLC.

Let us face it. Most of the business scams and fly by night businesses out there are sole proprietors. Their goals are to take money from unsuspecting victims. Many will not go through the process of setting up a formal legal entity for their scheming plans. It is so simple to put forth a business name to the public and allege that you are running a business. This is all that is required for a proprietor to start.

Many customers recognize a business that has taken the steps involved with creating an LLC likely has intelligent and serious owners behind it. A single member LLC business generally portrays more trust and professionalism over a sole proprietor running the same business.

Of course, there are many legitimate and respectable sole proprietor businesses out there but for the potential customer it is difficult to ascertain which ones are for real and are trustworthy. It helps a lot when customers see an LLC designation after a business name. Creating an LLC can makes it easier to launch your business and get those customers.

For more FAQ information about the LLC v. Sole Proprietorship, visit the LLC Learning Center at http://www.TheLLCExpert.com

British citizens who are living permanently abroad often struggle with finding the right investment option for their retirement funds. British pension plans tend to keep the money tied up within the UK, making it difficult for the expatriate to access his or her funds. When money is made available, it is heavily taxed and is delivered in British pounds. Pounds are often not the currency of choice for those living abroad, creating a problem. The British government has recently made provisions to make it easier for expats to access and use their money while residing outside of the UK.

A QROPS, or Qualified Recognized Pension Plan, is a relatively new investment option for British expatriates. This option became available to expatriates in April of 2006. The new regulations regarding QROPS allow British expatriates to move money from their UK pension plans to QROPS. The QROPS must be qualified and recognized, which means the government has agreed that it is a qualified plan. This allows the expatriate to put his or her funds into an account that is subject to fewer taxes, allows access to the money when needed, and provides a better form of currency.

This has led to the question of who is able to apply for QROPS. Under current tax law, this system is open to British citizens who are living overseas for an extended period of time. Those who hold UK pensions and are citizens of other countries are also able to transfer their money form the pension to a QROPS, provided they are no longer living in the UK.

This means that individuals who have worked within the UK at any time, while maintaining their citizenship elsewhere, can apply for a QROPS, provided they are no longer living in the UK. The only people who cannot use a QROPS are United States citizens. At this time, Americans who hold UK pensions cannot use the QROPS program.

Money that is transferred into a QROPS can be accessed tax free if the fund is structured properly. However, this benefit is not available until the individual who owns the account has been out of the UK for at least five complete tax years. This stipulation keeps people from moving out of the country temporarily simply to access the tax benefits associated with a QROPS.

There are no minimum amounts required to transfer money from a UK pension plan to a QROPS, unless the QROPS itself sets these minimums. However, the cost of the transfer and the management of the account may prohibit those with small pensions from utilizing this tool. For instance, individuals with less than 150,000pounds may find that the cost of creating and maintaining the fund outweighs the tax benefits they will receive.

Why should those who qualify for QROPS consider making the transfer? Not only will the money in their pension now be available in a new currency, but it will also be available before they reach retirement age. Provided the individual has lived outside of the UK for the past five years, that money can be withdrawn from the QROPS free of UK pension taxes. This can mean that the full value of the pension funds is available to the expatriate. The taxes in the country where the fund is set up still must be paid, but choosing the right country can make these taxes close to nothing.

Money in a QROPS is also freed from UK inheritance taxes. For those who are working on their estate plans, this is a great incentive. By setting up a QROPS and transferring pension money to it from a UK pension, these individuals can protect more of their funds for their heirs when they die. Because of these great benefits, many British expats and others who hold British pension plans are looking to transfer their money out of the pension plan and into a QROPS.

Financial Services Company offers offshore investment banking with offices in Bermuda, the Bahamas, Grand Cayman and London providing offshore bank account services to clients worldwide.

http://www.lom.com/