The Business Owner Blog

The Chief Executive of British Petroleum (BP) will be fired within the week. This was reported yesterday by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and corroborated by various sources.

And so, once again, we see large and successful organizations – when things go wrong – make a change. Send a message. Roll some heads. Can we learn from them as owners of small and mid-size companies?

What can we read into the stock market dive of late?
It’s just a sign things are getting back to normal.
According to the Richard Cripps, Chief Investment Officer at Stifel Nicolaus. “There have been ninety-two corrections of ten percent or more since 1928, or one every eleven months.” In April he said a 10% correct as likely to soon occur, based on historical precedence. "We are due," Cripps said.
And it did.

“Things Every Business Seller Should Know” was the title of a presentation given Tuesday by David Perkins, Managing Editor of The Business Owner Journal. He accepted the invitation extended to him by Dennis Currington to speak to the volunteer counselors of Tulsa SCORE.

Tulsa SCORE is an affiliate of the Service Corps of Retire Executives (SCORE) headquartered in Herndon, Virginia and Washington, DC. The organization’s mission is “educating entrepreneurs and helping small business start, grow and succeed nationwide.” Among the topics covered were:

With the advent of websites, blogs, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, the real you is rapidly and widely disseminated. What people really think about your company today tends to have as much—if not more—to do with how you and your employees conduct themselves as it does with the image you work hard to portray.

It’s over.
Word may not have reached your desk yet but the bleeding has stopped. The fever has receded. The prognosis is for a full recovery.
Dr. Jeffrey Dietrich -- senior analyst for the Institute for Trend Research – presented the latest economic data today. Dr. Dietrich said:
Good things are happening in the economy
All indicators are positive
The turn-around is under way
Growth will [...]

People want to do business with organizations that are credible and trustworthy. They want to patronize organizations that are good corporate citizens. Ultimately, people want to be inspired, have hope and feel good about themselves and others.

If your not already a subscriber to The Business Owner Journal, click here and subscribe right now, for only $79. It’s a must-have resource for anyone that’s trying to manage and grow a private company.

“Want to compare yourself to someone, make it someone great,” my father used to say. Okay, maybe I should compare myself to a winning football coach, such as Sean Payton of the New Orleans Saints. After all, a professional sports team is a business.

A leading cause of business failure in the U.S. is employee theft.1 Organizations lose 5% of their revenue to fraud.2 Small businesses suffer disproportionately2 and the perpetrator is typically a “most trusted” employee. One in twenty-five employees are sociopaths and looking for opportunities to swindle you.

The great news for you is, odds are, your competitors are not hitting on all cylinders. It’s just not the real world. The really well functioning teams are the extreme exception, not the norm.
You remember. You worked for a variety of companies before you became owner. Were they well functioning or did they survive, somehow, despite themselves?