Tax Deadline

By Brad Semp

 Many people who are unfamiliar with - or who are not sold on the concept of systemizing their business - believe that systems will stifle their creativity or freedom.

Nothing could be further from the truth! By implementing systems in your business, you will actually free up both yourself and your staff to apply your and their creativity to those matters that require creative thinking… rather than requiring them to apply their minds to reinventing the wheel on routine tasks.

Take any business process where a certain sequence of events leads to the same result, each and every time. Imagine that you want a certain result, and that you or someone else in your business has come up with a sequence of events that will yield that result. In fact, let’s say you run a restaurant and the process in question concerns the preparation of a pasta dish.

Your chef knows that by using certain ingredients… sauteing them for a certain amount of time at a certain temperature in a particular kind of pan… boiling a certain kind of pasta for just the right number of minutes… and following a number of other specific steps… he will end up with a bowl of pasta that tastes the same today, as it will if he follows the exact same steps tomorrow.

Now, does following those steps inhibit the chef’s freedom because he can’t just make the pasta dish anyway he wants? Well, yes… but only if the chef wants to make different tasting pasta each time he makes it. Which is, of course, a sure “recipe” for customer complaints and a chef about to be sacked!

In reality, a chef who takes pride in his or her work and wants to serve a meal that customers look forward to each and every night because of its consistent good taste, will apply his or her creativity to creating the system (i.e. the recipe) in the first place, and leave creativity out of the equation during the actual cooking process. By contrast, the last thing a chef wants - especially when the restaurant is busy with hungry patrons - is to be wondering how he should make a given dish!

So too, when it comes to managing your business, you want to apply YOUR creativity to developing and improving your systems, not to reinventing them each time you want something done. That way, you and your staff focus all your creative efforts where they really matter, not to rethinking what has already been thought through.

Equally, by systemizing your business, you are free to walk away from it at any time, knowing that your staff do not need to be told what to do. You do NOT need to be there reigning them in, making sure they do the right things. For instance, if you properly document the processes in your business, you can be confident that the results that you seek stand a good chance that they will be achieved.

Thus, by developing, managing, and training people in your business systems, you can leave the business knowing that it will perform as intended. And that’s why systems GIVE you freedom in your business!

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Information Regarding Upcoming Tax Deadlines

Finding Creative Business Card Ideas
By Samuel Zipursky

 Making sure that you come up with creative business card design ideas that stand out is a very important element of business promotion and branding. The last thing you want to have is just a plain old boring card that doesn’t really stand out or catch people’s attention when you’re doing business with them.

So today I thought I’d speak a little bit about where are some good places for you to come up with inspiration and ideas for how you might want to get your next business cards designed.

The first place I would suggest is looking through all of the business cards you have ever received. If you are a designer or business person like me then you probably have a box, drawer, or rolodex filled with business cards that you have received from clients, friends, school mates, people you have met at conferences, etc. Get this old pile of what you thought was trash out and just start going through them for design ideas.

I’m not saying that you are doing this research of all your old creative business cards to steal any ideas. What I’m saying is that you can often get fresh design inspiration or new ideas just from seeing what others have done that caught your eye in terms of good promotional design that works.

Another great way to find inspiration and ideas when you’re starting out that new design project is on the web. Don’t just type in “business cards” and hope to find the most creative of all. What you should do is actually look around for design company websites. One you find the company what you’re going to want do is check through their portfolio of past work they have done for other clients that have been happy.

By going around to other designer and design firm websites you’d be surprised at how many cutting edge examples you’ll start to find. Don’t just limit your search to firms in the US or Canada. Think a bit broader and go international with your search. Some of the most amazing creative business card designs come from countries such as Germany, Holland, and Japan so think globally not just locally.

So using design company website portfolios and also using cards that you have received over the years can both be great ways of gathering ideas for your next business card design project. Even if you are not the designer at least you will have some designs to show him or her as a base or guide of the kind of creativity, textures, and colors you are looking for in the design job that you want.

Sam provides further information about creative business cards through his website all about clear business cards and more.

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