THINK OUTSIDE

YOUR BRAIN!

     Okay, you own and/or operate or manage a small business (or piece of a big one), or you’re a salesperson or an entrepreneur. That makes you a schizoid, right? I mean you have so much going on that even reading this is a sacrifice … but take heart!

     If you’re really serious about what you’re doing, you are also serious about exploring innovative approaches to today’s basic essentials: productivity, customer service, value-adding, and marketing efficiency. Whoa, there’s a couple of new ones there!

     Yup! Those last two essentials that snuck onto that list are the fruits of our egg-sucking economy. Until the going got tough, we never paid no never-mind to ideas like adding product and services value or to pulling out all the stops to maintain marketing impact while cutting marketing costs. They were token pursuits.

     But now we care. Now we’re here. And here means taking a fresh look at what you’re doing. Here’s just one example:

     Do you have any interns working for you? No, not the White House kind … BUSINESS interns. Why not? Have you actually approached your nearby community college or university campus (or even high schools for some situations) and pointblank asked how such an arrangement could be made? Why not?

     Perhaps you think there’s no room in your organization for a wet-behind-the-pierced-ears-tattooed dude? You may want to revisit that thinking. Interns in much of academia will work for free or minimum wage because they can earn course credits for on-the-job experience.

     Interns who perform well often turn out to be loyal, long-term, full time employees.

     Interns need a definitive plan and can sometimes require some extra hand-holding, but they are also typically eager to learn and anxious to please (especially when performance is grade-related!)

     Spare yourself the worry of excessive planning and what-ifs, and make some exploratory calls. If and when you uncover access to an internship program, THEN decide how, when, and where you can use some free or inexpensive project help. Many short-term projects, by the way, can turn into mutually-beneficial long-term assignments.

     The trade-off? Well, you or someone you can trust to provide role-model leadership will need to expend energy (and patience) with any intern(s) you take on, and the intern(s) may not provide what’s needed.

     But, then again, you could end up a major winner and that depends a great deal on your screening skills to start with. Formal programs offer the advantage of giving you recourse to the school if there’s any problem, and you’d probably only be required to provide periodic performance evaluations.

     The bottom line is to think outside your computer, outside your workspace, outside your organization — outside your brain — and start making better use of resources you may have been overlooking, whatever and whomever they are.

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  Hal@Businessworks.US   302.933.0116

  Open Minds Open Doors 

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