Business Strategy | Mike McRitchie | Resume and LinkedIn Profile Writer

How To Bring Your Business Into The Year 2022

May 17, 2022 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

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As a business owner, you’re going to want to make sure that you have a fully-functional company with lots of flowing factors. If everything is moving properly, then the chances are that you’ll be in a good place for the time being and for many years ahead. Businesses that work well and have a solid group typically end up doing well and growing for many years.

The thing about business running, however, is that it evolves as time moves on. You cannot stay the same. A business from the 80s cannot operate in that same way anymore as it will get swallowed up by the competition. It also will not function too well in what feels like an entirely different time. If you want to make sure you have a business fit for 2022, here’s what you can do:

Keep Your Systems Protected And Secure With Cybersecurity

A lot of what you’ll do is online, so you have to make sure everything is kept safe and sound. Getting the right cybersecurity software matters as you never know when someone might try to infiltrate your devices and gather info/money. Managed IT services would also be able to help as they’ll watch over everything you do and ward off any threats.

Digital Marketing

In order to attract people to what you’re looking to sell, you have to make sure that you have a solid marketing strategy. Digital marketing is a staple in business nowadays as so many people are online. Older, traditional methods simply will not suffice. SEO, social media, and many other facets will need to be executed if you want the right success.

Manage Your Data Effectively

You will have lots of data stored on your devices, so you have to make sure it’s kept secure and in order. Having a cloud of information that all staff members can access and work within will make a lot of sense. We’re in a paperless time, so you have to get to grips with how it works now. Knowing how to move data from the likes of a data warehouse to another business app might be necessary. That’s where the likes of Census can come in and help.

Ensure You Have Many Forms Of Physical Security

Your company needs to be safe from all kinds of problems. CCTV cameras, alarm systems, locks, and extra doors will help out. You obviously don’t need to be kitted out with everything safety-wise, but the more the merrier. It’s better to be safe than sorry, of course.

Adopt A Modern Approach To Worklife

This doesn’t mean you can slack off a lot, but you certainly don’t need to adopt strict principles that are perhaps better left in the 70s. If a certain attire is necessary, then of course everyone will have to follow suit. If not, then a smart casual look could be worn as long as everyone is comfortable. Certain staff members might have certain needs and requirements, so be sure to allow leniency. Adopt certain working methods that would be fit for 2022, too, instead of archaic and traditional stuff.

6 Tips for Creating a Successful Business Strategy with Vulnerability Management in Mind

November 21, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

Successful business strategy

Strategy is important for any business large or small. Check out these 6 tips for creating a successful business strategy today!

Every 39 seconds there’s a cyber attack costing individuals and companies millions of dollars and destroying reputations.

There’s nothing that undermines management more than a breach of security. No matter how successful your management is or how clearly defined your organizational structure is it can all be wiped away with one well-timed attack.

If you don’t want this to be your company then you need to think long and hard about how management will deal with security vulnerabilities.

Luckily we’ve created a plan to help you make a successful business strategy for your company with vulnerability in mind.

1. Make Cybersecurity Part of Your Vision Statement

Your vision statement declares your objectives as a company. It tells the world what your focus is and what your goals are. As well as how you plan to shape your actions to achieve those goals.

If you want to tell the world that you value cybersecurity and privacy spell it out in your vision statement.

2. Review Your Strengths and Weaknesses

The hardest part of making a successful business strategy especially if you’ve been in business a long time is giving an honest assessment of your strengths and weaknesses.

One good thing to look over is whether or not your company has FFIEC compliance. This is a set of online banking standards that help ensure data safety.

3. Know Who to Hold Accountable

Once a security breach happens everyone scrambles to find out who they should blame. This’ll lead to a nearly endless game of pass the buck.

If you want to build a strategy that’s effective you have to know how to hold accountable and potentially fire someone if an emergency happens.

When developing a business strategy you should have a clear chain of command so that each employee knows who to answer to.

4. Create a Rolling 3-year plan

A key part of developing a business strategy is knowing where you supposed to be at any point in time. This should also extend to vulnerability management.

You should use the rolling 3-year plan to anticipate your security needs and plan solutions for any upcoming security threat.

The fact that it’s a rolling plan means that each you change and readjust the plan each based on what has already happened.

5. Performance Management

No matter how good we are at writing a business strategy and creating a plan it will all be ineffective if you don’t constantly make sure that you follow through.

This means writing quarterly or annual reports, making sure project managers are up to date on the latest threats and being sure you’re hitting your goals in a timely fashion.

6. Do a Risk Profile

When asking how to create a strategic plan that includes vulnerability management you need to know how to asses your risks. The best way to do this is to build a profile or outline of all the risks your vulnerable to.

When working with strategy development you need to factor cost into how you handle these risks. You need to understand what vulnerabilities you cannot afford to fix.

We’ll Help You Create a Successful Business Strategy!

Building a successful business strategy is a challenge but it will set your company apart. And will make it seem like a safer option than the competition. But there’s more to running a business like setting up payroll and dealing with clients.

If you want more help running your business feel free to contact us!

Wind Down Your Business Worries

May 21, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

Running a business is hardly a breeze. It takes a lot of hard work and stress to build a business from the ground up. You might be capable of taking things one step at a time, and not really worrying about anything. However, most people are likely to have a huge number of worries. It’s healthy to worry about some things when you own a business. If you weren’t stressing about anything, you would probably be a bit too casual about the fate of your company. But you don’t want your worries to consume you and prevent you doing your best. If you want to worry less, try these tips.

Set Your Finances Straight

Money is obviously the primary worry of any business person. Money is what allows your business to keep going and to grow. It can quickly stop your company in its tracks if you don’t have enough of it. Cash flow problems and thinking about how you can afford to grow your business can keep you awake at night. If you want to reduce your financial stress, you need to start by knowing your numbers inside and out. If you can’t say how much you’re spending and bringing in, and what you expect those numbers to be in a few years, you need to get on top of your finances.

Get Tech Troubles Taken Care Of

Technology of some kind is necessary to make most businesses tick. Even if you start off with a single computer and phone, you need to make the most of them. Problems with your tech can have an impact on productivity, customer satisfaction, and your finances. If you want to avoid worrying about tech issues, Xirtix Consulting for businesses can help you. IT consulting firms can take care of your problems so that you can take care of other things. If you have the right help, you can have tech issues taken care of before they have any real impact on your business.

Make Sure You Have a Clear Plan

Not having an idea of the future can be a considerable point of worry for any business owner. Of course, you can’t make any solid predictions about what’s going to happen in the future. Anything unexpected could occur, but that doesn’t mean that plans are useless. Making plans is still an important thing to do so that your business has direction. You should have goals and projections so that you at least know where you want to be in six months or two years.

Get Your Priorities Right

When you have a seemingly endless list of things to do, it can all get overwhelming. You don’t know where to start, and you can end up focusing on the wrong things. Then you get stressed out because everything keeps building up. One of the most important things is to have your priorities sorted. You can use a tool like Trello or Asana to organize everything that you need to do. Rank your tasks by what you need to do first and assign tasks to the right people too.

You can’t completely get rid of your worries about your business, but you can reduce them. Get more organized, and everything should be less overwhelming.

Response to: The More We Learn…The Less We Know

January 27, 2016 by Mike McRitchie Leave a Comment

Before you read this response you might want to check out the original post here:

The More We Learn..The Less We Know

My friend Tim, a retired regional VP for a large health imaging business, who inspired the original article, responded to me with the following. You’ll get some amazing insights from him. He is a thorough and well-read researcher, critical and deep thinker, with a wealth of knowledge. Enjoy…

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Like all of your blogs I was impressed. I’m not on Facebook so will respond the old fashioned e-mail way.

I think that a good business strategy must be empirical but also philosophical to a certain extent. My strategic business acumen would now be considered BCE but I made a few observations.

I would sum up my views with 16 bullet points but I hate bullet points with a passion…if one hasn’t got time to understand the context how can one understand the tweet?

Know your market, customers and competition well
Know your products
Have a vision
Plan carefully (strategically and financially)
Execute carefully and manage risk
Change the plan to coincide with market conditions
Choose good intelligent and personable people as employees
Continually train them with precision
Trust them and do not micro-manage
Give them reasonable goals and don’t pit them against each other
Treat them as gold because they are
Treat your customers as gold because they are and don’t forget to tell them that all the time
Reward good customers and loyal customers not new customers just to get the business
Provide legionary customer service
Have a business brain, heart and soul…Believe in your business, employees, products, services
Take your profits to the bank and reinvest part of it in your business and employees

Remember not to allow success to go to your head…it can change in a Nano second, too much pride and complacency is the devil.

I loved your analogy of the fish in and out of the fish bowl and also your theme of “The more we learn the less we know”…a very philosophical idiom which is often stated as “The more we know the more we don’t know”. Topped-off with Al Einstein’s quote was a nice touch.

I have my own definition of philosophy in the search for why. …that you have two voices with which you speak: your Mind-Voice and your Soul-Voice. I believe these voices are continually speaking to us.

Most will argue that we must sometimes listen and speak with the mind and sometimes listen and speak from the heart or soul. I say we must listen and speak with both. I say that because facts and reason without experience and wisdom doesn’t get anyone anywhere.

I see that in the many of the corporations today. They do not seem to learn the lessons of the past. Their business strategy ‘all’ comes from the mind and nothing from the heart…corporations like United Healthcare, Comcast and Bank of America with one focus only…Profit. I refer to them as “Ferengi” of Star Trek fame. However, they are not too big to fail and you know what will bring them down…not listening or speaking with their heart and soul (I’m not sure they have either).

Customers and employees also have minds and souls…heads that remind them how they are treated and souls that recognize greed when they see it.

So, I guess what I’m saying is a good business strategy must be empirical when it comes to planning and execution but it must also have heart…w/o good customers, profit will vanish in time. Oriental thinking and strategy contains both reason and wisdom and plans not one year to the next but for years to come. That would be my advice to a fledging new business enterprise. You can become an MBA and learn finance and business strategy but wisdom and morality can’t be easily taught in school.

I like the manner in which you employed your Global Warming political analogy…although that one must be handled very carefully. I think what most climate deniers miss is…what if they are wrong? You can be right but also ‘dead’ right.

I think most men and women with children and grandchildren would prefer not to leave their children worse off than they were. If by chance the deniers are wrong then why not hedge the bet and do something to mitigate what science believes to be the cause. To reason otherwise is to throw the baby out with the bath water or in short doing something is better than doing nothing.

The point being that if science is right and we don’t do anything about it then we have nowhere to escape? I think Maslow would agree…don’t mess with my food and shelter…planet earth.

I think the global warming analogy is also in concert with what I said above. The opinions of many climate deniers (but not all) partially conclude that to take definitive actions to curb greenhouse gases would have dire consequences on our economy because it would mean more regulations, no more reliance on fossil fuels…increasing overall cost adversely hurting industry and large corporations as if that ‘trumps’ (excuse the pun) the obvious cost of the effects of global warming…how many billions did Katrina or the NE storm cost?

Now if one wants to put their head in the sand arguing well…global warming had nothing to do with it then once again why take the risk? If anyone denies that ‘something’ isn’t going on they are blind. Sure it could be the beginning of a new ice-age but that is not what science says…why do we rely on science for everything else other than their conclusion on climate change?

These folks have a mind and soul but they are not listening to either… let them explain it to their grandchildren. Big and small business alike must bear tremendous responsibility not only to themselves employees, shareholders but customers and humanity at large. They must remove their Ferengi costumes and learn that profit w/o heart is a snowball heading to hell.

Mike, please, please put me back into the fishbowl…its getting hard to breathe with all this smog and pollution around me. There is no lead in the water is there? 🙂

Love you man…keep up the good work.

Tim

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Tim covered a lot of ground. But let it sink in. Maybe re-read some sections. If you’re looking to build or improve an existing business, definitely read and absorb his 16 bullet points.

If you’re on one or the other side of the climate change fence, there are things to think about there as well.

And if you’re just into deep, metaphysical thinking…or Star Trek…there’s something for you too.

If this spurred any interesting insights, please share your comments below or on your favorite social media site. If you want to be reminded of these posts on a weekly basis, and pick up some extra cool gifts, subscribe below too.

Thank you again Tim for sharing your insights.

Find Out What Relationship Experts Tony Robbins and Josh Gretz Have In Common

October 12, 2015 by Mike McRitchie Leave a Comment

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0uKO1h3t7M[/youtube]

Over the years I’ve spent a lot of time and money investing in personal growth through Tony Robbins’ books and programs. And I wouldn’t be here (doing what I’m doing now – meeting with and helping – small business entrepreneurs succeed in their business ventures) without the personal growth that Tony lead me through in my twenties.

Josh Gretz reminds me a lot of Tony. Josh is a quieter, more thoughtful version (we all know Tony Robbins is the over-the-top high energy guy). What I like about Josh is he brings his own version of passion (a Tony Robbins staple) to his business. You can just tell he loves what he does and is passionate about making a difference in his area of expertise – helping people improve their relationships and get a much higher quality of life as a result.

He tackles challenges such as introversion in his speaking events. And he coaches people one on one as well. Even high-achieving individuals come to Josh to get guidance before speaking at high profile events.

Josh is a body language and relationships expert who shows people how to build stronger relationships at home, in business and even on the go. If you’re not in the relationships you want, he’ll show you how to change that, too.

If you have a need in this area or know someone who does, check him out at http://www.joshgretz.com/

So in this video I interview Josh. Together we uncover 17 specific strategies to grow and market his speaking business. This is the part of my business I most enjoy – helping entrepreneurs uncover and leverage the most impactful areas of their business that they’re often too close to the business to recognize. Along with that I take my operational and marketing expertise to suggest out-of-the-box approaches that maximize their time and effort to get the results they are in business to achieve.

How many of these 17 strategies can you implement in your business? Need help in uncovering them for yourself? Or know someone who could? Get in contact with me.

In the meantime, enjoy!