That’s when everything is going smoothly without interruption; you’re getting clients, your schedule is full, and your clients are happy and referring other clients to hire you. But what if you can not keep up for any reason? Say you have a family issue or you get some health complications and everything goes off the schedule?

What about your limits? You are trading your time for money, so even if everything is fine and you never have anything to take you away from your clients, chances are there are other clients who need your help and you need their money but you can not take them because your schedule is full.How about your retirement? Say you decided you had enough and it’s time to enjoy life in a peaceful retirement, at that point your only income could be your investment that you made while working. But did you know that you could have invested that same time working with clients, and without doing any thing different except a few minor changes, and you would have had a business that you can sell for a big chunk of money when you decide to retire?

Structuring your business as a self employed executive coach is not the ideal choice. As long as you are trading time for money you are still employed, not a business owner. Your business in the former case only works when you work on it, and there is no way you can get yourself out of the equation and still make money.

The ideal structure for your executive coaching business is a firm. You put the guidelines, strategies, and the plans, in other words, you put a system for your executive coaching process, and hire certified executive coaches to do the job. This way you can have several folds more clients than you could have as a self employed executive coach without having to do more than a fraction of what you could have done in the one-on-one model.

An executive coaching firm is also more credible than an individual, and can be sold or passed to someone else, which is enough to consider it a worthy investment of your time.

It’s Time For A Brainstorm

Let’s face it – you can’t possibly think of everything that might happen to your team. You can think of some things, but it’s going to take the input from the rest of your team in order to come up with a complete list of the possible crisis that you need to plan for.

The best way to go about doing this is to pull your team together into a brainstorming session. During this meeting allow everyone to come up with crisis scenarios and don’t initially reject any of them as being too far fetched. During this session you want to collect all possible ideas and you can sort them out later on.It Takes A Team To Manage A Crisis

When a crisis hits, your team is going to be under a great deal of stress. As an IT manager you need to realize this before the crisis hits and you need to come up with a plan that is going to allow them to deal with the crisis.

One way to do this is to take the time to set up a crisis-management team before a crisis hits. By creating teams to deal with different types of crisis (natural disaster, IT outage, company disaster, etc.) the members of your team will know their roles and therefore will know what to do.

Once assigned to a crisis-management team, your IT staff should take the time to create a plan for dealing with the future crisis. One piece of information that you should also be collecting is to identify any side effects of implementing your crisis plan – what could go wrong? Simply by taking the time to do this planning your team will be better situated to deal with the crisis when it comes.
What All Of This Means For You

IT managers need to take the Boy Scout motto to heart: “Be Prepared”. This means that although none of us can predict what the future holds for us, we can at least take the time to prepare for the next crisis.

This means working with your team to brainstorm the possible crisis that could strike your team. This is a good way to prevent problems before they happen. You can’t be expected to do it all once a crisis hits. That’s why you need to establish a crisis management team. This will help every member of your team to know their roll when a crisis hits.

Perhaps someday we’ll have the ability to accurately see into the future. However, until that day comes IT managers will need to take the time to prepare for crisis that we know will happen someday. Those IT managers who prepare for the worst are the ones who are able to make it through to the other side.

Delving deeper into the specifics of these successful projects, I uncovered a similar pattern. Yes, the individual’s technical skills and the process they followed were important. However, some of the projects didn’t follow a defined process but were still successful. Some of the projects didn’t use the latest and greatest technology and were still successful. What these projects had in common with those that did was the relationship the technologists had with the business (user) community.Asking the head of the business area why they considered specific technology projects successful, their answers varied. Many projects satisfied their needs…many did not. The ones they believe were the most successful were when they could mention a specific person (manager, technologist, analyst, PC Support, or quality control) that made it that much more responsible for the success. They didn’t mention the technology. They didn’t mention the process they followed. All of them mentioned that it was more than just having their needs met…that it was the relationship they had with the technologist that made the project a true success.

Think about this in terms of YOU. Why do you have the job you have? Who really puts the food on your table? It’s the company’s clients and customers. The business person (marketing, sales, executive management) may be your interface but you have a job because they need you to give them what they want. They are the reason why you are fed regularly.

If business had its way, it would pick a team of technologists that had the best relationship with them. They know the project may be late, over budget, and some of their requirements may not even be met. Again and again, they would select the individual they find easiest to work with, the one who listens and understands them. What type of relationship do you have with the non-technical community? Meeting the business needs is only satisfaction. Having them request you over and over again… that’s loyalty.

Think about this in terms of YOU. Having a loyal relationship with the business community gives you first priority to work on the top projects. It gives you priority to learn the skills you need. It builds systems that they will remember you by. It provides a future reference. Surprisingly, it may even provide a lifelong relationship.

Your technical skills and process are important. It just shouldn’t be the first two in the list of what skills you need. Building great systems that meet or exceed business expectations requires relationship building. Relationship building provides more avenues for technologists to play with the latest and greatest technologies and less likely you will get laid-off. Yet, this is the one area that is often ignored, avoided, and least trained.

Think about this in terms of YOU. How may classes have you attended on building business relationships? How many articles or books have you read on the topic? The answer to both questions is either none or not enough. Now, how many classes have you attended on technology or process? Do you see your gap? Shouldn’t you change your focus a bit?

Now for some tough questions. Answer them on a scale of 1 to 5 (five being a loyal relationship):

* How quickly does business return your call or email?

* How often are you requested to work on the next juicy project for them?

* How long does the key business person stay involved with the project?

* Are you caught off guard with “scope creep”?

* Does the business community dread a meeting with you?

I dare you to actually ask 5 business people the following 4 questions (of course, that is if they even take your call):

* Why was the project I was on successful?

* Did you enjoy working with me on the project?

* Would you select me to work on your next project?

* How involved will you be in the project?

Your technological skill set and the process you follow is not what is keeping you fed. It’s how you exceed meeting the needs of the business. Exceeding goes beyond satisfaction, it creates a loyal partnership. CIOs and business systems manager will always select a person the business requests. Said in a technical way, technology skills and process are commodity items. Relationship building is what separates you from the pack. Building the relationship starts with YOU!

There are “rules of engagement” which illustrates sincerity and respect. Once understood and put in practice, the sincerity and respect will go both ways. It only works if you believe that the Relationship is important in the long run. It only works if you believe that relationships are more important than your technical skills and process. No matter what technical position you hold, business relationship building skills must be your top priority (Rule of Engagement #1).

Beware! Relationship building does not happen overnight. It will take up to a year to form a permanent bridge. The rewards are endless. These skills will help you build better systems and build a better relationship with business personnel (as well as other technologists, family and friends) for a lifetime. It will become part of your brand and lead you towards continual success.

Over the next week, identify specific business individuals you want to have a better relationship with by year end.

You must be wondering how on earth you will actually make a living off committing your life to the internet. Basically the starting point centers on starting a website. Because this is going to be a lifetime commitment you ought to decide upon something you know you can do even when you wake up with a bad hair day.If you love the weird taste of flowers then you can start a site that deals specifically with that, no matter what you might think. Whatever it is just make sure it is something you love because staying motivated is not a quality most online entrepreneurs have managed to master. With that done you should then begin the process of building the site, of course with the help of online freelancers like me who will write articulate articles to give your site the creative and lustrous appeal it needs.

There are three distinct avenues of profit that can be exploited. The very first actually revolves around the selling or provision of services. Therefore you can sell bags, clothes, cosmetics or flowers directly to browsers or even provide the option of auctioning. When it comes to services you could specialize in giving browsers quotes on insurance or sell articles to other sites.

Apart from selling products and providing services you can create effective links with other website owners and make money through affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is whereby you work together with affiliate sites by having a few of their adverts on your web site. How then does it work in reality? Well, when an advert is followed up with a sale you automatically receive a percentage commission of the overall price from the affiliate site.

In order to start making money in this way you need to be registered with Google Adwords, the company that is responsible for creating the apparently nonsensical links that eventually lead to you receiving your commission. However, if you doubt the truth in this you will surely not earn a single penny, not even a half penny if it existed.

The pay per click route is one that is responsible for enriching the owners of websites like Facebook, Yahoo and Google. Basically every time you click on any of the listed sites above the owners make a certain amount of money. Now imagine how many clicks Google receives every second, unimaginable right. Well, if you have a similarly popular site you will be making unimaginable revenue.

When businesses are focussing on efficiency, it becomes easier to respond towards product demand. When considering this in the chain of distribution, the supplier knows right away when certain inventory needs to be replaced. When there are less products available on the shelf. This way, demand is being matched in real time, and less storage space is being used for inventory. Less storage space is being used because there is a focus on just-in-time processes. Businesses strive to have inventory arrive as soon as its needed. When thinking in terms of benefits, firms are able to cut costs in the long run. Short term investments are made on technology and knowledge. However, the results do pay off, and the investments do get recouped. This is because firms are able to get the product out to their customers quicker. When they do this, the customers are satisfied because their needs are met. Satisfied customers bring growth to the company.Old businesses that still retain traditional methods are being left out. They refuse to spend money and take calculated risks. When this is the case, their is less control over inventory and the cycle time is a lot longer. Therefore, the product gets out to the customer later than expected. This can lead to additional inventory being accumulated, inventory that is not being purchased by customers. This inventory requires storage and warehousing space, which costs money. Effective businesses don’t allow inventory to be accumulated. To be specific, traditional businesses may use phone calls and sales forecasts to make more predictions. When the business is not advancing, sales become volatile and less predictable.

When considering improving businesses, most of the time, inventory is in transit with suppliers because the product is delivered as soon as its needed. When the product needs to be replaced on a store shelf, costs for storage space is reduced and the products get to the customer on time. The inventory is either being delivered or on a store shelf, there is little time for it to be in a warehouse. When following this procedure, the demand for the product is matched effectively. Wal-Mart is a perfect example for this. Customer takes a product off the shelf, brings it to the cashier, the cashier scans the item. Right away, the supplier knows one piece of inventory is needed. That one inventory item needs to be replaced. This instantaneous flow of inventory will help a business succeed. It is when there is good collaboration between the supplier and retailer, we find an effective supply-chain model.

Businesses should start moving towards new ways of decreasing cycle time. Basically, reduce the time it takes for a product to get from the supplier to the customer. When this happens, not only is the customer happy, so is the business owner. The owner is happy because he or she reduced costs on warehousing. Also, changing businesses will get an edge on their competitors. By investing in technology and focussing on new ways to improve efficiency, companies will be immune in developing industries. Another crucial element will be on improving logistics, delivery methods between the supplier and retailer. By using networking based solutions, and moving away from brick-and-mortar methods, a business is able to keep up with the needs of customers. A businesses that wishes to evolve in a globalizing world, should focus their effort towards supply chain management.