Do you have a business plan prior to starting up your company? Have you researched the market sufficiently? Planning is a key ingredient in the success of an entrepreneur. A business plan helps to guide the decision making process needed to operate a business. Understanding the importance of preparation and research before starting a business is vital for its success; it gives you a clear focus and can stop you from heading in the wrong direction. What is more being prepared gives you the right expectation towards reality and helps you appreciate the possibilities and identify likely setbacks. Thus, business planning can be described as the cornerstone of fruitful business development and the set of skills needed for its execution should be carefully nurtured in order to realize the full potential of your business idea.
Taking this assessment will help you to reveal how skilful you are in Business Planning and will give you sources of information and training on the topic.
The ‘marketing concept’ proposes that in order to satisfy the organizational objectives, an organization should anticipate the needs and wants of potential consumers and satisfy them more effectively than its competitors.
Steps in using product categories to optimize your marketing strategy:
1.Understand how YOUR TARGET MARKET categorizes a specific product.
2.Determine the appropriate (most likely successful) marketing strategy for each of your brands.
3.Implement your strategy.
4.Test the impact of your product strategy on achieving goals — such as increased sales.
5.Finally tweak your strategy to improve your results.
With these skills you will be able to test yourself and check which success stories fit you better .
Taking this assessment will help you to reveal how skilful you are in Business Planning and will give you sources of information and training on the topic.
The uncertain economic times of the past few years have had a major effect on how companies operate these days. Companies that used to operate smoothly with the help of forecasts and projections now refrain from making business judgements that are set in stone. Now, companies have a renewed focus: to manage risk.
Risk is the main cause of uncertainty in any organization. Thus, companies increasingly focus more on identifying risks and managing them before they even affect the business. The ability to manage risk will help companies act more confidently on future business decisions. Their knowledge of the risks they are facing will give them various options on how to deal with potential problems.
Without risk management, a firm cannot possibly define its objectives for the future. If a company defines objectives without taking the risks into consideration, chances are that they will lose direction once any of these risks hit home.
Taking this assessment will help you to reveal how familiar you are with risk management and will give you sources of information and training on the topic.
Today, many entrepreneurs who want to start their own business have a lack of motivation and support. Unfortunately, many of them go into entrepreneurship just as a source of income, which of course cannot come immediately, and later complain that they have not had enough support and opportunities for growth and advancement. And then comes the failure. On the other hand, other entrepreneurs start with small things, and know how important it is to have support to develop their business (family, friends, financial support), but they also have great motivation to accomplish great things and to strengthen their business to be considered successful.
Taking this assessment will help you understand your level of motivation and support and will give you sources of information and training on the topic.
After one or a few businesses that did not make it, learning is key to stand a better chance of success for a new enterprise endeavour. Yet shame and words that come along, like failure and blame, are no good conditions for learning. Quite the opposite. Even though you might have made mistakes in the past, only by acknowledging them and appreciating them (along with your successes), you can strengthen what you are good at and minimize the risk of making the same or similar mistakes.
This is also about being able to see and balance your own responsibility with external factors, which sometimes are hard to predict and anticipate. Knowing what was and is under your control, and what is not, puts your responsibility in context. In doing so, you will be better in analysing what your competences are as an entrepreneur, and what you need to use those competences to their best possible extent!
Taking this assessment will help you understand your level self-confidence and your ability to learn from your mistakes and will give you sources of information and training on the topic.
To err is human and nobody is immune from this. If, however, we only apologize but then continue as before, we risk repeating the same mistakes. When we do not learn from our mistakes, we cause unnecessary stress to ourselves and others, both in private life and at work, which is often the primary cause of the first. Mistakes and stress can become great opportunities for learning and development on a personal, as well as organizational level. We just have to learn from them and how to handle stress.
The main important steps of “Stress Management” are:
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- To learn personal and professional lessons from the mistakes to better face the future stress situations and the challenges;
- To listen to the advice from trusted professionals and don’t persevere in obstinate courses;
- To know how to delegate your tasks when you are overloaded and/or you aren’t able to face and to solve issues;
- To create and preserve a work-life balance environment based on the trust among yourself and the people surrounding you;
- To face with courage the challenges and the issues;
- To be able to mediate among the parties and/or compromise to find a peaceful and acceptable solution to the problems;
- To communicate, create strategies and manage them with other people to avoid misunderstandings;
- To be connected to each other.
Taking this assessment will reveal the way you manage stress and will give you sources of information and training on the topic.
Do you know how to adapt? Are you capable of reacting to the constantly changing environment, market & customers, external factors? Can you adjust your business on time?
Instability, unpredictability and risk are one of the most important characteristics of today’s business world. They have profoundly altered the reality of running a successful company. Entrepreneurs can no longer rely on static advantages such as their company’s position on the market, scale, speed of production, the terms of offering, delivering. They need to develop skills that foster and facilitate quick adaptation which is crucial to the survival of a business. Such skills include being able to: identify and address signals of change; experiment at a high scale by introducing new technologies and approaches, products and services; create flexible structures, etc. Learning how to be adaptable helps entrepreneurs tackle the ever coming instabilities and ensure the sustainability of their business’ competitive advantage in the long-term. Failing to adapt diminishes the competitiveness of a business and can ultimately lead to low performance and even dissolvement of companies. Thus, it is critical to apply adaptability in your company’s culture in order to secure successful “life” of a business.
Taking this assessment will help you understand your readiness to adapt and transform your business to make it more future proof and will give you sources of information and training on the topic.