Did You Just Fall Out of Love With Your Business?

It's the Christmas season again, and love and festivity is just all around us. Symbols of love are everywhere—the color red, Christmas trees, Santa, gifts, et cetera. What also caught my attention was the  massive business going on. Lantern stores sprout on busy sidewalks, beggars are now singing carols, and the price of fruits and flowers slightly shot up.

.

I had no problem with any of those. However, as I contemplated on the business part and on all the love brewing around, I suddenly thought: what if you fall out of love for your business? What if you just lost it? What do you do to fall back in love again?

See, perhaps the best job in the world is to be one’s own boss. And even though it’s not that easy or as loose as it sounds, many people still jump into the bandwagon and try to come up with their very own gigs. At first you like being the king of your time and being able to have the say on everything; however, when the realities of business ownership and management settle in, it’s also easy to just lose the zest for your business.

Imagine, you have to worry about financial management, employee relationship, sales and most of the time, you even get to work on weekends as well. When your to-do list starts to lengthen more than usual, there will be times when all you want to do is shut yourself out and sleep all day.

If you need help falling back in love with your business, here are a few time tested tips:

The first thing that you need to do is to set your mindset right back on track. Ask yourself why you are doing what you do and what your business stands for. Or, if you want to amp up the purpose of your business, ask yourself, “what is the most important aspect of my job?”. Whether it’s giving jobs or providing above satisfactory services, you need to remind yourself what your purpose is. Take time to pause for a while and reflect on what we are there for. Usually it’s the daily drill that just gets into us, and reflecting on our purpose re-energizes us back into taking those drills more seriously and purposefully.

Now, if you think that it’s the huge mound of tasks getting into you, start delegating some of the little ones to a trustworthy delegate. Pass some important-but-easy-and-time-consuming tasks like website maintenance, social media marketing and calendar scheduling off to an assistant. This will give you more energy and time to focus on the more important aspects of your business or future projects.

Lastly, don’t forget to take some time off. Take a quick vacation (one weekend will do) to inspire yourself and perhaps generate fresh ideas and more innovative perspectives. Indulge your employees to these kinds of mini vacations once in a while as well.

See, it’s not very difficult, isn’t it? You just have to start with the right mindset and work from there. And for a while, take your time off the numbers (sales, debts, etc.) and work on the heart of your business—the purpose. Once you get it right from there, the numbers will eventually concede.

Need more help with business revamping or mindset recharging? Drop me a line at the comment box or email Your New PR Girl at karlastefansingson@gmail.com.

Facebook Etiquette for the Working Ones

We all know how famous Facebook has become. And we all know what this fame can do to our careers. Now that bosses and employees may get cozy and may take a peek at each other's personal live through Facebook's social networking magic, there are unwritten rules about Facebook Etiquette for employees. I'm listing down those that jump out of my mind:

1. Don't send a friend request to your boss. It's just wrong. However, if he adds you up, clean up your profile (meaning: no drunk and obscene pictures) and click "Approve". Also, you might want a grammar check on your info.

2. Don't whine about work on Facebook. Even if you *think* your boss won't see it, it doesn't mean it won't reach him.

3. Don't badmouth your boss or your officemate on Facebook. It's very unbecoming.

4. If your motto is "Work hard, party harder", change it. Stick with "Time is gold" instead. Haha!

5. No slutty pictures, videos and language. Once in a while, swearing is okay. But don't make it about work!

6. Don't Facebook while you're at work! AND DON'T PLAY FACEBOOK GAMES in the office! Just don't. Unless it's part of your job.

7. Use private messaging for posting personal news. Nobody likes to see you scream on the Facebook walls. Your workmates will thank you later.

8. Avoid oversharing. Enough said.

Here's some more social networking new bits:

A recent survey conducted in 2008 by Jackson Lewis LLP, one of the nation’s largest management-side employment law firms, surveyed 100 employers in New York to determine how on-line social networking sites have affected the employer-employee relationship. Some of the findings were as follows:

• 56 percent of the employers admitted to monitoring employees’ Internet use to determine whether they are accessing on-line social networking sites, among other potential inappropriate behavior.
• 38 percent of the employers blocked employees from accessing such websites.
• 16 percent of the employers admitted checking out on-line networking sites to see what current and former employees might be saying about them.
• 12 percent of the employers use social networking sites to recruit new employees and to assess applicants before extending a job offer.
• 6 percent of the employers have terminated employees for utilizing on-line social networking during work time.

You're welcome! :)

Love,

Run for Peace Tomorrow

Run for peace tomorrow (October 30, 2011) at Davao Medical School. This FUN RUN is spearheaded by Fr. Robert Reyes and Avy Silva.

"It is not through war that we can achieve peace within our nation and even throughout the world. It is through Peace itself. Let us all unite as we support this Peace process for our fellow Filipinos. War is NOT the solution."

Personally, I'm tired of hearing war stories. Sometimes I even catch myself finding pleasure in reading showbiz magazines because I want to dodge the stress that comes with reading about the harsh realities of war. What appalls me more is the fact that there are actually a lot of intelligent people who are pushing for an all-out war in Mindanao and hailing it as the panacea. Tsk tsk. When has war ever made things better?

But that's another story. For tomorrow, let's just run in peace. And hope that that peace in our hearts multiply.

How to Deal with a Difficult Officemate

Confrontation never looks good, especially if it’s in the office with an officemate. Nothing is better than preventing any conflict from arising to begin with, but when it does sprout up, you should be ready. Sometimes the usual misunderstandings are work-related, which is relatively more manageable. The worse kind of conflict you can face if it’s personal by nature. Here are 4 easy conflict-resolution steps you can follow so you know how to deal with a difficult officemate:

Firstly, know who you’re dealing with. The approach to problems with a higher-ranking official in the company is totally different with the approach you can take with a peer or subordinate in a department. After this, make sure you objectively assess the problems you have with him or her. If it’s work-related, you might want to consider approaching the appropriate level of management or human resource official to help you with the situation. Otherwise, try to take matters into your hand first.

Now that you have a general overview into the problem, be ready to talk with him or her outside the office. It’s always best to talk about settling conflicts outside the office first, before you let other people in the office know about it if it does become more difficult to deal with. You can talk with your officemate at a cosy café or anywhere else that both of you can feel relaxed. You don’t want sparks to flare early on in your meeting before talking with each other about settling the issues that you confront.

Next, you should be open about your opinions with your difficult officemate. Along the way into easing up the confrontation into an objective assessment of your relationship with him or her, be willing to make or propose compromises that both of you will observe from thereon. This is important so that your officemate may feel that, despite your misunderstanding, you’d still be willing enough to give him or her importance as your colleague.

When everything has been sorted out, never come off too casual with a joke or sensitive topics that may be related with your conversation. Don’t assume that everything’s going to be fine and dandy right away to the point that you want to laugh about what just happened after settling your issues. Don’t even try to haggle up a deal that you’ll be bringing a prostitute over to his apartment to patch things up. At this point, don’t make things awkward and just leave everything time to heal the remaining wounds. 

Corporate Social Responsibility Shoutout: North Palm Hotel and Garden

Last October 8, 2011, with the event planning and management headed by PREP Davao, an eco-friendly hotel opened. It was North Palm Hotel and Garden, located in Lanang, Davao city.

Aside from having the opportunity to own the eco-friendly hotel branding, North Palm can also help a lot in educating people on environmentally sound ways to take care of Mother Nature.

Here are some of the things that North Palm does to pay their share in taking care of our environment:

• Using solar heat to warm up your showers
• Utilizing rain water for cleaning your rooms, bathrooms, the entire hotel and for watering the plants.
• Employing waste management systems inside the room so you can properly segregate your waste
• Keeping the hallways open to let natural breeze flow through
• Using only organic detergents and cleansers for all cleaning activities
• Application of eco-friendly paint all over the hotel
• Putting the No Smoking Ordinance under strict compliance
• Use of recycled wood for flooring and stair treads

Aside from North Palm’s eco-friendly commitment, they’re also keen on aiding advocacies that help uplift livelihoods, families and communities.

Kudos to North Palm Hotel and Garden! Don't forget to show them some love! Click this link to like their Facebook page.

---

Photos by DJ Tadena

Opening Event Coordination and Full Event Planning by PREP (PR, Events and Promotions)

Business Advice: Bigger Vs. Greater

There are a lot of people who resign from their jobs and start out on their own because they want to work on their own terms. They want to be the kings and queens of their times, and they want to explore their passions. On one hand, entrepreneurship does make a lot of hard work pay off in bigger terms. However, it is not the best business advice to hurry on expansion once you see income pouring in.

Many entrepreneurs commit the mistake of hasty expansion. They want to branch out ASAP when they find that their first venture is earning a lot of money. They want to get as much mileage as they can, make the brand as famous at it can be and most of all, they want to invest their income before these investments get watered down to careless expenses. They want to be big, big and BIG! In this light, sadly, most of them lose their focus.

One way to avoid losing focus is to remember why you created your company in the first place. Rethink its purpose and through this, you can begin to re-define success. You don’t have to change anything. Sometimes, all you need is to remember. 

Remember the time when you were up and about, thinking about the things that you wanted to do for your business. Remember the time when you were convincing your friends that you had a great idea and that it would be a really good business endeavor. Remember that particular time you mustered efforts to ask your stern professor about sound business advice. Remember the time when you were trying to borrow money from your parents, and arguing a little about it. These things will remind you of what really matters in your business; and what really makes your business idea great.

Any small company will be given an opportunity to widen their range of products and services. What is important is that they maintain (or preferably, surpass) the benefits that their clients get from their current offers, as well as maintain the good experience of their employees. For this, you might want to consider a little survey.

See, bigger isn’t always better. Companies are not just evaluated by their revenue or their number of branches. These things sit side-by-side the number of employees, their growth rate, their location, and their openness to other opportunities for moving forward. Here's one great business advice: there are a lot of instances when growth is not from the outside but from the inside. Does your company still provide what your employees are there for? Does your company create the impact that you want it to contain? What do you want to be known for? And is that emanating? Those things make you not just big, but great.

You are What You Do... No More!

Today, a lot of people have their personal lives and their professional lives all tangled up. And for most youngsters, we have certain passions that we also want to pursue, plus the desire to make a difference. Given these responsibilities and different facets of our existence, it’s easy to blur the lines among them.

What I find the saddest with such situations are the times when one loses his/ her identity to his/ her job. See, after spending years and years of effort, time, money and passion on trying to make an education stellar, achieve AND keep a high profile career, we start identifying ourselves exclusively to what it says on our business cards.

We go through life this way: waking up to fulfill tasks demanded by the job, we go home at night to rest, to have a clearer mind when we go back to our jobs the next day. We take vacations, but dread the last days of it because we’re going to “go back to reality” again. At the end of the day, we all believe all these are paying off; we now hold high positions in the companies we are working at and sometimes, we’re even successful enough to garner enough credentials and capital for a personal business. We look around us; we feel so “up there”; we know we deserve it. Although this might help in keeping a healthy self esteem, it’s too big a gamble for personal identity.

For, what happens when you suddenly lose your job? Or your business? Your affiliations?

Whether you’re a en employee, a businessman or simply a socialite, you must be ready to shake your title off anytime. Why is this so?

When we enclose ourselves to our job titles, we jeopardize ourselves emotionally. When something bad happens at work, we take it personally. A disaster in the middle of our big event? We break down. If you fall into this kind of trap, you lose your presence outside of your office or your business and this will (sadly) lead to you seeing people (outside that world) of less value. You can only get to value and appreciate people who are there to help you advance in your career.

Chill out a little, fellow. Take certain passions that help you breathe easy, those which you have been dreaming since you were a child, or those which you have been dying to do after college. Volunteer work, some art lessons, dancing workshops, whatever. Stop looking upon others and comparing yourself to them. Instead, focus on you, on your well being, and lastly, take a second look on your health. Many youngsters nowadays are unbelievable workaholics that sometimes it shocks me to see them work harder than a single mom who raises 6 kids. And for what? Most of the time, they are not really sure.

Don’t wait for the time when you lose your job and you won’t know how to introduce yourself to a new friend. So really, stop being a workaholic and take time to smell the flowers. Even literally. Trust me, it helps.