The Business Growth Blog by Rob Cuesta

UBC7: Stuck for ideas? Read this!

I’ve been reading. It’ll be no great shock to anyone who knows me or indeed who has followed this blog over the years. The fact is, the demise of Borders merely made way for more time sitting in Costa downloading ebooks to the Kindle app on my iPad rather than sitting in Starbucks leafing through paper books 

But my latest read has been a “real” book. With hard covers no less!

Quick Growth Tip #12: Focus and Thrive

One surefire way of failing in business is to try to do everything for everyone, and for coaches, consultants, therapists, and other service professionals, the temptation is very string. After all, we have a toolset that is designed to solve problems - any problems - and to do it quickly and effectively.

The "problem" is, though, that no-one wakes up thinking "I have a problem, I must go and find someone to help me solve it!"

How much is your time REALLY worth

I was at a meeting of the mastermind group I belong to today (yes, even coaches have coaches. Or should that be "Above all, coaches have coaches") and one of the topics that came up was procrastination.

We were talking about ways of prioritising tasks, and how to spot the things that take us away from what we should be doing.

As I was driving home I was struck by a simple way of putting "busy work" into a new light. Want to know what I came up with?

Why recruiters have it all wrong - part 2

Have you ever worked with someone who, on paper, looked like the perfect person for a job, but over time it turned out they just didn't have "what it takes" to be successful in the role?

In the previous post we looked at some of the pitfalls of the traditional hiring process, and why it can be fatal for a company that is hiring in order to grow. The reality is, most interviewers are great at spotting people with the right skills for a job, but not necessarily the few who have "what it takes" - especially if the interviewer hasn't, themselves, done the job they're interviewing for.

So what can we do to avoid those pitfalls? How do we know if someone will have "what it takes"?

Why recruiters have it all wrong

Whether you're an entrepreneur hiring your first employee, or a corporate manager filling a new post or backfilling a gap created by the departure of an existing memebr of your team, recruiting the right people is essential to growing any business. You need to know that the new person will fit in the organisation, and you need to know they'll be able to do the job. Hiring the wrong person isn't just a potentially expensive mistake: put the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time and it could kill your business completely (RIP Barings Bank!).

The problem is, most recruiters - even agents, whose job is solely to find candidates for other companies - have their focus all wrong when it comes to finding the right person. And the reason for that isn't hard to find.

Schrodinger's Lunch - does business networking work?

At a recent workshop I ran, one of the attendees asked whether networking works.

I know people in business who swear by the power of networking meetings in growing their business. I also know people who swear just at the thought of going networking. The reality is that for some people it works, and for others it doesn't.

It's a little like Schrodinger's cat. Schrodinger imagined a thought experiment that goes as follows: imagine a cat in a sealed box. In the box there is also a piece of radioactive material that is decaying and will ultimately kill the cat (remember - this is an imaginary cat, not a real one!). How do you know the cat whether the cat is alive or dead? You can't know until you open the box¹.

Networking is much the same: you won't know if it works for you until you try it. And whether networking will work for a particular person is down to two things.

Personal Branding and the Accounting Profession

Even as far back as 2005, members of the UK's Institute of Chartered Accountants were being advised to work on their personal brand. Addressing that year's prizewinners and the Institute's annual awards, Steve Easterbrook (UK CEO of McDonalds) said: “Chartered Accountants are in such high demand due to their well-rounded flexibility. [Accountants] learn from and observe business management competencies, behaviours and soft skills - both good and bad. To be respected today you have to be authentic. You must understand who you are, your strengths, your weaknesses and your personal values. By being open about these and by being consistent you will be able to build and protect your own reputation.”

6 Steps for Creating a Social Media Marketing Roadmap & Plan

Social media can be a bit of a maze. It's no longer just about telling your friends what you've been up to: alongside blogs we have mashups, file sharing (the legitimate, business-useful kind like Slideshare.com), podcasts, wikis, video hosting, music sharing, bookmarking...

How do you make sense of all of those and use them to support your marketing efforts - personal or corporate? For one approach, take a look at this post by Lorna Li.

It's not just candidates who interview badly...

There's a temptation to think that how an interview goes is always down to the candidate, but I received a request today for funny interview stories that reminded me of one interview that went badly in a VERY unexpected way.

All the money you will ever earn...

Whether you're an employee or a business owner, all the money you will ever earn is currently in the hands of other people. So here's my challenge to you:

Why should they give it to you rather than to anyone else?

And how does your personal brand help to convey those reasons?