Why do some businesses thrive (about 3%),

....some survive, (about 95%) and...

....others fail? 

A successful business is a complex system, where small changes can make or break the company.  Successful organizations are made up of seven business subsystems.  Each business subsystem is made up of a set of business processes. 

Capacity Planning Variable -Technology Factors

“The most exciting breakthroughs of the 21st century will not occur because of technology but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human”- John Naisbitt

This article spends time defining the technical variables were introduced in a previous article Vision 2.0 Sales Capacity Planning.  This is one of a series of  on Vision 1.0 to Vision 2.0 transitions.

The original title for this article was going to be: "You mean I have to pay taxes on this?" This was inspired by conversations with a number of business brokers, because someone who has owned a business for 30 years, just might forget.  If you own a business, chances are that someday will want to sell your business.  What some owners forget is that when they sell their business (and not everyone can), capital gains taxes will be due!  This article was written for owners as a reminder of how important it is to  'think early'.  

“When planning for a year, plant corn. When planning for a decade, plant trees. When planning for life, train and educate people.” - Chinese Proverb

Early in my career, I supported the technology for sales teams and marketing departments.

In one company, the turnover rate for one of the sales team roles was very high. I watched 12 salespeople cycle through the role. Finally, a new sales person came onboard who sold more in one month than everyone else combined.

The management became more enthusiastic and chose to add a second sales person hoping to double sales... but the plan failed.  The second salesperson provided less than 10% more sales per year compared to the top salesperson.

This introduces us to the problem of how to calculate sales capacity.

I have had several people submit articles that I have had to reject. In one article the writer tried suggesting article titles. I want to encourage you to write articles, but don’t have the time to answer every email or try to correct every writer. Here are some obvious mistakes.

The Entrepreneurial Dilemma

"An entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down." - Reid Hoffman

Every business starts out as an idea. Put the right idea with the right entrepreneur and out of the thousands of good ideas, a single organizational foundation may be laid. From that foundation, a new organization is built. Building that organization is the first stage of business that we’ll call the Vision 1.0 organization.

Cyber Security Planning Levels

This article discusses some of the levels of systems planning for almost any  business for protection from security breaches. Planning should include focus on these topics.

• Identify – Who is accessing the network resources
• Protect – How much access is given to each network resource
• Detect – Systems that identify unexpected or un-identify access to the network
• Respond – Once a breach is detected, how the company teams will respond
• Recover – If there is loss after the breach, how will the company resolve the loss

I recently attended the Cybersecurity Awareness Conference, sponsored by the Small Business Development Center (SBDC). In this conference, cybersecurity issues were covered. Some of the cybersecuirty experts who presented includ: