How to Increase Your Business Learning Effectiveness

So much to learn...so much information...so little time! Information has never been more accessible. Learning has never been so easy. BUT...there is so MUCH information out there. We are besieged by learning opportunities...awash in a sea of data, facts, and details assaulting our senses and leading to learning frustration rather than learning fulfillment. Try these tips, tools, and techniques to make the most of learning.

1. Examine Your Information Diet As You Would Examine Your Nutritional Habits.

Establish categories of information needs/interests based on the various roles in your life...professional information needs, personal informational needs, and just-for-the-fun-of-it information needs.

2. Inventory Your Current Information Sources.

Make a list of the television shows you watch on a regular basis, the books you read, the newspapers and magazines you subscribe to or purchase, the radio stations or tapes you listen to during drive time, the seminars you attend, the people who supply information to you in your daily life. Match these sources to the categories of information needs you established. Which of the information sources best meets your professional, personal and recreational information needs? Increase and improve these sources.

3. Determine Your Preferred Method Of Learning.

Are you visual, auditory, or sensory in your information processing? Visuals usually learn best by reading a book, magazine or periodical. Auditory people learn best by listening to tapes and attending teleclasses. Sensory people need person to person interaction to learn. Maybe you are a combination of two of these information styles.... or lucky you...maybe you enjoy and benefit from almost any learning experience. It is important: however, to recognize your best information processing style so that when you need to learn something quickly you can seek out the information in your preferred learning style.

4. Keep An Ongoing List Of Terms You Don't Understand And Subjects You Would Like/Need To Learn More About.

Make it a point to learn the meaning of new terms weekly and use them as often as possible. Seek out those who are experts in subject interest areas and ask them a lot of questions...questions that cannot be answered with yes or no!

5. Let Go Of The Perception That Classes Must Take Place In Brick And Mortar Institutions During the Day With Homework At Night.

Explore diverse, leading edge learning avenues. Check out the classes offered by websites such as teleclass.com and teleu.com. Teleclasses are offered over a telephone "bridge" accomodating 30-150 people. You sit at your own kitchen table in your jammies, if you wish, with a cup of tea or a glass of vino, and learn from leading experts in a wide variety of fields while interacting with other lifelong learners from all over the world! Look into on-line learning and increase your on-line learning effectiveness by bookmarking websites that meet your learning needs and offer the most return for your time.

6. Take Advantage Of "Wait-Time Learning."

We all spend a great deal of time waiting...in the grocery line, at the doctor's or dentist's office, in ticket lines, and in traffic jams. Grab a magazine off the rack while you are waiting in the grocery line and scan it for items of interest. Maintain a ready supply of audio tapes in the car to take advantage of drive time. Always have reading material in your handbag or briefcase. Wait-time learning can meet your recreational, professional, or personal information needs and turn this otherwise down time into productive learning time.

7. Improve Learning Skills By Improving Listening Skills.

Don't assume because you pop an audio tape in the car during drive time or attend a lecture on a topic of interest that you are learning. There are a lot of distractions out there and the mind has a tendency to wander easily. Encourage a positive learning environment by consciously eliminating as many distractions as possible. Take notes. Ask questions. Later a good test of your understanding is to try to explain what you just learned or read to your mother or to a ten year old.

8. Avoid The Tendency to "pretend to know."

Never nod your head in understanding when you don't really understand at all. Practice saying, "Please clarify that for me" and "I'm not really sure I understand what you are saying."

9. Pick A Successful Person And Learn Everything You Can About Them Personally and Professionally.

Think about how much you could learn if you could spend 30 minutes a day with Barbara Walters, Sam Walton, Bill Gates, Ted Turner, one of our former Presidents or State Leaders. You can. Through their biographies or autobiographies, you can learn what made them successful and you can profit by their trial and error rather your own. Commit yourself to the 30/10 Rule for 30 days. Spend 30 minutes each and every day learning something new from a Master Of Success and then spend another 10 minutes deciding how to apply what you learned to your own life.

10. Use It Or Lose It!

Research shows that we forget 25% of what we hear in 24 hours, 50% in 48 hours, and by the end of 30 days we are down to less than 5% information retention unless we USE what we learn. Relate new ideas and information to something you already know and use. When you find a connection to link and USE new information on a regular basis, productivity and retention increase.

Why do some Business managers reach the profit goal more often than others? They do it because they keep their performance pointed
in this direction - management of profit earning. They never drop sight of the goal - to finish the year with a profit.

This manual Gives suggestions which should help an owner-manager to zero on profit making. It points out that you have to keep
informed, make timely decisions, and take action. In effect you need to control the actions of your company instead of being
controlled by them.

Topnotch Performance in golfing, shootingfishing requires knowledge, practice, and perseverance.

Similarly, in Small businesses, year-end profit arrives to the owner-manager who tries for topnotch performance. You attain profit
making goals by understanding your operation, by practicing the art of earning timely, balanced decisions and by controlling the
organization's activities.

Adapt the Suggestions in this guide to your circumstance. They ought to allow you to predict the shots to keep your company headed
in the ideal direction - toward profit making.

First Rule of Profit Making: Know Your Small Business. The Time-honored truth"Knowledge is power" is especially pertinent to the
owner-manager of a small business. To keep your company pointed toward profit you need to keep yourself well informed about it.
You have to know how the organization is doing before you can enhance its performance. You have to understand its weak points
before you may correct them. A number of the knowledge you require you pick up from daily personal monitoring, but records should
be your main source of information about profits, costs, and sales.

Know Your Gain. The gain and loss statement (or earnings Statement) prepared frequently each month or every quarter by your
accountant is among the most essential indicators of your company's worth and health. You need to be certain that this statement
contains all of the details you will need for assessing your profit. This statement must pinpoint each earnings and price area.
For instance, it should show the gain and loss for each of your products and product lines in addition to the gain and loss for
your entire operation.

It's a great Idea to have your own profit and loss statement prepared that it reveals every single item for the current period,
for the same period last year, and for the present year-to-date. By way of example, a P&L announcement for the month of November
would reveal income and expenses for the current month, for November this past year, and totals for the eleven months of this
present calendar year. Many corporations publish their annual reports with a few previous years so stockholders can compare
earnings.

Comparison is The key to using your P&L statement. If your accountant is not already furnishing figures that you can compare, you
should discuss the possibility of having them provided.

Financial Ratios from the balance sheet also allow you to know if your profit is exactly what it ought to be. As an instance, the
ratio of net worth (return on investment ratio) shows what the company earned on the equity capital invested.

Know Your Costs. An owner-manager ought to understand costs in detail. Then, you can compare your cost figures as a proportion of
earnings (operating ratio). Be certain that your prices are itemized so that you can put your fingers on those that seem to be
climbing or falling according to your expertise and the price figures of your own industry. When costs are itemized, you can spot
the offender once the general figure is greater than what you'd budgeted. Take advertising costs for example. It's possible to
grab the offender if you break out your advertising expenses by product lines and from websites. Additionally, a comprehensive
check of inquiry returns from advertisements will help avoid unproductive books.

In understanding your Prices, remember that the formulation for gain is: Profit equals Sales minus Costs.

Know Your Product Markup. Be certain That the pricing of your goods provides a markup adequate for the kind of profit you expect
to achieve. You must keep constantly informed on pricing since you have to adjust for increasing costs and at precisely the same
time keep costs competitive. Knowledge on your markup also helps you to run workouts with your eyes open. Continuing to generate a
product which only a few customers desire is a powerful merchandising tool just once you use it on goal - for instance, to hold or
attract buyers to additional high markup solutions. Don't hesitate to shed a loser from online.

Garbage-In, Garbage-Out. An Owner-manager should not fudge the documents. The acronym GIGO the computer industry uses is accurate
with manually stored records in addition to with machine-processed ones. If an owner-manager lets"garbage" to enter the records,
the reports will include"garbage." Reports do not need to be extensive but they need to be accurate.

Look For Trends. Try not to look at one month's sales or Profit image by itself. The figures in your operating statements are
significant only when you put the picture in the right frame - which is, look at your characters from the context of what's
happened and what's very likely to happen. In that manner, you grab a downward trend before it gets out of hand.

You should also Concern yourself with all the figures behind the bucks - for instance, the amount Of units offered or the number
of orders. Insist on cost-per-unit statistics. The Fluctuation of the cost-per-unit can be much more meaningful than simply
looking In the dollar figures . Another idea would be to exhibit these comparative Figures on charts so that important trends can
be seen easily.

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