How to Develop Your Creativity Skills

Creativity is a complex, multi-faceted process. Many myths have grown up around the process, one of which is that creative people have no say in the matter; that somehow creativity strikes certain people and misses others. Nothing could be further from the truth. Creativity can be developed, sharpened, amplified, because it is a factor of nurture as well as nature.

1. Believe You Are Creative

Everyone is. Or has the potential to be. It is part of being human.

2. Broaden Your Interests

Consciously seek out what you have not sought out before. Be open to new experiences, new sources of information.

3. Prepare to Create

Gather information, hunches, impressions, colors, textures, sounds. Keep Notes!

4. Look for (or, better still, make) Connections.

The more varied your interests, the greater the chance of cross-fertilization; of combining two or more things that have not been combined before. Look for relationships between things that are not related.

5. Break Habits.

Our own habits are what often keep us from being more creative. The more you follow the script, the less you can improvise. Breaking even little habits can shake up the system enough to allow new connections to happen, new points of view to form.

6. Provide the Right Environment (for you).

Some people like to listen to music, others prefer silence once they are in the creative flow. Experiment until you find what works for you.

7. Provide Time To Create

(1) Time to sleep on it. Time without your conscious manipulation. Time for seemingly random thoughts and bits of input to percolate and bump into each other. (2) Time away from the immediate demands of work and/or home, dedicated to the creative task at hand. In certain environments, time is so precious that this seems like an unrealistic element of developing your creativity. But even five minutes could make a difference.

8. Persevere

Don't give up on yourself or your project. Creativity is not necessarily easy. Make lots of mistakes. Learn from them. It is to be expected. It is a part of the process. Keep going. There is a paradox here because sometimes an important part of being creative is knowing when to abandon an unproductive idea.

9. Maximize All Of Your Senses

The more you utilize all of your senses to gather and process information, the greater the chance of those bits of ideas bumping into each other . . . and sticking together to create a new something.

10. Forget How Much You Know.

Adopt the beginner's mind. Conventional wisdom may say this or that cannot be done and then unconventional wisdom goes right ahead and does it. Learn to look at things with a fresh eye. Don't be afraid to ask the "dumb" questions.

How to Choose and Keep Customers

1. Do you know who your customers are?

It may sound automatic, but many businesses simply don't keep track of who actually buys their products. And, those that do, rarely analyze buying behavior. A customer database is essential. If you don't have one, create one. Start by capturing the basics: customer contact information, product preference and purchase frequency.

2. Have you ranked your customers?

Not all customers are created equal, yet most businesses treat them exactly the same. That's why you need a customer ranking system. Look at those variables that are most relevant to your business -- purchase frequency, revenue, selling costs, referral potential, and so on and score your customers accordingly. Marketing research firm CRI, for example, ranked their 157 customers using a simple quadrant that bucketed customers according to the kind of business they generated each year, i.e. High Volume/Low Margin and Low Volume/High Margin.

3. Do you know which customers are your most valuable?

The ranking exercise may help explain puzzling disparities in company performance. The 'Why aren't we growing/more profitable/gaining market share when we have more customers than we ever have?' dilemma can be crystal clear when you really look at how each customer is contributing or subtracting from the bottom line. CRI found that only 10 of its customers fell into the preferred category-High/High.

4. Do you have too many customers?

In CRI's case, they concluded they were 'spending much too much time and valuable employee resources on too many unprofitable customers' -- in fact, 101 of them essentially contributed nothing to the bottom line. Smart CEOs understand precisely who their target customers are. And, they know how to go after only the right customers. Is there room in your business to be more customer-selective?

5. Which of your customers may be worth firing?

Less can definitely be more when it comes to unprofitable customers. Like CRI, who cut its customer base in half, getting rid of some customers may be your company's secret growth strategy. Also think about the costs you would NOT incur if certain customers went away. Are some draining the business? The process of raising your customer standards and paring automatically opens space to attract the flow of new, more profitable business.

6. When is the last time you checked customer satisfaction?

If you're not regularly taking the pulse of your customers, they may be sacrificing, rather than being satisfied. 'Customer sacrifice = What the customer wants EXACTLY minus what the customer settles for' say B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, authors of The Experience Economy. Check to see if you can shore up the areas of your product or service that may be cracking or settling.

7. Are you spending too much on finding new customers?

Determine all of the costs (people, time and dollars) you incur to grab new customers. Are more company resources focused on customer acquisition vs. customer retention? Consider putting more attention on holding on to the ones you already have. It can have a profound impact on the bottom line -- current customers are 5-10 times LESS expensive to sell to than new customers. And, you can avoid nasty customer defections due to neglect.

8. Are you actively converting first-time buyers to long-term customers?

In some businesses, such as car or life insurance and credit cards, companies actually lose money on first-year customers. Check to make sure you don't have a 'leaky bucket' --- losing mature customers and replacing them with new ones. It takes many new customers to compensate for the loss of just one veteran, according to Frederick Reichheld, author of The Loyalty Effect. And, the bigger the leak, the harder you have to work to keep it full.

9. Are you fortifying relationships with your best customers?

There are 4 strategies to keep great customers, say Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, authors of The One-to-One Future: #1) Recognize your Most Valuable Customers (MVCs) with special treatment (perks, MVC Club, unique services), #2) Reward loyal buyers, i.e. frequent buyer programs, #3) Deliver Consistent Product Quality and Satisfaction, and #4) Customize Product/Service For Individual Customers -- the ultimate way to keep customers loyal longer is to spend more time catering more to their individual tastes. What can you do to better personalize each customer's experience with you?

10. Are you earning customer loyalty?

Strategic CEOs treat customers like assets and do everything they can to invest and safe keep them. Customer loyalty standouts, such as Lexus, State Farm and MBNA, engineer their entire company (not just the customer service dept.) around customer loyalty -- manufacturing, pricing, sales incentives, and all operations inside and out are built for lifetime customers.

Why do some Business managers hit the gain goal more frequently than others? They do it because they keep their operation pointed
in this direction - management of profit earning. They never lose sight of this goal - to finish the year with a gain.

This manual Gives suggestions which should enable an owner-manager to zero on profit making. It points out that you must stay
educated, make timely decisions, and take action. In effect you need to control the actions of your company rather than being
controlled by them.

Topnotch Performance in golf, shooting, and fishing demands knowledge, practice, and endurance.

Likewise in Small businesses, year-end profit comes to the owner-manager who strives for topnotch performance. You attain profit
making goals by understanding your performance, by practicing the art of making timely, balanced judgments 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 earning.

First Rule of Profit Making: Know Your Business. The Time-honored truth"Knowledge is power" is particularly pertinent to this
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 be aware of how the company is doing before you can improve its operation. You must understand its weak points before
you may correct them. A number of the knowledge you require you pick up from daily personal observation, but records should be
your principal source of information about profits, expenses, and earnings.

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

It is a good Idea to have your profit and loss statement prepared that it shows each product for the current interval, for the
identical period this past year, and also for your current year-to-date. For instance, a P&L statement for the month of November
would reveal expenses and income for the current month, for November this past year, and totals for the eleven months of this
current calendar year. Many corporations publish their annual reports with several previous years so stockholders can compare
earnings.

Comparison is The key to utilizing your P&L statement. If your accountant is not already supplying figures which you may compare,
you should talk about the possibility of having them supplied.

Financial Ratios from your balance sheet also allow you to understand whether your gain is exactly what it ought to be. For
example, the ratio of net worth (return on investment ratio) reveals what the business earned on the equity capital invested.

Know Your Costs. An owner-manager should know costs in detail. Following that, you can compare your cost figures as a proportion
of earnings (operating ratio). Be sure your prices are itemized so you can set your fingers on those that appear to be rising or
falling according to your expertise and the cost figures of your industry. When prices are itemized, you are able to spot the
offender when the overall figure is greater than what you had budgeted. Take advertising costs for example. It's possible to catch
the offender if you split out your advertising expenditures by product lines and from websites. Additionally, a comprehensive
check of inquiry returns from advertising will help avoid unproductive books.

In knowing your Prices, keep in mind that the formula for gain is: Profit equals Sales minus Costs.

Know Your Product Markup. Be sure That the pricing of your products supplies a markup adequate for the sort of profit you expect
to attain. You must keep constantly educated on pricing because you have to adjust for increasing costs and at the same time keep
costs competitive. Knowledge on your markup also can help you to run close outs with your eyes open. Continuing to generate a
product which just a few clients desire is an effective merchandising tool only when you use it on goal - for example, to hold or
draw buyers to additional high markup solutions. Don't be afraid to shed a loser from your line.

Garbage-In, Garbage-Out. An Owner-manager shouldn't fudge the records. The acronym GIGO the computer business uses is true with
manually stored records as well as with machine-processed ones. When an owner-manager allows"garbage" to enter the records, the
accounts will include"garbage." Reports need not be extensive but they need to be accurate.

Look For Trends. Try not to look at a single month's earnings or Profit image by itself. The characters on your operating
statements are meaningful only when you set the image in the ideal framework - that is, look at your figures in the context of
what has happened and what is very likely to happen. In that manner, you catch a downward trend before it gets out of control.

You should also Concern yourself with the figures behind the dollars - for instance, the amount Of units offered or the amount of
orders. Insist on cost-per-unit figures. The Fluctuation of this cost-per-unit can be 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 viewed
easily.

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