Wednesday 29 March 2017

If you want to be big you got to think fast

Owning a business is like sailing a ship. There are days where you sail through a nice, clear, calm day, and then there are days where your ship is about to be tipped over by the monsoon that erupts.
Thinking fast is the ability to make prompt decisions that keep your ship sailing forward at a constant speed across the monsoon.
There are countless of “how to” books written on entrepreneurship, management, and business, while those provide useful insight, there is nothing that comes close to experiencing it hands on.
Diving into any project, whether you are prepared or not, you will face obstacles. At which point you either learn how to overcome the obstacles that stand in your way or use them as leverage.
The prepared mind will learn how to leverage these obstacles.
When you learn something extrinsically you face the challenge of forgetting what you learned in times of stress or uncertainty. It is only when you move the extrinsic knowledge and internalize it that you begin to feed off the inspiration.
You begin to create a momentum that continuously propels you forward, like a wave forming in the sea.
Recently I have been rebranding my steam cleaning company. By observing everything that I have internalized being in business, I am more excited then I have ever been to bring the company to it’s fullest potential.
This comes from a deep-rooted understanding of the basics as well as the inspiration that comes from the risks, stepping into the unknown.
Doing things you haven’t done before sounds scary and it is until you understand the power that lies within the unknown. Once you get through this barrier you will elevate yourself to a new perspective.
The thing you must consider is that if you haven’t tried it before, you don’t know if it will work, and just because it worked for someone else it might not work well for you.
By not trying it you will miss the chance of finding out.
For example, many companies are scared to invest into social media because they don’t believe that it can be a useful tool for their business.
What these companies need to consider is that it isn’t about social media, advertising, or the internet.
It is about where people’s attention lies.
When you understand this, you understand business.
The day you start talking about your audience, not about you, that’s the day you start doing business.” Unmarketing by Scott Stratten
Thinking fast comes from being prepared. A prepared mind has a vast potential to accelerate growth, notice here how I say potential. It isn’t the end all be all. Without the doing, thinking isn’t enough.
You can think of all the best ideas out there when you don’t implement them they dissolve into the ether.
You don’t have to jump all in. Taking incremental steps is key, and this leads to becoming big.
There might be confusion as to how you should think fast and be big, so let me clarify; come over here to finish the post https://karasingroup.com/2017/03/29/want-big-got-think-fast/

Sunday 12 February 2017

The power of transformative information for a mentee


The feeling you get when delivering an AHA moment to someone is memorable and shareable.
There is nothing in this world that excited and energizes me more than conveying practical information to someone who gets it, who deploys it, and who shows it in their success in making it work.
When you give someone practical knowledge which they didn’t see before, or maybe you show them a different perspective of the outcome, their expression is telling. Their mouth drops, pupils dilate and begin to look at you like you are the messiah.
That’s how I feel when I am around my mentors and even people who I don’t know, who deliver great content and shed new light and opportunity onto new theory’s and observations.
It’s those moments, will call them transformative moments, it’s not just about information being passed, but it is information that will be applied by the recipient.
I want to give you a little bit of a background to build the context on which my thesis is based on.
I volunteer for a program with an organization who lends money to young start-ups and entrepreneurs. There I have a role as a mentor to an individual who was granted a loan for his retail start-up business.
We come from two different backgrounds, not just in our ethnicity and experience but also in our business practices. I come from the service based industry and he is at the retail end.
On a side note, I have been thinking a lot about the retail business and I am thinking about penetrating it through the custom design furniture industry, more on that later.
Having no prior experience on the retail end I understand business and so does my mentee. Our relationship is formal and structured. But our conversations are seamless and fluid.
When I give him practical wisdom that I apply in my business and that he never thought off applying in his, his response is 
come finish over here 

Saturday 11 February 2017

Hire as if you were never going to fire.


Remember that employee that got away with everything; Paid holidays, extended vacations, sick leave, excuses, asking for more money, more sick leave, blaming others for their own mistakes, even more sick leaves.
Who hired him/her?
Oh, it was your executive assistant, or your HR department, recruiters? Let me guess, it’s their fault?
Okay, and who hired the person that hired your employee? If you want to go through that again we can, but I think you understand that behind all the hiring’s, you were the person who was secretly in charge of it all.
You might not admit it, that’s fine. This post isn’t about you.
I want you to understand that no matter how good your hiring intuition is, or how good a person seems to be when they start their job, there is no perfect candidate out there.
This is because life goes on.
Things change, people get married, have kids, move away, have relatives move in, or they die. Either way what seems too good to be true is.
So why am I telling you this? It’s not so you recognize that everyone at some point will be mediocre. It’s so you appreciate the things that they do well, and not dwell on the things they don’t.
I tell you this so you understand that organizations are built on people. They aren’t just a digit for when the economy collapses for them to get slashed in the figurative sense. Or literally, however, you want to take that.
Oh, wait, but your employee is extraordinary he/she is the best there is out there and has never let you down.
They will, time will come.
The point I am getting at