Category: Business growth

How to Implement New Tools and Achieve the Best Results

Pamela Ayuso October 19, 2020

Implementing new ideas is not always easy. Sometimes we arrive with the best intentions at a new company and want to introduce many innovations, but we may come face-to-face with entrenched patterns within an organization. Even in organizations that we have led for some time, we might find resistance when we try to institute new practices.

Whether you wish to implement a company intranet, a new business process management system, or the use of objectives and key results in your company, you may face friction. This occurrence is normal, especially if it is not a solution to an existing problem but rather improvement. Having to learn a new tool or information system takes additional time on top of daily procedures.

Maintaining What You Have Implemented in Your Company

Pamela Ayuso September 7, 2020

Often new ideas come unexpectedly, and they are frequently precious. When you create a new workflow or have a new idea about how to do what you or your teams do daily, the concept is often not enough. For the idea to persist, it must be institutionalized in some way; otherwise it may never be implemented. Then, even if the idea is ultimately implemented, it may disappear after some time.

At Celaque, we are encountering this problem now, as we are in the middle of systematizing how we manage the buildings we develop. Although it is not our first time managing buildings and we already have some systems in place, we are always upgrading how we do it. As a team, we come up with lots of new ideas for innovation. From keeping a book so that the maintenance staff can report anything that happened during their shift to adding bulletin boards so that residents who do not use our software platform can find out about our events and important information, we have been adding many new practices.

Finding out What Your Customer Wants and Needs

Pamela Ayuso August 24, 2020

In business, we all sell something. We may have a great product that has done well in the past but needs updating, or we may be looking for new product lines to grow. Whatever the case may be, the key to creating a great product is to find out what your customer wants and needs and make it for them.

I’ve thought about this often – producing the type of invention that will be just the right combination of features our customers need. My company is a real estate development firm, and we construct apartment and office buildings. Before we launch a new project, we tweak it and modify it until we are confident that we have the best possible design. Our customers and whether they buy it or not, however, are the ultimate judges.

How Risk Management Can Protect and Grow Your Business

Pamela Ayuso August 17, 2020

In his book, The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor, Howard Marks (public library) writes extensively about risk. As the co-founder and co-chairman of a highly successful asset management firm called Oaktree Capital Management, he assesses investment risk daily and has unique insight into how it works. Risk is variously defined as volatility and uncertainty – he describes it as the “likelihood of loss.”

Most of us do not buy and sell securities for a living, but we all face risk whenever we make a decision. The quality of our outcomes depends on how well we deliberate and manage the inherent risk in our choices. We aim to select the best possible path, but there is always a risk that it will turn out differently.

What to Do When You Cannot Find the Information System You Need

Pamela Ayuso July 27, 2020

At my company, Celaque, we have been looking for a Human Resources system to keep a more accurate employee database of our contractors, subcontractors, and other personnel at our construction projects. We can have as many as 300 people working on a building during our peak construction months, and using spreadsheets to track this data is no longer enough.

We have been searching for the ideal tool for over a month and have explored dozens of options. However, we have found our choices to be either too expensive or too limited. Sometimes what you need does not seem to exist. In that case, the solution to the problem is not always straightforward. The following steps may be helpful.

Building a Culture and What to Consider for Your Business

Pamela Ayuso July 13, 2020

First, a disclaimer: I am not an expert at building company cultures. I have, however, experimented a lot over the span of a decade. Here are some things that have worked for us, others that haven’t, as well as other promising initiatives.

Finding the people that match your mission and values is the centerpiece of a great work culture. Every company stands for different things, and before anything, you need to know who you are. Unfortunately, if you are starting, you may not be entirely sure yet. You may have some idea, but you may not be clear of what it will look like in real life. You may have also inherited someone else’s culture, which may not match your vision of what you want to see in your company.

Exploration as a Necessary Element of Innovation

Pamela Ayuso June 29, 2020

Constantly exploring due to curiosity about what others are doing or how to improve is a necessary precursor to any innovation. Through exploration, we can learn about our environment and about new concepts that we can apply to our companies. Relentless curiosity without an explicit agenda is necessary for sustained creativity.

Exploration does not have to be exhaustive. There are endless topics you can research around how to run companies. It is not necessary, however, to be experts at everything to create and grow a great company. Staying curious and constantly exploring to see how things can be improved, however, is.

Planning and Looking to the Future

Pamela Ayuso May 11, 2020

The coronavirus has caused widespread health and economic problems; no one has been spared from its impact in some way or another. It has created a daily rollercoaster of emotions.

Yet, in the middle of it all, I am ready to start thinking about the future, about hope and beauty. I am taking the COVID-19 pandemic as a forced break to slow down and reassess, and even reinvent my life. Once I am out of this necessary hibernation, I want my life to align with my dreams and ideals more closely, so I am doing a few things to meet those aspirations.

Growing Your Business with Incremental Investment

Pamela Ayuso March 23, 2020

I’m writing on a Monday, and it is one of those Mondays. I feel tired after waking up early to start my day and my week. Not only do I feel fatigued, but I’m also not feeling motivated. Writing isn’t easy today.

It is at times like this that I am encouraged by compound interest. I realize it may sound silly to read that I draw inspiration from something as bland as interest, yet compound interest reminds me of how consistently adding more (money, effort, knowledge), regardless of whatever else is happening, will result in exponential growth.

Your Company’s Structure and How to Establish the Best Organization

Pamela Ayuso February 3, 2020

Defining the right structure for your company is one of the most important areas in which you can invest your time as an entrepreneur. It is a significant undertaking, especially if the company is already operating under an existing configuration. Nevertheless, your organizational structure will determine how everyone operates within your company. How well it fits the company’s tasks and internal dynamics as well as the external context that it inhabits can make a significant difference in the company’s performance of up 24% [i].

As entrepreneurs, we usually start selling a product or a service. When we begin to have more demand for that product or service, we then decide to build a team and a company. Usually, we start with a simple configuration. Very soon, if we are lucky, we have more work than we can manage so we need to hire more people.