Category: Business growth

Why Formatting is Beneficial for Your Company and Its Growth

Pamela Ayuso November 25, 2019

How we format the documents that we use to work with daily can have an enormous impact on our productivity. Formatting is one of those elements that, although hidden, can have a considerable effect on our workflow. Consistent guidelines for document configuration save time and produce better results.

The less time we spend trying to understand how something works, the more time we have available to focus on the content itself. Consistent formatting also helps us work more quickly because we know and identify the general guidelines. It also helps us regularly produce better results. If you multiply this concept throughout an organization, valuable time will be saved to do better work.

Achieving Better Clarity for Your Business in the Middle of the Chaos

Pamela Ayuso August 19, 2019

The demands we face today can feel overwhelming. Our to-do lists are never-ending, and the pace of technological changes continues to accelerate. It may seem as though as soon as we have adapted to a new technology, we must learn something new. Although there are certain basic, underlying principles that never change, the noise around us is constant.

Before the Internet, all that we had access to was the information physically available around us, like newspapers, books, television, or even conversations with colleagues and friends. Today, many barriers to information have been removed, and this, combined with the creation of content by previously silent communicators, makes it difficult to sift through what matters and what is simply clutter.

This is the Time to Hire and Grow Your Company

Pamela Ayuso August 12, 2019

It’s not always easy to decide to hire someone new. There are many things to consider in the interview and onboarding process, and some of these things may be of concern. What if the person doesn’t adapt? What if the new employee will create more work? What if we can’t find the right person? All these concerns are scary. Finding the right mix of people takes time and effort. At the same time, expanding your team is the only way to grow as an organization.

Therefore, it’s important to get started. The process of onboarding isn’t always straightforward, and it takes time. The sooner you begin, the sooner you will find candidates you like and the sooner you can hire and train the new team member. When you go through all these steps, you will be able to delegate those tasks you are ready to give to someone else and move on with improving your company.

Bring It All Together: How to Implement Processes in a Nutshell – Part 2

Pamela Ayuso August 5, 2019

If you are thinking about implementing processes at your company, the task of doing so can feel daunting. Additionally, getting the infrastructure off the ground is a lot of work, but it’s also a great investment of time and effort.

Processes are a group of tasks that are performed to obtain a desired objective within a company. Outlining the main processes and implementing them for you and your team will result in greater efficiency, adaptability, and peace of mind. In Part 1 of this post (add link), I outlined the initial steps for implementing processes at a firm.

Bring It All Together: How to Implement Processes in a Nutshell – Part 1

Pamela Ayuso July 29, 2019

Once a business grows to a certain level of success, it becomes an absolute necessity to organize daily tasks to avoid mistakes. Errors happen all the time, and inconsistencies can result in unhappy customers, tense employees, and unbudgeted costs.

The best way to organize these daily duties is to create and implement business processes. A process is a group of tasks that are performed within a business to obtain a specific objective—it is like a chain of events that guides a project from start to finish. By clearly outlining for yourself and your company what the main processes in your company are and how, ideally, they should work, you will gain greater efficiency.

Maintaining Faith: Build It and They Will Come

Pamela Ayuso July 8, 2019

If your product is built right for your client, they will come. More often than not, it will work out as you envisioned.

How to Make Sense of This Crazy World

Pamela Ayuso June 17, 2019

I used to think that I could build a perfectly structured company in which everything would be neat and tidy. I tirelessly designed and organized the company to ensure the structure would be failproof. Little by little, that idea was slowly torn apart as I discovered how little is actually in my control. The world and life itself can change in an instant. An organization will be put under stress and sometimes experience failures no matter how organized it is.

At times the changes may come slowly and are easier to adapt to. Other times, a circumstance may be a game changer and can present itself unexpectedly, to which we have no choice but to adapt. Given that this is how the world operates, how can we succeed in the middle of all this uncertainty? How do we operate effectively in a world that sometimes makes no sense? I don’t have all the answers, but I do have some strategies I’ve been experimenting with for some time.

Assess How Effective You Are at Delegating

Pamela Ayuso June 10, 2019

As you advance in your career, the ability to delegate becomes more important. By delegating, you will have more time to focus on the work where you can add the most value. You will also provide the space for others to get valuable training and move up in their careers. Take a moment today and assess your effectiveness in delegating.

To start, analyze your current workload. Some of the questions you can ask yourself are:

What are you doing today that you can delegate to free up time for yourself?
Is there a specific task that only you can do which you are neglecting to do something that another person on the team can do?
Can someone do part of the work you are doing more effectively (or efficiently) than you?

Why You Need to Practice Perseverance to Achieve More of Your Goals

Pamela Ayuso June 3, 2019

Perseverance is one of the key ingredients to accomplishing anything worthwhile in life and professionally. Growth is not always linear: there are usually ups and downs. Sometimes it may even feel like you took two steps back when what you intended was to move forward. At times like these is where perseverance is most useful; it encourages us to keep going. You may not know for sure when you’ll get there or what you will discover along the way, but perseverance will ensure you keep going long enough to find out.

According to Merriam-Webster, the definition of perseverance is:

“continued effort to do or achieve something despite difficulties, failure, or opposition”

Setbacks happen often enough that it is difficult to stay on track. Part of growth is persevering: having the ability to face challenges and move past them. The problems we encounter can either be defeating empowering. Instead of pushing us to quit, they can help us grow in our capacities as professionals and leaders. Once we achieve our objectives, we will be able to handle more.

Configuring Processes to Gain More Efficient Results

Pamela Ayuso May 27, 2019

Our company recently underwent a company-wide process revamp: we examined all our processes, revised the content, and standardized the formatting since it was not consistent across departments. This project underlined the importance of setting up processes to be as clean and organized as possible with proper categorization and structuring. This deliberate configuring helps the user focus on the language itself and not be distracted by discrepancies in the arrangement of the processes.

We have processes for every department within our company. Some departments, like Finance, have more processes than others based on the nature of the work. For more on how we use processes at Celaque, our firm, please refer to my blog posts on processes: The Benefits of Implementing Processes in Your Business, How to Improve and Grow Your Business with Effective Processes, and 6 Useful Ideas to Make Your Processes More Streamlined.