Ways to Recharge for Successful Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are a different lot. It takes a certain type of person to hang out there on the edge and take calculated (and sometimes not so calculated) risks. The rush of adrenaline that keeps tycoons in the sweet spot of success can wear a person out, though. The hard-charging, always-ready attitude is a unique quality that has its own set of rules when it comes to taking a little downtime without losing precious time and opportunities. The following are excellent strategies for how to recharge for moguls of business.

Contemplation
There is no "right" or "wrong" way to sit quietly for a few minutes a day. Taking the time to think and contemplate things is a real game changer. It teaches you to quiet your mind and gives that big brain of yours time to rest. That's all it is. Give it a try. Take 20 minutes and sit quietly. Let your thoughts come in and gently focus on them one at a time, allowing yourself to sit in silence. Over time, the effects build and offer a calmer mind and body, heightened focus, more patience, and greater productivity.

Movement
Your doctor and Jillian Michaels are right. Exercise is especially critical for entrepreneurs. You may feel like you are going 100 MPH on any given day and do not need "additional" activity, but get outside and take a brisk walk. You can even take the time to think at the same time. It's a twofer for the multi-tasking magnate in you.

Experience the Outdoors
Great Scott! Throw nature in the mix and it's a "three-fer" (it's a real word - scout's honor). The outdoors can spark relaxation, creativity, and help stave off burnout. Daily exposure to natural surroundings will give you the fuel to get back in the office and power through your day.

Schedule Your Time
Keep a single calendar that gives you mandated time each day to walk away from your desk, your phone, and your email. Maybe a couple of 10-15 minute breaks that give you time to stretch your legs, interact on a social level, grab a (healthy) snack or call a loved one. This single calendar will house business related obligations and personal outings and priorities. Seeing all of your obligations in one place helps eliminate the over-scheduled executive trap and gives you the opportunity to see, in black and white, how you are spending your time. In addition to your breaks, dedicate some time to your meal periods. Maybe you do not want to allocate an hour per day for lunch. At the very least, turn off your electronic world for 15-20 minutes and give your food your full attention. Think of it as "eating meditation."

Unplug
Unplugging from all electronics, while a little frightening at first, can help alleviate a ton of stress. Think about it; all of those dings and beeps and buzzes that are always pulling at every last ounce of concentration you have. There's only so much a person can take. Every tweet, poke, Instagram, Snapchat, email and reminder activates responses in you that eventually lead to mental and emotional breakdowns. It's a daunting prospect, but consider taking an hour away from all electronics and build from there. Who knows, maybe you could allocate an entire electronics-free day or evening. Your creativity and your soul will thank you.

These few tips can help avoid burnout and create the optimal environment for the successful entrepreneur in you.

There Are No Pointless Meetings, Only Wasted Opportunities

If you ask any business professional what they dread on their calendar the most, many of them would tell you the same thing: all of those pointless meetings. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who hasn't been pulled away from their desk at the most inopportune time, only to sit in a room and hear people convey information that they either already knew or that they didn't need to know in the first place.

The dirty little secret here is that there are NO pointless meetings in the world of business - only wasted opportunities to get things done. If you want to make sure your meetings are justifying their existence, you'll want to keep a few key things in mind.

Know When to Schedule a Meeting and When Not To

The first step on your road to a more productive meeting schedule involves coming to an understanding of what type of information should be conveyed in a meeting and what would be better left for some other delivery mechanism. One of the reasons why meetings tend to fall into the "pointless" category for many people is that they don't require input or collaboration. If a team leader wants to draw everyone together to talk about updates to a project, but they don't want the advice of anyone else, what they're scheduling is not a meeting at all. It is an email at best.

Collaboration and the input of everyone involved should be a requirement for any meeting to justify its existence. If a particular problem has cropped up with a project and everyone needs to come together to solve it, that's one thing. However, if the purpose of the meeting can be accomplished by just sending a memo or some other form of communication, don't waste everyone's time by gathering the entire team together to talk about the work they are already doing. Instead, let the team just get on with doing their jobs.

It's All About Solutions and Focus

Another one of the reasons why more meetings tend to be less than productive is because people come with ideas, not solutions. One sure-fire way to make sure that nothing gets done is to allow people to come to a meeting and say off the top of their heads whatever is on their minds, firing off ideas that may or may not work.

In a perfect world, everyone at the meeting would know that you have a problem and would come prepared with X, Y, and Z suggestions for how to feasibly solve it. You wouldn't waste the meeting time searching for an answer to your problem. Instead, you would be able to pick the best solution available to you from what the team members came prepared with and brought to the meeting. Far too many meetings lack this type of targeted focus, which is why so many of us can walk out of a meeting and feel like it accomplished nothing.

At the end of the day, there are no pointless meetings in the world of business or, at least, there shouldn't be. Getting everyone together for a meeting can be a great thing. Everyone is in a room together, feeding off of everyone else's energy and building a solid foundation of creativity that will carry your business forward. Meetings that are little more than lectures (or worse, freestyle sessions) have no place in a productive organization. If you want to have a meeting, by all means, do so - just make sure it has a clear focus before you schedule it.

Taking Over: Tips for Becoming a Team Leader for an Already Established Group

Building a team is an inherently personal proposition, regardless of the industry in which you're operating. These are people that you've hand-selected based on their unique strengths to come together to form a complete whole. When everyone is firing on all cylinders, a well-designed team is more than just a tool - it's a reflection of yourself, of the type of work you do, and of the quality of the product you're about to deliver.

So what happens when you didn't form the team, but you're still being asked to lead them?

Things change in business all the time and at some point, you may be invited to take the reigns of a project that had already existed long before you got there - inheriting the project's team at the same time. Jumping into a team as the newly deemed leader can be a difficult situation to find yourself in, but it doesn't have to be provided you keep a few key things in mind.

Trust - The Most Important Element of All

When you take over as the team leader for an already established group, one thing will become clear: you probably wouldn't have made the same decisions had you been there from the beginning. It's a bit like a Hollywood feature film when one director takes over for another - a movie is still going to get made, but can that new director still put his or her own stamp on what is about to happen?

The answer is "yes," provided you take advantage of your most valuable asset of all: the team itself. Remember, the people in that group were selected for a reason, and the most important thing you can do right now is to trust them to guide you just as they're trusting you to guide them. Remember that they WERE there from the beginning. They have experience in this context that you do not, and their experience is incredibly valuable. Don't come in barking orders, changing this or that just so that the project is more "yours" than anybody else's. Listen to what they have to say. Talk to them about what they're doing and why they're doing it. Instead of changing them to fit your needs, do what you can to make yourself malleable to address theirs.

You've Been Tasked With Filling a Void, So Fill It

If you're coming in to lead an already established group, the chances are high that what you're being asked to do is fill a void. Why the previous team leader was replaced no longer matters - the people in front of you were prepared to follow that person, and now that person is gone. What you need to do is throw any pre-conceived strategies you may have had out the window and learn the score, so to speak. Find out what challenges were present under the previous leadership and learn what you can do to correct them. Find out how you can provide your personal value in a situation that already existed before you got there. Take the time to learn precisely what type of leader these people need and do whatever you have to do to become it. In this situation, you need to be willing to become a collaborator almost more than you would if you had built the team in the first place.


These are just a few of the ways that you can successfully become a team leader for an already established group. Make no mistake - it's an awkward position to be in, but above all else, the quality of the work can't suffer due to an unfortunate identity crisis. By trusting these people who have already come together and by being willing to become a real collaborator in every sense of the word, you'll be able to make this team your own over time - all without tearing down what was old to build something new in the process.

5 Psychological Triggers To Convert Prospects To Clients

Any marketer worth anything will tell you that the key to increasing sales is to use A/B testing to determine which sales tactic is more successful than another. If you're not familiar with it, A/B testing (sometimes called split testing) is comparing two versions of something to see which one performs better. With that in mind, have you ever wondered why some tactics are more successful than others?

Logically, we think that if we appeal to the rational brain, we will convince people that our product is the best possible product for their needs. However, if that were the case, would anyone ever buy Croc Accessories or Pet Rocks? Nope.

Unless you're selling to Mr. Spock, there's a much simpler way of convincing people to buy what you're selling. The key to turning prospects into clients is tapping into the deeply embedded emotions inside each one of them.

By identifying these emotions and learning how to trigger them, you can increase your revenue faster than you can say "Chia Pet." Here are the top 5 psychological triggers you can start using immediately to boost your bottom line.

1. Increasing Pleasure and Avoiding Pain

Avoiding pain and increasing pleasure are the driving forces of all human activity. This idea is the most fundamental reason we have a nervous system. If something hurts, we find a way to stop it. If something feels pleasurable, we do it more.

Translating this into your marketing strategy, you must first identify what your clients associate with pain and pleasure. Once you've figured that out, the rest is easy. Draft your marketing message in a way that shows your customers how your product or service will get them as close as possible to their pleasure trigger and away from their pain trigger.

2. Simplifying Life

For most of us, life is complicated. Too complicated. It takes 47 steps to get us from the comfort of our beds and out the door prepared to work. We don't need another product or service that will add more steps (obstacles) to our day.

Take a good, hard look at what you're selling. Does it add or remove barriers from people's lives? If it's not easy and fast to use, consider making a few tweaks that will take all of the "no's" out of the equation.

3. Creating Novelty

New and shiny are what we love. In fact, it has been scientifically shown that exposure to something novel increases the amount of dopamine in the brain, that chemical that makes us all tingly and excited.

If you've ever heard someone complaining about the lack of significant changes in the latest iPhone, but still stand in line for hours to get one in their hot, little hands on release day, you've witnessed the power of novelty.

You can easily create innovation with your products by making a few simple changes and give your prospects that shot of dopamine they've been craving. Think googly-eyes on the pet rock.

4. Telling a Story

Humans have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years by telling stories. It's how we share our experiences. The best storytellers invoke all of the senses to put their audience directly into the action.

You can infuse even the most mundane products with the magic of a good story. Try updating your copy to tell a story about your product that transports your prospects to a happier, more memorable place. They'll buy just to keep the story alive.

5. Building Anticipation

We've all turned 16 at some point in our lives. Remember the anticipation we felt as the day drew nearer and the prospect of being able to drive around without an adult sat winking at us in the distance? It made life a little more sparkly, didn't it?

If you've got a new product or service in the works, don't just plunk it down on the counter when it's all done. Start building some buzz while you're still working on it. Send out emails to your current customers and prospects. Create a series of videos giving out little bits of information at a time. Get people in that "I can't wait" mode and your launch day will be more profitable than you can imagine.

Managing Employees Who Are Working Remotely: Bringing Your Team Together, Even When They're a World Apart

Modern technology has ushered in a bold, new era in terms of employee productivity. Case in point: thanks to not only cloud computing but mobile technology, almost ANY employee can become a remote worker if they truly desire. Employees can be just as productive at a coffee shop as they could from their desk in the office, which has meant big things for businesses in all industries. For the people tasked with actually managing these remote employees, however, it can quickly become a challenge, to say the least.

If you want to get better at managing employees who are working remotely and your goal is to bring your team together even when they're a world apart, you'll want to keep a few key things in mind.

Lay Down the Ground Rules

Some employees who are working remotely tend to have this romantic idea that they are their own boss or that they "work for themselves." After all, they don't have to go into the office to be productive - they can work with the TV on if they want to or decide to stay in their pajamas all day if they feel like it, right?

Wrong. In reality, even remote employees still have a very real boss - the work itself. This is the master they're trying to serve, and while they do have an extra level of comfort that on-site employees might not, any decision that takes away from the quality of the work is one that has to go.

Establishing a firm set of ground rules for all employees who are working remotely is essential to getting everyone on the same page. Whether it's the fact that they have to work at least X number of hours per day. or that they have to be available between 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m., or even a rule saying that you'll have at least one video conference per day, rules are important to not only keep everyone focused but also to make sure you're all working towards the same long-term goal.

It's All About Perspective

Above all else, it's important for you and your employees to start looking at working remotely as a privilege, not a right. Just because the technology exists and is more affordable than ever does NOT mean it is something that they are entitled to. If a top-quality employee who previously worked on-site switches to remote access and the quality of the work suffers, you have to see the situation for what it is: someone who is abusing that privilege. If that situation arises, it's time to not only bring them back into the office (if possible) but make sure that all other employees know that the same thing can happen to them in the future.

Encourage Communication

The type of work that you're doing cannot exist in a vacuum, yet this is exactly what you're creating if you don't encourage or even insist that remote workers still communicate and collaborate with one another. Even if it's something as simple as a quick daily phone call, it's hugely important for remote workers to understand that what they're doing affects everyone else at the same time. It's far too easy for someone who doesn't go into the office to start thinking "out of sight, out of mind" in terms of their fellow employees. Encouraging regular communication can help prevent this from happening.

Working remotely for a business is a truly great thing, but the opposite can certainly be true if you're not careful. Only by establishing ground rules, holding people accountable, and by having the right perspective will you be able to unlock all of the benefits of remote workers with as few of the downsides as possible.

Sharing the Challenge Means Sharing the Victory: The Two-Way Street of Team Leadership

Many people work their entire lives to achieve a leadership role within an organization. They've put in their time, tirelessly working their way up through the ranks and then, it finally happens: they're trusted enough to be given the responsibility of bringing a team together for the benefit of a business's long-term goals. And yet, unfortunately, far too many people tend to veer off course with this almost immediately by assuming that respect is a given (which we've talked in detail about before), and by looking at "the team" as one thing and the "team leader" as something separate. They're not separate, and they never were. The sooner this is understood, the sooner you'll be generating the types of results you were after.

There IS an "I" in Team - It's Just Silent

An old saying has told us for years that "there is no 'I' in 'team'", meaning that in order to become a successful, respected leader, you have to put aside your own needs and look at yourself as just one part of a larger whole. While this is certainly true, from the perspective of a leader there actually IS a pretty important "I" in team. It's just that most people use it incorrectly.

As a leader, you don't lead by delegating authority or even by simply demanding excellence from those around you. You lead by example. You always have (whether you realize it or not) and you always will. You set the tone for everything that happens. Think about it - if you like to joke around throughout the work day, your team members will probably joke around a bit, too. If you like to keep things a bit more on the serious side, the mood of your team members will reflect that.

This is a clear-cut example of the two-way street of team leadership, and it is one you NEED to know how to use to your advantage. Never, under any circumstances, should you ask something of your employees that you would be unwilling to do yourself. Don't say to your new graphic designer, Timothy, "Hey, we're a bit behind on this upcoming project and I need you to come in on the weekend." Instead, say, "Hey, so that we can get caught up, I'm going to be coming in on the weekend and I would really appreciate it if you could find the time to as well." This goes above and beyond just showing your team members that they're appreciated. It lets them know that you're not JUST the team leader, you're a part of the team as well. Of course, you might not always be able to come in on the weekend yourself, but showing your willingness is more of the idea here.

Pay attention to the way this idea plays out in visual cues, as well. If you want your employees to dress more professionally in the office, don't call them together and reprimand them for their current appearance while you're wearing beach shorts and flip-flops. Doing so will end in slowly chipping away at that high-functioning team you worked so hard to build in the first place. If you show up every day at the office dressed in a suit and tie, just watch how your employees will rise to meet your dress code.

A Team Shares EVERYTHING

This idea also plays out in how you celebrate your accomplishments or lack thereof. By making yourself a more ingrained part of the team and sharing the challenges, it means that you truly get to share in the victories as well. Remember - you don't work in a vacuum. When a project finishes successfully, people may want to give you the credit because "you told the right people to do the right things." You didn't. Never forget that you're just one small part of a larger whole. If you were willing to share the challenges, you have to share the victories as well - this means that any success is the TEAM'S success, not yours.

In the end, the phrase "team leader" is actually something of a misnomer. People tend to think of it as immediately positive - you're in a position of authority and that is something to be celebrated. While this may be true, it's also something that can be far too easily abused - even unintentionally - if you're not careful. If a chain (or team) is only as strong as its weakest link, you need to understand that the weakest link will ALWAYS be the team leader by default. Your number one priority is making sure that the entire team is moving forward through the way you treat your team members, the way you behave, and the way you show them that you're all in this together.

As a Leader, Helping Your Employees Grow is One of Your Most Important Jobs

As a leader within your organization, it's understandable to feel like the list of things you have to look over gets longer and longer all the time. While you're being pulled in so many different directions, it can be easy to forget about one of your most important jobs of all: doing everything in your power to make sure that your employees are getting better and stronger with each passing day. Make no mistake: this is absolutely something you'll want to spend time thinking about every day for a number of compelling reasons.

Helping Your Employees, One Step at a Time

One of the most important ways that you can help your employees grow is by encouraging them to take an active role in their own professional development. One of the major reasons that you became the leader you are today is because you were not content to "spin your wheels" as far as your career was concerned. Help your employees understand that the status quo is never something they should be satisfied with and provide them with guidance in the form of mentorship opportunities along the way.

Another one of the most important ways that you can help your employees grow involves showing that you trust them by constantly pushing them outside of their comfort zones. One of the ways that we get better in our professional lives involves stepping outside the box we normally live in and doing something that makes us fear what might happen. By constantly challenging your employees, you not only help them move forward - you help show how valuable they are to both you and your organization by establishing a bond of trust that is very difficult to break.

An Investment in Your Employees is an Investment in Your Future

Another reason why helping your employees grow is one of your most important jobs has to do with the positive effect it can have on your company as a whole. Think about things from a hiring perspective - you aren't just looking for someone to fulfill certain job duties. Anybody can do that. You're looking for someone who can regularly surprise you and exceed your expectations on a daily basis. If you're having a hard time finding or attracting these candidates in the interviewing process, the next best thing is to essentially build them yourself by investing in their development over time.

This not only presents you with a workforce capable of doing higher quality work on a daily basis, but it also helps cement your business's reputation in your industry and with your own clients as an entity that can be trusted and relied on. Yes, it's true that this will also make your employees more marketable. But with benefits like these, this is one risk that you should be more than willing to take.

At the end of the day, outward success in the world of business begins from within. By looking at your employees as what they are - a solid foundation from which to build the business you've always dreamed of - you can then begin strengthening that foundation brick by brick through employee growth and development initiatives. Not only will your employees themselves thank you, but your clients and ultimately your bottom line will thank you, as well.