What to Do When the Signs Look Bleak in your Startup

You are already analyzing your numbers on a regular basis—running cost-benefit analyses regularly and analyzing your expenditures on a return-on-investment (ROI) basis. But what do you do when the signs aren’t looking so hot? When your expendi­tures are greater than your income? You need to immediately look for ways to cut back if you

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Making Your Startup Business Legal

In Chapter 4, on starting your business, we discussed a bit about creating a DBA and getting your name filed. We will expand a bit in this section on what to do if the name you want is taken, how to check to be sure you are following all the rules, and where to

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Needs of hiring for your Startup

1. Deciding If You Need to Hire In your first year, you may grow rapidly and feel the need to hire as you get more and more overwhelmed. Remember that there are many costs associated with hiring, so while it feels like the business is growing rapidly and you’re buried in work, this may

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Setting Up for Your Startup Business

1. Setting Up for Business One vital decision you must make in year one is how you will set up for business. If you are going to have a back-end business that doesn’t literally see customers, like a retail store would, you have more options than if you do have a retail center or

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Financial Management of Your Startup Business

1. Business Checking Accounts One of your first tasks as a new business owner is to obtain a checking account. I remember my very first business and the feeling of seeing my company’s name printed on an official docu­ment that had the means of actually paying for something. Today it doesn’t offer quite as

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Advertising and Marketing Your Startup Business

1. Using Online Tools In the Internet era, we have a lot of online tools available to us to advertise businesses, many at little to no cost. Some online advertising tools are more effective than others; just as many are significantly more expensive than they were even a year ago and may not neces­sarily

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Growing Your Startup Business

1. Moving Your Business Ahead You want to move your business ahead—but what that means to you might differ based on your plan. Moving ahead might mean expanding your existing service offerings. It might mean tapping into a new demographic. It might mean taking a brick-and-mortar business online in a supplementary fashion, or vice

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Service Demands in your Startup Business

1. Customers Are Demanding—And They Should Be! Customers are generally demanding—and they should be. There are millions of companies out there competing for their dollars. Every family and individual has only X dollars available for discretionary spending. That means that if your product or service is optional, you need to fight incredibly hard to

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Porter’s Five Forces Analysis of Your Startup Business

So who is Porter, and what the heck do his five forces have to do with your busi­ness? Just about everything! Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School developed the five forces model in 1979 to help determine the competitive intensity of a specific market. In turn, he believed that this model also identified

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Controlling Your Startup Business Growth

1. Review Your Five-Year Plan Periodically, as you move through your business, you should review your original plan and consider future plans when you wish to expand (discussed further in Chapter 13). As you review your plan and take account of where you’re headed, be prepared to identify changes, determine where you need to

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Succeeding and Expanding Your Startup Business

1. Feeling Successful and Loving What You Do: The Ultimate Payoff! What is the ultimate in business success? In my view, and in the view of 98 percent of those surveyed who are existing entrepreneurs, it means meeting goals for the business and also loving what you do. If you are highly successful but

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The nature of human resource management

1. HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT FOR THE TWENTY- FIRST CENTURY Businesses are diverse. Prisons, restaurants, oil companies, corner shops, fire brigades, churches, hotel chains, hospitals, schools, newspapers, charities, doctors’ and dentists’ surgeries, professional sports teams, airlines, barristers’ chambers and universities are all businesses in the sense that they have overall corporate missions to deliver and

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Debates and philosophy of human resource Management

1. DEBATES IN HRM The world in which human resource managers exist and with which they interact is continually changing, generating new issues and conundrums to consider. While in most cases managers have a fair degree of choice about how to deal with new ideas and new sets of circumstances, the choices themselves are

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The nature of Strategic human resource management

1. STRATEGIC HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT AND HUMAN RESOURCE STRATEGY Our understanding of HR strategy has changed considerably since strategy first became the subject of great attention. We have moved from viewing strategy as a physical docu­ment to seeing it as an incremental process, affected by political influences and gener­ating learning. Tyson’s (1995) definition of

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Theoretical perspectives of strategic human resource management

Three theoretical approaches to strategic HRM can be identified. The first is founded on the concept that there is ‘one best way’ of managing human resources in order to improve business performance. The second focuses on the need to align employment policies and practice with the requirements of business strategy in order that the

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Introduction to human resource planning

1. THE CONTRIBUTION AND FEASIBILITY OF HR PLANNING A useful starting point is to consider the different contributions that strategy and planning make to the organisation. A common view has been that they are virtually one and the same – hence the term ‘strategic planning’. Henry Mintzberg (1994, p. 108) dis­tinguished between strategic thinking,

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Analysing the environment and Forecasting future human resource needs

1. ANALYSING THE ENVIRONMENT In this chapter we refer to the environment broadly as the context of the organisation, and this is clearly critical in the impact that it has on both organisational and human resource strategy. Much strategy is based on a response to the environment – for example, what our customers now

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Current HR situation analysis, reconciliation, decisions and plans

1. ANALYSING THE CURRENT SITUATION AND PROJECTING FORWARD 1.1. Organisation, behaviour and culture It is in this area that more choice of techniques is available, and the possibilities include the use of questionnaires to staff (see www.pearsoned.co.uk/torrington HRP Exercise, 3.1, note 7.), interviews with staff and managerial judgement. Focus groups are an increasingly popular

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International human resource management

The main problem about understanding international HRM issues is that they evolve so rapidly; having worked out how to deal with one opportunity or challenge, you find that things have changed and your plans are obsolete. As one company chairman put it, ‘You feel as if you are driving from one station to another,

International communication and coordination of human resources

Communicating across geographical, ethnic and national boundaries is a major chal­lenge for HR people. Brandt and Hulbert (1976) studied organisational feedback in a number of multinational companies that had their headquarters in Europe, Japan and the United States. They found that the American organisations had many more feedback reports and meetings between headquarters and

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