"Employees" Posts
Does Your Balance Sheet Have An Asset Called Social Capital?
By Ken DiPrima
Time and time again, we read about a new spectacular company that, just a few short years ago, was started in someone’s garage, financed with a meager $700 from personal savings or a gift from a friend or relative, that quickly skyrocketed into a huge, successful company worth millions of dollars.
How did they do that? What makes them so very different from the millions of companies that start up every year that either fails or flounders for a period of time, until the owner decides to do something else?
Were Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg just lucky, or …
A Good Working Environment
By Ken DiPrima
All too often, companies hire large masses of people in order to fill high turnover slots on their personnel rosters with little regard to the employees that they hired or for the ultimate success of the company. Hiring and training costs eat into precious profits and, frequently, fail to deliver the desired outcome.
What steps can a company take to make certain that these two vital functions more successful and long lasting?
If you think that change is hard for clients to accept and implement, just think how difficult it is for new employees to become acclimated and productive in …
Is Your Business Friendly?
By Zach Miller
Thumbtack, a consumer service for finding and hiring local businesses, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on education and entrepreneurship, recently released the results of their Small Business Friendliness Survey. The study measured data from over 12,000 small business owners and provides insight regarding the impact of friendliness towards customers as it relates to a business’ overall success.
This study demonstrates the importance between business friendliness and business success, as the former is directly correlative to customer loyalty, according to the survey.
For many businesses, in both B2B and B2C, customer loyalty is determined by …
Beat the Meeting Blues: 10 Tips to Improve Meetings
By Zach Miller
For too many employees, the weekly Monday meeting is the longest two hours of the day. They may drag their feet to the conference room, yawn during the presentation, check their missed texts throughout the meeting, and contribute minimally to the conversation in order to leave an uncomfortable position as early as possible.
The team meeting is not just a mandatory event—it has utility that should directly benefit the participants and the company. When a meeting is regarded as a nuisance, however, the functionality is lost and the benefits disappear. To best take advantage of the meeting, here are ten …
How To Increase Sales
By Ken DiPrima
“Nothing happens in business until somebody sells something.” How many times have you heard that? It makes no difference whether that something is a product, a service, a commodity, a tangible, or an intangible. Nor does it matter how good is your manufacturing operation, how cutting-edge your technology, how tight your financial goals, or how progressive and forward-thinking your management techniques. You must still have a sales mechanism, in place, or everything else is useless.
Sales is the one department in which a business organization generates revenues. Sales supply that vital elixir that all businesses need—the steady flow of cash.…
The Impact Of The ACA On Small Business Owners
By Ken DiPrima
Eric Lee’s excellent article on the consequences of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on married taxpayers is an outstanding examination of how this law affects a very select, but rather small portion of American taxpayers (approximately 2.9% of all married couples have taxable income of $250,000 or more). Businesses, additionally, making over $250,000 in profit must pay a .9% increase on the current Medicare part ‘A’tax on that portion of their income over that amount. The tax is split (.45% each) between the employer and employees making over $200,000 individual or $250,000 family.
GPS Inc. Supports Made ‘As If’ in the USA…
By 
The April 24th eight-story garment factory collapse in Bangladesh that killed 1,127 workers drew the international spotlight on Western companies taking advantage of cheap labor, but not enforcing Western standards in terms of fire and safety regulations. How Western companies should respond and if they can play a critical role in reform is now the issue for debate.
Corporate Interest Should Include Worker Safety
America’s Walt Disney Company made headlines by pulling out completely in Bangladesh, while more than 30 mostly European companies (these include H&M of Sweden, Zara’s parent Inditex of Spain, Carrefour of France, and Tesco of …
Ask The Expert
By GPSWhile large-scale business fraud and breaches of business ethics seem to dominate the front pages of newspapers and the 11 o’clock news, fraud can, touch the world of almost any business.
Employee fraud costs businesses $400 billion in annual losses, and 75 percent of that goes undetected.
Fraud occurs because most companies don’t have the ability to track what is going on. They don’t have the right internal controls, and they don’t understand the key matrices within their business. Many companies are constantly shocked by the fact that while they think little things are walking out the back door, big …
Americans Are Living Longer
By GPSAmericans are living longer. The life expectancy for Baby Boomers, those born between 1946 and 1965, is greater than any previous generation.
National Center for Health Statistics tables show that life expectancy increased 30 years, during the 20th Century, from 47 in 1900 to 77 at the millennium. The new tables are reporting that life expectancy of men 65 years old to be another 15.9 years, and women can expect to live an additional 19.2 years.
What do these numbers mean to you? The good news is that your retirement may be years longer than you had thought it to …
Build A Team At Work
By GPSSo, how do you bring diverse personalities together to work as a team?
It is the business owner’s responsibility to bring a group of people together that work harmoniously and produce a profit. Sound easy? If it was, the overwhelming amount of business failures would be considered an exception rather than the norm.
So how do you bring diverse personalities together to work as a team? The team should produce a profit that not only accounts for risk recovery, but provides enough working capital to assure the long term success of the business enterprise.
The importance and ability to work …
