Your Business Quick Tip Newsletter
Vol 18 No #171 – 8th of October 2019
Contents
- Pick One of Three eBooks
- Here’s A Wee Excel Tip You’ll Love
- How To Make Significant Personal Improvements
- Media Training
Pick One Of Three eBooks
Can I entice you with one of the three eBooks below? I’d be delighted to send you your choice if you take 30 seconds to help me with your opinion.
I am trying to decide on what form of new online education to create. I’ve put a quick survey of eight questions (mostly tic boxes) together. If you don’t mind helping, you can select one of these eBooks (the print versions are sold out)
The ebooks are
- 101 Quick Tips: Create A Great Customer Experience
- Surviving The Kids
- Effective Communication
Here’s A Wee Excel Tip You’ll Love
Did you know that if you wanted the current date to always appear in an Excel spreadsheet, you simply type this into the cell. =Today()
How To Make Significant Personal Improvements
You can’t escape reading about advancing technology. Self-driving vehicles. Robotic assisted surgery. Artificial Intelligence. Machine learning. Google bots setting appointments with real people.
In fact, most would think big improvements can only come from big changes in technology. But that isn’t always the case. Simply learning how to use your everyday office software better can help you make significant personal improvement.
Let me share three stories with you.
Survey’s Consistently Highlights Lack of Knowledge
I always do a pre-conference/training survey to help individually customise my sessions. When including the topic of email – everyone’s number one communication channel and where most of office time is spent, I ask about the use of functions I know would save a phenomenal amount of time.
You can see from the Table below, no matter what position or industry -the very, very low numbers of individuals that knew or used the functions I listed.
“My life has changed. I’m going to have so much time”
Chris, a business development representative who works primarily with Excel came to me for a touch of training. After looking through her spreadsheets, I derived 10 learning points to cover in our Skype training. After showing her custom sorting and filtering; the first two learning points, “You changed my life” she said. After point eight she said “I never knew how wonderful Excel could be”. By learning point 10 she was fretting she would have to shift down to part time work (which she didn’t want) because her Excel work would take perhaps 1/20th of the time previously.
“Don’t worry Chris. You’ll be able to use the time to call more clients, build relationships and make more sales, Your boss will love it and you’ll go from being good to spectacular” I responded.
Risk Management
Finally, finally I got my sister to visit New Zealand in 2010. It’s a long way from Florida. Naturally we toured around. While out visiting a vineyard in Napier, our motel room was burgled. My laptop, the veritable lifeblood of my business was stolen. Thankfully my husband had backed it up a week before- so I lost very few important files.
With the new laptop in hand and the backups installed I changed the way I worked. Dropbox was loaded, and I organised my files under Dropbox instead of My Documents. The important ones that is. Syncing and saving them online meant no matter what happened to my laptop – I would always have access to my files. Anywhere. Anytime and on any computer, tablet or phone.
Fast forward nine years. Now you have both online file storage AND free Office software with Google and Microsoft. But wait, there’s more! They keep adding new apps and tweaking. Have you had a look recently?
- Microsoft / Google Forms – create surveys, forms, invites with responses filling online, downloadable spreadsheets.
- Google Drive- Map layers. Create pindrops on Google Maps. You can load up to 2000 rows at a time, creating Pins which hold all the data within that row. Great for visualising member locations, training attendees. Promotional results. Imagine how useful this would be getting sponsors on board.
- Teams – a four in one solution of chat and phone, online meetings, messaging and document integration.
- Microsoft Sway and Google Sites allow you to build simple free website.
To summarise these three little vignettes, highlight the personal improvement individuals and businesses can make. A magnificent amount of time freed up. Improved communication. Increased business profits. All from simply learning how to use their everyday business ‘technology’ software better.
Media Training
Many will recognise the name: Mary Lambie. An award winning broadcaster working in the media for the past 25 years, Mary and her husband / fellow broadcaster / writer, Jim Mora, run Socius Media. It focuses on media training corporate executives through to social media ‘influencers’ on how to best present in front of the camera.
If you’re interested in mastering the art of being a standout interviewee and helping your business get publicity and press, contact Mary at mary@socius.co.nz or call +64 274 838 800 to discuss your (or your company’s) media training or media consultation needs.