Hiring families as our employee

According a world price increasing, some of employers complain about how difficult it is to find good employees. Because every people become individual person and forget some attitude and loyalty factor. But there’s one place that can be a terrific source of great workers — the families and friends of your best employees. After all, current employees who have great work attitudes probably have brothers, sisters, and best pals with great work attitudes, too.

But hiring friends and relatives is tricky. If not handled well, it can sour the work environment. Personal disputes can affect business interaction. Other employees may feel that a boss’s relative gets special treatment, and cliques can form.

So for me, hire our families as employee, our someone who have relatives relation with our current employee must be have some criteria, such as :

Don’t hire someone’s relative just because they need a job. If someone has trouble holding down a job, you don’t want them either.

Don’t have relatives work too closely together. It’s one thing to have siblings work for the same company, but if they work together on the same project, you’re likely to see old family patterns emerge. If something goes wrong, don’t be surprised if you hear something like, “He started it,” “No, she started it,” and so on.

Ask specific, detailed questions about the relative’s qualifications before you agree to interview them. While you want to hire people with the right attitude rather than just skills, leave yourself an out: “I’m not sure Chris has the right computer skills we need.”

Watch out when hiring spouses! Spouses or domestic partners working together can present difficulties. There are logistical issues — vacations or family emergencies may leave you doubly short-handed — and behavioral issues — a terrific worker may change dramatically with a spouse around.

Moreover, in a small, new, or very risky company, having both breadwinners work for the same company puts a lot of stress on a family and their budget.

Be extraordinarily cautious about working with your own spouse. I know of a few businesses where a husband and wife successfully and productively work side-by-side all day. But I’ve had a number of clients where either the business or the relationship (or both) ended up on the rocks. Tread carefully.

Never play favorites. Make sure all the rules apply to all employees. Everyone has to be qualified, and they have to do their jobs well. Otherwise, they’re not hired or they get fired. Even your mother.

Be toughest on your own close relatives. I’m old-fashioned enough to think it’s good for the boss’s kid (or niece or nephew) to have to work their way up, and it’s good for other employees to know that the boss’s brother doesn’t get a free ride.

Before you hire a relative, make it clear to them that they’ll be held to the highest standard. And I have a firm rule: I never supervise one of my relatives directly.
Conclusion, I’m recommend to do some nepotism, but don’t forget the most important thing! you hire them because if their skill and professional. Not because they have some relative relation.

Find someone to build website

As a web developer there are certain scenarios under which I would develop a website for someone without asking for a penny. If you are looking to have a free website designed here are some ways you might go about it:

1. Ask around and seek out a web developer who is looking to build up his or her portfolio. Developers without a large portfolio will often build websites for free to get their portfolio started. However they may ask to include the site they designed for you to showcase it for their business, or they may add their logo at the bottom of your site to advertise themselves. If a web developer can get good promotion through your site, (such as a ‘this site was built by so and so’) at the bottom, they will be more interested in taking you on as a client than for the money.

2. If you are selling something through the site, offer the developer a commission. Certain developers will build a site for you providing you give them a percentage commission on particular sales through that site.

3. Don’t pay, exchange. Offer the developer a service from your business in exchange for his or her web development services. Make sure the exchange is fair both ways.

Keep in mind:

1. Stick to a simple project. Do not ask for an overly complex site like Yahoo or EBay, a developer will be more inclined to take on a project that will take 10-15 hours to complete, than one that will take 100-150 hours to complete.

2. Keep your decisions ethical. Do not look for ways of ripping others off to get a free website, this is bad business practice. The above 3 ways are both effective and ethical ways of going about it.

The most important aspects in our business

Peter Drucker’s insightful and timeless definition remains the only correct answer, and that is “the purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer”. A business serves to do only one thing, and that is to provide a product or service that has sufficient value in fulfilling a need that the business can be sustained. The customer determines that value and, and to a large degree, also determines whether the business continues to exist. Sure, it must also make money because if the business is truly sustainable it must be able to generate enough earnings or profit over and above its costs to invest in improving its products and services over those of its competitors.

All of the “hot button” topics like environmental stewardship, insuring the safety and health of its workers, actively participating in the betterment of the communities in which it operates, respect for and equality for all races and gender to name a few are all peripheral issues to this most important aspect, which is to deliver a product or service that is of value. In this age of unparalleled flows of information, the failure of a business to properly address those social responsibilities or its lack of sincere values and beliefs that are aligned with those of society will not go unnoticed and these oversights will quickly diminish or destroy its value in the eyes of its customers. Businesses that are successful understand this and so do their employees. They do not need a wall full of posters or wallet-sized cards to remind them of what is important; it is natural to them in their every action. Businesses that do not understand this are businesses that fail and the many clever marketing and re-positioning campaigns only serve to forestall the inevitable.

Some will of course disagree with this and unfortunately there are still many examples to support this dissenting view; utility monopolies, and businesses that have managed to protect their inferior value through political guile (airlines quickly come to mind) are perhaps the most obvious on this list. Another equally onerous problem is when the customer has allowed his or her own value system to be compromised for the sake of a lower cost. The recent rash of reports and “horror shows” on the inferior and dangerous goods coming from China are excellent examples of this phenomenon. The customer has been lulled by a seemingly endless downward spiral of prices for over a decade now and continues to expect this. Turning a blind eye to the real cost of this to society is easy until it hits home when the family pooch is lying belly up in the garage one morning.

As the culture of consumerism continues its march around the world, technology has dramatically increased both our real time knowledge along with the number of available choices we the customer have. Perhaps now more than ever the most important aspect of business must be “to create and keep the customer.”

The art of recruiting new staff

Want to know how potential employees will perform in a new job? Apply the SAO L formula: Situation Action Outcome Learnings to mine their past behavior and predict how well they will perform with your company.

The first step is to think of a situation you expect the new employee to encounter at your company and match it with a situation in your applicant’s past. Choose one where it’s crucial that your new hire will excel. For example, you might be filling a position involving dealing with dissatisfied customers. That’s your starting situation. Now, look for a similar situation in your interviewee’s past. Using concrete questions, probe to see whether your interviewee has dealt with angry customers in the past. Ask, “Can you describe a situation where” or “Tell me about a time when you.”. Note that it’s important not to ask hypothetical questions. Never ask “How would you react if” That doesn’t tell you anything about what the applicant has done in the past: it only tells you how creative his or her imagination is.

Once you’ve lined up a situation to explore, you’ll need to understand what your applicant did. Press the applicant to be as concrete as possible, using phrases like “Tell me specifically what you did”, or “What exactly did you do”. Question the applicant politely but closely until you understand exactly what steps he or she took in the past. What exactly did the applicant do to handle irate customers? You want to finish this step with concrete examples of what happened.

Next, you want to know how effective the applicant was, so you need to make sure you understand what the outcome was. If your applicant tells you that he or she dealt with angry customers by explaining that the fine print on the warranty meant that the company couldn’t provide product support, you’ll want to know whether that was effective. Was the applicant able to meet the challenge? Applicants who were unsuccessful in meeting common challenges in the past are unlikely to be successful in future.

Finally, you want to understand what the applicant learned from his or her experience. For example, your applicant might say, “Initially, I carefully explained the conditions of our warranty to customers and made clear why we couldn’t support products beyond twelve months. But then I realised that satisfied customers often more than made up for the cost of that support in extra business and referrals, so I started to waive that time limit if they were only one or two months past the expiry date.” Establishing what the employee has learned tells you two things. First, it tells you that the employee was able to adapt and meet the challenge successfully. Secondly, it tells you that the applicant is able to take on and respond to feedback a characteristic which will make him or her a successful employee in your own workplace.

In sum, the rule to remember is this: Past behavior predicts future behavior. To know how applicants will perform at your firm, first define a situation that they are likely to encounter, then probe for a similar situation in their past. Next, find out what they did when that situation occurred. Thirdly, discover how effective they were once you know what they did, ask what happened next. Finally, ask them what they learned from the situation.

About OPEX and CAPEX

What is a business worth? Why does the value of a business change over time, sometimes radically such as was seen with some technology companies in recent years? In a knowledge-driven and dominated economy how should intellectual capital and brand identity be valued?

The measurement of Capital Expenditures (CAPEX) and Operating Expenditures (OPEX) is one of the starting points for grappling with the difficult problem of business valuation. Capital Expenditures consist of all of the tangible and sometimes intangible assets that are used to generate new business and revenues. Operating Expenses consist of those expenses necessary to maintain the capital assets. After subtracting operating expenses from operating revenue the magical figure which everyone is interested in is arrived at: Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization, or EBITDA. EBITDA is a good starting point to help with firm valuation but as it has been said, things aren’t so simple.

The OPEX/CAPEX distinction becomes much more complicated when it is applied to firms whose products are driven by knowledge workers which happens to be true of most firms these days. It is, in fact, a accounting concept derived from an earlier era where capital-intensive firm dominated the landscape. The persistent gap between what is known as the Enterprise Value of the firm which is derived from EBITDA and the value of a firm assigned by the stock market is a testament to the limitations of the Enterprise Value concept in today’s technology-dominated economy.

At present, there is no generally accepted way of measuring the value of Intellectual Capital in the firm. In a technology firm, by way of example, is investment in critical knowledge acquisition by the engineering staff truly an operating expense or is it, at least partially, a capital expense? Traditional accounting theory would always classify such an outlay as an operating expense but the distinction seems less clear when knowledge acquisition becomes an essential pat of the firm’s plan to create future cash flows. A company such as Qualcomm consists largely of engineers and lawyers and doesn’t have a tangible, physical product.

The CAPEX/OPEX paradigm needs to be updated for the 21st century. A more up to date approach to expense accounting properly would take into account changes to Intellectual Capital Assets. Such a change must wait, however, for a more precise accounting definition of Intellectual Capital.

The most popular sites in our life

Welcome to the Real World, when everything could be access by something called internet.

These days, there are more than a few sites that have become mainstays in our personal and professional lives. Whether you looking up useless facts or trying to balance your checkbook, there are a few sites you can use to broaden your scope.

1) GOOGLE: First and foremost, your search engine is the guide by which you shall access significant websites. Although there are quite a few search engines now, none of them provide the tools and access like Google does. More than that, there are a few Google-associated tools that are simply groundbreaking. if you get the chance, do a little exploration. (Check out Google calendar, documents, Earth, maps, etc.)

2) WIKIPEDIA: i know there has some controversy surrounding this site. Mostly because of the way it allows it’s users to edit it’s entries. However, if you’re doing research, it’s one of the easiest to use and has a wide breadth of subjects. But sometimes we couldn’t just using this site’s content as our based, because it just someone’s idea and didn’t have any legalization about their contents.

3) Social internet network like friendster, facebook, etc are become our part of life recently. when we were starting online, some of interneter check his account because it was interesting to find and keep contact with another people who was living faraway from us.

Reason why oil price were crushing down?

As we know, after reached their highest price ever (147 USD perbarrel), oil price was starting to crush down. Why it could happen? The answer is so simple, when the oil price reached their highest level the biggest oil producer country like Iraq, Iran, and Venezuela were banned by UNESCO and now allowed to sell his oil to the market. Although there are another country who also as oil producer but that 3 countries has a big share for world’s oil production. so without them, oil’s demand wouldn’t full supported with enough amount of oil.

When UNESCO was allowing that countries selling their oil, of course there isn’t demand problem anymore. Some expert from OPEC predicted that oil price will back to 70.

“Hot money” definition

The term “hot money” has been around for a long time now and has different meaning and different uses, depending on the market and industry. The term hot money is also used in legal and illegal instances

In the banking industry, hot money applies in different aspects. Hot money can be when money is transferred internally, from American Dollars to moneys in another nation, because of questionable or illegal activities. This transfer can also take place legally. Investors will sometimes transfer their moneys from American to a different countries dollar to see a higher yield when it comes to interest rates. This money is usually there short term, only until a large enough return is seen in a short amount of time, and then it is transferred back making an income.

Hot money is also money that is very desirable and needed. When a person has money or assets that are highly liquefiable, that money is hot. This money is usually hot because a person is in dire need of the money or some kind of financial stress. This money can usually be taken or drawn upon on a moments notice.

Criminally, hot money can be anything such as money that was stolen, robbed from bank or money that was earned as result of the sale of illegal items such as drugs or items stolen from a house during a robbery and moneys that were illegally printed. Any money that can be linked back to a crime is considered hot money.

Hot money can also be applied to something that you use frequently. Money spent on supplies that are in constant use and replacement for a business is also hot. You unfortunately have to get rid of the money fast to buy something that you are in need of.

Have you ever had the urge to spend the extra money out of your paycheck? When you use that money it is now hot money. Money that you don’t need for something important and willing to waste to get something you want is hot money.

Hot money can be applied to many different aspects of life, whether it is illegal or legal. Any money that is quickly spent or transferred it hot. Think of it more like the hot potato game. The potato is hot so you quickly pass it along.

Commodities were crushing down

No one would made prediction that commodities’s prices would crush down like now. Starting with oil price which crush down untill almost 100 USD per barrel. And then gold’s price from the highest price more than thousand dollars per troy ounce, and now become 750 USD per troy ounce. Of course for some stocks market also have some influence with this condition. Some market stocks in development countries crushing down. For example a countries which have a lot of natural resources, their stocks also crushing down.

So watch out for every one who played in development countries’s stocks.

Improving our company aspects

To improve anything one must first understand what need to be improved. In improving all aspects of your company the first thing that must be done is an audit of accounts receivables, accounts payables, cash, profit margin, human resources, and quality. Since these are the core functions of any business a thorough knowledge of these is critical to improving the company.

When this information is gathered from the audit an analysis need to be performed on each area and strategies need to be developed that will guide the transformation process. Many of the core areas are involved with finance and therefore undergirdes all attempts to performance improvement. Once these analysis have been done the next step will be the development of a transformation plan with strategies for each core activity of the business entity. This will ensure that each core area an its corresponding support function is addressed.

In the audit and in the transformation plan the questions of who, what, when, where, how, and why must be asked and answered. Answering these questions will yield critical information that will help in developing the implementation plan after all the strategies have been developed. These questions will lead the company to do a situational audit so that it may determine its postion in the market in which it competes in relationship to those companies that make up the market. Such a competitive analysis will provide greater insight into what needs to be improved in order to enhance the company’s competitive position in the market.

Improving all aspects of your company will hopefully make the company more competitive and maybe an industry leader. Any company that will take the time to do market research will understand why it is necessary to perform an overhaul of all aspects of the company. Since the company competes in a global marketplace and the economy is in constant change it becomes necessary for the company to keep up with that change which therefore makes improving all aspects of your company critical.

The simplest way to go at change is to develop a systems view of the company. Every company has several systems at work at all times. When these systems all work in synchronization then the company will function smoothly. These systems; materials, people, finance, benefits, and education must all be of high quality and high functionality in-order to maintain constant improvement in performance. By looking at the systems and core functions of your company on a periodic basis you can maintain an ongoing quality improvement program that will ensure continued improvement on into the future.