Let's Talk About Business

The Business Quadrant
The cashflow quadrant shows the different methods by which income is generated. Various income generation methods require unique technical skills, training courses, and different types of people. It is a useful tool that has led ambitious people to entrepreneurial paths in the search for financial freedom. The cash quadrant is a very important characteristic of wealth.

E - Employee
Here is where most people earn their income (employment jobs). The employee sacrifices time, energy, skills, and ideas to their employer in exchange for compensation. Employee income varies through commission, but when an employee ceases to work, their income also stops. The lack of guaranteed income is the main problem in the E quadrant. The financial freedom of an employee depends on the employer.

S – Self-Employed
The self-employed do work for their own job. This quadrant includes restaurant owners, real estate agents, dentists, and other industry workers. Many freelancers earn a lot, but like the employee, when they stop working, their income also stops. Self-employed people have much more autonomy than an employee. As a result, success usually means working hard and working longer.

B - Business Owner
Those in Quadrant B have a cash production machine. Those in S may transition into B owners. For example, a carpenter could possess and work in their joinery business, or a business owner could set up a carpentry shop and hire quality carpenters and a manager to run the business. The wealthiest individuals in the world generally own businesses. These include Microsoft's Bill Gates, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and Tesla and SpaceX's Elon Musk.

I - Investors
Investors hold assets that generate income. This is the passive income quadrant. Investors in this quadrant have generally accumulated money earned in one or more of the other three quadrants and let the money work and produce even more money for itself. There are thousands of avenues to deploy your money and make it work for you. This is the crescendo of financial freedom.

How to Value Your Business?
Valuation is the process of determining the “economic worth” of an asset or company under certain assumptions and limiting conditions and subject to the data available at the valuation date. Business valuation is a process and a set of procedures used to estimate the economic value of an owner's interest in a business. Valuation is used by financial market participants to determine the price they are willing to pay or receive to affect a sale of a business. The valuation strategy includes:

Obtaining an in-depth understanding of the business and its ownership interest.
Performing a thorough financial and qualitative analysis.
Considering valuation adjustments.
Reconciling indicated value(s) to arrive at a conclusion of value.
Presenting the findings in a report.
Building a Strong Business Relationship

When it comes to business and sales, building a strong relationship is critical. The stronger your relationship is with your customer, the more likely they will be to refer to your business.

Every day, make an attempt to build on the relationships you have with your customers. Don't just say hi as they walk in and goodbye as they leave.
The last thing you want to do is make your customer feel like a statistic.
Let them know that their business with you is appreciated. Talk to them, strike up a non-business conversation with them. It could involve just about anything, such as the weather, sports, a movie, pets, etc.
Non-business conversation puts your customer at ease and gets them talking. The more they talk to you, the more they will open up to you, opening the door for more sales opportunities.
Or, you can keep it simple. For starters, get to know your customers by name, then address them by name. Say things

Workplace Wellness: Performance with a Purpose
When we talk about workplace health from the perspective of employers, workplace health includes providing the conditions for personal development and allowing individuals to become the best they can be, thanks to the opportunities available to them in the workplace. When the employer says, "If we give you everything you need to do your job properly, or if we keep your working environment safe, we are ensuring workplace health."
When we talk about workplace health from the perspective of employees, we are talking about emotional health, well-being, and happiness in the workplace. So, when employees say they can take care of their physical health, it is much more a function of psychological and emotional health, and social health than it is of physical health because good emotional health comes from working in a respectful place. Good emotional health from an employee's perspective is about feeling respected, valued, emotionally comfortable, and more in the workplace.
At the same time, it is imperative to understand the factors or elements that affect workplace health. The first one is organizational culture, which refers to the social setup within an organization, interpersonal relationships within an organization, and the way of working, hours, and stories that propagate, among others. What kind of system of rewards do you have in your organization? The other is the promotion of health promotion programs conducted by the organization for its employees, and physical amenities such as employee lounge, gym, places for a walk, etc. Then, the flexibility of the workplace is another factor, and the amount of control you have over your job. Communication and management support are also important factors that depend upon how much the organization supports you in your attempts to grow and how much they trust your integrity.

According to research, 28 percent of adults are not thriving in any element, while just 19 percent are thriving in four or five elements. Employees with low well-being are the source of immense healthcare costs and lost productivity for organizations. There are a few ways that organizations can invest in their employees' well-being and encourage participation in well-being programs. First, communicate and clarify that well-being is an important organizational value. Second, individualize and let employees choose well-being activities that are best suited to their individual wellness goals and interests. Third, recognize and understand that recognition reinforces your well-being efforts. Successful wellness programs focus on providing the tools, resources, and opportunities to develop and strengthen each of the five areas of total employee well-being. Understand that every person is different, so your program needs to be tailored to meet employees' needs, interests, and goals.
In recent times, with the coming up of COVID-19, the world is learning new ways to live life, build community, and work, which can increase feelings of frustration, anxiety, and stress. Organizations need to lead thinking about mental health by creating a supportive space for teams. Before COVID, nearly 60% of employees didn't tell anyone at work about their mental health. Many do not know what resources are available or are afraid to use them.
To conclude, organizations need to ensure their employees understand the mental health benefits and resources available, be specific with phone numbers and websites, reiterate organizational support, and lead by example through honest communication and compassion.

Communication- The Blood of Business
"The expertise in communication begins by being intentional about it, rather than treating it as an afterthought at the very end of a project or worse, after communication problems happen. To be proactive about communication, we need to make it a habit to ask ourselves seven key questions when faced with any new project or initiative. These seven questions reflect the variables that exist in every communication event. So, what is a communication event? It could be making a sales call, presenting at a conference, or simply chatting with friends over lunch. Maybe your company is about to make a major reorganization or a minor policy change. Every one of these situations involves communication, and those seven variables are at work. When we learn to manage these variables, we increase the likelihood of communication success. For instance, you get that sale, your conference attendees understand your ideas clearly, and your friends feel a more solid relationship with you. To the extent that we ignore any of these seven variables, we risk miscommunication. The customer doesn't understand the value of the product and doesn't purchase it. Your conference colleagues think, "What are you talking about?" And your friends, well, they're friends, so they give you the benefit of the doubt. But repeated miscommunication can leave even our closest loved ones feeling wounded or upset with us.

Who should receive this news?
Who would be the best sender?
What is the bottom-line message?
How might the message be interpreted?
Do we want or need feedback on the message?
What is the best channel?
How should we time and sequence this message, or are any other contextual issues important?
To understand these questions and their assessments in business, it is important to understand their framework and application in an organization.

"First, who were the receivers or the people who heard the news? Did the right people get the message? In your situation, one of the leading communication problems is assuming that everyone who needs to get a message actually got that message. When we take the time to identify each party who should receive a message, we'll avoid this common problem.
Next, who is the sender of the message? Was the sender the best person for the job? Why or why not?
Third, what was the intended message? Did people get enough, but not too much information? Did they know what they were supposed to do in response to the message?

Fourth, how was the message interpreted? Do you think that you and all of the other receivers heard the message in the same way? Did it mean the same thing to all of you? Did the sender clarify any aspects of the message that might have caused confusion or emotional upset? Getting senders and receivers to align their thinking is one of the most challenging aspects of communication.
Fifth, how did the message get from the sender to the receiver, or what was the channel of communication? Was it an email, a one-on-one, a large group meeting, maybe a notice on your intranet, or a blurb in the newsletter? What would have been the best way to get the message from point A to point B?
The sixth question is about feedback. Were receivers asked to share their thoughts on the message? If people did give feedback, did anyone respond to the feedback, or was communication pretty much one-way? Feedback allows us to make sure that the message was received and understood the way that we had hoped. Finally,"

Downward communication involves messages that flow from the top levels of management to the employees throughout the company. This type of communication is most common but can become distorted if it passes through too many people. Remember the childhood game called "telephone"? One person would whisper something to the next person in the circle, who would then whisper it to the next, and so on. The last person in the circle would say aloud what she heard, which was never what the first player had originally said. The game was fun and made us all laugh, but in business, it's not funny. Try to communicate directly with as many receivers as possible. Upward communication allows management to learn about problems that only frontline people are privy to. When channels are in place for employees to be heard by their leadership, they feel more valued. However, upward communication is notorious for being skewed toward the positive. No one wants to give the boss bad news, and no one wants to confess when things aren't going well.
Upward messages tend to suffer from a positivist bias. You can use opinion surveys, Q&A sessions, advisory boards, Ombudsman hotlines, suggestion boxes, skip-level interviews, or anything else to encourage honest upward communication in your company. Horizontal communication is often overlooked, yet that dreaded silo mentality begins to grow when departments or units see themselves as independent actors rather than part of a collective system. If you notice a lack of lateral communication, you can initiate conversations with people at our level in other departments. Consider a once-a-week coffee or even just a quick drop by to chat about current projects. Powerful collaborations often begin as simple conversations. There is one more group to consider who might be an unintended audience: emails are so easy to forward. As communicators, we want our message to be received by the intended audience, and we need to be aware of unintended audiences. So think carefully about who could end up reading your message.

It is important to understand that senders of your message should be influential to the receivers. But the real question is, what makes a person influential and a good candidate for sending messages? People generally influence us if they have some kind of power in our eyes, and that power falls into three categories.
Legitimate power happens when people comply with a request because the sender has a certain title or position. For example, employees in a company fulfill senior or boss requests because they respect the position and have to demonstrate that respect through compliance.
Reward power refers to behavior motivated because a sender can reward you in some way. For instance, you follow up quickly with a request from a potential client because he has the power to reward you with new business. Conversely, coercive power happens when a sender can punish you in some way or take away good things in life. For instance, you follow up quickly with an existing client because he has the power to take his business elsewhere.

Referent power is the influence that happens as a result of credibility. If someone else could more effectively pass the torch, focus on your purpose, and if enlisting someone else to be a spokesperson for your idea would help give the idea wings, go for it. Tap into the influence that will work.
Once we understand and identify who should hear our message, we must remember that these people will interpret our message to understand its meaning. See the lines drawn through the heads of the senders and receivers. These little lines remind us that no listener is an empty vessel awaiting our message. Rather, people have mental filters. We all have preconceived notions, assumptions, biases, good and bad. Our unique way of seeing the world is that your receivers have their own perspectives about you and your message. These mental filters can skew how our message is heard and understood.
An important communication feedback constructively, it can lead to disengagement and frustration among employees. Therefore, it is important to create a culture of open and constructive feedback, where employees feel safe to share their opinions and ideas.

Another important aspect of effective communication is the use of appropriate language and tone. Depending on the audience, the language and tone of the message may need to be adjusted. For example, when communicating with customers, the language should be clear and concise, and the tone should be friendly and respectful. On the other hand, when communicating with executives or managers, the language should be more formal, and the tone should be professional and confident.
In addition to language and tone, nonverbal communication also plays a crucial role in effective communication. Nonverbal cues such as body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice can convey a lot of information about the speaker's attitude and emotions. It is important to be aware of these nonverbal cues and to use them effectively to enhance the message being communicated.
In conclusion, effective communication is critical to the success of any organization. By understanding the different types of communication, identifying the intended audience, focusing on the bottom line message, and using appropriate language, tone, and nonverbal cues, communicators can increase the effectiveness of their messages and avoid common pitfalls. Moreover, creating a culture of open and constructive feedback can help ensure that communication is a two-way process that promotes engagement and alignment among employees.

To understand how a network works in a company, imagine a situation where a HR director needs to communicate a time-sensitive change in the benefits package to all employees the message starts with a face-to-face visit to the vice president's who are in turn to tell departmental directors who in turn are to tell unit supervisors who in turn tell their staff good plan unless one of those directors also had ten other messages to communicate to her supervisors who were now on overload and another director communicated the message but two of the supervisors were on vacation so didn't pass the message along to their staff some staff members don't have a reporting line to any of those vice presidents

Communication is all one-way and when some employees have heard the message and others haven't the rumor mill kicks in as it inevitably will, when people experience a communication vacuum the grapevine which is the rumor mill is fascinating. it's an informal network of communication that often moves faster than the formal channels but isn't always as accurate rumors and misinformation can spread rapid-fire hence that great line a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still lacing up its boots we can't dictate an order to stop using the grapevine rather we can attempt to limit its damaging effects by sharing a wealth of information in the formal channels when people aren't thirsty for information they're less inclined to participate in rumor spreading concede that the rumor mill exists attempt to understand its nuances and use it when appropriate to supplement the slower formal channels meetings are a channel that we rely on heavily in the workplace more.

The next aspect of communication is to improve the efficiency of the meetings.

First make a minor adjustment to your agenda to improve the efficiency of your meetings most agendas look something like this strategy realignment quarterly sales regional marketing plans suggest that you add an objective to each agenda item like this determine the next steps for strategy realignment report quarterly sales brainstorm regional marketing plans people prepare and interact differently if they are listening to brainstorming about or acting on deciding on an issue let them know in advance what mental space to be in as they enter the meeting then add a time frame to each agenda item the time frames allow people to gauge how much sharing is appropriate.

If we reach the end of the allotted time and the team has not finished that item you can simply ask do we want to continue this discussion and eliminate some other agenda item or can we in the next two minutes wrap this up teams frequently realize that they are belaboring a point and will choose to wrap up and move on suddenly naysayer are ready for a vote people full of conversation are ready to be quiet and you move on.

Therefore, these different business segments play an important role in developing and in the growth of a business where communication becomes the life blood of a business.