Business Strategy Archives – Page 28 of 38

9 Sep 2009

Lessons From Amazon

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:23:41-06:00September 9th, 2009|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog|

The lessons in a nutshell:

Always focus on your customers first; not your competition or anything else.
Invent – Don't settle for either or; invent a solution that gives you both… invent for your customers.
Think Long Term – Keep your eye on the long-term payback and not the quick results. If you are doing the first two in conjunction with this you will eventually do well.
It is always Day 1 – There are always new opportunities to focus on customers, invent and think long-term.

8 Sep 2009

Fall – Back to Business

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:23:48-06:00September 8th, 2009|Categories: Business Strategy, Current Events, Doug's Blog|

We are up on a bit of a hill. Last night we got a surprise frost. So much for the weather forecast.

Yup the nights are getting cooler here in Calgary and that means everyone is getting back to business after a relatively short summer.

There are two main periods of busy business activity here in Calgary: Fall and Winter/Spring. Stampede until Labour Day is a slow period and so is December/January. This year with the doom and gloom economy still lingering, it was especially pronounced.

Federally, the politicians are thumping their chests again. Too bad they consider their job to be mudslinging […]

4 Sep 2009

Outsourcing your HR Needs – Small Business

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:24:05-06:00September 4th, 2009|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Dream Teams|

Al and I finally reconnected with Kim Bechtel after losing touch a few years ago. We did a project for him while he was at the City of Calgary. Somehow we lost touch and then when Kim changed jobs, his contact information no longer worked.

Today Kim is the President and Chief Idea Officer at YourHRco (web site under construction).

He has been working in HR for many years but has decided to focus on HR strategy and services related to smaller businesses. Small business is different than the big companies and HR needs to be applied to helping small businesses with those […]

2 Sep 2009

101 Business Tips

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:24:14-06:00September 2nd, 2009|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Marketing, Sales|

Good compilation of business and marketing tips from various authors.

101 Tips from 50 Small Business Bloggers

31 Aug 2009

Who Are You (and your Business)?

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:24:50-06:00August 31st, 2009|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Dream Teams, Marketing, Sales|

Who are you? What matters? What do you stand for? What do you want to become?

At the core, the business and owners must be in synch for long-term success.

Sure you can buy a franchise for a proven business, say a muffler shop, but if you have absolutely no interest fixing cars it is going to be a long painful ride.

I've been running Sunwapta Solutions for over 9 years now and we never clearly defined this for ourselves… until now. Luckily strong ethics and doing good work were part of our core make up without thinking about it regularly.

If you just go with […]

24 Aug 2009

Some Good Business Books

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:24:59-06:00August 24th, 2009|Categories: Books and Courses, Business Strategy, Doug's Blog|

Sometimes you pick up a business or personal development book and you enjoy reading it, but for some reason, nothing really changes afterward. Some are read it once and never read it again.

Well, recently I was perusing my bookshelf and picked up two I had read quite a while ago for a re-read.

When reading these (or any other books), you are not likely to get magic ideas or formulas to guarantee success in your business. What works for one company will not work for yours straight out of the box.

No the thing to get out of these books are […]

19 Aug 2009

Those Pesky Customers

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:25:05-06:00August 19th, 2009|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Leadership, Marketing, Mindset and Motivation, Sales|

Ever have one of those days where customers (internal or external) keep derailing something you want to get done?

If only they would go away, life would be simpler and you could accomplish all your projects.

Yup, no customers would be perfect.

No customers, no distractions… no revenue… no business.

POP!

The trick is not in making your customers go away. Unless you have no intention of growing you actually want more happy, satisfied customers receiving something they need. Your business depends on it.

So the trick, is setting up your business so you can do both; and I don't mean working 16 hours a day.

You need to […]

17 Aug 2009

Build Versus Buy (Software)

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:25:15-06:00August 17th, 2009|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Software Development, Technology|

There are two main reasons to build your own software versus buy an existing software product:

A preexisting software product does not exist; and
Competitive Advantage.

The impact of competitive advantage through software and automation is underestimated by most small and mid-sized companies (and many large corporations too).

Non-Existent

Despite the vast amount of software out there in the cloud and available to be run in your own enterprise, there are still a number of business problems that cannot be solved by off-the-shelf or preexisting software.

And even if that software exists, it may have been tooled to be too specific to one environment and the cost […]

31 Jul 2009

Age and Money – A Matter of Perspective

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:25:43-06:00July 31st, 2009|Categories: Business Strategy, Current Events, Doug's Blog|

A business client and friend of mine is turning 50 on Monday.

For humans 50 years is a long time.

But $50 is not much money.

50 years is the same as 18,262.5 days. $18,262.5 is slightly more than what you would make on minimum wage in Alberta in a year of working full-time.

50 years is the same as 438,300 hours. $438,300 is nice.

There are 26,298,000 minutes and 1,577,880,000 seconds in 50 years.

$1.5 billion is a nice big number and few achieve it.

If you earn 1 dollar every second of your life, you can have $1.5 billion in 50 years.

Treat every second of your life as […]

28 Jul 2009

Choosing a Content Management System

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-06T12:25:18-06:00July 28th, 2009|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Marketing, Sales, Technology|

Historically we have been a Microsoft .NET shop with some experience in Java. It is not that we are against other technologies, it is just that we don’t see a reason to jump all over if the tools you have do the trick.

In the case of choosing a content management system (CMS) for our corporate website, we looked at open source and low cost CMS products on the .NET platform and found them not as mature as we needed.

We have therefore chosen Joomla as our CMS. It is a well supported and widlely used CMS developed on the PHP platform […]