Maybe your goal this New Year isn’t recruitment, but sales growth. Make a list of creative ways that you can encourage customers to consider your products. You can jumpstart this year’s sales by offering “After Christmas” specials, after-purchase freebies, contests and more.

One way that many home-based business owners online neglect to take advantage of is signature line in emails and when posting in forums. This can be a great tool to advertise your business, specials and contests. I receive many emails from business owners who do not include a signature line with their business name, and sometimes they fail to even put their name at end of email! This is not only unprofessional, but makes it much more difficult to find out more about their business. Every email sent this way is a potential sale lost.

The “freebie” is another great sales booster. Everybody (especially women) loves to get something for nothing. Consider offering a small thank you token when a purchase is made. No matter how inexpensive value of “freebie” may be, it can still be a great incentive! It can also foster customer loyalty and repeat business.

If you have an online business reciprocal linking can be a great way to jumpstart business. The more sites that link to yours, more visits your website will receive. Linking also helps you place higher in Search Engine listings. Take time to search for sites with similar content and request a link exchange. This is almost always a win-win situation for both sites.

Jumpstarting your business for New Year can be a challenge, but if you take time to be creative and put some effort towards it, it can be very rewarding. Use resources available in this information age: Leads Programs, Link Exchanges and signature lines. God Bless you in New Year!

This is an important first step to assure we meet our customer requirements and expectations while eliminating costly and unnecessary steps.

We can visualize this process as follows:

•Customer needs and expectations define what process will do. •Upper and lower expectation limits are set. •Analysis of each process within system is completed. •All defect causes and waste are eliminated. •Design specifications are created.

Many companies who gross at least five million dollars in a fiscal year could save $250,000 or more and increase their customer satisfaction at same time by eliminating wasteful variances from their processes alone.

Human systems are handled in an entirely different manner. Businesses should spend more time and effort in selection of candidates to assure only high performing individuals make grade, these individuals should be thoroughly trained in human relationships and leadership skills along with their respective technical skills. Individuals and teams should be autonomous and in charge of whole processes. They should present with all of skills necessary to not only complete work but to interact with their customers.

We can visualize a good human system as follows:

•Careful selection of employees. •Personal Development. •Professional Development. •Value Individual. •Empower Individual. •Attain Synergy.

Businesses should concentrate on both human and process systems in following order:

•Human Systems •Process Systems

Processes can be designed but only by people who are capable of design and who understand business and customer.

It is hard work to achieve true synergy but once it is mastered businesses can expect hard working and customer centered employees working in total cooperation with other human systems and process systems, which together create a base for total customer quality and internal efficiency.

Mr. Maceda is president of Applied Knowledge Systems Inc. a Washington D.C. metro area consulting firm specializing in high performance for human systems and process systems.