How to think like an entrepreneur

You may have thought about starting your own business several times over the years. You have ideas which you think could work, but you always stop short of actually doing it. Becoming an entrepreneur is a state of mind. Be positive and you can become one. Entrepreneurial spirit is the first step. The following may get you into the right frame of mind. To be an entrepreneur, you need to be passionate about the business you wish to build. This will drive you on during good and bad times to eventual success. You may look at the people around you at work with better and more interesting jobs which you think you could do just as well, if not better.  Examine your skills and think about where and how they could be used to better effect. Consider updating them by enrolling in training and college courses. Study the careers of business icons such as Sir Alan Sugar and Sir Richard Branson. They are both self made men who worked hard on their innovative business ideas and developed their small businesses into multi-million pound and multi-national companies. They had the instinct to anticipate and react to where there were gaps and opportunities in the market and jump in to fill them. Alan Sugar, for instance, revolutionised the early sound systems market with innovative products at affordable prices. True entrepreneurs are adept in improvisation and have the foresight to diversify to meet changes in the global business world. Another example is Richard Branson who had success...

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Sales Coaching Performance

Sales coaching helps improve performance and motivation for sales teams by providing individualized training that builds internal resources toward success. Sales is a high-skill, high-demand career that requires special skills in order to continue to meet ever-changing goals. Proper coaching offers focused sales strategies, and works towards replacing negative thoughts with confidence and resourcefulness. Sales coaching allows member of a sales team to discover their inner strengths and enables them to obtain higher levels of achievement and improve company sales. How to Get Solid Results The key to top performance is that the coach facilitates the learning of the person who is being coached. In other words, although the coach is providing guidance, the person being coached must be permitted to think through problems and issues on their own. This allows the coached employee to begin thinking in terms of problem solving without intervention. Sales performance coaching should be viewed as a partnership in sales training and not simply instruction on how to sell. Sales coaching uses the many different aspects of sales, including branding, communication and product positioning and teaches sales employees how to use their own, individual strengths to reach the targeted market. By focusing on the individual salesperson, sales coaching performance enhances a sales force by targeting specific strengths and weaknesses. Types of Coaching The two types of sales coaching, strategic...

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Merchandising Aunt Jemima

This article traces the development of Aunt Jemima, one of America's most enduring advertising icons, from her roots in Old South slave mythology and reality, through her reinterpretation in Reconstruction, minstrel shows, turn-of-the-century mass advertisements, and the Civil Rights movement, to her present incarnation as a "working grandmother." The main focus is to demonstrate how the image of Aunt Jemima, and the slave mammy, reflected contemporary realities faced by black women in slavery and as servants in northern and southern households. Particular attention is paid to the years between 1893, when Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix was first marketed, and the Great Depression. During this period, the character of Aunt Jemima--the image and biographical detail that were sustained into the 1970s--was created in a series of print advertisements and personal appearances, even as black women were moving out of the South and then out of live-in household service. Aunt Jemima products were sold and have continued to be sold to predominately white households by playing on popular ideas about race, class, and gender and using the plantation South as a reference point. In the ads, as in the real antebellum South, putting a black Aunt Jemima in the kitchen kept white women out of it, simultaneously offering solutions to the management of black labor and reinforcing ideas about white femininity. The continued marriage between the product and Aunt Jemima persona was so close that white housewives...

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