What's New?

The New Business Center Models

The wonderful thing about OBCs is that they are a living breathing entity with a wealth of ideas, resources, and experience. Recently we have seen an emergence of new business center models that hone in on innovation, connections, and community. Their focus is to provide the networking, resources, and excitement to create an environment for entrepreneurs to thrive. Each member is responsible for sharing ideas and experience to make sure other members succeed. The center is responsible for creatively finding new ways provide vital business information through workshops and guest speakers that focus on the problems facing business today.

Check out the website www.the-hub.net and see for yourself how focusing on your clients' success creates center success.

Masters of The Academy

Viveka von Rosen, Master of Social Media

Viveka von Rosen, Master of Social Media, is ready to help you take your OBC to the next level. Social media is the one networking resource that every center should master, but few have taken the imitative to create the proper profiles, groups, and blogs.

A well executed Social Media campaign provides attraction marketing to create warm center leads, and increases SEO rankings, brand visibility and website conversions.

Viveka offers public webinars on all facets of social media as well as private consulting to ensure your return on investment with measurable outcomes of an aggressive social media campaign.

For more information about mastering social media at your center, please contact Viveka at viveka@theallianceacademy.com.

Training that Works

Delegating for Success

The holiday season provides an excellent time to cross train team members on all center duties. Take a look at some of the time consuming task you handle on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Which of these tasks could be handled by a team member if they only had the proper training to get the job done?

A manager who refuses to delegate will very likely be a very busy and frustrated person. It is not necessary for a manager to personally handle every item. People use many excuse for not delegating. Their reasons are usually unfounded.

You’ll get more done through delegation if you assume the opposite of the following statements is true:
• I could do better myself
• I don’t know if I can trust her to do it
• She doesn’t want any added responsibilities
• I don’t have time to show her how to do it
• She messed up the last time, so I’m not giving her anything else to do.

Assume that most people want more responsibilities. Assume they are willing to lean. Recognize that the short-term training investment will pay off in the long term.

For a full discussion on how you can effectively delegate responsibilities among your team, contact us today.

Case Study

How to Hold Difficult Conversation

If you manage people, work in Human Resources, or care about your friends at work, chances are good that one day you will need to hold a difficult conversation.

Have you ever worked alongside an employee who had poor personal hygiene, foul smelling clothes or breath, or an annoying personal habit, like making clicking noises? Or worse, the employee drinks heavily in the evening and then exudes the smell of alcohol, often mixed with the equally fetid smell of coffee and cigarettes, all day at work?

Or, worst on the list of most challenging issues, the employee's breath, and pores exude a spicy aroma that makes you ill; the employee's clothes are clean, but he or she appears to bathe infrequently, and you're positive that saying anything would be culturally insensitive. Welcome to the workplace situations from hell.

Tips for Holding Difficult Conversations
• Start with a soft approach to set the employee at ease, but don't beat around the bush. The employee's level of anxiety is already sky high and making more small talk while he waits for the bad news to emerge, is cruel. Once you've told him that you want to discuss a difficult topic, move right in to the topic of your difficult conversation.

• Tell the employee directly what the problem is as you perceive it. If you talk around the issue or soften the impact of the issue too much, the employee may never get that the problem is serious. If you reference the problem as "some of our employees do the following," the employee may never understand that you mean him.

• Whenever possible, attach the feedback to a business issue. This is not a personal vendetta; the difficult conversation has a direct business purpose. Perhaps you've noticed the lack of volunteers as other employees don't want to participate on his team. Perhaps his appearance is affecting the perception of customers about the quality of your center. Maybe an irritating mannerism has caused a customer to request a different team member. Make the business purpose of the conversation clear.

• Let the employee know that not only is the behavior affecting the business and his or her coworkers, it is affecting the employee's career. Express directly the impact you believe the behavior is having on his or her potential promotions, raises, career opportunities, and relationships in the workplace.

• Be sensitive to the fact that different cultures have different norms and standards for appearance, bathing, and dress. I'd probably leave this discussion to the employee's manager, but your workplace is justified in asking employees to embrace the cultural standards of the workplace in which the employee is working. This is especially true if nonconformance to the standard is interfering with the harmony and productivity of your workplace.

• Be sensitive to the difference in cooking and eating traditions, too. A woman confided to me recently that her fellow students had laughed at her and made fun of her because she always smelled like curry and garlic and other pungent spices. As a working adult, she has toned down the amount of spice in her cooking, but she was injured by the thoughtlessness for years. Heck, my own father used to regularly complain that I smelled like garlic, and he didn't mean it as a compliment; he was not fond of garlic, and I am.

• If an employee has repeatedly tried to correct a hygiene issue such as bad breath, and is not making progress, suggest that the employee see a physician to determine if an underlying medical condition might be causing the problem. Your thoughtfulness could save an employee's life.

• Finally, if you are the employee's supervisor, you owe it to the employee to hold the difficult conversation. Especially if other employees have complained to you, understand that if you don't hold the difficult conversation, the employee's coworkers will.

You can become effective at holding difficult conversations. Practice and these steps will help build your comfort level to hold difficult conversations. After all, a difficult conversation can make the difference between success and failure for a valued employee. Care enough about the team member and your productive, harmonious workplace to hold the difficult conversation.

Focus On...

Policies & Procedures

Virtual Offices are quickly outpacing full office agreements by 5:1 and this trend will only continue to increase throughout the coming years. With the growth of this type of client comes the risk of attracting fraudulent businesses. It’s important to have solid policies and procedures in place to protect your team, center, and clients.

We all know that the United State Postal Service requires each virtual office client to complete a CMRA. However, this does not seem to be an industry wide requirement.

Here are a few policies that we recommend all OBCs put in place to protect the integrity of the center.
• Potential client must complete a credit application.
• CMRA must be completed with 2 forms of ID and submitted to your local Post Master.
• Obtain a copy of a utility bill matching the address of the potential client.
• Mandatory credit card payment policy.
• Every virtual office prospect must complete these requirements before services can be rendered.

If a potential client objects, then consider yourself lucky to have avoided a potential fraudulent customer and/or potential collection problem.

Insider Tips

Co-working

In the past 36 months, we have seen no less than 500 co-working centers enter the marketplace. How does this concept differ than a business center? Why is it seen as a different business model? Most OBCs have a little extra space these days, but are not capturing the tremendous benefit associated with creating co-working cultures to attract entrepreneurs.

Co-working is essentially a shared workspace where everyone in the facility pays a portion of the costs to make it affordable. It’s hardly a new concept - OBCs have been doing this for years. Artists have been renting out lofts and sharing the rent for studio space for years — but it is quickly gaining popularity among folks working in other fields.

Co-working locations have been starting up in cities across the world, a list of which can be seen on the Coworking Wiki. The locations tend to host freelancers from a variety of fields, from programmers, writers, web designers and almost any other type who’d normally tote a laptop to a coffee shop.
Each center tends to attract specific industries and client types. So why wouldn’t you convert some of those vacant offices to attract and support specific freelancers who want and need this co-working space?

For more Insider Tips, visit the Academy site to access the Training Bytes section.