Thursday, September 19, 2013

Essential Advice For Being An Excellent Leader



When you’re running a business like Charlie Bouri, or are taking charge of a big project, you need to learn how to be a good leader.  Some people think that you have to be a natural at management and leadership to be able to do it well, but you can easily learn skills that will help you become a better leader.  If you’re going to be in a leadership position, follow these tips to ensure that you’ll be the leader that you need to be.

Avoid Blaming

Playing the blame game in a managerial situation is sure to result in a lot of missed opportunities.  Your employees may have messed something up, but in the end everything comes back to your managerial skills.  You don’t have to avoid mentioning someone else’s mistakes, but you shouldn’t immediately set out to pin a problem or setback on someone.  If you consistently get angry and blame your employees for problems, they’ll be less likely to come to you when there are actual problems.

Cut Your Losses

Nobody likes admitting that they’re wrong, but sticking to something that clearly isn’t working to seem competent is a big mistake.   When you find out that original idea you had for a project isn’t going to work, don’t stick with it and hope that it’ll sort itself out later.  If a new hire you brought on has been turning in inconsistent and bad work, don’t give them a few more months to figure things out when it’s apparent that they aren’t doing a good job.

Lead By Example

If you tell your employees that they should work hard and put in extra hours on a project, they won’t take your words to heart if they see you taking half days three days a week.  Being a manager shouldn’t put you above your own rules, and if you practice what you preach your employees will notice it.  Obviously there are some exceptions to this rule, but if you want your employees to trust your leadership skills, you’ll need to show them that you’re more than capable of living up to your own standards.

Monday, September 16, 2013

Three Things That Spell Certain Disaster For Family Businesses



There are countless successful corporates that started out as family business, but there are also many more family businesses that fizzled out before they could make it big.  Alexander F Bouri found significant success in the cement business, but other family business owners haven’t been as lucky.  It takes a lot of work to run a family business, and keeping a balance between your work life and your home life can be difficult.  There are a lot of reasons why some family businesses don’t make it past their first year, and if you want to run a successful family owned business you should try to avoid making these mistakes.

Nepotism

This is one of the biggest reasons why family businesses fail.  If you’re going to run a business with your family, you need to hire people based on whether or not they have the ability to do their job, and not if they share your DNA.  Hiring, promoting, and managing your employees based on their bloodlines can lead to failure, and resentment from non-related employees.  It could also lead to your favorite family members/employees slack on the job because they know that they won’t have to face the consequences.

Emotions

It may seem harsh, but the phrase “It’s not personal, it’s business” has no place in a family run company.  Separating your emotions from your work can be very difficult, and the task becomes even more difficult when you’re managing your family.  Having your emotions interfere with your business can lead to several problems.  Your employees could take your emotional decisions as a sign of weakness, or a sign that their boss can’t handle what would usually be simple situations in a non-family owned establishment.  It could also cause some of your family members/employees to resent you if they think you’re acting too emotional.  Try to reign in your emotions when you’re dealing with business.  If you don’t, you could be setting yourself up for failure.

Refusing outside help

Unless you have a huge family with members that are experts in your industry, you’re going to have to hire people who you aren’t related to.  Refusing to hire employees who aren’t your family members can end in disaster.  It’s impossible to start a business from the ground up without skilled help, but there can be risks when you hire people from the outside.  If you have a business that’s full of feuding family members, your other employees will get sick of working in a hostile environment.  Don’t refuse help from other people, and make sure that your non-related employees feel like they’re being treated fairly.

Thursday, July 25, 2013

Three Fatal Mistakes New Business Owners Make



Alex F Bouri has been able to grow his cement business into a multinational corporation, and he, along with an array of other successful entrepreneurs, know how much time and effort goes into making a successful business.  When people get started in the business world they make a lot of easily avoidable mistakes that end up costing them their business.  Don't let yourself make these simple mistakes, read on to find out some of things people do that doom their business to fail.

Lacking Long Term Goals

If your only long term business goal is "to make money", your business isn't going to be nearly as successful as you envision that it will be.  Making money isn't a clear goal, but offering consumers a better version of a popular product is.  As an up and coming entrepreneur it's important for you to know that the success of your business depends on the goals that you set.  You should understand exactly what you want your business to achieve from the beginning.  Think about the goals you want to meet in the long term, and the ones you're hoping to meet in the short term.  Once you have those figured out you'll be on your way to business success.

Refusing Help

You've heard the phrase that no man is an island, and in the business world no one person can be a business.  Some entrepreneurs refuse help from others because they want to work on a project on their own, others simply don't want to pay other employees to do the work.  Either way, if you strive to do everything yourself you're setting yourself up for failure.  You'll be devoting most of your time rushing to get tasks completed, instead of taking the proper amount of time to do a task well completely.

Being Impatient

Everything that's good in life takes time, so you shouldn't start a business and expect to be a multi-millionaire in a month.  Building a business takes time, and a lot of businesses end up failing because their owners throw in the towel when they don't see money rolling in immediately.  Give your business time to grow before you determine whether they were a success or a failure.

Friday, June 28, 2013

Small Efforts Make a Big Difference: Recycling Containers



As a citizen, you may be in the habit of separating your plastics from your regular garbage. Modern society has made it somewhat convenient, and most people are willing to dispose accordingly if it doesn't make them go out of their way. For businesses, though, it may be a different story. Trying to recycle used containers on a large scale can be a much more difficult endeavor, and you might not realize just how important it is.

 Every company should live by the motto "use and reuse." Take into consideration the findings of the company Envipco. This company works alongside other companies to help them with their recycling initiatives, because they have found that not only do recycled products consume less energy in the production process, but they cost less, too. You're benefitting the Earth and the environment by recycling and reusing your containers.

In fact, if the total amount of post-consumer containers that were recycled in 2008 were reclaimed, it would have required 30 trillion fewer BTUs than was required to produce virgin resin. That's equal to the amount of power used in 317,000 homes.

However, Envipco is also aware that it takes more than a business plan to extend the life of a produced material. For that reason, its chairpeople, which include Alexander F Bouri of Seament among other global figures, have come up with a number of solutions to be followed. Customized couponing, incentive programs, and advertising-generated revenue models are all part of the plan to get everyone on board with the recycling and reclaiming process. The ultimate goal is to transform business owners' ways of thinking – not to see containers as garbage, but as materials. Should companies adopt such a philosophy, Envipco ensures that they will find it both financially and morally satisfying.

Working alongside a company like Envipco is just one thing a company can do to go green. There are, of course, smaller steps that companies can use to start off with, but initiatives like the ones put in place by Envipco are the type that make immediate and substantial changes.

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Meet the Envipco Board of Directors



Envipco's motto is one that should be shared by most of today's companies: "One of the best ways to protect our natural resources is to be smart about recovering our man-made ones." This company has quite the revolutionary business plan, especially in our world, where the importance of recycling can't be stressed enough. The company works with other partners around the world in order to embed a "use and reuse" philosophy into the minds of business owners. No matter what type of business you run, Envipco is willing to help you come up with a solution.

So who are the masterminds behind this project?

The chairman, Gregory S. Garvey, also chairs a private software company called Virtual Hold, Inc. Before that, he was the Vice Chairman of Tomra Systems A/S and the CEO and President of Tomra North America, Inc. Thus, he has the leadership skills to front such an endeavor.

Then there's Alexander Bouri, whose name you might recognize from his revolutionary work in the cement industry. He founded Seament, which went on to become the largest cement handling and chipping company in the world. However, he owns many other companies as well.

The President and CEO of the company is Gool B. Santchurn, who is on the board of a number of other different companies around the world. To further his blogal resume, he belongs to the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants in the UK.

Christian Y. Crepet of France is the Deputy Managing Director and is involved with many other European environmental efforts.

Along with many other talented and globally-conscious board members, these chairmen help lead the company in a powerful and successful environmental endeavor. Many companies are making small strides to "go green," but Envipco takes the sentiment to a new level with its experienced and creative contributors.