Injecting Classical Business Sense in Producing Sustainable Online Income Streams

Online business ventures often fail due to many of the same reasons that more traditional bricks and mortar businesses fold up; lack of execution. Whether you work from home or from a 50-story highrise, you have to execute to succeed.

In the bestseller appropriately titled Execution, Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan describe execution, "...in its most fundamental sense, as a systematic way of exposing reality and acting on it." I generally put it in more layman terms to my staff and, before I had a staff, to myself. I would say, "Self, you know what you have to do, how you have to do it, now you need to get on with it!" Now I often lay the same line on my staff and it produces results. Whether you have a staff or you are a lone wolf, you have to be open, honest and clear about what has to be accomplished and how you are going to accomplish it.

Bossidy and Charan further purport that, "The heart of execution lies in the three processes: the people process, the strategy process, and the operations process." Now I am a simple guy and apologize if you are too sophisticated for my common approach to things, but it helps me to imagine each of these core processes as spokes in a wheel. If anyone of the processes are not given the appropriate attention in the construction of the wheel and, as a result, the technical integrity of one of the spokes may well cause the wheel to fail. If the wheel fails, the wagon stops rolling and nothing gets to market.

If you intend to produce sustainable income streams an online work from home business or in any business venture, you must give due attention to these three key processes.

People: whether the people consist of a staff totaling one or one thousand, there should be clear processes for what they are trying to accomplish and how they are to accomplish them. Using the example of the lone wolf wanting to successfully promote an affiliate, or other, product he or she must have an achievable plan to reach this goal (systematic way of exposing reality) and execute the plan (act on it). Depending on your philosophy, this may mean that you spend 2 hours per day refining key words and 2 hours per day posting ads with Googls's AdWords. It could mean that you post 5 key word oriented postings per day in product relevant forums. Whichever action is required to attain the goal, ensure that you and, if applicable, your staff clearly understand what is required and have a clearly communicated paradigm how to reach it.

Strategy: to state the obvious, the strategy is the master plan that put into place the means and methods you are going to utilize in order to accomplish certain task in a defined time frame. Additionally, the strategy to reach a certain goal should be broken down into individual task each of which build upon on another toward the ultimate attainment of the final goal. The strategy, including the time frame in which the specific tasks must be accomplished should be clearly communicated to your staff (or yourself) and ensure that you and your staff have individual ownership in the accomplishment of the task(s) for which each individual is responsible for.

Operations: operations are the repetitive execution of the processes identified in the strategy phase that are necessary for the organizational effort to attain a certain goal. Once you have indentified what you are going to do, how you are going to do it, have the individual commitment from you, your staff (or both), you must ensure that the processes utilized to reach individual goals are recorded for the reutilization in the ongoing operations. Of course, the strategy or individual tasks which fail to reach goals as planned should also be recorded and marked up in the lessons learned column so as to avoid the organization repeating the same or similar failures in future operations.

Treat your online business as what it is; a serious business venture that deserves the professionalism and structure of a Fortune 500 Company even if you work from home as a lone wolf. Be sure to treat yourself and your staff with the utmost of respect and clearly communicate the goals and strategies in place to attain said goals. Subsequent to the communication, ensure that all involved are taking on the commitment to accomplish each individual task necessary to attain the organizational goal in accordance with the strategy. Employees (and individuals even when working alone) appreciate a well thought out plan of action and feel as if they are a part of something bigger when the information is distributed and communicated appropriately.

If you are a start up, ensure all of your initial activities are recorded for the ease of developing procedures from the tasks that worked for you. These procedures will be the heart of your operations and, again, confirm the status of your business as a legitimate organization rather than an individual as it will grow and have a life of its own with a unique look, feel and tastes as it serves to produce a steady and sustainable stream of income for you, your partners and your employees.

Seed Newsvine

Bookmark this article in your preferred program

Comments

Add Comment

Popular Articles in this cathegory

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.