office fashion!

You will never get a second chance to make a first impression. no matter how good you are. when at work, how you carry your self is a reflection of what you feel inside. what you wear is a translation of what you think about your self.

with all this weather change, I find myself pulling and tugging at my clothes either for warmth or for fresh air. Yet no matter the weather, I must stay within the confines of my dress code - abaya. I am a lover of fashion but chose not to be a slave to it. I like the simple things in life and enjoying a good breeze or a sun kiss even when am at my desk,hard at work should not be made difficult by what am wearing, .

One thing I forgot to mention I love color and living on the edge. a few ideas for the working woman I know Monday is one of those days ... lift your spirits by what you are wearing ... no matter how hard my day gets, I am consoled by the fact that i feel and look good. Masha Allah, when you are alive, enjoy every bit of it, how ever small fashion a factor is, it makes a whole lot of difference.

Richard Branson: Conjuring Up The People Factor

Nicki McKenzie, of Malaga, Western Australia, asked: “If you were to list your top five rules for achieving success in business, what would they be and where would the ‘people factor’ come in?”

And on behalf of her students studying business at the high school level, teacher Annette Moran of Wavell Heights, Queensland, asked me a similar question.

The “people factor” appears over and over on my list of top five tips. It is the basis of many entrepreneurial successes and, because many business leaders discount it, innumerable failures.

While the current thinking in business schools holds that all someone with an idea needs to succeed are focus, clarity and a good business plan, I have found that bringing together a great team that’s united by strong motivation, determination and bravery is much more important. Let’s look at how to get started.

FIND GOOD PEOPLE

The successes of Virgin businesses such as Active, Atlantic, Money and Mobile were all based on our assembling a great management team that had a vision, passion and a real sense of ownership.

Specifically, we look for leaders who have the ability to listen to feedback from employees and customers - this is crucial to keeping a service or product fresh and innovative. Often, when things start going wrong, you’ll notice that the staff members feel they are being ignored and good ideas are not bubbling to the top.

Leaders should have the character to make tough decisions and the passion and ability to inspire their staff and carry them through difficult times. Our best CEOs tend to be unconcerned about the size of their office or the thickness of the carpet. REALIZE THAT THE EMPLOYEES ARE THE BUSINESS

A successful business isn’t the product or service it sells, its supply chain or its corporate culture: It is a group of people bound together by a common purpose and vision. In Virgin’s case, we fly the same planes as our competitors and our gyms offer much of the same equipment as other gyms. What separates our businesses from the competition? Our employees.

The best designed business plan will come to nothing if it is not carried out by an enthusiastic and passionate staff. This is especially true when things go slightly wrong; a friendly and proactive team can often win people round, averting a potential disaster or even turning it to your benefit.

Earlier this year, a Virgin America flight was diverted from New York to an airport in nearby Connecticut due to bad weather. The passengers were stuck on the plane for many hours while the small airport struggled to cope with the huge number of extra planes. It took far too long.

Afterward, CEO David Cush himself called many of the passengers to apologise, which may have helped to give those customers a sense of all the Virgin staffers who had been worrying about them and working to fix the situation.

LOOK FOR THE BEST IN YOUR PEOPLE - LAVISH PRAISE, NEVER CRITICISE

Rather than focusing on mistakes, a leader needs to catch someone doing something right every day. If this culture of fostering employee development through praise and recognition starts at the top, it will go far toward stamping out the employee fear of failure that can stunt a business, particularly in its early days. When mistakes happen - which is inevitable - I always take the position that you have to learn from them and try not to dwell on what went wrong. It’s almost always better not to go over the obvious with the people involved. They know exactly what happened.

DON’T TAKE YOURSELF TOO SERIOUSLY

We at Virgin pride ourselves on trying to find the fun in our businesses, by which I mean that we try to ensure that both our staff and customers feel a real sense of warmth and affection.

I have led from the front on this - dressing up in costumes, trying all manner of stunts (not all going 100-per-cent right!), and generally showing that I do not take myself too seriously. My approach will not work for all businesses, but keeping a sense of perspective and not allowing management to be seen as aloof will help keep your staff onside.

To foster employees’ sense of warm, personal interest in clients’ needs, it’s crucial to ensure that everyone who works with you enjoys what he or she is doing, which means that everyone must be proud of the company. This is vital to building lasting success and ensuring your service has an edge over the competition.

To find employees who will take such an interest in our customers, we look for people who show genuine enthusiasm and character.

We have a bit of an advantage over our competitors, partly because of our brand and partly because our roots include having hired people to work in the music industry, and now aviation and space, all of which attract real enthusiasts.

JUST DO IT

Finally, to succeed in business, you must have the bravery to give it a go. Starting a business is a big risk; an entrepreneur needs resolve and conviction to overcome the early hurdles. Most start-ups fail in the first few years, so a key ingredient of success is the ability to pick yourself up and try again.

If it starts to look like your business is not going to make it, some on your team might start to lose courage. At that crucial time, your knowledge of the people factor may make or break your company.

Richard Branson is the founder of the Virgin Group and companies such as Virgin Atlantic, Virgin America, Virgin Mobile and Virgin Active. Questions from readers will be answered in future columns. Send them toRichardBranson@nytimes.com, including your name, country, email address and the name of the publication where you read the column

Rayah Magazine: Of Teamwork in your Business:

Rayah Magazine: Of Teamwork in your Business:: "I have always wondered why many businesses collapse after the death of the owner. In Africa especially, SME are built around the ideals, dr..."

Of Teamwork in your Business:

I have always wondered why many businesses collapse after the death of the owner. In Africa especially, SME are built around the ideals, dreams and objectives of the owner. The importance of teamwork gets doubly highlighted in the realm of businesses. Delving deeper into the issue of teamwork we see that irrespective of the size of a particular business venture, teamwork among the partners, staff or employees, as may be the case, is of immense importance. Even if it is a small scale business with a modest start up, constructing professional relationships and working together as a team, goes a long way in achieving dynamism and success.

A one man army entrepreneurship is sure to betray a business at some point or the other. Most successful businesses get help and support both from those within and outside the peripheries of the venture. The owner of a business venture must highlight the importance of teamwork by blending it with the company's culture and business methods. Effective networking and working together with other business leaders is a fool proof method of successfully promoting a small scale enterprise.

Teamwork involves the combined efforts of two or more people contributing different skills but sharing the same view point and working towards common aims and goals. Employees of the business must be made aware of the goals set for the enterprise and must work in such a way that catapults the business closer towards meeting these aims and targets. Mutually beneficial interactions and networking with other small business owners can be the perfect antidote to a future of long term struggle.

It is very crucial to incorporate and blend teamwork into one's business culture and working methods. Teamwork incorporates mutual respect for each other's opinions and capabilities, injects a sense of ownership and thus accountability within the employees and allows for honest communication and discussion about the issues dealt by the company.

RICHARD BRANSON: When small-business owners think big

Question: How can a small-business owner go about laying the foundation for a corporate culture like Virgin’s?

Published: 2011/02/14 08:25:44 AM

Q: How can a small-business owner go about laying the foundation for a corporate culture like Virgin’s?

A: Whether you’re launching a new business or preparing to expand your existing one, laying a solid foundation for the future is critically important – bringing in investors, getting your contracts right, hiring your core team members, choosing the right suppliers. The fact that you are thinking about this question shows that you already have a sense of where your priorities should lie and you’re ready to follow through.

To be honest, when my friends and I started the first Virgin business 40 years ago, we had no master plan – especially not one for a group of companies that by 2011 would number more than 400 businesses around the world and employ 50,000 people. Had we tried to plan for such a future, we would certainly have messed it up.

If there is a "right" way to develop your company’s culture, our experience shows that it should evolve organically. In 1970, my friends and I weren’t planning to do anything other than make some money and have a good time while doing something we loved. We loved listening to music, so we tried to sell records to other kids who wanted a fun place to hang out while deciding which ones to buy. We had no marketing plan or budget – our goals were simply to make enough money to pay the rent and our suppliers, and to have some cash left over at the end of the month.

Our launch was really no different from that of most small companies, since few entrepreneurs start thinking about their business’s culture until it is already well established. If I think back to what we did right, it was in our planning process, when we made sure we were having fun working together and that everyone who had a good idea was included in our decision-making process. We had accidentally stumbled on the core elements of a culture dedicated to delivering great customer service! It turned out that people who work in a friendly environment that is tolerant of mistakes, and who are empowered to make decisions about how they do their jobs, arrive at the best possible solutions for serving customers.

When you’re sorting out what your front-line colleagues’ priorities should be, remember that how you treat the customer will form the basis of your corporate culture. Put your staff first, listen to them, and follow up on their ideas and suggestions.

Because you can be sure that every person on your staff already has deep insights into what your customers want and what employees need in order to deliver it. Should they focus on delivering solutions tailored to each customer’s needs? Or on building lasting customer relationships? Or should they quickly deliver the goods or services your company offers? Listen carefully and find ways to empower each person to do a great job. One of my mentors, the late Sir Freddie Laker, was famous for his standard response to any staffer who came to him to whine about something: "Don’t bring me problems, bring

me solutions!" (He could certainly never be accused of running an autocracy.)

Small-business owners often find it tough to learn how to handle success. When a business does well, many chief executives start to focus solely on increasing profits, no matter what the cost – leaving behind everything that originally made the business special. The founder usually moves to a big corner office on the top floor and never again sets foot in the factory. Employees who were integral to the company’s early success suddenly find they are the last to know what is happening, and their views are no longer valued or sought.

So try to ensure your company grows at a comfortable pace and, whenever possible, involve your employees in the company’s evolution. If you are a small-business owner mulling over an expansion, tell all your employees about your plan – include everyone from the truck driver to your senior team – and ask for their input. If you can, it would be best to work out the details of the expansion plan together, taking into account the challenges faced by your employees, and incorporating improvements they would like to make. The ultimate winners will be your customers and the bottom line.

At Virgin, we have never had to struggle with the typical problems of big corporations, probably because we never really got big – we just diversified. Our growth was once described as "vertical disintegration" because our new businesses frequently appear to be tangential or even completely unrelated to our core mission. When Virgin was known for producing and selling records, for instance, we started up an airline.

The traditional corporate response to our typical plan for a new business would be, "I’m sorry, but we’re a ____ company. This business not within our core competency." But we see a uniting factor in our dedication to customer service. Instead of becoming a huge, bloated entity locked into a single sector, these tangential forays have kept our company fresh and different – we are always learning new businesses and recruiting smart new people. Each Virgin company is run by its own largely autonomous management team that relies on the same small-business principles we’ve employed since the very beginning.

Whatever route you decide to take as you expand your business, make sure that it builds on your company’s past successes, and that it fits with the corporate culture and the vision for the future that you and your team have created. If someone says, "That’s not the way a big company would do it," take it as a compliment! ©2010 Richard Branson. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate

• Branson is the founder of the Virgin Group. He maintains a blog at www.virgin.com/richard-branson/blog. You can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/richard branson. Questions from readers will be answered in future columns. Please send them to branson@bdfm.co.za and include your name, country, e-mail address and the publication where you read the column.

Customer Service Skills

WE ARE ALL SALESMEN/WOMEN one way or another, but how we do it is entirely another matter. many times we stamp our feet in frustration over how the we have been treated un respectfuly across the counter. Once is enough for us to write off the service as extremely poor and make demands of wanting to see the manager... do we even know that ourselves are sales persons at a certain time 'T' ? Do we even know what good customer care translates to? I find myself wanting to share my thoughts on customer care. here we go...

1. Personal Skills

The first thing I look out for in a customer service rep is the personal skills. A customer service rep must have good intra-personal skills to be able to effectively discharge his/her duty. Patience, discipline, humility, team spirit and a good sense of humor are intra-personal skills a customer service rep must possess for effectiveness.

Aside the intra-personal skills listed above, a good customer service rep must have good appearance; display confidence, always wear a charming smile and speak with a clear voice.

2. Communication Skills

The second customer service skill a rep must possess is good communication skill. A good customer service rep must be able to communicate fluently in the language of the people. This is where bilingual customer service reps come in handy. A good customer service rep must be able to send a message across to a customer or client and that message must be clearly understood by the customer. Body language is also essential in this case.

3. Negotiation Skills

A good customer service rep must be good in negotiating and striking deals with the customer. Since a rep has direct contact or access with the customers; he/she must be a good negotiator.

4. Listening Skills

A good customer service rep must be able to listen with rapt attention and clearly understand the needs, concerns or complaints of the customer before proffering a solution. Customers hate being ignored; nothing annoys a customer more than talking to a less concerned staff.

Sometimes, customers find it difficult to express them clearly; but remember that the customer is always right. It’s your duty as a customer service rep to clearly decode the customer’s message before passing it across to the appropriate quarters and you can’t achieve that if you lack good listening skills.

5. Sales Skills

Sales skill is something I don’t joke with when hiring an employee. Customer service reps are always in touch with the customers so there is a high tendency that they can instigate a sale; that’s if they are good at the game.

Sales skill is an essential customer service skill. A customer service rep with a good knowledge of selling will outperform a rep that lacks sales skills. So work on improving your sales skills; it may become an asset in the long run.

6. Retentive Memory

Retentive memory is a must have for every customer service rep. A good customer service rep must be able to remember loyal customers and address them by their names. A good customer service rep must also be able to recall past discussions and important transactions made. Nothing annoys a customer other than repeating what has already been said; it’s a waste of precious time.

7. Adequate Understanding of the Business products or services

A good customer service rep must have adequate understanding of the business products or services; as this may be the major subject of discussions with customers. If a rep is new on board; the ability to learn quickly is highly essential. You must understand the company’s product and services; its benefits and features like the palm of your hand.

8. Persuasion Skills

The last but not the list customer service skill a good rep must possess is persuasion skill. A good customer service rep must be able to sense a customer’s soft spot and touch that spot. A good customer service rep must be able to win back the heart of lost customers and calm the nerves of aggrieved customers. This cannot be achieved without mastering the art of persuasion.

Persuasion skill is essential for getting the sale and winning negotiations. If you are really interested in developing your persuasion skill; then I will advice you read the “Persuasion Skill Black Book.” It’s the bible for those who want to master and harness the power of persuasion.

As a final note, these are the eight customer service skills a good rep must possess to be effective. But possession of these customer service skills is not restricted to reps alone. Even entrepreneurs, corporate managers and employees need such skills. So if you are lacking any of the customer service skills listed above, it’s advisable you work on strengthening it.