Wealth Business

Archive for the ‘The Business Connection’ Category

What is the last snapshot in the mind of the people who have at some point met with you? What do they remember most? The first impression can either open for you greater business opportunities that are bound to change your entire life, or they can be the only thing that blocks your chances of acquiring anything significant in your life.

Fashion specialists have discovered that 95% of people who are likely to pay any attention to you when they meet you especially for the first time, will only do so because of how you appear to them. People will always treat you the way you look or talk so long as they do not know you much.

Supposing you have an appointment with a businessman to strike a deal, try to look your best. Look organized, presentable, confident, well informed and financially stable. When selling your product, be careful how you relate with your customers. They do not know much about you but if you give them the best impression on the first contact, they will keep returning over and over.

Learn to prepare yourself well before you go out to make a business deal. Never forget, respect, courtesy, smartness and intelligence.

If you have a website use good color combinations that are attractive and eye catching. That first impression is crucial in determining how long a visitor will spend on your site. Also, the site should be well organized and easy to navigate through, in other words user friendly. On top of that offer your customers genuine products in order to gain their trust.

As we enter the information age and the world enters a global economy, more and more women today are turning to alternative ways to earn additional income. The old adage of “go to school, get good grades and get a safe secure job with benefits” may have worked in the industrial age of our parents and grandparents. However, relying on old age advice in a new age can be a recipe for financial disaster. What are you going to do if your job gets outsourced to another country? What if you are happily married to a loving husband with three wonderful children and God forbid, your husband dies unexpectedly. In an age where most households are a two income household, how are you going to provide for your children?

Some women make an incredible income and have a job in a very stable industry. However, they never have time to spend with their children. A mother’s worst nightmare is when your youngest child calls the babysitter “mommy” instead of her. It is for these and many other reasons why women are flocking to the work from home businesses and having massive home business success. Here are some examples of home business success stories of successful women who have made the transition to the home business industry.

In a recent issue of Home Business Connection magazine, we learn the story of Ms. Elizabeth Foo. A young, single and successful woman in her mid twenties, Liz had a very successful career as a top salesperson marketing gym memberships. With a six figure income in her twenties, you would think that Liz had the ultimate lifestyle. Unfortunately, that income came with a price and the price was working 6 days a week including nights and weekends with very little time to do anything else. By getting involved in a proven home business, she was able to make $40,000 part time her first year and over $100,000 full time her second year. She now not only enjoys home business success, an incredible income, but she actually has time to enjoy it and the income continues to come in whether she personally works or not.

Dani Johnson has an incredible story of the power of owning your own business. Getting started in the work from home industry, at the age of 19, she really struggled to have success, not making any money and going deeper into debt. However, after investing in herself and getting much needed training and development, she was able to go from being broke to becoming a home business success as the #1 producer in her work from home opportunity and earned her first million by the age of 23.

Margaret Tanaka was a highly successful producer at a public broadcasting station in Chicago, Illinois. However, she and her family were tired of the big city life and wanted to slow down. Of course, with a slower pace in life, her income took a huge hit as well. Prior to moving from Chicago, she got involved in a work from home business but didn’t do anything with it for 3 plus years. She finally made a decision to get started and work her business like a business. It’s a good thing she did that. Her husband unfortunately died at the age of 36. However, because of the time she invested into building her business she was able to take off completely, spend time with her son and still earn monthly checks that averaged $5000 a month.

There are many reasons why getting started in a work from home opportunity is often the right move for women. Success in this type of opportunity is usually based on effectively communicating your vision for what the business opportunity can do for people. Women, generally speaking are better communicators than men, which is one of the reasons why so many women are coming to this industry and are experiencing massive home business success.

Success in this type of opportunity is also based on building effective relationships, another trait that women tend to do a better job at then men. For example, one of the reasons why Margaret Tanaka decided to give her business opportunity another try is because her sponsor, also a successful woman distributor within the opportunity constantly followed up with her through letters and phone calls over the 3 plus year period that Margaret was inactive in the business. As you can see there are many home business success stories for women. The only question that remains is will you be the next one?

Information Technology lies at the very heart of today’s organisations and many companies are now so dependent on their networks that they take them for granted. In today’s 24/7 digital economy, just imagine the business implications of critical data being lost, internet and email access being unavailable or your internal network going down.

The impact of the unexpected on your business, whether in the form of malicious damage such as hacking or some kind of natural disaster, can be devastating in the networked world. Take for example the 2007 flash floods across the UK. Following the wettest May to July on record, approximately 7,100 businesses were flooded and the resulting damage cost an estimated £3 billion1. However, this figure fails to take into account the cost of lost business during that period, when some companies were unable to operate a normal (if any) service, or the damage to reputation that the inability to communicate caused. No-one can predict the future, but by carefully planning in advance you can ensure that your business is in the best possible position, if and when disruption occurs.

To meet resiliency requirements for coping with both unexpected events and increasing volumes of data, today’s businesses require more than Next Generation Network capability alone. They need a combination of robust network capability and a next generation service mindset from their telecoms provider. When it comes to business resiliency, it’s not simply a case of ‘one size fits all’. ntl:Telewest Business closely collaborates with its customers and tailors its services to meet their needs. The next generation of business resiliency is here.

What level of resilience is needed?

Different industries have unique requirements for resilience. In the banking industry, for example, access to accurate, real-time buying and selling data is critical and business continuity and resiliency are considered so important that they are subject to specific regulations such as Basel II. However, for the majority of businesses, the rules and regulations are not so strict, and yet the implications of a network collapse without sufficient backup systems can be equally severe. This is particularly true when you consider that, according to the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 80 per cent of small to medium sized businesses go out of business within 18 months of experiencing a major network problem and 90 per cent of businesses that lose data in a disaster are forced to shut within two years.

The indisputable fact is that all business premises, no matter what the organisation’s size or industry, face the risk of disasters and they need to bring certainty to how they store and use their information. Firms need to be able to move their data around freely and ensure that it is 100 per cent backed up from every site, minimising the exposure to risk at any one site and making sure that the most important data is prioritised.

What types of network meet the requirement?

Network capability and flexibility provide the technology platform for next generation telecoms providers to roll out a resilient service. As well as being able to withstand unexpected events, today’s networks need to be able to cope with the everincreasing amounts of information being transported by today’s businesses. Their needs have extended from just email and web browsing to encompass multimedia applications, image-driven, user-generated content and video. In order to cope with these burgeoning volumes of data and the swift pace of operational change, networks need to be both extremely resilient and scalable. Rapidly growing workforces require constant, uninterrupted access to business resources and only a Next Generation Network can provide the flexibility and resilience required.

ntl:Telewest Business’ £13 billion Next Generation Network was built specifically with the demands of the digital age in mind and, based on fibre-optic technology, it is highly resilient. The Next Generation Network is capable of delivering the next generation IP and Ethernet services required by today’s fast-moving business and, as bandwidth can be increased quickly and painlessly in line with demand, scalability issues are overcome. In order to significantly reduce the volume of faults on their networks, today’s telcos also need to engage far earlier in proactive network management. By constantly monitoring its network, ntl:Telewest Business ensures that potential issues can be identified before they develop into problems. As a result, both the network’s performance and the user’s experience are significantly improved.

How can every eventuality be covered?

Maintaining business continuity is not as simple as deploying two separate links to your business sites, there are a number of considerations that have to be taken into account. How far a customer wants to go in assuring resilience depends on the importance of their information assets and their budget, but there are four key business continuity measures that can be taken into consideration.

As there are two UK-wide access networks, ntl:Telewest Business’ and BT’s, it stands to reason that if information is your organisation’s lifeblood you should not trust all of your services to just one network. Having an alternative access network in place ensures that critical applications continue to run even if one provider has a major outage. An alternative transmission path can also handle unexpected peaks in traffic and provide protection against denial of service attacks, which are designed to swamp networks with traffic and cause them to buckle.

The second business continuity measure is eliminating a single point of failure for the availability of voice and data services. Rather than relying on a single network provider to deliver connectivity between a site and the rest of the private network or the internet, businesses can run multiple links to their sites, guaranteeing up-time should one of the lines be inadvertently damaged and rendered unusable. In the event of network connectivity being destroyed over one connection, services can seamlessly divert to the backup connection, maintaining continuous data transfer and call availability.

One of the most basic disaster recovery tools that businesses should consider is spreading their risks across the network. By creating a mirrored system in which all information and applications are regularly and automatically backed up at different points on the network, businesses can ensure that information is protected in the event that one part of the network experiences an outage.

Multiple Ethernet connections into a Virtual Private Network (VPN) with any-to-any connectivity enable organisations to decentralise their IT across multiple sites and replicate their business-critical data. If a problem does occur, whether it is a natural disaster or simply a power failure, employees should be able to work from home and log onto their VPN remotely, safe in the knowledge that the network is secure and work can continue as usual, albeit off-site. This any-to-any connectivity overcomes the needs for backup circuits.

Finally, in the event of one of an organisation’s main circuits going down, forcing all data to run over the other and increasing the risk of a network bottleneck, the prioritisation of critical data is essential. The application of up to eight classes of service over the ntl:Telewest Business network, with predefined Quality of Service (QoS) parameters, will also ensure that business critical data is delivered in advance of lower priority traffic such as internet data. This way organisations can ensure their business critical applications continue to perform at optimum levels, even in adverse conditions.

With such an array of business continuity options available, organisations require a telco provider that’s prepared to sit down and discuss the most appropriat
e solution for their unique needs, risks and budget. ntl:Telewest Business collaborates closely with all sizes of business, not just its largest customers with big communication budgets. Consultative and technologically-savvy local service teams, both at the presales and project management stages, work hand-in-glove with the customer to ensure they receive the most appropriate solutions for their business.

How can businesses design and provision truly resilient networks?

True business resilience can only be attained when network capability is fused with a high level of consultative input at the stage of designing new network infrastructures. Until now, the legacy telco practice has been to keep customers at arm’s length from the services they use and act as merely a circuit provider, rather than responding to customers’ requirements. The next generation of telecoms providers need to invest in their service delivery, and not solely their network, ensuring that their customers feel connected to their telco teams as well as their network.

As a next generation telecoms provider, ntl:Telewest Business is committed to sitting down with organisations, listening to and understanding their individual requirements. This way it can help the customer implement measures appropriate to the risk associated with the type of traffic on its network, with a design that reflects the confines of the budget.

A customer-centric mindset and ‘can do’ attitude ensures that ntl:Telewest Business collaborates with its customers from the start, helping to plan, design, and implement their networks. But it doesn’t stop there, many of the same teams remain all the way through integration and while the network is running. No one can predict the future, but by working with a telecoms provider that has such a Next Generation Network and a customer-centric mindset, you’ll be better prepared for any eventuality.