CEO of Chobani Ensures Employees Will Share in Success of Company

Chobani Greek yogurt has been said to be rich in protein and flavor and now some of its employees could become rich. CEO and founder of Chobani Hamdi Ulukaya has announced that he was giving all 2,000 of his full time workers awards which could be worth as much as 10% of the future value […]
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CEO of Chobani Ensures Employees Will Share in Success of Company

Business Intelligence: Your Key to Success in Stiff Competition

In the past, the expense of collecting, storing, and analyzing data meant business intelligence (BI) was available only to large corporations.

But technology has changed and increased, namely through widespread internet access and usage. It’s therefore become quite affordable to collect and store big data that’s useful to business decisions. The problem, until recently, has been handling the analysis of said data.

Now, a variety of tools are available to assist even the smallest of businesses operating on a limited budget. These days, anyone can be his or her own data scientist.

What Is Business Intelligence?

We can break down business intelligence  into four main categories:

• Reporting: This area of BI focuses on developing documents with valuable information in order to communicate to readers what has happened. The writer determines the time span the report covers, as well as the information it covers. Reports can be as simple as a weekly look at what has happened on Facebook. Or they can be as complex as an annual look at the entire company’s finances. Many BI tools (discussed below) have built-in reporting tools.
• Analysis: This area of BI focuses on why something happened, which is a core part of BI. The data itself is pointless if you can’t understand what it’s telling you. The analysis part is why many companies have data sitting around that’s doing nothing for them. Many tools are helping to bridge these gaps. There are three main types of analysis, which are important to know for tool selection.
  • Spreadsheet: Data presented in spreadsheets helps you to evaluate performance.
  • Ad-Hoc Query: This kind of software allows users to develop their own queries, which is how many BI tools on the market today work.
  • Visualization Tools: This software coverts raw data into visualizations the users can read and understand. Examples include graphs and pie charts.
• Monitoring: With BI, it’s possible to monitor information in real-time, and if not in actual real-time, fairly close to it. Monitoring can help you see how things are going right now. It can also help you evaluate any point between reporting periods if you need to make a decision quickly. There are three kinds of monitoring:
  • Dashboard: Dashboard monitoring provides a central location for all data and actionable metrics. Typically, the information is represented in a graphical format for better and easier comprehension. Google Analytics presents in a dashboard format.
  • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): KPIs measure the performance of a specific action or project. These include return on investment (ROI), customer acquisition cost (CAC), customer lifetime value (CLV), and so on.
  • Business Performance Management: Business performance management refers to a system designed to ensure people meet performance goals and deliver results. Some BI tools refer to this type of monitoring as the “Balanced Scorecard.”
• Prediction/Forecasting: BI helps us see what’s going on right now. But based on the data we feed into it, we can also predict what may happen in the future. Of course, these predictions are just that—they are not guarantees of what will happen. Variants might impact the actual outcome, but forecasting can help guide your business decisions in the right direction instead of leaving you to take a shot in the dark. Prediction is a fairly complex area of BI, so many companies rely on others to handle this part for them. However, there are some tools that use automation to manage it well. There are two types of prediction:
  • Data Mining: Data mining finds patterns and relationships both in data and between sets of data. The end goal is to extract the data and create something you can read and understand so that you can use it.
  • Predictive Modeling: Predictive modeling aims to predict outcomes or the probability of an outcome.

Benefits of BI

One of the main benefits of BI is obvious. Companies can dissect and transform the data they collect into something they can understand and use. They can then make improvements to their products and services.

BI allows companies to see where they need to make changes in marketing to improve their profit margins. They can project how much product they need to produce. And they can see what kind of overflow they have and what sales tend to perform the best with their customers.

Companies can see who their best and worst customers are, how much they’re spending to acquire new customers, and more. Ultimately, data can support the majority of business decisions. Data makes it easier to see the direction the business needs to move in to continue being successful.

But with today’s cloud-based BI tools and ease of accessibility, BI also offers interdisciplinary opportunities. It can strengthen collaboration between departments, ultimately in order to improve performance company-wide.

For instance, your content creation team can work closely with the data team to determine how each piece of content is doing. Using the insights from that data, the content team can then adjust their editorial calendar.

They can include more content that performs well and eliminate content that does not. Doing so will save time and money on content creation, while in theory boosting the amount of money that content indirectly brings into the business.

BI Tools

There are a wide variety of BI tools out there from which to choose. Some tools require the exclusive use of desktop client applications. But nearly all of them offer a browser-based experience, making it possible to use the tools from anywhere there’s an internet connection.

Many vendors are also working on implementing native applications for use on tablets and smartphones. So you’ll be able to use them anywhere you can get online, regardless of your device.

Larger companies might implement BI application servers as part of their on-premise IT department. But doing so is costly in the sense you must have the servers to hold the data and a team of IT experts on hand to manage it. As a result, smaller businesses are opting to deploy cloud-based BI solutions.

Cyfe

Cyfe is an all-in-one monitoring dashboard you can use for everything related to your business. You can create multiple dashboards as needed. For example, you could have dashboards for social media, marketing, financials, IT, clients, sales, and more.

You can pull in data from a number of sources automatically and get real-time reports. The pre-built widgets make it easy to get the information you need right in front of you. There is a free trial, but you’ll need to pay $ 20/month for the paid version that allows for more widgets and dashboards. Cyfe also allows for branded reports and domain name mapping.

Sisense

Sisense is a cloud-based BI platform designed for non-technical people. There is a free trial available, but you must contact the company to get pricing information. Sisense is capable of processing large amounts of data in minutes and then transforming that data into visuals on a user-friendly interface.

Sisense also has a BI bots feature. This feature allows it to integrate with communications and productivity platforms such as Slack, Skype, and even Alexa. As a result, users will be able to speak their data commands and turn conversations from Skype and Facebook Messenger into an informal knowledgebase of sorts.

Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft Power BI is a cloud-based analytics service. There is a free version, but if you want more features, you’ll need to upgrade to Power BI Pro. The cost is $ 9.99 per user, per month.

This system is similar to Cyfe in the sense that you can create a dashboard with more than 50 connections to popular business applications. There are also pre-built dashboards designed to help you get started quickly.

Microsoft Power BI offers both a mobile app and a desktop app. The desktop app allows you to write your own reports and include visuals. The idea behind the platform is that if your team knows how to use Microsoft Office, they will understand how to use Power BI. That way there’s no need for IT or training.

Hubspot

Hubspot is a BI tool for your

Business Intelligence: Your Key to Success in Stiff Competition

Building The Bridge: Why Compliance Is Key To Digital Currency’s Success

I occasionally see people in the digital currency industry question the value of compliance. By this I mean working with regulators, law

Continue reading on The Coinbase Blog »

Stories by Brian Armstrong on Medium

Building The Bridge: Why Compliance Is Key To Digital Currency’s Success

How You Can Achieve Self-Motivation and Why It Is the Key to Success

Everyone has dreams. However, only a few realise them. The question is why? The fact is that self-motivation allows us to control our own success. And there are key principles that enable us to be self-motivated.

Does hard work really pay off?

Some argue that entrepreneurs are born, not made. They say true entrepreneurs learn faster and have greater intuition than those who are not born that way. Such people also have a natural talent for business.

On the other hand, there are those who argue that natural talent is irrelevant. Researchers Ericsson, Krampe, and Tech-Romer believe that success is purely built on purposeful, thoughtful, and intense effort.

There is a study by David Hambrick and Elizabeth Meinz called “Limits on the Predictive Power of Domain-Specific Experience and Knowledge in Skilled Performance.” I believe this study hits the spot.

On the graph below, the vertical axis shows performance. The higher up on the axis, the better you perform. The horizontal axis shows your intelligence. The further to the right, the more intelligent you are. The red line indicates people who work hard, while the blue line indicates people who don’t put in the necessary effort.

The takeaways from this study are:

• Hard work beats talent when the talented don’t work hard.
• If the intelligent and unintelligent both work hard, there is not much difference in performance.
• In a career where only the best performers succeed, such as the Olympics, you need to have a lot of talent. However, in careers (such as business), talent is not as important.

Either way you look at it, hard work puts you right up there with the top performers. So while many people take the view that being successful is all about talent, they are often using this perspective as a defence mechanism to justify their mediocre level of success.

If you study successful people, it is clear that talent only plays a small role. Check out this great video of Will Smith talking about talent and hard work:

To me, it is an exciting prospect that someone with average intelligence can achieve a level of success similar to the smartest individuals. Hard work is the variable we can control. If you can motivate yourself to work hard, you can achieve great success. The question is, how do you stay motivated?

It starts with a dream

If you ask children what their dream lives look like, they will often express their hopes with passion and conviction. As you grow older, people often see their dream lives as fantasies that will never come true. The difference is that adults have the experience to know how tough reality can be. So they often put their dreams in the back of their minds.

Successful people, however, actively visualise their dreams. Arnold Schwarzenegger is a great advocate of having a vision. Have a look at this video of Arnold talking about the importance of having a goal:

Conor McGregor, an extremely successful UFC fighter, has recently been in the news because he is the first person ever to simultaneously win two titles in two weight divisions. It would be easy to think that a fighter’s thought process has no relevance to running a business, but you would be wrong.

Successful people from all different backgrounds share the principle of visualisation. Conor epitomises the power of visualisation in this video:

Dreaming about and visualising what you want allows you to see and feel what it would be like to achieve real success. Not only is visualising your goals a fantastic source of motivation but doing so also gives you purpose and direction in your life. Donald Trump is someone else who advises people to dream big.

If your vision is not compelling enough, you’ll never find the motivation to pursue it. If you’re keen to start a business in order to achieve your dream, I recommend you read my article, “The real truth behind finding a viable business idea.”

Make a solid plan

A vision might motivate you, but a plan maps out how you will get to your end goal. As Gary Vaynerchuk says, people love the feeling of being motivated, but few people do anything with that feeling. Having a plan ensures that your motivation is not short-lived. It gives you a clear direction to channel your energy.

When I first founded my business (www.zzaponline.com), my vision was to make ZZap the most valued cash-handling brand. I then wrote out a plan. Then I took the most successful company in our sector and analysed what made it the best. I ended up with a list of points such as great photography, professional website, unique products, excellent online presence, etc. These became my goals for my company.

I then examined how successful companies achieved these goals. For example, they achieved a good online presence through paid search, remarketing, and SEO. So those became my short-term goals. Finally, by searching the internet, reading books, and reaching out to any contacts I knew in the industry, I researched how I could accomplish my short-term goals.

Once I had made my plan, I was extremely motivated. I had a vision and I knew how to get there. All that was left was hard work. To know that hard work is the only thing between you and your dream is enlightening. You can believe with conviction that it is possible to achieve your vision. That is a powerful feeling.

Feed off others

“We are the average of the five people we spend the most time with.” – Jim Rohn

We are all influenced by others. People can influence you either positively or negatively. If you spend enough time with successful people, they will start to rub off on you.

Spending time with the right people is perhaps one of the most effective and easiest ways to motivate yourself. If all your friends are motivated, passionate, and hungry for success, your conversations and activities are going to gravitate toward those qualities. This is peer pressure done right!

The hard part is finding and keeping those special individuals in your social circle. For example, spending time with Alan Sugar on a regular basis might not be feasible.

Earlier generations had less opportunities to learn from the best in their fields. But with the internet, we now have access to countless videos and blogs from successful business leaders.

Watching a video might not be the same as spending time with an individual. But if you watch the videos often enough, you will be amazed at how the attitudes of those in them can still start to shape yours. Some YouTube channelers, such as Evan Carmichael, specialise in finding advice from successful people.

Some channels are purely geared toward motivation. And some hugely successful entrepreneurs, such as Gary Vaynerchuk, even record their whole day on camera! You can watch Gary Vaynerchuk every day here:

The internet has made it possible to literally wake up and go to bed watching and listening to the great business minds. This ability has never been possible before. Make use of it. Feed off the energy of influencers each and every day. Doing so is a hugely underrated tactic that will help the next generation of business leaders.

Last word

There are many things that trigger motivation in an individual. Visualise your dream, know what it takes to get there, and learn from the best people in your field. These tactics build a foundation for exceptional work ethic.

Some people are born with natural talent, but most of us are not. Hard work bridges that gap. You are in full control. You determine your own success.

The post How You Can Achieve Self-Motivation and Why It Is the Key to Success appeared first on Growmap.

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How You Can Achieve Self-Motivation and Why It Is the Key to Success