When travelling the world and staying in hotels one of the challenges is noisy neighbours. How do you address the challenge when other consumers can become a problem?

One hotel I stopped at in California had a noisy neighboiur policy and this got me thinking about whether this type of policy could work for other retailers. Could we have a policy for a pet store or garden centre where we kept neighbours happy or even a restaurant? Food for thought.

Here is the policy and it may provide an idea to help you.
 
Good Neigbour Policy
If you disturb your neighbours you will be asked to leave the hotel. We do not knowingly book reservations for Batchelor, Batchelette or Birthday Parties. The hotel has a Good Neigbour Policy and does not allow gatherings in guest rooms. If the hotel receives a noise complaint from another room due to a gathering in your room or public space you will be financially responsible for the room charges of the rooms that complain. There will be no further warnings issued. No refunds will be given. Please be respectful of your neighbours.

Farmers markets have reached maturity as a retail model and this brings its own challenges. Even a year ago it was rare to hear farmers markets being referred to the board rooms of supermarket directors. Today it is one of the hot topics. With farmers markets seeing some of the biggest growth in retailing they are now on the radar and a perceived threat to other retailers.

It seems that every month there is another market that calls itself a farmers market starting up in another suburb. There will come a point where saturation will occur and I believe some communities that will not be to far away.

This bring extra challenges along the way. (more…)

A colleague of mine is Steve Simpson, who operates the consultancy and conference speaking business, Keystone Management Services,[www.keystone-management.com.]

Steve and I meet about twice a year to discuss various aspects of our conference and consultancy work. Steve has created the UGRs® concept [www.ugrs.net] . UGRs stands for “Unwritten Ground Rules”, something that occurs in all businesses. UGRs are people’s perceptions of ‘this is the way we do things around here’. They drive people’s behaviour yet they are rarely talked about openly .

Steve focuses on how both negative and positive actions and the conversation between team members can affect the morale of the team and reduce the motivation. This clearly applies to large business, but can the small retailer suffer from the same problems?

I live in a small community on the outskirts of Perth in Western Australia and have just come across some examples of how UGRs can affect you as a retailer. The scary part is that the owner of the business may have no idea what damage is being done to the business. (more…)

This is the third article in a series on “who wants to be an entrepreneur”. I was awarded “The Small Business Entrepreneur of the Year” for W.A. in 2009 under the Small Business Champions Awards.

In the previous articles I have concentrated on what entrepreneurs do and how they motivate team members. In this article I will concentrate on the communication skills that entrepreneurs introduce into their business.

Communications is the Key
Entrepreneurs, by nature, are better communicators than the rest of us. They ensure that communications is effective both within their business and with their stakeholders and customers.

Communications is one of the basic skills of business, we all do it, but to different degrees of effectiveness. Let’s get back to the basics and what entrepreneurs excel at. (more…)