"The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say "I." And that's not because they have trained themselves not to say "I." They don't think "I." They think "we"; they think "team." They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don't sidestep it, but "we" gets the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done."
To survive and succeed in life, you must take risks. To manage many risks in life, you need insurance coverage.
What Is Insurance Coverage?
Insurance coverage is the amount of risk or liability that is covered for an individual or entity by way of insurance services.
With an insurance cover, you transfer the cost of a potential loss to the insurance company in exchange for a fee, known as the premium. Insurance companies invest the funds securely and pay out when there’s a claim.
It is not enough to take out an insurance policy, you must know the important considerations to make when you negotiate insurance covearge and after you haven taken out a cover. These considerations are fundamental to making a successful insurance claim.
What are these considerations?
1. Get a full description in writing of every documentation the insurer will require should you have any claim to make,
2. Do a comparative analysis of claims filing procedures of different insurers offering the insurance you are interested in,
3. Bring in your lawyer at the first sign of delay,
4. If the insurer still refuses to keep their own half of the contract, threaten to report the insurer to the appropriate insurance commissioner.
"Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows that approximately 20% of new businesses fail during the first two years of being open, 45% during the first five years, and 65% during the first 10 years. Only 25% of new businesses make it to 15 years or more. These statistics haven't changed much over time, and have been fairly consistent since the 1990s.Though the odds are better than the commonly held belief, there are still many businesses that are closing down every year in the United States."
For a startup to grow a going concern that outlives the founder, attention must be paid to little details, after all God is in the details.
What are these details? They are!
1. Ideas,
2. Cash flow,
3.Salesmanship..
What have successful entrepreneurs said about ideas?
1. Capital isn’t that important in business. Experience isn’t that important. You can get both of these things. What is important is ideas. – Harvey S. Firestone.
2. Get a good idea and stay with it. Dog it, and work at it until it’s done right.– Walt Disney.
3. The air is full of ideas. They are knocking you in the head all the time. You only have to know what you want, then forget it, and go about your business. Suddenly, the idea will come through. It was there all the time.– Henry Ford.
What have entrepreneurs said about cash flow?
1. If I had to run a company on three measures, those measures would be customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and cash flow.- Jack Welch.
2. Never take your eyes off the cash flow because it's the life blood of business.- Richard Branson.
3. If you look at academic studies, you can see that stock prices are most closely correlated with cash flow. It's such a straightforward number. Cash flow is what will drive shareholder returns.- Jeff Bezos.
What have entrepreneurs said about salesmanship?
1. "You Don’t Need A Big Close As Many Sales Reps Believe. You Risk Losing Your Customer When You Save All The Good Stuff For The End. Keep The Customer Actively Involved Throughout Your Presentation, And Watch Your Results Improve.” – Harvey Mackay.
2. "Sales Are Contingent Upon The Attitude Of The Salesman – Not The Attitude Of The Prospect.” – W. Clement Stone.
3. "Keep Yourself Positive, Cheerful And Goal-Oriented. Sales Success Is 80% Attitude And Only 20% Aptitude.” – Brian Tracy.
First, what according to 5 great investors, "The key to successful investment is?"
1.“If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness.” – Jeff Bezos
" The success template is already there. It is with those who are a success. If you are close to one learn from close quarters, but if you are not close to one and you can't figure out a way to have access then read and learn. Either way you are going to save yourself wasted years of having to wander, fruitlessly, in the woods. Focus on first learning everything you could about the business you wish to go into. But don't spend a life time just learning without taking the leap. Find out;
1. Is it going to fill a need?
2. Are you passionate about it? Because if you are not passionate about it, you may find it difficult to find the way when you run into a hitch.
3. If what you are passionate about is going to fill a need, where are those with this peculiar need? Can you reach them at the lowest of costs and easily too?
4. If you could take care of 1-3 above then get started and continue to learn on it.
Continue to study with greater emphasis on learning to know the habits of successful people in business. How many are in the business you want to go into? Learn from them and learn from successful people in other businesses too. Success has few fundamentals that are the same in all human endeavors. For instance Goodwill."- (From The Book, "Answers To Life's Frequently Asked Questions").
Fifty of the biggest UK employers questioned by BBC have said they have no plans to return all staff to the office full-time in the near future.
Some 24 firms said that they did not have any plans in place to return workers to the office.
However, 20 have opened their offices for staff unable to work from home.
It comes as many employees return to work from the summer holidays with the reality of a prolonged period of home working becoming increasingly likely.
The BBC questioned 50 big employers ranging from banks to retailers to get a sense of when they expected to ask employees to return to the office.
One of the main reasons given for the lack of a substantial return was that firms could not see a way of accommodating large numbers of staff while social distancing regulations were still in place.
Many companies said they were offering choice and flexibility to those who want to return, particularly in the banking and finance sectors.
A few firms have already toannounced they have no plans to return to the office until late autumn, and Facebook has said it does not plan a return of employees until July 2021.
SOURCE-BBC.
Aveva chief executive Craig Hayman said the takeover would “enable Aveva to broaden and deepen its relationships with existing and new customers and bring a more comprehensive product portfolio to market.”
Aveva sells software to industrial and engineering firms to help them visualise and plan projects. OSIsoft is a data management company.
“The acquisition of OSIsoft is perfectly in line with our strategic vision and it will accelerate the enlarged group’s role in the digitisation of the industrial world, which is being driven by a need for sustainability, the industrial internet of things, cloud, data visualisation and artificial intelligence,” Hayman said.
OSIsoft has around 1,400 employees and its systems are used on 14,000 sites in 127 different countries. It helps customers collect and analyse their data. Users range from large oil companies and miners to pharmaceutical giants.
The company had revenues of $488.5m (£373m) in the 12 months to 30 June and pulled in adjusted earnings of $152.2m (£116m).
Shares in Aveva rose 2%.
Source - Yahoo Finance
Ant Group, an affiliate of Alibaba, has given the first look at its financials ahead of its highly-anticipated initial public offering (IPO), in a document filed on Tuesday.
The financial technology powerhouse, which is still controlled by Alibaba founder Jack Ma, reported profit of 21.9 billion Chinese yuan ($3.2 billion) on total revenues of 72.5 billion yuan in the first half of the year, according to the exchange filing.
Ant Group, formerly known as Ant Financial, is planning a concurrent listing on the Shanghai stock exchange's STAR market — a Nasdaq-style tech board — and the Hong Kong stock exchange.
Source- CNBc.
Nielsen's Personality is reflected in the guidelines he set for his firm in 1931, some of which were, in part;
1. Be influenced by nothing but your client's interests. Tell them the truth.
2. Charge enough to do a thorough job. Then do a thorough job regardless of the cost.
3. Watch every detail that affects the accuracy of your work.
4. Leave no stone unturned to help your client.
Before you invest in those stocks, it is important to know if your investment is going to yield the highest profitable returns possible in a chosen sector. The most reliable tool to test for optimal profitability is the Earnings Per Share (EPS) shareholder ratio
EPS is the most frequently used of all accounting ratios. It ia believed to give the best picture of a company's performance.
To calculate EPS, divide a company's net profit or loss attributable to ordinary shareholders by the weighted average number of ordinary shares outstanding during the period. The net profit or loss attributable to ordinary shareholders is earnings after tax, minority interest and extraordinary items available for equity shareholders.
Every information needed for the calculation of EPS is available in a company's financial statements.
But the EPS shouldn't be used in isolation to make an investment decision. Other factors must be considered before a final decision is reached. Don't ignore the following factors;
1. Evaluate the policies of companies (operating within the same sector is recommended) on;
A. Depreciation and,
B. Replacement of assets.
2. Compare EPS of a company with the EPS for the same organization in respect of previous years. Repeat the same comparisons over time for all other companies (within the same industry- sector relevance is very important) you have selected to choose from,
3. Company size is also very important. To make a sound choice among companies within a given sector, the EPS of companies of similar size must be evaluated.
Decision- Tje higher the Earnings Per Share , EPS, of a company, the higher is its profitability.
LinkedIn analyzed applications for remote jobs in Europe since the beginning of March, to see which were the most popular with job hunters.
For six European countries, LinkedIn has listed the remote jobs that saw applications grow the most during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The data is based on applications for jobs that companies have paid to post on the platform... Read more
"The best preparation for tomorrow is doing your best today."- H. Jackson Brown Jr.,
What would you do if you were to lose your job? It is a possibility. We are living in a world of uncertainties. You never know what is going to happen the next moment or tomorrow.
The best preparation for tomorrow is doing your best now. The best thing to do now to guarantee your financial future is to start to invest now.
The best place to start that investment is creating a space in your personal budget for savings. Then invest a significant portion of that savings in profitable ventures.
So how do you save? But before that it is important to set aside a certain percentage of your income to cover;
1. A variable life insurance policy. This policy is a combination of a death protection benefit and savings. The savings could be invested in stocks, mutual funds and bonds. With this policy, care must be taken so as not to lose your investment and erode your death benefit. You could avoid this situation by either setting a minimum level (a floor) to your death benefit or you take the variable-universal life policy which gives you the room to adjust the premiums and death benefit.
2. Your nestegg/Retirement Account. In case you don't have a regular job, you must contribute a substantial portion of your income to a retirement account. Doing this and having high financial discipline to stay committed would boost your long term financial goal.
Now where should you put a portion of your saved income as a buffer against a sudden job lost?
1. Invest in Bonds,
2. Invest in Mtual Funds,
3. Invest in Stocks,
4. Invest in Real Estate,
5. Invest in Gold and
6. Invest in continuous learning.
Investment is a risky business. You must have love for what you wish to invest in and you must have an above average knowledge of what you want to invest in. It is always safer and better to seek the services of an investment advisor (a stock broker)
Do you have a budget? Is it designed to help you grow?
A budget is your quantitative plan. It is a collection of the things you want to spend money on and where the money is going to come from. It is a simply a collection of your future revenues and expenditures.
Having a budget is an indication of an intention to avoid running into financial distress and focus on financial growth. Growth is a product of a good budget. What is a good personal budget?
This is how a good personal budget should look like;
A. Income: It must show your expected annual income. The annual income should be broken down to a monthly income by dividing the annual income by 12 months. And the monthly income further broken down to a weekly income by dividing each monthly income by 4 weeks.
Your income is your is your net revenue. That is, it is what is left of your revenue after taxes, interests and all other deductibles are removed.
B. Allocation of your weekly income. It is very important to always allocate your weekly income among your basic needs and set aside a portion as your weekly saving.
For instance, you may allocate your weekly income to the following needs and saving with their corresponding percentages;
1. Shelter- Accomodation- 20%
2. Food - 20%
3. Clothing - 5%
4, Communications- 5%
5. Continuous Learning- 20%
6. Savings-- 30%
At this point, it is important to remind you that this is a personal budget that is focused on personal financial growth. This is the reason learning and savings take 50%. Of the budget.
The next important item that must make a good personal budget is how you intend to allocate your saving.
C. Allocation of savings. You may;
1. Invest 30% of your savings.
60% of which may be in ventures with a short term returns on investment (within 12 months) and 40% of the 30% set aside for investment may be invested in ventures with long term returns (more than 12 months).
2. Set aside 30% of your savings towards getting a personal home. Remember, your saving is a portion of your weekly income not spent. So the 30% saved towards a personal home is accumulated over time till it could buy a personal home. Or, till it could be used as a counter fund to buy a personal home.
3. Set aside 25% of your savings towards other things like a car and house stuff.
4. Reinvest 15% of your savings. This is absolutely important in order to maintain and progressively enlarge the cycle of growth.
Please let us know what your personal budget looks like and what is missing in the one above. Use the comment section.
Thank you.