The 9 Best Business Lessons From The Godfather

Source: http://www.onlinebusinessdegree.org/2012/05/07/the-9-best-business-lessons-from-the-godfather/

Just what kind of business are you in that you want to model your professional actions after the greatest cinematic mob story of all time? Well, no matter. The Godfather is chock full of great advice, and there’s lots to learn from the themes of this classic film. Check out the nine best business lessons that we’ve learned from The Godfather, or you might be (metaphorically) sleeping with the fishes sooner than you thought.

1. Make Them An Offer They Can’t Refuse

   Obviously. One of the best ways to get what you want in business is to tailor your product to your customer’s needs. And this works for managers, too. If you want to incentivize your employees, there’s often a way that you can make your request primarily beneficial to them and the company both. Barring using horse-headed death threats as a strategy, make sure that when you want a certain result, you make the incentive good enough to warrant it.

2. Trust No One

   Whether you’re a bona fide wise guy or not, it’s wise to watch who you trust. That’s not to say that you should be suspicious of everyone all the time, it’s that the only person whose decisions and actions that you can safely rely on are your own. Even being in business with people for years doesn’t mean that you can trust them, but you can trust them to be themselves. And whether you’re running the underground or just the office, that’s another key lesson to learn.

3. Keep Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer

   Well, maybe not your enemies. More like your competitors. It’s important to have a good idea the landscape of your market competition, both larger and smaller than you. And when there’s an industry-wide issue that could improve your field, do yourself a favor and be the one to lead the charge to unity. You’ll stand out among your competitors while also improving things for all involved when you’re the one to get a group to band together faster than you can say “five families.”

4. Patience is a Virtue

   Don’t expect for things to blow up for you overnight — it takes time to build a mafia empire strong business. And this advice goes for both rookies and veterans: quality comes from patience, planning, and having a great product.

5. Always Have A Plan

   When you’re running an international crime syndicate, you’ve simply got to have a plan. It’s not profitable to do things willy-nilly, with no discussion or lack of a business model. It’s probably best to avoid a business plan that involves gunning people down in the street, but appropriate foresight, planning, and action can lead to, ahem, legitimate business success.

6. Learn from Your Failures

   Failure happens. Even to mafiosos. Let this fact lead you, and give yourself permission to fail. But also let yourself learn from your missteps, as it’s possible to turn any short-term failure into long-time success. If you lose some guys in a gun battle, or lose money from a dirty double cross, you know how crucial it can be to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, regroup, and move forward. Also, what kind of job did you say you had, again?

7. Loyalty Matters

   One of the most important lessons to take from the Don is that loyalty is key. In this day and age, economic security is a spectre — but it’s paramount to remember never to bite the hand that feeds you. Whether you have a boss or have to deal with distributors, it’s always best to be loyal to your higher-ups and those who depend on you. It’s as simple as this: the better everyone does, the better everyone does.

8. Respect Must Be Earned

   While loyalty is important, respect must be earned. Make sure that you’re commanding respect, and not just because of your great work product. If you act with dignity and put integrity first on your value list, you’ll see how easy it can be to build up mutual respect with co-workers, superiors, and those in other areas with whom you have to work. Additionally, take caution to respect respect: it’s easy to build up, takes time to cement, and can be gone forever in a flash.

9. Business Is Personal

   Tom, don’t let anyone kid you. It’s all personal, every bit of business. Every piece of sh-t every man has to eat every day of his life is personal. They call it business. OK. But it’s personal as hell.And there you have it. Michael Corleone said it best, and it’s the honest truth: business is made up of people. People who care, people who create, people who perform, and everything in between. The great thing about a business is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but its parts are people — and those are pretty great, too.

Before You Hire Your First Employee…

First assess the implications of putting workers on payroll. Then limit future legal headaches by creating an employment policy

By Karen E. Klein

I own a professional services firm where [I have] a team working with me part time on a per-project basis. They all have other full-time jobs. I would like to get to the stage where I can hire two to four employees full time, but I’m wondering how and when to do that. Can you share some advice and ideas? —W.M., Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

The decision to move from self-employed to employer is among the most important a business owner must make. The added cost of employees can swamp a young company, particularly in an economic downturn or if there’s a sudden decline in business.

The most cautious strategy would be to wait until demand dictates that you must hire—because, say, you are routinely turning down work—and when you do, hire people who add to your bottom line, such as sales or administrative employees.

It is frustrating to work exclusively with “sidepreneurs”—people who leverage expertise from full-time jobs but can never make your projects their top priority, says Rhonda Abrams, president of PlanningShop, a Palo Alto (Calif.) publisher, and author of Successful Business Plan: Secrets and Strategies. “I’m in a similar situation, and it’s very difficult when you can’t even schedule a meeting with all the people you need, because one’s available only at noon and someone else is available only on Tuesdays,” she says.

LOSING FLEXIBILITY

But once you move from independent contractors to employees, you’re “changing your business model from variable-cost, low-regulation, and highly flexible to fixed-cost, highly regulated, and somewhat inflexible,” says Derek Alderton, a business consultant and lecturer at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. At least in the U.S., employers must meet a host of tax and labor requirements. And it would be far more difficult to lay off an employee if your projects were to dry up.

Here are some exercises to help you plan:

1. Calculate financial impact. Familiarize yourself with laws and costs that apply to employers in your country. Be sure to include “not only their direct salary or wage, but also the employer share of taxes, insurance, holidays, and vacation time,” says Gene Fairbrother, chief executive officer of MBA Consulting in Dallas. “At the very least, get your CPA to show you what last year’s financial results would have looked like if you had been complying with all the costs and regulations for employees, rather than project contractors,” Alderton says.

2. Consider alternatives. Could you hire student interns, temps, or part-time employees as a way to test the waters? “An intern or recent graduate can be hired full time per project or for a set time with the possibility of full-time employment depending on the growth of the firm,” says Philip Moorcroft, president of MGPS, an expense management consulting firm in Toronto. Bringing in a temporary employee or hiring a contractor as a part-time employee could increase the attention paid to your projects, minimize your costs, and allow the contractor more time to expand his or her moonlighting to make up for lost wages.

3. Make realistic projections. “When you’re working on a project-to-project basis, you don’t know how long things are going to last,” Abrams says. “Look over your existing contracts and see how many are ongoing, or could become ongoing. Then hustle to get signatures on proposals so you will be more confident about the future.”

If you want to expand your company, at some point you will need to bite the bullet. “The virtual company goes only so far,” Abrams notes. When you do hire, start slowly and be ready to deal with fallout from your existing contractors, Alderton says. “They will rightly perceive the new employee as being a threat to their own incomes or choice of desirable projects.”

Even with just one employee, you should create a manual that states your employment policies in writing, Fairbrother recommends. “Having your policies in place could save you considerable confusion and headaches later on, including legal costs if an employee or ex-employee challenges you,” he says. Search for sample employee manuals online or buy software that allows you to develop your own handbook. He recommends Nolo Press’s Create Your Own Employee Handbook.

Karen E. Klein is a Los Angeles-based writer who covers entrepreneurship and small-business issues.

Source: http://www.businessweek.com/small-business/before-you-hire-your-first-employee-11182011.html?campaign_id=rss_search