Runhua Group of Companies

You only need to start the conversation at a dinner party or function to hear countless tales of woe in the workplace about “that idiot I work with”.

If you are unfortunate enough to work with difficult people, you can sometimes feel powerless to effect any change.

You could leave, but difficult people are not centralised to your workplace so looking for greener pastures may not be the answer.

What’s more, difficult people are often oblivious to the fact that they are difficult. If you sit back and wait for the offending colleagues to change, you may be in for a long wait.

In their book, Working with You is Killing Me, Katherine Crowley and Kathi Elster discuss the serious side effects of working with destructive people.

Crowley and Elster assert that working with these people can cause headaches, exhaustion, anxiety, neck and back pain and insomnia.

It can also significantly increase stress, which is strongly linked with heart attack. With all these potential health complications, working with difficult people may be more damaging than you think.

Crowley and Elster also have a great segment on YouTube where they discuss their theory of ‘unhooking’ different workplace personalities and coping in the workplace. You can view it here – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_pIMvP-otY.

If you can’t wait for the offending individual to amend their behaviour, and changing jobs isn’t an option, here are a few coping strategies to make your day a little easier.

How to deal with difficult people

1. Analyse the situation

* What is it about the situation or person that annoys you?
* When does this situation seem to present itself? Is there a pattern?

Once you understand what is really bothering you, you are better placed to establish coping strategies.

2. Examine yourself

* Are you contributing to the situation in any way?
* Are your expectations of others unrealistic?
* Are you letting your own moods and emotions colour situations?

Consider that it may not be everyone else’s fault. Put the microscope on yourself and examine how you or your feelings may be impacting a situation.

3. Train your brain

* Try to focus on the difficult person’s positive attributes
* If necessary, lie to yourself and try to enjoy the behavior! (You would be surprised how effective this can be, if you commit. Think George Costanza’s famous line on the iconic Seinfeld TV show: “Jerry, just remember, it’s not a lie if you believe it”).

As a participant in the workplace, you have some control over the way you respond to and allow situations to affect you.

While you can’t control the behaviours of others, it is possible to change your attitude towards them.

Innovation and invention are hot topics amongst business and political leaders alike.

Innovation impacts on not only businesses growth and planning but also the country and society we live in – from the air we breathe (clean energy) to what we eat and how we communicate and travel.

When working with underperforming businesses, the subject of innovation and invention is often at the bottom of their list.

Yet if embraced, innovation can be used as a key to their success – and it doesn’t have to mean great cash outflow.

Innovation can be about the way a business deals with staff, customers and suppliers. It can involve internal process improvement and efficiencies. It is a vast subject that is worth exploring even if a business is experiencing crisis.

Here are three key factors influencing business reinvention and innovation:

1. Customer demand and competition
Today’s customers are sophisticated and keen to try new things. They demand more efficient services and products that will improve their business.

A maturing of the product or service, with it becoming uncompetitive due to external pressures or simply changing times, should not be a viewed as a threat.

Instead, it is an opportunity to discover new products or a niche that will allow the business to evolve in new directions.

The introduction of brick-sized mobile phones signalled the beginning of a new era in telephony. No one could have predicted the usage and ownership of mobile phones would grow to over 5 billion users around the world by 2010.

Maturing products and services simply open the door to new things. They are opportunities not to be missed!

2. Funding
The need for the business to invest in Research and Development (R&D) is often overlooked due to the pressures of delivering on short term profitability and cash flow.

In times of crisis, successful companies are those that keep spending on R&D, as they will come out of the crisis with market leading products.

For example, Hewlett Packard, during the recession of 1969 invented a pocket calculator and Apple came out of the Dot-Com crash of 2001 with the iPod.

I totally agree with celebrities being in debt and not being able to get a credit card. If you are not filing taxes, and filing bankruptucy, and owing all kinds of money to the state, you should not be able to get a credit card and reasonable rates for car insurance from various car insurance companies in Canada.

Whether you are a celebrity or not, everyone should get treated the same, especially when it comes to having good or bad credit. Banks are not going to give anyone a credit card if you owe debt out of this world. Celebrities just like anyone else are humans. If a celebrity is trying to get a credit card, they need to work on getting their credit back together. If this means erasing all debt you have, and then trying to rebuild your credit, then that is what it is going to take.

You have celebrities that are in more debt that any average person, and think just because they are famous a bank will give them a credit card. This is why the economy is so messed up today, and banks are becoming more strict on people than they have ever been before. Erase the debt that you already have, then work on rebuilding your credit. All of the money that many of these celebrities make, I do not understand how they end up in debt in the first place. It shouldn’t be that hard to get back out of it.

Bad debt, no credit card. Sure, you can get one again, but not anytime soon. I truthfully just think that it is ridicolous how celebrities end up in debt. If you carefully spend your money, and put it where it is needed, you will have no such thing as bad debt. You will then be able to get whatever it is you want, like a credit card.

If you want to go into business for yourself, you can do many things. You can come up with something that you have always wanted to do, go with an already established franchise, or you can find out what a really new small business would really be. There are new ideas out there that are going to be the way of the future, and if you get in on them now and come up with your own ideas, you can have a long lasting and very successful venture on your hands. Think green, think about the environment, and go from there.

Many of the new small business ideas that are popping up with great success are the ones that cater to a newer and greener world economy. These are the new ideas for small businesses that are really starting to take off. If you have an invention or a service that goes with this new lifestyle that so many are trying to embrace, you could be on to something that has a long shelf life and that can offer you success where older ideas may be fading out and are not worth your time.

Just one example of a new small business in this category is natural burials. These are not wide spread yet, but you can find people running these in some areas of the country. As of right now, there are very few in each state, but they could be gaining in popularity very soon. Some people are interested in being buried without chemicals and a lot of extras. They want to be put into the ground to back into the earth naturally without preservation and large tombstones. It seems a bit morbid, but these cemeteries are going to catch on with some folks.

You don’t have to buy land to bury people in a green way to come up with new small business ideas, but you can think along the same lines. People want to go back to more natural things. Organic is big, so think about things you can sell that are organic. You may not have to grow them yourself, you can just find suppliers and come up with your own business. These are not totally new, as natural food stores are already around, but you can come up with your own twist for a totally new business idea that is similar but also offers something new.

Think of all of the things that people are trying to change to come up with your green new small business ideas. People want energy that is better for the environment, and they also want to make their lives easier, simply, and chemical free. You can think of new things for children as well as adults, and community based services that you think may catch on in the very near future. The older, tried and true businesses are still going to work, but if you want something new, think green and move into the future while taking everyone else along with you.

One of the most important parts of protecting your business is to know how to set up your business security systems so that you make the most of the technology that will protect your investment, and you and your employees. You can find someone to set up your system for you, but this is something that you can do on your own. If you set up your system by yourself, you can then easily adjust that same system when your business grows and changes. Your security needs will change as your business does.

One mistake that many business owners make is that they get the wrong size system for their business. They may get something totally inadequate or they may spend way too much on things that they simply do not need to have included in their business security systems. What you want is to set up the perfect system for what you need right now, with the capacity to grow as you need to add more to your system. Find systems that can start out small but have plenty of room for growth. It saves money in the long run.

First, you want to have the usual alarm system included in your business security systems. This means that doors and windows are protected when your business is not open to customers. You should secure both with alarms, and change the codes often. You may have some false alarms, but that is better than someone getting a code that you have become too comfortable with using. Secure your basement windows, if you have any, just as you would any other opening. Some businesses find that bars or doors that secure over glass at night at a good option as well. Don’t forget to protect upper floor windows near fire escapes and roof access doors.

Good business security systems also include some type of camera surveillance. You do not want to overdo it with the cameras, as you will never keep up with them, but you want to have important areas covered. This includes all entrances, as well as any parking areas that you may have. These parking areas should be well lit as a part of your business security systems. Criminals avoid lit areas. Your cameras can not pick up anything if your business is unlit, so keep all exterior lights focused and on at night. It’ll cost you more in your electric bill, but it could save you money and even someone’s life. Get energy efficient bulbs for this task.

You can also have motion sensors as part of your business security systems, but for many businesses, this is overkill. Only invest in these if you really need them. Motion sensors that triggers lights to turn on are cheaper, and usually just as effective. You may have to adjust them for sensitivity, but a light popping on usually scares away anyone with mischief in mind. If you have installed your system, but worry it is not enough or that you missed something, there are other options. Talk with an expert to make sure you are making the most of what you have or if you really do need to expand.

It used to be that if you were interested in racking up enough frequent flyer miles for business class upgrade, that it was pretty uncomplicated. You’d make sure that you always flew on an airline that was affiliated to your credit card, and pretty soon you would have enough miles to make a go of it – free tickets, even an upgrade to first class if you were lucky.

The summer travel season is upon us, and things are beginning to look distinctly different already. If a business class upgrade is on your mind on, say, flights to Asia, then you should probably be prepared to understand the airlines’ new position, communicated to you via about 10 inches of single-spaced fine print; and be prepared to work out percentages and complicated formulas. For instance, frequent flyer miles don’t always pay for the whole trip these days – they usually expect that you pay an additional fee. It doesn’t end there; whether you get to upgrade or not, depends on what kind of seats you buy. There are certain kinds of coach seats you must have the privilege of holding to be eligible for an upgrade. Not all seats make the cut in eligibility for an upgrade. Typically, Delta Air Lines is the most hard fisted, while American and Continental-United can be somewhat more reasonable. It may seem tempting to believe that all frequent flyer plans are more or less the same, give or take. They really are not, even in a very competitive market.

It is a kind of trick the airlines play on you. When you go buy your coach seat, they make it look pretty much like any seat would be eligible for a business class upgrade. In reality, it all depends on what fare base you buy that coach seat on – and these can be bewilderingly complex – they have a dozen kinds of fares on any given flight, on any given class of travel. And airlines have every reason to keep the truth from you in the way they package everything. If you don’t dig too deep, it will make your seat look more attractive than it really is.

There are other significant pieces of information airlines keep under their hats too – for instance, not all the business class seats on a flight are open to upgrades. Only a few are. And they have a complex policy of what frequent-flier options and programs to make available to you, depending on what part of the country you live in, and what airlines you have, serving your market. If you choose Delta, the stingiest airline, they’ll ask you to buy the most expensive coach seats if you want a business class upgrade. American will let you upgrade even if you do have the cheapest coach seat.

Airlines have been cutting down on the number of seats available for years now. That, in combination with the way the economy has been improving, gives the airlines more leverage in how they will make you pay, or cut back rewards. Still, American and Continental on the whole are more rewarding airlines to travel on, if you’re looking for specials like a business class upgrade. For instance, when I tried to pull that upgrade on Delta, they demanded that I do it both legs of the trip. On American though, they’ll let you do it on only one. But anyway you look at it, the rewards on airlines are on their way down, and prices are on their way up. Don’t be surprised if pretty soon, the whole concept of the business class upgrade begins to evaporate

The federal government ended their generous tax credit of $8000 at the end of April of 2010 but in California at least, first time home buyers have another option. The State of California, under an initiative from legislators and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger have extended and expanded the California first time home buyers?tax credit to $10,000 at least through 2011. This is great news for many Californians and actually covers more than first time home buyers but to all who purchase new or existing homes this coming year. This terrific incentive should help to revitalize a home buying market that has dropped precipitously in the last two to three years due to the bursting of the real estate market bubble.

For first time home buyers there has never been a better time to purchase, though they need to manage their expectations. Home values have dropped in California and interest rates are at all time lows. The main problem is still the availability of credit and the fact that lenders have made it very difficult for borrowers to qualify. This was a reaction to the too loose lending practices of the past decade which led to the wave of foreclosures that have endangered our economy. Lenders have money to lend, but they have placed super tight restrictions on giving loan approvals. Most lenders require very high credit scores and steady, rock-solid employment as well as seasoned assets.

There are a lot of first time home buyers down payment assistance programs available, especially in California that are well worth looking into. In the San Francisco Bay Area many of the counties and cities have collaborated on bringing these great programs to buyers. In the City of Alameda for instance, first time home buyers who have a combined household income of less than 80% of the median income for the county may qualify for a loan amount maximum of $80,000. The payments are deferred for fifteen years at which time there is a balloon payment due. No interest is charged for the first five years and after that the city takes a percentage of shared appreciation. This is a second position loan.

In the city of Antioch, where you can get a huge house for very little money, first time home buyers may qualify for down payment assistance of up to $30,000. Once again there is a shared appreciation clause that allows the buyer to sell the house at a future date and pay a portion of the accrued appreciation equity back to the city.

Besides the city programs, the State of California under the CalHFA department offers great assistance programs like CHDAP which will give up to $15,000 in assistance for first time home buyers. You can also stack all of these programs including MCCs or Mortgage Credit Certificates which are credits of 15% of the interest payments made on home loans. This helps many borrowers to qualify by effectively raising their take home pay.

Image, credibility, and saving money are three aspects of a business that you focus on. You want to project an image about your company that you can get products to your clients on time and without issue. Credibility comes in when you deliver something on time and uphold anything you say regarding your business. There are also plenty of ways you can save money, especially if you use commercial vehicle tracking. With a tracking device you are able to see exactly where your drivers and fleet are in the event you need to make a time correction or have a new pickup.

There are plenty of benefits for fleet tracking which can help you streamline your business when it comes to customer service. Furthermore, you can save money in a variety of areas when you use tracking options. By monitoring how much a truck idles, if a driver takes a longer road than needed, and how much time they spend using your vehicles for business you can save money in your business.

Another area where you can save money is with stolen vehicle tracking. This concept works both for fleets and personal vehicles. Insurance companies offer discounts if you have tracking on your car. It helps the insurance recover the vehicle. Without a tracking device it is easy for a car to be turned into scrap and sold off in parts, even a big truck used for deliveries. This is why most companies have installed vehicle tracking and more are adding these systems each day.

They recognise the benefits of installing a system that they can get insurance discounts on, recover their property with ease, as well as save money on maintenance and fuel costs. It also helps with customer relations in having more accurate information for the client.

Using a process known as debt consolidation, these firms negotiate with creditors for better terms on unsecured loans such as credit cards, medical bills, utility bills, and IRS debts.

The new terms may include reduced monthly payments, reduced interest or no interest, or waivers of late and over-the-limit fees. Don’t confuse debt consolidation with debt-consolidation loans, which involve taking out new, usually lower-interest loans to pay off several higher-interest loans.

Debt Refinancing (Refinanciacion De Deudas in Spanish)can save you money and get collection agencies off your back. Plus, you make only one monthly payment to the debt-management firm, which pays your creditors.

Unfortunately, you can’t always escape damage to your credit record. Creditors may still report you to a credit bureau for late payments; however, this is not nearly as damaging to your credit report as bankruptcy.

When to Use a Debt-Management Firm
Debt management is typically for small businesses on the verge of bankruptcy, but this isn’t always the case. Sometimes it’s better to use debt consolidation sooner rather than later. Your debt ratio — the percentage of your after-tax income that goes to paying off debt — is a good indicator of potential problems. Most experts agree that a manageable debt ratio is 40 percent or less. If your debt ratio is 50 to 70 percent, you could probably benefit from debt consolidation.

If you’re late on several bills and some of your debts have gone into collections, you should consider contacting a debt-management firm. In addition to debt consolidation, debt-management companies can also help clients manage money through services like credit counseling, budgeting workshops, and crisis relief.

There are many debt-management firms, both for-profit and not-for-profit. Some even operate over the Internet. To find a reputable firm, it pays to do a little homework.

* Check the company’s standing with the Better Business Bureau office where the company is located.
* Find out how often the agency pays creditors. The more frequently (once a week or more) the better, since this will help keep your interest and late payments to a minimum.
* Ask if the company keeps a reserve fund. This is your insurance in case the debt-management company you’ve chosen goes out of business after it gets your money.

Smart consumer’s comparison shop for credit, whether they’re looking for a mortgage, an auto loan, or a credit card. Comparison-shopping is important because it could save you money.

When you’re looking for a credit card, be sure to consider the costs and terms. They can make a difference in how much you pay for the privilege of borrowing. Compare them with the costs and terms of the cards you already have to find the plan that best fits your spending and repayment habits.

Key costs and terms to consider are the annual percentage rate (APR) for goods and services as well as for cash advances, the annual fee, and the grace period. Also compare cash-advance fees, late-payment charges, and over-the-limit fees.

Besides looking at these costs and terms, think about your typical bill-paying behavior. Do you pay your outstanding balance in full each month? Or do you usually carry over a balance? Matching the credit card plan to your needs could save money. This is just a git for the credit card comparison, for more information, please feel free to contact me.