Business Coaching

The American Business Awards announced ActionCOACH was a Finalist for one of their most prestigious awards, Company of the Year in the Business Services category, up to 100 employees.

This is the third straight year the company has been honored as a finalist and ActionCOACH was named the award’s winner in 2007.

The names of the winners of the American Business Awards, or Stevies, will be announced at the 2011 awards banquet and presentations in New York’s Marriott Marquis Hotel on Monday, June 20.

ActionCOACH was also recently awarded with three Hermes Creative Awards, including a Platinum award for ActionSTEPS, the company’s E-Newsletter, a Gold Award for actioncoach.com in the category of Design/Web Site Overall and an Honorable Mention for “I Am an ActionCOACH” in the Video/Corporate Image Category at the Hermes Creative Awards.

This has already been a great year for ActionCOACH, but there is a lot more to come. On August 19 and 20, ActionCOACH will be sponsoring the Business Excellence Forum, which will culminate with the Business Excellence Awards on August 20.

If you run a small or medium sized business, register your company for the Business Excellence Awards and see how you stack up against the competition.

A basic part of the ActionCOACH system is our belief in the power of testing and measuring. No business should ever undertake a project or campaign without setting up a process which will test and measure its success.

But, in our personal lives, we fail to test and measure all the time.

For instance, we go to sleep and assume we’ve gotten enough rest when we get up, even though we may still feel groggy. We got to the gym and assume we’ve gotten enough exercise to burn the necessary calories to stay in shape, but have no real data to prove it aside from how we feel.

In these situations, we are hoping our actions will lead to the desired outcome, but we are taking a leap of faith to get there, much like business owners that spend money on advertising but don’t test and measure that campaign’s effectiveness.

But, thanks in part to some incredible advances in technology and some enterprising entrepreneurs, the time has come for us to be able to test and measure virtually anything we do and use that data to design better program or situations for us to take advantage of.

Today there are alarm clocks that will measure your sleep patterns to give you a better idea how long you should sleep and when you should wake up. There are smartphone applications that will measure your spending habits and do your budgeting for you. There are even systems that allow you to measure your happiness at various times of the day or with various people in your life.

There are so many tools available that it may seem like overload, but these tools can help anybody make better usage of their resources and create a happier and more abundant life.

That is the goal when we test and measure with our clients and, no doubt, testing and measuring, with the help of the tools available these days, can positively influence you personally as well.

What's the difference between succeeding and not failing?

What is success? Is it just not failing?

It’s more than that, really. Not failing is really just breaking even, because not failing is just about the same as just scraping by.

How does that feel? Probably not the best…but at least you’re still in business.

The difference between succeeding and not failing ultimately comes down to no margin of uncertainty. As a small business owner, you decide which will happen.

When we fail at something, whatever it is, life is teaching us a lesson. What’s the difference between those who are successful in life and those who are not? The successful ones learn from their failures and follow those lessons, while the losers end up doing the exact same thing, or nothing at all, and most importantly, not learning from their mistakes when they failed.

In the business world, it’s exactly the same. Those who succeed will do things using what they’ve learned in all of their past failures. Those who don’t succeed but who just “not fail,” will  The trick is to try something out, and if it doesn’t work, understand why and then do it again with that information in mind to make it work for you.

What does it mean to you readers to succeed and to just not fail? What’s the difference between the two? Business owners: in your business, what carries you over from just “not failing” to success?

Melanie Oudin made it to the quarterfinals of the US Open.

Seventeen year old Melanie Oudin, that is, who upset some major players like Maria Sharapova and Nadia Petrova, in the US Open, which finished Monday. She was finally ousted from the tournament by No. 8 Caroline Wozniacki in the quarterfinals. But to focus on the negative would be silly – after all, at just 17, Oudin made it to where few 17-year-old players make it in one of the biggest tennis tournaments.

First, Oudin had nothing to lose. If she made it to the finals or even won the US Open, she’d be a phenomenal news story. But if not – well, she’s just a kid, and she can just go back to practicing and playing. But the fact that she ousted tough players like Sharapova and Petrova at least say something of her abilities. It wasn’t just luck – it was skill. Skills discovered thanks to coaches showing Oudin how to play her best.

Oudin, despite her loss, is still another example of a young, promising athlete being coached to success…comparable to promising businesses being coached to success.