Thursday, February 9, 2017

How To Balance Tasks As A Working Business Owner


Mike KappelContributor
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
ENTREPRENEURS  617 views

How To Balance Tasks As A Working Business Owner

As a small business owner, you’re not afraid to get your hands dirty when it comes to day-to-day operations. You need to split the time you spend working in your business vs. on your business in order to grow. Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.
As a small business owner, you’re used to doing it all. You built your business from the ground up. And, every day your business continues because of the things you do and the choices you make.
It’s crucial to work on your business. But, many entrepreneurs don’t spend much time on long-term goals and strategic planning. In fact, the average small business owner spends 68.1% of the time working in the company, taking care of daily tasks. Only 31.9% of the time is spent working on growing their business.
If you’re like many entrepreneurs, you take pride in the work you put into your business. But eventually, you need to step out of the day-to-day grind and steer your business in the direction you want it to go. As a business owner for over thirty years, I can offer you some tips on how to handle working “on” versus working “in” your business.

Learning to delegate

When I had to focus “on” my business instead of “in” my business, I found the time I needed by delegating tasks. To give the future of your company attention, you need to learn how to pass certain tasks onto others.
I know firsthand that it can be hard to delegate. One of my first companies, Top Echelon Network, is a recruiting network for executive recruiters. In its early years, I thought I was the only person who could code resumes correctly. But, the business was ready to grow. I needed time to make sales calls and plan new service options.
I had an enthusiastic employee who completed work faster than I could hand it out. I took a chance and was humbled when she easily took on the time-consuming task. Eventually, she coded and classified resumes better and faster than I ever did!
Bottom line: The task was done quickly and accurately, and I had more time to build the business.
As difficult as it is, delegating tasks lets you pin down issues and find opportunities. The truth is that one person doesn’t have all the skills and time necessary to keep the engine of a business running. You need to find people with the right skills, knowledge, and ambition to help you.

Hiring talent

To delegate tasks, you need to hire employees. When it comes to growing a business, quality often trumps quantity. Hiring the right people can make all the difference in taking your company to the next level.

For my business, Patriot Software, I hire the brightest people I can for every area of the company. Whether it’s a software developer, customer service, or marketing position, every candidate goes through a comprehensive screening process. After each employee is hired, I make sure they are trained and integrated into the company.
A strong onboarding system gives me more time to work on the business in the long run. I trust my employees to accomplish tasks at my company’s standards.
When you give your employees the power to make decisions, you do not have to micro-manage. I’m not a textbook-trained manager. And, I’m definitely not a micro-manager. I give my employees the tools they need to complete the job, and I let them do it.
That’s not to say I’m an absent employer. I have an open door policy. If an employee has a question, I’m there to answer it. But, for the most part, I let my employees handle the tasks that keep the gears of the business moving. When it comes to your small business, try to be a leader instead of another employee. If you don’t hire talent, you have to constantly spend your time overseeing employees instead of growing your business.

Establish processes

As a working business owner, you need to be in control of operations. But, you also must give yourself time to work on your business, rather than always working in it.
By setting up effective processes, your employees can complete tasks for you. Give your employees clear direction on your business’s methods and expectations. Tell them why the tasks they perform are important and what you expect to see when they are complete.
Establishing a process is not enough. Make sure employees are trained on the processes and prepared to handle tasks. Provide the resources that your employees need to get the job done right.
Check the progress of your employees regularly. You will know if your processes are working, and your employees will see how well they are performing.
An employee review system makes it easy to see who can make improvements and who is ready to advance. Employers should do performance reviews every six months.

Encourage growth

No matter how good you are at what you do, you’re not going to excel at everything. Your employees can be one of your best assets. Encouraging learning in the workplace adds skills and knowledge to your business. The more tasks employees do well, the more your business can offer customers.

Make learning opportunities available to employees. Hold training sessions or send employees to outside classes. Offer incentives to employees, like promotions and higher wages.

Evaluate Strengths and Weaknesses of Your Company

When it comes to working on versus working in your business, use your time to look at every aspect of your company. By examining issues and opportunities, you can make decisions that help your business grow.

Troubleshoot problems

Look for weak areas as you work on your business. Whether it’s an inefficient production method or a cost that you don’t need, pinpointing smaller issues will make your business run better as a whole.
As you troubleshoot problems, remember that you do not have to solve them all on your own. Often, your employees can fix issues. Encourage employees to keep an eye out for problems and come up with solutions.
Other times, you might need to call an expert with specialized skills or knowledge. For example, you might notice you are having cash flow management issues, but you’re not sure how to fix them. Ask an accountant to review your books and come up with a solution.

Look ahead

As a small business owner, you’re the person in charge: the “big cheese.” Your employees and your business will go in the direction you point them. So, it’s your job to cast a vision for your company.
Your entrepreneurial spirit can make you want to leap before you look. Trust me, in my earlier years as a business owner, I was known to do the same. But to push your business forward, you need a plan.
See the big picture of your business. Think about where you want it to go and what you want to accomplish. Then, make a solid plan to get there. Strategize concrete goals in your small business plan. Set up a system for tracking progress and reaching small business milestones.
Having a clear vision of your company’s future is crucial for the working business owner. You’re in the driver’s seat. Would you rather be steering the way on smooth pavement or down a mountain in a snow storm? The more you prepare plans, the more likely you will see your vision through.

Be a leader and host

To grow your business, you need to be a good leader and a good host. Your business will expand because of the people you come into contact with. The customers, lenders, employees, and vendors you meet all affect your business.
As a strong leader, your employees will have faith in you and feel comfortable coming to you with issues. And, lenders will have faith in your ability to lead the business into new stages.
As a working business owner, you must also be an inviting host. Help customers and make them feel appreciated when they buy from your business. Be kind and professional when dealing with your vendors. The more people want to work with you, the healthier your business will be.
Fostering good relationships turns big rewards for a small business. For example, vendors might give you better purchasing terms. Lenders might give you lower interest rates. And, customers might recommend your business to others, bringing in more sales. All these scenarios are possible by building trust with the people connected to your business.

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Portuguese-based creole languages



Portuguese-based creole languages

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  (Redirected from Portuguese-based creole)
Portuguese creoles are creole languages which have Portuguese as the lexifier language.

Origins[edit]

Portuguese overseas exploration in the 15th and 16th centuries led to the establishment of a Portuguese Empire with trading posts, forts and colonies in Africa, Asia and the Americas. Contact between the Portuguese language and native languages gave rise to many Portuguese-based pidgins, used as linguas francas throughout the Portuguese sphere of influence. In time, many of these pidgins were nativized becoming new stable creole languages.
As is the rule in most creoles, the lexicon of these languages can be traced to the parent languages, usually with predominance of Portuguese; while the grammar is mostly original and unique to each creole with little resemblance to the syntax of Portuguese or the substrate language.
These creoles are (or were) spoken mostly by communities of descendants of Portuguese, natives, and sometimes other peoples from the Portuguese colonial empire.
Until recently creoles were considered "degenerate" dialects of Portuguese unworthy of attention. As a consequence, there is little documentation on the details of their formation. Since the 20th century, increased study of creoles by linguists led to several theories being advanced. According to the monogenetic theory of pidgins assumes that some type of pidgin language, dubbed West African Pidgin Portuguese, based on Portuguese was spoken from the 15th to 18th centuries in the forts established by the Portuguese on the West African coast. This variety was the starting point of all the pidgin and creole languages. This would explain to some extent why Portuguese lexical items can be found in many creoles, but more importantly, it would account for the numerous grammatical similarities shared by such languages, such as the preposition na, meaning "in" and/or "on", which would come from the Portuguese contraction na meaning "in the" (feminine singular).

Origin of the name[edit]

See also: Creole peoples
The Portuguese word for "creole" is crioulo, which derives from the verb criar ("to raise", "to bring up") and a suffix -oulo of debated origin. Originally the word was used to distinguish the members of any ethnic group who were born and raised in the colonies from those who were born in their homeland. So in Africa it was often applied to locally born people of (wholly or partly) Portuguese descent, as opposed to those born in Portugal; whereas in Brazil it was also used to distinguish locally born black people of African descent from those who had been brought from Africa as slaves.
In time, however, this generic sense was lost, and the word crioulo or its derivatives (like "Creole" and its equivalents in other languages) became the name of several specific Upper Guinean communities and their languages: the Guinean people and their Kriol language, Cape Verdean people and their Kriolu language, all of which still today with very vigorous use suppressing the importance of official standard Portuguese.

Concise list[edit]

Africa[edit]

Upper Guinea[edit]

The oldest Portuguese-based creole are the so-called Crioulos of Upper Guinea, born around the Portuguese settlements along the northwest coast of Africa. Portuguese Creoles are the mother tongue of most people in Cape Verde. In Guinea-Bissau, the creole is used as lingua franca among people speaking different languages, is becoming the mother tongue of a growing population. They consist of two languages:

Gulf of Guinea[edit]

Another group of Creoles is spoken in the Gulf of Guinea, in São Tomé and Príncipe and Equatorial Guinea. Many other Portuguese creoles probably existed[citation needed] in the former Portuguese feitorias in the Gulf of Guinea, but also in the Congo region.

Portuguese pidgins[edit]

Portuguese pidgins still exist in Angola and Mozambique, uncreolized. A Portuguese pidgin, known as Pequeno Português, is still used as lingua franca between people speaking different languages.

South Asia[edit]

India[edit]

See also: Indo-Portuguese creoles
The numerous Portuguese outposts in India and Sri Lanka gave rise to many Portuguese-based creole languages, of which only a few have survived to the present. The largest group were the Norteiro languages, spoken by the Norteiro people, the Christian Indo-Portuguese in the North Konkan. Those communities were centered on Baçaim, modern Vasai, which was then called the “Northern Court of Portuguese India” (in opposition to the "Southern Court" at Goa). The creole languages spoken in Baçaim, Salsete, Thana, Chevai, Mahim, Tecelaria, Dadar, Parel, Cavel, Bandora (modern Bandra), Gorai, Morol, Andheri, Versova, Malvan, Manori, Mazagão, and Chaul are now extinct. The only surviving Norteiro creoles are:
These surviving Norteiro creoles have suffered drastic changes in the last decades. Standard Portuguese re-influenced the creole of Daman in the mid-20th century.
The Creoles of the Coast of Coromandel, such as of Meliapor, Madras, Tuticorin, Cuddalore, Karikal, Pondicheri, Tranquebar, Manapar, and Negapatam, were already extinct by the 19th century. Their speakers (mostly the people of mixed Portuguese-Indian ancestry, known locally as Topasses) switched to English after the British takeover.
Most of the creoles of the Coast of Malabar, namely those of Cananor, Tellicherry, Mahé, Cochin (modern Kerala), and Quilon) had become extinct by the 19th century. In Cananor and Tellicherry, some elderly people still spoke some creole in the 1980s. The only creole that is still spoken (by a few Christian families only) is
Christians, even in Calcutta, used Portuguese until 1811. A Portuguese Creole was still spoken in the early 20th century. Portuguese creoles were spoken in Bengal, such as at Balasore, Pipli, Chandernagore, Chittagong, Midnapore and Hugli.

Sri Lanka[edit]

Significant Portuguese-based creole flourished among the so-called Burgher and Kaffir communities of Sri Lanka:
In the past, Portuguese creoles were also spoken in Burma and Bangladesh.

Southeast Asia[edit]

Southeast Asia Portuguese creoles: Papiá Kristang of Malaysia (1) and Macaista Chapado of Macao, SAR (2).
The earliest Portuguese creole in the region probably arose in the 16th century in Malacca, Malaysia, as well as in the Moluccas. After the takeover of those places by the Dutch in the 17th century, many creole-speaking slaves were taken to other places in Indonesia and South Africa, leading to several creoles that survived until recent times:
The Malacca creole also had an influence on the creole of Macau (see below).
The Portuguese were present in the island of Flores, Indonesia since the 16th century, mainly in Larantuka and Sikka; but the local creole language, if any, has not survived.
Other Portuguese-based creoles were once spoken in Thailand (In KudeeJeen and Conception) and Bayingy in Burma.

Macau[edit]

The Portuguese language was present in its colony, Macau, since the mid-16th century. A Portuguese creole, Patua, developed there, first by interaction with the local Cantonese people, and later modified by influx of refugees from the Dutch takeover of Portuguese colonies in Indonesia.

Americas[edit]

The position regarding Papiamento (spoken in Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao in the Caribbean) is not consensual. Some authors consider it Portuguese-based Creole, other authors consider it a Spanish-based Creole, while others consider it as an Iberian-based. Other authors see Papiamento as an initially Portuguese-based but which underwent significative Spanish influence.
There is no consensus regarding the position Saramaccan, with some scholars classifying it as Portuguese Creole with an English relexification. Saramaccan may be an English Creole with Portuguese words, since structurally (morphology and syntax) it is related to Surinamese Creoles (Sranan, Ndyuka and Jamaican Maroon), despite the heavy percentage of Portuguese origin words. Other English creoles languages of Suriname, such as the Paramaccan or the Kwinti, have also Portuguese influences[citation needed].
Although sometimes classified as a creole, the Cupópia language from the Quilombo do Cafundó, at Salto de Pirapora, São Paulo,[3] is better classified as a Portuguese variety since it is structurally similar to Portuguese, in spite of having a large number of Bantu words in its lexicon. For languages with this characteristics, H. H. do Couto has forged the designation of Anticreole[4] which would be the inverse of a Creole language, as they are seen by the non-European input theories (i.e.: Creoles = African languages grammar + European languages lexicon; Anticreoles = European languages grammar + African languages lexicon).
Portuguese-based creoles existed in Brazil. There is a Portuguese dialect in Helvécia, South of Bahia that presents signs of an earlier decreolization. Ancient Portuguese creoles originating from Africa are still preserved in the ritual songs of the Afro-Brazilian animist religions (Candomblé)[citation needed].
It has been conjectured that vernacular of Brazil (not the official and standard Brazilian Portuguese) resulted from decreolization of a creole based on Portuguese and native languages; but this is not a widely accepted view. Vernacular Brazilian Portuguese is continuous with European Portuguese, and in fact quite conservative in some aspects.[5] Academic specialists affirm the Brazilian linguistic phenomena are the "nativização", nativization/nativism of a most radically romanic form. The phenomena in Brazilian Portuguese are Classic Latin and Old Portuguese heritage. Not a creole form, but the radical romanic form.[5] Regardless of borrowings and changes, it must be kept in mind that Brazilian Portuguese is not a Portuguese creole, since both grammar and vocabulary remain real Portuguese. Some authors, like Parkvall,[6] classify it as a Semicreole in the concept defined by Holm:[7] a Semicreole is a language that has undergone “partial restructuring, producing varieties which were never fully pidginized and which preserve a substantial part of their lexifier’s structure (...) while showing a noticeable degree of restructuring”.

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. Jump up^ Forro was a declaration of freedom of a specific slave used in Portugal and its colonies. These were the most wished documents for the enslaved population. These freeded slaves developed and stabilized a creole.
  2. Jump up^ Sandra Luísa Rodrigues Madeira, "Towards an Annotated Bibliography of Restructured Portuguese in Africa", Faculdade de Letras, Universidade de Coimbra, 2008.
  3. Jump up^ Em Cafundó, esforço para salvar identidade. São Paulo dos Campos de Piratininga, SP: O Estado de S. Paulo, 24 December 2006, p. A8.
  4. Jump up^ Hildo Honório do Couto, "Anticrioulo: manifestação lingüística de resistência cultural", 2002.
  5. ^ Jump up to:a b "Origens do português brasileiro".
  6. Jump up^ Mikael Parkvall, "The alleged creole past of Brazilian Vernacular Portuguese", in d' Andrade, Pereria & Mota, 1999, Crioulos de Base Portuguesa, p. 223.
  7. Jump up^ Holm, J., "American Black English and Afrikaans: two Germanic semicreoles", 1991.

External links[edit]

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