Daily Biz Solutions

By Mary White, DailyBizSolutions Editor

As a busy entrepreneur, finding work-life balance can certainly be a challenging. It’s even difficult to juggle meal planning and grocery shopping with all of the many things that you have to keep track of on a daily basis. Hormel’s EZ  Cook application is a great tool for busy business owners like you! It certainly helped me.

Meal Planning and Shopping Challenges

Have you ever gone to the grocery store to pick up the items you need to prepare your favorite recipe only to get home and find that you don’t have everything you need? Or, do you ever stumble across a great deal on a certain cut of meat while you’re in the supermarket only to realize that you don’t know what else you might need to purchase to turn it in to a tasty meal?

Buying the items that you need to prepare a complete meal shouldn’t be difficult, yet it’s not uncommon to spend quite a bit of time and money in the supermarket only to get home and discover that you still don’t have everything you need to prepare a tasty, healthful meal for your family.

Wouldn’t shopping be easier if you could access all of the information you need to purchase everything you need to prepare a complete meal while you are actually in the supermarket? With a Smartphone and the Hormel EZ Cook application, you can do just that!

About Hormel EZCook

The next time you’re shopping for meat in the supermarket, check to see what varieties of Hormel Always Tender ® meat items the grocer has on hand. No matter what cuts from the product line you’d like to try, you don’t have to wonder about how to prepare it or what else you need to shop for if you if you use the EZ Cook application.

Simply access the application directly from the browser of your Smart Phone and enter the EZ Cook code from the meat package. Alternately, you can use the drop down menu to select the product you are interested in from the drop down menu. When you do that, you’ll find that all of your concerns about what to do to transform the Always Tender product you want to purchase into a complete meal for your family.

You’ll find great recipes for the item you choose that includes step-by-step instructions, plus nutritional information, a detailed shopping list and a photograph of what the finished meal will look like. You can decide what you want to prepare and add any necessary items from the shopping list while you are in the store. What could be easier than that?

Try Something New with EZ Cook

You’ll likely find that you’re brave enough to try out cuts of meat that you wouldn’t ordinarily purchase when you use this application. For example, I have seen ground pork in the store many times, but never knew what to do with it. Armed with the recipe for French Onion Patty Melts that I could access from my phone, I was confident that I could successfully prepare a meal with this product. It was a big hit in my house, and I never would have attempted it without EZ Cook.

Disclosure

I received a gift card and coupons from Hormel Foods to cover the cost of groceries for my EZ Cook inspired meal, and I am entered in a drawing for writing this post.

Guest post from: Winston Stewart

The best fashion show on TV is “What Not To Wear” I don’t claim to be a stylish dresser, but some of the clothing that people wear is unfortunate. One episode featured a girl that had slippers she wore out to the store and slippers that she wore inside her home. I couldn’t understand why someone would wear slippers to go out.

Fashion experts Stacy London and Clinton Kelly are able to transform the stylishly challenged. It’s amazing to see the difference in how someone looks with the advice given. The experts give the individual chosen for a clothing intervention advice on what styles, fabrics and cuts to look for and the show sends them shopping with a budget. They are allowed to choos! e clothing for themselves and later Stacy and Clinton will step in and help them find items that are better suited to their body and frame.

Usually the individual offers some resistance; however, they are generally swayed to dress themselves better. I have found myself choosing different styles that are better suited to my body and nicer clothing than I used to.

I watch this show o directstartv with my DVR system. This allows me to record all of the episodes and have a marathon. We sit around watching the show eating popcorn and trying not to be too judgmental.

Whether your business operates only online or you just decided to add a new perspective for your business, it is very important to deal with the online side of the things right. In this matter, you might find the tips presented in the next lines very useful to you.

Is Selling Online The Right Solution?

The first and most important question you need to ask yourself before actually implementing an online solution for your business is to balance if the investment is worth the money. It is very important to know the viability of it and find out if it is appropriate for the services you offer or products you sell.

As a concrete example, selling heavy machinery online will require you to take into consideration the total cost for postage and deliveries. Offering your services online might sometimes be a hard process, mainly because the existence of certain limits related to the level of customers service you can provide.

Furthermore, you might realise that online selling is just not right for boosting your business and does not have the same effects as other means of promoting your company. Therefore, the cost of your website should be as small as possible. You should avoid spending too much for something that does not bring you the profit you expected.

Make Interesting Product Descriptions

Writing some catchy descriptions for the products offered by your business will make you stand out from your competition. Customers will always appreciate creativity and uniqueness applied to your website.

Most of the online retailers fail to produce well shaped and captivating descriptions for their products and this is the main reason why customers do not show much interest in the services offered by them. As a business owner, you should always be aware that high quality images are not the only necessary factor for your website.

One wise thing to do is to search for reviews of your products on famous online websites, such as YouTube, and to embed your favorite one into your page. This is because most of the customers are always keen on watching reviews, especially video ones, for a great number of products.

Social Media Integration

A good idea when it comes to the good development of the website for your company is to include links to social networks accounts such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. Being available to these platforms is very important because you will be able to have a direct contact with your customers and answer the questions they might have for you. This is also a sign that you care about them and people will always appreciate this.

Furthermore, you could also implement a live chat function, in order to make things even more interactive. As a starting point, you will only need a bunch of employees who are willing to work at interacting with customers and handle the responses you receive from them, such as emails.

Avoid Getting a Messy Website

It is very important for your company to always keep the aspect of your website as clean as possible. Furthermore, you should be aware that there are always bad people, involved with the competition or not, who will post negative comments on your website, even if they are completely unjustified. In this matter, it is very important to have someone handle the post of the users or implement a system that requires an admin to check everything before being actually posted on the website.

If customers see what they should not see, they will tend to change the good impression they had about your company.

 

Guest Post by Al Weatherhead

With the national unemployment rate stubbornly hovering at 9% and in some parts of the country approaching double digits, and the media’s constant proclamations of gloom and doom, it might seem like we’re making little progress on the road to economic recovery.  However, I believe that seeming lack of progress is an illusion – one akin to driving 80 miles an hour across Nebraska and thinking you’re not getting anywhere because your eyes are fixed on the horizon.

Nevertheless, politicians, business leaders and informed citizens can hurry the process along and put America back at the top of its economic game by understanding the value of:

Time and Patience
Let’s start by looking at the flip side of the equation: if, say, approximately 9 percent are unemployed, that means that 91% of the workforce does have a job, so certainly we are progressing to better economic times. What we need to understand is that it’s going to take time and patience to see things through to our national recovery.

It’s true that historically most recessions have lasted only an average of eleven months, and that this recovery has been extremely drawn out and shallow.  Nonetheless, business investment has stabilized and is ever increasing. This means that eventually businesses will start growing and hiring again.

Now I know this may be scant solace to an individual who’s been out of work and looking for a job a long time.  But as the saying goes, “time heals all wounds…”

Understanding and using time to overcome life’s challenges is a topic I cover extensively in my book, THE POWER OF ADVERSITY: Tough Times Can Make You Stronger, Wiser, and Better. Transforming time from an adversary into an ally has helped me develop the positive mindset to be able to dust myself off from my own early business failures and build my company, Weatherchem, into the leader in my industry.

Bottom line, the American economy is multi-faceted, robust and resilient.  Nothing has ever been able to keep it down for long, and nothing ever will, if we are patient and allow our economy the time to heal itself through the virtues of the free-market system and:

Deregulation
It’s no secret that businesses across the country are drowning in a Sargasso Sea of onerous state and federal regulations.  As a successful industrialist, I know from personal experience that business succeeds when government (no matter how well meaning) gets out of the way and lets American ingenuity go to work.

The government is responsible for the military and foreign relations. In a capitalist democracy, government should not be involved with what we in the private sector do, which is managing time to manage money. (As I further explain in my book, whether you’re in a corner office… on the factory floor… at a computer in a cube… or perusing the Help Wanted listings, your management of your time will directly relate to your mastery of the power of adversity.)

While we’re on the subject of government’s role in our lives, I also believe we must banish “Too Big to Fail” from our vocabularies, stop the bailouts and if necessary endure the short term pain of scattered industry failures in order to come back leaner, meaner and stronger than ever.

In tough times like these, the seeming allure of the cosseting “Nanny-State” can indeed appear seductive.  But as the 19th Century French Economist Claude Frédéric Bastiat said,  “Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone.”

Nannies are for children – not free men and women who want to prosper in the American way by rolling up their sleeves, working hard and keeping what they earn through:

Entrepreneurship
You needn’t work for yourself – or even be working at all – to be an entrepreneur.  All it takes is the desire to be innovative and creative in tackling a problem. The lifeblood of creative entrepreneurship is collaborative communication with those around you: your colleagues, employees, customers, friends and family.

In my book I make the point that all forms of adversity build walls that you must tear down through communication with others.  This is especially true for economic adversity.  It is only through the sharing of ideas, hopes and fears – by talking with each other as opposed to at each other – that we as a nation and individually will maintain or regain prosperity.

If you’re a business owner or executive and your business is currently suffering, walk around and talk to all your employees. Ask: How can we improve this place? What’s wrong here? Discover what’s running through their minds, and be sure to let them know what you’re thinking, and that you want their help because you’re all in the same boat.

You also should collaboratively communicate with your customers.  Chances are many of your customers are going through the same economic turmoil. Your timely customer service visit, telephone call or email might be just the ticket to let your customers know how much they mean to you and get them thinking they would be better off reducing – or eliminating – the business they do with some other company, as opposed to yours.

If you’re an employee, you can put the entrepreneurial mindset to work by talking to your colleagues in order to spark and nurture ideas. If you’re currently looking for work, demonstrate entrepreneurial creative enterprise by reaching out to friends and family to discover new opportunities – perhaps through volunteerism — to rejoin the workforce.

I was on a radio program the other day when a call came in from a woman who had immigrated to United States and become a citizen. Her voice was bursting with pride to be here and to be contemplating her bright future.

Despite all the talk about the competitiveness of the global economy, the fact remains that for almost every rational human being on the planet, America remains the envy of the world and the land of opportunity. This has been true in the past, is true today, and will be true in the future – if we remain patient, independent and creatively entrepreneurial in pursuit of the American Dream.

About the Author
Al Weatherhead is the author of The Power Of Adversity and chairman and CEO of Weatherchem, a private manufacturer of plastic closures for food, spice, pharmaceutical and nutraceutical products.  Please visit www.powerofadversity.net or www.weatherchem.com for more information.