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Your employees don’t want to work for a task-dispensing machine. You do not necessarily have to become best friends with your employees, but you don’t want to remain so distant as to seem unapproachable, either.

Getting to know your employees, and allowing them to get to know you, is a great way to encourage retention that will not cost you anything except a little of your time, and some common sense. Engendering a good rapport between all members of your company – whether it’s just you and one other person, or dozens or hundreds of people – will strengthen productivity and morale, and allow for a creative and welcoming environment.

How can you cultivate a rapport? The most obvious way is to respect your employees, and realize they are individual people with lives of their own. They have thoughts, opinions, and feelings, and they would prefer to share them in the workplace without fear of retaliation by management. Therefore, open lines of communication are essential (as discussed earlier in this book).

Let your employees participate in some of your company’s decision-making and policy writing processes. Give them ample opportunities to provide feedback, both face-to-face and in the form of surveys or questionnaires. Get to know them as people, and try to understand their wants and expectations of the job.

A good understanding of what attracts people to your company in the first place can also help you get to know your employees. Once you understand what they like about working for you, you can then work to enhance those qualities of your business and keep your employees satisfied.

Inform your employees of company changes whenever they are going to occur. Few people enjoy being surprised with unexpected changes that will affect the way they do their jobs, especially if the effect is negative. If you must implement changes that will impact your employees, keep them in the loop and let them know well in advance.

Finally, don’t forget that even the best employees get bored doing the same job all the time. Be willing to cross-train your employees in other areas, or introduce new business elements for them to work with. If you have multiple employees, encouraging intra-company job hopping will allow them to remain challenged enough to keep things interesting, while still providing the security of knowing they can go back to their former job duties if the new ones are not enjoyable.

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As with any professional relationship, it is important to be able to communicate effectively and feel comfortable doing so. However, first thing’s first: you need to be able to evaluate your lawyer’s work ethic and performance.

So now that you’ve hired a lawyer and you’re beginning to work together on your legal matters for your business, it’s a good time to step back to see just how effective their work has been. You will not see overnight results and should not expect to see improvements in every facet of your business; however, you should expect an improvement in organization and financial matters.

During the time the lawyer has been hired by you, what have the results been? Have you benefited by having properly drafted contracts to send out to clients? Have you been able to better keep track of your intellectual property and ensure that your company never infringes on the rights of others? Or, have you been able to draft an employee handbook with an up to date discrimination policy section? Essentially, what you want to see is that your lawyer has done what you needed. They have taken your needs and fulfilled them.

Anything less than satisfaction is grounds for searching for another lawyer.

So far, I’ve made it sound like all of the responsibility lies with the lawyer in order to make a successful working relationship. However, you play a major role in how their work turns out as well.

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As you understand from the previous chapter, there are grants available for businesses at the federal, state and local levels that can be used for a wide variety of purposes. Now we will take a more in-depth look at some of the places where you can begin your search for grants that will meet your specific needs.

The Single Best Reference For Finding Grants

This is the largest, and likely, the single-best reference on where to find grants at the federal and state levels of the grant pipeline.

This website is a portal to a database of all types of Federal programs that would benefit state and local governments, Indian tribes, public and private for-profit and non-profit groups, special groups and individuals. This database gives you information about specific grants, and then you can contact the specific office that is in charge of the grant to learn how to apply for it.

You can narrow your search by looking at their Assistance Programs listings page, or you can do a wide sweeping search of all the programs they have listed. Each topic, for example the Agricultural Research-Basic and Applied Research topic, has a corresponding program number that precedes it, which refers to the federal department that is in charge of the particular grant and the numerical order of grants. They will list the type of assistance offered, in this case project grants, and they will tell you how you can and cannot use the grant money. They will list the eligibility requirements, in this case a non-profit university or college or a non-profit research organization.

It can also give information about how to apply and what their evaluation procedure is for the applications and how they award the grant. You will also see what the deadlines are to apply, and how long it will take them to get back to you and let you know if you were awarded the grant or not.

Some grants also have requirements for after the time you have received a grant, which can include things like reports and audits. You can also learn how much money they usually award, and contacts to ask questions. They helpfully also might list related programs. These are other places where you will want to explore to see if your grant proposal will work for these other programs because they are similar to the one at which you are currently looking.

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Now that you know why you should market on the Internet, where to find a great online business that will work for you, and when to start your business and marketing campaigns, it is time to learn how you can go about doing it!

Free instant Internet business: Just add blog

You should now possess a basic understanding of the key ingredients for successful Internet businesses. You need a product or service, you need customers to target, and you need a website to reach them.

If you already have a website, you're one step ahead of the game. However, if you don't yet have your own business website, you can get one that is free, easy to maintain, and can be set up in about thirty minutes with a specialized website form called a blog.

What in the world is a blog? The word is short for "web log", and refers to a website that is set up like an online journal: you can "post" to your blog as often as you want, and you can add pictures, sound, and graphics to your posts. Blogs are one of the most interactive media forms available online— with the comments feature, visitors can leave notes on your blog to let you know what they like or dislike about your products or services, and what they would like to see in the future.

Blogs are not used only for business. In fact, there are millions of personal blogs that Internet users have created just to connect with other like-minded souls. The popularity of blogs has spawned a whole new subsection of the Internet that is commonly called the "blogosphere" and involves bloggers (people who blog) linking to other blogs, reading and commenting regularly on other blogs, and enjoying many visitors and commenters in return.

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Maybe you remember the old elementary school project "making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich." In this project, students are asked to create a set of instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and then the instructions are followed by another set of students. The results are sometimes hilarious, and often disastrous—not because of the inability to follow instructions, but because of the incomplete or vague instructions that they began with.

People who have been developing software for decades still wonder how to effectively articulate their needs and the end results that they want to see. Unfortunately, there is no magic bullet, no unbeatable approach that always produces great results. However, there are some tools and processes you can use to get the best possible articulation of your needs.

Interestingly, one way to get a good articulation of needs is to hire a software developer with good communication skills! A good software developer will ask questions, provide a series of releases of the software, and listen to the person who's buying the software and make adjustments as new information flows in. Providers and users may well know their needs intuitively, but they will often be at a loss when asked to articulate those needs clearly and specifically. Good software developers know this and make adjustments for it.

Some very small projects can have their needs articulated verbally. If you want an Excel macro that will copy data from one spreadsheet to another, it isn't generally necessary to go through all of the steps we are about to outline. Projects that are more complex than that—particularly when combined with the vagaries of outsourcing the development process to someone who isn't working just down the hall—need a more formal approach.

Just as builders have developed standards for blueprints, years of software development processes have stimulated the evolution of an entire set of documents for articulating software development needs. We will discuss those documents, and provide some tips on how to create them most effectively.