Running a home business is the ideal path for some entrepreneurs who just want to have more flexibility in their lives. But, in the initial stages money can be tight so how do you ensure that you have a lean, mean fighting machine?

Make Your Home More Energy Efficient – Lag your boiler and insulate your loft. It is actually frightening how much heat is lost through the roof. Buy some thick curtains and close them when the sun goes down. Many local councils offer grants to make your home more energy efficient. Why not give them a call today?

Buy energy saving bulbs & turn the thermostat down by just one degree. Just doing this could save you over a hundred dollars a year. Always turn the light off when you leave the room and never leave appliances on stand by.

Shop around for the best utility suppliers as some offer great deal if you buy all your energy from one place.

Cut Costs on Your Office Supplies – buy basic items in bulk and you could save quiet a bit of money. Ordering your stationary online and receiving credit could also aid your cash flow.

Use price comparison sites when replacing old equipment and look for the most energy efficient models. Printers use a lot of ink so buy one that you can buy cheap generic ink cartridges for.

Save Money on Your Phone Bill – the market for telecommunications has never been so competitive and you could save a bit of money by just changing your supplier. If you make a lot of national calls pay a little extra every month, and get all your local and national calls free.

Use companies like Skype to make and receive free calls. They provide this service by allowing you make calls through your internet connection rather than more traditional means.

Send and receive faxes via your computer rather then printing them out and using an old fashioned fax machine. Better still do all your communication via email!

Most of the tips above are very quick and easy to implement for most home businesses. Some could start saving you money straight away whilst others reduce costs over the longer term and make your business a lean mean fighting machine!

If you dig deep enough into any industry, businesses with best practices in employee retention and development are characteristically the most competitive and most profitable. So why do those organizations who struggle to compete find it so difficult?

People Leave Bosses, Not Companies: According to extensive research from the authors of “First, Break All The Rules”, employees do not leave primarily for monetary reasons as a motivation. They leave their bosses. That can really sting for any who have been bosses with employees who left them.

To discover the real problem, we have to ask the question, “why exactly do they leave?” The bad news is it’s a matter of poor hiring practices from the top-down, and the bosses are not being developed to the next level of their own individual improvement. The good news is there are solutions for each.

Organizational Capacity and Competitive Edge How important is all this really? According to the late, great business guru Peter Drucker, “Of all the decisions an executive makes, none is as important as the decision about people because they determine the performance capacity of the organization.”

Assuming this to be true then decisions about people should be treated as the priority they really are, and nothing less.

Is Top Talent The Priority It Should Be For You? If we were to do a post-moterm on any company, we would find that hiring and development practices determine retention, and retention determines competitive edge. For the most part, it’s just that simple. Naturally, there are other factors to be considered, but these are the real issues.

Since these best practices begin with management, and most importantly, leadership, let’s ask the tough questions for your organization: 1. Have your managers been assessed for their own strengths and weaknesses? Are they being developed by anyone inside or outside of the organization? If you asked what they would do differently over the past year, would they have a clear answer – one that would pass muster with say a Jack Welch? 2. How does your current management identify and recruit top talent? How do they develop the talent they currently have? Is this a symptom of what they’ve been shown from their own leadership?

Pulling It All Together For Profitability: Using assessments for both existing employees to foster development and new hires for selection has become a very practical means to achieve the best decisions for management priorities which include hiring, development which leads to greater retention, business growth, and ultimately, profitability.

Determining the “right fit” for the job, the corporate culture, and even with the employee-boss connection is critical for success.

The most important example of something to be measured for leaders, management and even for certain types of new hires is well communicated by Jack Welch, Chairman of General Electric, “A leader’s intelligence has to have a strong emotional component. He has to have high levels of self-awareness, maturity and self-control. She must be able to withstand the heat, handle setbacks and when those lucky moments arise, enjoy success with equal parts of joy and humility. No doubt emotional intelligence is more rare than book smarts, but my experience says that it is actually more important in the making of a leader. You just can’t ignore it.”

In my experience of assisting clients with hiring decisions, I typically find emotional intelligence to be one of the greatest determining factors for hiring decisions. With it, you can make the job-employee-boss connection with highly productive results.