Business and Money Tips

(Read also 'Move over PIC, now it's Training Credit' at here ) Following my over 9 articles on PIC (read one of them here ), these are the 2 changes to PIC from 2015 onwards.  Note: there is this course on PIC at here .  1.  PIC Bonus of up to $15,000 will cease to exist    This means that the last financial year to get your PIC bonus is 2014 .  What this means is that in this year of 2015, you can still get PIC Bonus for your PIC claims made in 2012 to 2014.  Note: the PIC Bonus is an automatic scheme, i.e., you don't need to apply .  The IRAS will automatically give you the PIC bonus as long as your PIC claims is $5,000 or more.  The PIC Bonus is another 100% of the PIC Claims that you made, on top of the 60% cash that you get. The cap is $15K for the years 2012 to 2014. 2.  Three Employees Requirement every month.   Companies need to have 3 CPF employees every month in the quarter that they're submitting.  Before 2015, companies only need to have 3

Talk about Productivity and many equate it to be 'better, faster and cheaper'.  Some think of getting new and advanced machines to replace manpower, others say productivity is about getting the government's Productivity and Innovation Credit (PIC) money to improve productivity.  (To read more on the latest curbs and abuse of PIC, click here ). Many trainers advocate training your staff while at Asia Trainers we opined that training bosses and managers are more important than training staff.  To the businessman, productivity is about E ver More with Ever Less.  This means getting more output with ever lesser input.  This must be the most apt definition and I shall use this in this article.  To have more output is easy, just lower your selling price and your sales would increase and you will have a quantum leap in productivity.  But without profit margins there is no productivity.  Thus the element of profit or residual value is important.   But how we distribute thi

Yes, they say Singaporeans are not hungry and that is why they lost jobs to the foreigners.  The truth is that Singaporeans are hard-working, but not as driven as compared to our neighbours. Many do not take much initiative and always wait for things to happen. They also dare not take risk and consider job security more important than doing a good job. On top of that, they want good pay and desire to go home punctually. No wonder many employers prefer to hire foreigners! Whether you are highly educated, highly skilled or inexperienced, you know that unless your employees are driven, your company will NOT achieve much and your company will lose out to competitors in due course.  This course will inspire your team to do more, teach them the 5 Ways to Be Hungry without Going Hungry, and most importantly, get them to work hard as a team. If you do not send your staff to this course, you are helping your competitors to be better than you.  This course qualifies for PIC (Productiv

If you too want your sales team to perform, not just conform, you need to inspire them to greater heights.  But first you must ensure that they possess these 9 hard skills: How to Look for New Customers without spending on expensive advertising Getting repeat business from customers Increasing the average spending of customers Converting all sales objections into buying impetus How to Sell the Impossible so as to sell ice to the Eskimos How to Present your product and service so that your product features make sense for the buyer Getting past gate keepers and reaching decision makers effortlessly Service from the heart and how to go the extra mile to serve customers Asking questions so as to elicit information from buyers and lead them to a sale On top of that, your salespeople must also possess these 3 soft skills: How to set their own sales targets and motivate themselves to work towards their own goals Persuasion, Influence and Negoti

You'll be surprised if you have a heart-to-heart talk with the people that you sent for  training .  "Tell me what have you learnt."  They will say, "Nothing much, I learnt those strategies that we may have taken for granted and not used much".  Is this their real answer? What do people really learnt from training?  You'll be shocked to discover the truths: there are 5 main things that people learnt but dare not tell you: They learnt about themselves: their weaknesses, strengths and most importantly, their potential.   Like people learnt that they can do magic: cut a piece of wood with paper.  Many people are frightened with this new discovery: they are afraid that now that they know they can do much more, will they be worked to death to implement the strategies learnt? They learnt about the best practises  that may not be practised in their organization, like having half-yearly dialogue style performance appraisal.  Some are afraid of telling this to

My previous article on how to make money on training drew a response from one person who commented that 'Isn't making money from training the norm?"  I replied him, "No".  From our experience in training since 1996, most people lose money on training.  In fact many companies do training because the training fee is subsidised by the government's PIC scheme .  They just want to 'take advantage of government's money'.  Few of them know how to apply the benefits of training (click here for the 7 ways to apply benefits), left alone make money on training.  One may attribute this to the high stress that companies people have (unless they know how to reduce stress ).  There are 5 reasons for this: Most companies do not consider training as an investment but just an expense .  Since they didn't expect to have any return, they are very happy to have spent money on training.  This is the same as some companies considering marketing as an expen

In response to an earlier article  stating that training is one of the 5 costs that cannot be cut, 3 persons asked me to elaborate how we can ensure that our training is profitable.  There are 3 simple steps to make money from training: Know what you want to learn .  Like I want to learn how to negotiate successfully, so I source for such a training program .  Learn with an objective in mind . When I attend the course on negotiation, I am not interested to learn everything about negotiation, I just want to apply negotiation to my work situation n ow .  Assuming I am a buyer, I want to learn how to get a good deal from supplier without being fooled by them Apply the learning within the next 3 days .  Studies show that unless you apply what you learn within the next 3 days, you will not apply the learning at all.  In fact, people lose money on training in one of these 5 ways , application is the main reason. To ensure that your training is profitable, you have to compare 2 thing

Because of the tight labour policies adopted by the government since 2011, every organization, from government agencies to MNCs, from small enterprises to professional firms, from F & B establishments to manufacturing, are facing labour shortage.  This has brought about the following 5 common frustrations: Overworked staff , leading to fewer people wanting to join your industry and making new people leaving faster than before. Such outcomes only aggravate the situation and leave the overworked staff even more overworked Giving Up Opportunities to Expand Business .  Business opportunities are plentiful, but there is simply no one to do the work.  Not to talk about overseas expansions, even expanding from Payer Lebar to Potong Pasir poses logistics problems for companies Customer Service Compromised .  Unfortunately customers still expect the same level of service as before, even when there are fewer people doing the work.  Many a times managers and even bosses have to roll up

It is common knowledge that nothing happens without a reason.  There are always causes and conditions and they in turn will produce effects, which will in turn become causes and effects and this goes on.  They called this Dependent Origination , which simply means everything originates from something (read here for the details).   As explained in our previous article on sales, you can use this understanding to boost your effectiveness quickly.   Today I will talk about Training: what causes people to do training and what are the effects of training.  First training is defined as any learning that is more structured, less informal and not unconscious .  So if you unconsciously learn how to cook better or you hear from friends how to do a better Facebook posting, that is not strictly training as it is called Self Learning .  Therefore training is always coming from somewhere outside you , and the driver of training is usually from someone other than yourself.  For example, if

Everyone knows the PIC ( Productivity and Innovation Credit ) scheme, which started in 2010, will end in 2017.  You can read our 7 blogs on this PIC by searching for 'PIC' at our blog ( Successful Sales Strategies is on 11 Sep 2014)  Today I will talk about 5 finer points of PIC that most people may not take note: PIC Bonus will definitely expire by December 2014 or your financial year end in 2014, WHICHEVER IS EARLIER.  There is no extension to PIC Bonus scheme All PIC Cash Claims must be done using online form and no other manual forms will be accepted from 1 August 2014 onwards. The IRAS site to get the form, plus how to use the form are found here   Equipment List: you need to follow the list of equipment by industry and any equipment not found in the list will need to apply for approval first. Click here for details Training fees: you can only claim PIC for training done for employees. Employees include part and full time employees, local and foreign citiz

We know words and phrases are magical in that they have the power to change minds.  If you use the right words and phrases, sales would come.  If you use the wrong one, sales would go away.   If you are selling to people holding management positions, you need to use words and phrases that reflect what they want: certainty, little risk and most importantly, reliable results .  Understand that management people are not entrepreneurs, they are not risk takers and their primary responsibility to their boss (the entrepreneur) is to protect and grow the investment.   Never use words and phrases that will frighten these managers, like "Rapid growth", "Double your return", "Massive profits", "Take more risks" and "Dare to be different".  The following 22 words and phrases are most suitable: Minimize your risk Going one step at a time Protect what you've built Go straight down the middle Spread the risk Cementing your career fu

You'll be surprised if you have a heart-to-heart talk with the people that you sent for training .  "Tell me what have you learnt."  They will say, "Nothing much, I learnt those strategies that we may have taken for granted and not used much".  Is this their real answer? What do people really learnt from training?  You'll be shocked to discover the truths: there are 5 main things that people learnt but dare not tell you: They learnt about themselves: their weaknesses, strengths and most importantly, their potential.   Like people learnt that they can do magic: cut a piece of wood with paper.  Many people are frightened with this new discovery: they are afraid that now that they know they can do much more, will they be worked to death to implement the strategies learnt? They learnt about the best practises that may not be practised in their organization, like having half-yearly dialogue style performance appraisal.  Some are afraid of telling this to

Some people think that training and development are a luxury for you cannot really measure its tangible benefits. Yet others think that there must at least be a 200% payoff (benefits over training cost) for any training program to be considered beneficial.  To us at AsiaTrainers.com , there are 7 tangible benefits that you can touch and feel IMMEDIATELY after the training : Ask the participants to do a written assessment of the training in terms of 3 areas: how does it improve their work, make their work easier or given them new ideas . You can also ask them to do a 30-day Action Plan on the action that they will take within 30 days of the training Voluntary self-reporting by the participants .  If your participants can report to you without being asked, you can be sure that they enjoyed the training and find it useful Measure the improvements in the work  This is very easy to be done for hard skills training (like how to operate a machine), but even for soft skills, you too

* Discover how to be a better manager in less than a month at here * Although everyone knows the value of training your staff, plus the Singapore Government is giving back 60% cash or 300% tax deduction for training (under the PIC scheme ), we at AsiaTrainers.com still receive registrations from individuals.  The reason is that their employer refused to pay for the staff training, even though they know the Government is paying back 60% cash and 160% cash under PIC Bonus scheme. There are 7 reasons why companies won't pay for staff training: They do not think that their staff is good enough to attend training.  That means the staff has not earned the right to be trained and has to work hard to prove himself first They are afraid that after the training, the staff will leave the company faster as he is now more skilled and knows more than the boss They don't believe the PIC scheme or don't know how to get PIC funding They never think the training is good for they

It sounds funny, right?  How can we lower staff cost by increasing staff cost?  As we know, staff cost is computed this way: Staff Remuneration/Staff Output .  So if you increase staff remuneration and get a higher output, your staff cost will decrease.  Other than this, there are 4 other ways that you too can increase cost and lower your staff cost as a result: Increase training cost .  With better trained staff, their output will increase automatically.  Make sure that you send your staff for training that cost less than $200 per head (for half day ).  Most importantly, ensure that the training covers practical issues and not just some impressive theories. With PIC covering at least 60% of your training cost, your net cost is only $80 per head, and I'm sure your company can recover it easily in just 2 days.  To find out the 7 ways to train your staff, click here .  Read here to discover the 9 things that a good sales training should cover.  Increase the equipment cost .  L

Note: How to be a Better Manager starts from 4 Aug 2014 Training is now considered no longer a luxury but a necessity.  It is said that if you don't train your people to be good, you're training your people to be bad .  This is because everyday there are so many bad influence - from market, the media, Facebook, contractors etc that many people have lamented that today's workforce does not possess the core values that workers used to have.  There are 7 ways that you can train your people: You let them learn on the job - that is, purely from work experience. This method is costless in terms of your time, but is extremely costly as mistakes made at work have many repercussions later on.  Highly not recommended, but still beats having no training at all (i.e. you never let them make any mistakes).  You get a senior staff to train them . This On-the-job training is the most common method.   PIC funds up to $10,000 a year for such internal training.  See here for detail

There are 5 things that every trainee is looking for in an external training program: Enhance their thinking , for it is the thinking capability that determines our work performance. That's why most trainers like to ask provocative questions to broaden the minds of the trainees.  Sometimes to make an impact trainers would purposely give the wrong information to ' wake people up ' Get Inspiration and Motivation .  As we know, the typical working life is full of stress and people usually get motivated when it's time for bonus or increment.  The fact that trainers help trainees to see things from another perspective will inspire people to do more.  Furthermore, trainers are external professionals that have no personal interest in the trainees, thus they can offer motivate people easily without being mistaken as phony Get Solutions to their Problems.  This is a very common and useful outcome of training, where trainees get answers to their current work problems.  Tra