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The reputation of a business is essential to its survival, but how do you create a positive reputation?

While intangible, having a good reputation can benefit a business in a multitude of ways including consumer preference, support for an organisation in times of crisis or controversy, and business value.

If an organisation has an excellent reputation; consumers have a preference for that company, it can enable a company to differentiate in highly competitive markets, allows for premium pricing, and can become the ultimate factor in whether a customer decides to choose one brand over another.

In my experience, there are ten components to reputation measurement:

• Ethics: behave ethically, be admirable, worthy of respect, and trustworthy
• Employees/workplace: have talented employees and treat your people well and have an appealing environment.
• Financial performance: be financially stable and profitable with growth prospects
• Leadership: be a leader and innovative
• Management: the business has a high-quality management team with a clear vision
• Social responsibility: recognise your social responsibilities and support good causes
• Customer focus: cares about and be strongly committed to customers
• Quality: offer high-quality products/services
• Reliability: stand behind products/services, and provides consistent service
• Emotional appeal: make consumers feel good

Knowing this, entrepreneurs looking to build reputation can do so in many ways:

• Establish trust: keep your word no matter what
• Be responsive: return calls and emails promptly
• Resolve mistakes: never make excuses or place blame on the client if an issue is the fault of the company
• Offer value: provide free services to loyal customers and pay attention to details and their preferences
• Become tech savvy: proficiency in technology is critical to being perceived as a competent and capable business
• Communicate efficiently and transparently: any correspondence should be direct and to the point. Check spelling/grammar and provide contact information
• Maintain a professional website: having a clean, up-to-date website is essential for any business
• Community service: generosity to local non-profit organisations can go a long way toward building and establishing a reputation

Before social media, businesses relied on word-of-mouth and campaigns by public relations and marketing professionals. But today, maintaining reputation through social media takes time and requires careful management. As an entrepreneur, you can establish a reputation by:

Assigning responsibility: as a leader, you must brief and trust someone to become the ‘voice’ of the organisation on social media.

Be responsive: the lack of a well-crafted, well-meaning response could cost you. Social media has given customers multiple options to voice their opinions. Taking ownership of your social media sites gives you the control you need to manage conversations and respond to feedback.

Establish your online reputation: when a potential customer searches online for your brand, your business should be on the first page. Creating a strong online presence is essential for an organisation to establish its brand and maintain its reputation.

Monitor conversations: use monitoring tools to find out what feedback your company is receiving; this is also a time-saver for the person in charge of social media content.

The reputation of a business depends on many factors, but being transparent, trustworthy and responsive are essential to the survival of any company. While an intangible asset, maintaining a positive reputation is fundamental to profitability, relevance, and existence of your business. Bad word-of-mouth, lack of response to a crisis, and lack of transparency can rapidly decimate the reputation of a company, so it is essential that entrepreneurs be steadfast in maintaining goodwill to their stakeholders.

We all have the same 24 hours a day to accomplish our goals, aspirations, and dreams. So how do we best utilise the time given to us with the millions of things we have going on each day?

Firstly, you can’t manage time; you can only manage yourself. As long as you focus on managing time – searching for systems, lists, and tools – you are ignoring the real issue: how to manage yourself.

Every time you repeat “Too much to do” and “Not enough time”, you are letting yourself off the hook for managing yourself. You are blaming circumstances beyond your control and playing the victim. Stop it! Of course, there is too much to do! Of course, there is not enough time! Get used to it!

Which leads me to priorities, you cannot have too many priorities. By definition priorities are the top few tasks that deserve attention next. If you have too many, you have none. So know your top few priorities because if you have two to three priorities, you will complete two to three tasks. If you have four to 10, you will complete one or two. If you have more than 10, you won’t finish any. The more items on your list, the more time you spend focusing on the list and feeling overwhelmed.

So here are my five ways to deal with too much to do:

• Accomplish more – this is simply wishful thinking unless you actually find a new, faster method that makes a measurable difference. You won’t save significant time trying to be faster and more disciplined
• Postpone – some things can wait. Push them out
• Cut corners – cutting corners sounds bad, but it isn’t. Not everything has to be awesome or perfect. Before starting any task, always ask the question, “How well?” Those last tweaks are usually discernible to no one but yourself
• Ignore – some tasks just don’t need to be done
• Delegate/outsource – too many people are doing things that should never be on their plates in the first place. If you don’t know how to delegate effectively and confidently, you need to learn. If you are a control freak or simply unwilling to let go, stop it!

When you fail to manage yourself, establish top priorities, and make conscious decisions about what to do and what not to do, the stress is unbelievable and the results aren’t pretty:

• Your inbox and meeting schedule starts to control your day
• Important tasks are trumped by easy tasks that you can dispense with quickly in exchange for the feeling of progress
• “Fun” tasks, those for which you always have time and energy, somehow get finished
• Short-term initiatives beat out long-term efforts.

And every week you copy and sort those to-do lists hoping they will magically become feasible.

It’s time to bite the bullet, narrow your top priorities list to two to three items at any one time, schedule time on your calendar to tackle those items and devote the rest of your energy to focusing and getting them done. Quit wasting so much time and energy listing, managing, and prioritising the things that deserve to fall through the cracks.

You may well have the characteristics to be an entrepreneur, but there are three large, practical hurdles to overcome:

Do you have the requisite skills to do the primary work of the business?
I’ve known many people who have charged headlong into a venture without having thought this through clearly. It’s unusual for a startup to succeed if an owner lacks the ability to do the primary work of the business, so if you can’t do it all. Find a partner who can.

Have a plan for performing the ancillary functions
If you are going to start a company, you had better want to run a business. That means you’ll have more to do than just the primary work of the enterprise. You will have to do admin works such as accounts receivable and payable, payroll. You’ll probably need some sort of IT infrastructure. The list goes on…

Getting ancillary functions right is critical for your business to survive. Yes, some functions can be outsourced, but you’ll need a plan to do each of them.

Growth means you will have to let go
You might be going into because you are passionate about doing the primary work of your startup. And you need that passion. But if your business is successful, it will grow and one day you will face a choice: delegate doing the primary, stop growing or hire someone to run the company while you continue doing the work.

Before you launch your new venture, know which path you’ll take and be prepared to handle success.

Starting a new business is exciting. But as with anything planning can help you avoid disaster. Make sure you have thought through the three critical issues above.