Category: Pamela Ayuso

Understanding Professional Roadblocks and How to Persevere

Pamela Ayuso October 14, 2019

Along with the joy of starting a new project, job, or journey to achieving a dream comes the hard part: discipline, work, patience, and perseverance. The path is not all pleasant, as that’s just how the territory is. You can expect many highs as you see the fruits of your effort or marvel at discoveries. During the evolution of your project, however, it may sometimes look like nothing will come of what you are doing.

Nevertheless, if you are confident in your vision, keep going. The end goal may not happen exactly as you may have envisioned it, as the result may come from a different direction altogether. The only way to discover that outcome is to keep going and maintain the goal in mind.

Why Rituals in Your Professional Life Are so Powerful

Pamela Ayuso October 7, 2019

Rituals are a powerful practice that can help you both conserve energy and achieve your personal and professional objectives. With practice, the actions you take to achieve your goals can become automatic. As Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz write in their book The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal (public library), rituals are an effective tool that can help you get the results you want and mold your life the way you want.

Positive energy rituals are powerful on three levels. They help us to insure that we effectively manage energy in the service of whatever mission we are on. They reduce the need to rely on our limited conscious will and discipline to take action. Finally, rituals are a powerful means by which to translate our values and priorities into action—to embody what matters most to us in our everyday behaviors.

– The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz

Structuring Your Company in a Way That Will Better Inform and Communicate

Pamela Ayuso September 30, 2019

Our world is more interconnected than ever. As barriers to information disappear due to technology, the velocity with which knowledge moves is quicker. An interrelated world creates more opportunities for all, and things that were never possible before are achievable today in just seconds. Though this is nothing short of miraculous in comparison to the world before it, it also makes us vulnerable. One broken link in this chain of information travel can have unforeseen repercussions.

To better handle this complexity, it helps to design an organization that responds to this new world of instant communication and information. One way to adapt to this new world is in the way you structure the company. Ideally, the information will flow inside the company similar to how information flows on the outside.

This is My Journey as a Writer: Applying What I Learned in the Corporate World

Pamela Ayuso September 23, 2019

I have always dreamt of writing a book. I told myself I couldn’t write, however, and that I wasn’t a good writer, even though I had a writer in my family. My paternal grandmother was a poet. She was known as the Poetess of Retalhuleu, a small town in Guatemala where my father’s family is from. The last time I saw her, she gave me all her books, and to this day, I keep them in a drawer as the most special gift I have ever received from her. I told myself she had a special talent — writers are born that way.

So, I continued my path following what I thought I was good at: accounting and finance. I built an entire career around numbers, and today I am the CEO of a real estate development firm. Still, it’s not all I wanted to do.

Four months after my youngest daughter was born, I felt a little voice inside of me that I had never heard before. It told me to write. I didn’t understand where it came from, and I still don’t. I just knew it was there, and it wouldn’t stop telling me to write. I tried to reason with it. I was too busy and tired with three young daughters at home, one of them a newborn. I had also just co-founded a company less than a year prior and was in the middle of setting up the new company while maintaining my role at my prior company. There was no way I could start writing.

Finding the Right Software Platform for Your Company

Pamela Ayuso September 16, 2019

Even within the same industry, every company is different. Selecting the systems that you will use within your company can often be difficult because the programs that are available for managing companies are not always customizable. Certain solutions are more adaptable than others, depending on their price.

Modifications are sometimes not enough; you may need to add more systems to arrive at a comprehensive result or implement further add-ons to the system you already have. It all depends on what works for you. Nevertheless, the solution you arrive at will probably never be 100% perfect. A workflow may not be as smooth as you would like, or the system may have quirks that you cannot eliminate.

How Your Company Can Keep Up in a Complex World

Pamela Ayuso September 9, 2019

One of the first business management consultants was Frederick Taylor. Taylor was an industrial-era management thinker who worked with factories to ensure maximum efficiency in their production processes. By assigning highly-specialized tasks to the employees in the factory, he managed to shave off significant amounts of time from overall production.

Taylor applied scientific principles to his observations about the production process. From those observations, he then wrote The Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911. In the process, his ideas helped shape current management theory.

Getting the Most Out of Your Day

Pamela Ayuso September 2, 2019

There are so many ideas and projects that we dream about doing. Some may be more immediate plans, such as launching a project at work, while others are more long-term, like writing a book. In so many cases, there doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day. The demands on our time, which include work and our personal responsibilities, are so many. It can often feel overwhelming, yet some people can do so much with the amount of time they have.

If we all have the same amount of time available in the day, then the only way to be more efficient is to make better use of the hours we do have. Efficiency will come from focusing on the work that will best give us the results we are seeking and from organizing your time as best as possible. This is not an exhaustive list of strategies for how to best organize your time, but they can help you start improving the impact of the time you have available.

Implementing a Management Team Meeting and How to Make it Work

Pamela Ayuso August 26, 2019

As a company grows, its day-to-day operations become more and more complex. Even when a company has the right structure in place to handle all the company’s transactions, communication within the company may not be flowing optimally. The interactions within the structure could be placing an undue burden on a person or a team within the company. A practice we recently developed, which is standard practice in many companies, is the creation of a management team to discuss ongoing management issues. A management team can help your company make communication across departments more fluid and effective.

I am the CEO in my company, Celaque and have been from day one, starting when our team numbered a total of just three people. The dynamics were of course very different then – managing communications and the workload in a small team was fairly easy. With time, however, we grew, and now we are in the final phases of selling/leasing and managing one building, the construction of another, and the development of a third project. Now, with many more transactions and interactions within the company, my role has shifted.

Achieving Better Clarity for Your Business in the Middle of the Chaos

Pamela Ayuso August 19, 2019

The demands we face today can feel overwhelming. Our to-do lists are never-ending, and the pace of technological changes continues to accelerate. It may seem as though as soon as we have adapted to a new technology, we must learn something new. Although there are certain basic, underlying principles that never change, the noise around us is constant.

Before the Internet, all that we had access to was the information physically available around us, like newspapers, books, television, or even conversations with colleagues and friends. Today, many barriers to information have been removed, and this, combined with the creation of content by previously silent communicators, makes it difficult to sift through what matters and what is simply clutter.

This is the Time to Hire and Grow Your Company

Pamela Ayuso August 12, 2019

It’s not always easy to decide to hire someone new. There are many things to consider in the interview and onboarding process, and some of these things may be of concern. What if the person doesn’t adapt? What if the new employee will create more work? What if we can’t find the right person? All these concerns are scary. Finding the right mix of people takes time and effort. At the same time, expanding your team is the only way to grow as an organization.

Therefore, it’s important to get started. The process of onboarding isn’t always straightforward, and it takes time. The sooner you begin, the sooner you will find candidates you like and the sooner you can hire and train the new team member. When you go through all these steps, you will be able to delegate those tasks you are ready to give to someone else and move on with improving your company.