Useful Phrases For Doing Business In English

When it comes to English for business youll find there are a number of expressions that you probably wont encounter in casual speech. Here are five expressions that you might hear if you are going to a business meeting or you are in a business situation.

1. Manage expectations

To manage expectations means to ensure that the client has realistic expectations. For example, a company may take an order to deliver a certain amount of products. The client, who does not know how long it takes to manufacture and prepare a product might expect in a week. When you manage their expectations you make sure they know exactly how long it will take and what to expect. In this way, the client is not disappointed, and you are not under increased pressure from an unhappy client.

Example: We need to manage their expectations so they know they will not get delivery of the product before April.

Anyone who has to deal directly with clients will need to know how to manage expectations.

2. At the 11th hour

If you do something, or deliver something at the 11th hour then you are doing it at the last minute. If you had two weeks to write a report but you leave it until the last minute, you are doing it at the 11th hour.

Example: Jane always delivers her reports at the 11th hour. One day she will miss the deadline if she is not careful.

A company might finish a project at the 11th hour, or an individual can finish a task at the 11th hour.

3. The lion’s share

The lions share is the largest share. If you are talking about a competitor and the fact that they have the lions share of the market, then they have most of the business.

Example: Martins have the lions share of the market as they make 80 percent of the sales. We need to increase our efforts to increase our market share.

This is phrase is generally used when referring to companies or organisations.

4. Dot your i’s and cross your t’s
If you are told to dot your is and cross you ts you are being told to make sure you get all the details right. You have to check and recheck your information to make sure that the end result is perfect.

Example: This project could bring in 2 million dollars in sales so make sure you dot your is and cross your ts. We need to make sure everything goes smoothly.

A manager or director will use this expression to ensure employees and other colleagues are careful when preparing the project.

5. Get your foot in the door

To get your foot in the door means to get an introduction to someone or something. You can get your foot in the door of a company by getting an introduction to the director or by selling a small amount of product to a company. If you do well and make a good impression, you can go on to increase your involvement with the client or the company.

Example: Make sure they agree to trial our latest products so that you can get your foot in the door. If they like it we can introduce the rest of our product line to them.

Both individuals and businesses can get their foot in the door.

How Much Do Senior Portraits Cost

If theres one question nearly everyone asks this is it. How much do senior portraits cost? The trite, sarcastic answer would be, If you really like pictures and youre going to miss your son or daughter like crazy when they go off to college, senior portrait are cheap. If you never take pictures yourself and you for-see your child living in your basement until theyre 35; senior portraits are outrageous. Truly, a great deal does depend on your point of view.

Most studios will charge a session fee. Some have just one flat fee and others, like our studio, have three different sessions that differ basically by length of time. The session fee covers kind of the photographers time to take the pictures and process the images for you to view. Quite honestly our session fees dont come close to covering the time it takes to photograph a senior, process the images, do some initial retouching and prepare the first view images for the client to see.

Many studios view the session fee more as a guarantee youll show up. Dont get me wrong, I know YOU wouldnt blow someone off but think about it; if theres no up-front session fee to guarantee your spot in the studios calendar, if you had nothing invested and the day of your session came and it was beautiful and sunny and all your friends were going to Valley Fair where would you want to be? Riding the Wild Thing or stuck in a dark studio listening to a 52 year old guy with a beer gut tell bad jokes? If theres money on the line Mom and Dad are going to be sure you show up – with bells on.

Studios session fees in southern Minnesota range from a low of probably fifty bucks to a high of $300 or more. Our studio charges $100, $150 and $200 for respectively, a one hour, an hour and a half and a two hour session. But hardly anyone pays full price for the session.

Studios often run session sales early in the year to start the business flowing. At d. holmes meir studios we have our big 12 hour sale in May and if you book your session for sometime in June youll save 75% on the session fee. In July you save 50% and August nets you a 25% savings. Youll probably find similar sales at most other studios in the area.

With respect to the portraits themselves it will vary a great deal on the number of friends and relatives youll want to gift with your images. At some studios youll spend less than $300 while at others youll invest $1000 or more. Its important to remember that like anything, all portraits and all photographers are not created equal. If youre not a fan of surprises you will want to do research and ask lots of questions as to what is and isnt included in a studios portrait pricing.

Chances are most studios will offer both package as well as a-la-carte pricing options. Packages are almost always cheaper often so much so you may be better off from a money standpoint – to buy more pictures in a package than you really need. No one likes waste but better to waste a little paper than a lot of money.

The most important question you need to ask are whether or not the final images will be retouched and to see examples of retouched images. Many people in this day and age just assume all photographers retouch their portraits nothing could be further from the truth. So look closely at the sample images on a photographers website which one would assume is their best work. If the skin tones are icky, if there are obvious blemishes and imperfections is it reasonable to assume your portraits would be any different?

Cross Country Running Shoes

One of the greatest sports I can think of is cross country running. A popular sport in high school and college athletics, and also a popular activity among outdoor enthusiast and runners in general, cross country running offers the opportunity to get out into nature and experience it in a very personal and intense way. If you enjoy running, either for the health benefits or the runners high, you should try getting out to one of your favorite spots in nature, find a good trail, lace up a decent pair of trail running shoes and go running through the forest.

I remember when I first went to purchase a pair of cross country running sneakers as a high school freshman. The sales person told me about durability and ruggedness and other things he had no knowledge about and sold me a pair of low quality tennis shoes. Well, needless to say I paid for that mistake with injuries and terrible times, but I learned a valuable lesson. It is important to be informed before going to shop for an important item like a trail running shoe. Your health and well being may depend on it, and you cant always rely on the sales clerk to know what he is talking about.

If you are going to be running cross country, you will inevitably find yourself running on every kind of terrain imaginable, from pavement to track to grass to trails through the woods. You will often find yourself jumping over roots and rocks, making sudden inclines or declines and crossing drastically from one type of surface to the next. However, ultimately you are still running, and a running shoe is what you are looking for.

trail running footwear is a running shoe that is generally a little sturdier and focuses on delivering a lot of cushioning and lateral support. The often treacherous and unpredictable paths a cross country runner takes requires a shoe that can withstand a lot of abuse. Trail running shoes are often made to be a little more weather and element resistant, as you will often find yourself trekking through mud, wet grass and perhaps even snow.

One sacrifice trail runners will sometimes make is in weight, as the added protection and durability come at the cost of more material and therefore more overall weight in the mens or womens running shoe. However, as you go up in quality, the trail running footwear will get lighter and lighter, until you find a range of durable, supportive, quality running shoes with the appropriate tread on the bottom and support to survive the rugged sport of cross country running.

Fitting a trail running shoe is exactly like fitting any other athletic footwear. Trail running shoes come in all the varieties that other running shoes do, so choose an appropriate style of shoe for your particular needs. When you try the running shoes on, put on both pair and walk around the store a little bit. Crouch down and bend the toe to see how flexible and comfortable they are, and whether or not they rub around your ankles. Try them on with a pair of socks that are like to the ones you run in, as many cross country runners will have special socks that they wear. Move side to side, jump a little bit and run a short distance.

The shoe should fit snug but not pinch your foot. This is especially important in trail running shoes, because the terrain you will be moving across is so varied and uneven. If a shoe pinches your toes, the result can be anything from twisted ankles to bunions to stress fractures. The runners stride depends on a certain range of motion to operate properly during a step, and the trail running shoes you choose should enhance and support that range of motion, not inhibit it.

Understanding Sales Coaching for Business Progress

All kinds of businesses depend on their customers to gain profit. A business has to constantly satisfy or exceed customer expectations to keep its customers. With this in mind, quality management techniques are implemented to ensure that products and services are top notch. A business must also accept customer feedback for it to know the aspects it needs to improve on.

However, before a business gets its first customers, it must know how to promote its products and services. It must reach out to its target market. Marketing is considered a very important aspect of a business. A business implements marketing strategies to make its products and services more relevant to the target customers. In marketing, customer behavior is also studied. With this, a business will know know how to approach its customers.

Another important thing in a business is sales. There are many sales techniques used by businesses; it usually depends on the kind of product or service they are offering. For example, there are travelling salesmen who sell their products door-to-door. There are also instances when sales are made over the phone. With today’s technology, some are even made on the Internet.

It is often believed that the sales performance of a certain business relies a lot on the salespeople. They need to know how to properly approach their customers. There may also be times when they need to reach a certain quota. They need to promote the products directly to the customers. They need to use whatever resources they have at hand; some salespeople use wit and charm to convince customers to make a purchase. For optimum sales performance, it may be helpful for a business to get a sales coach for its sales staff.

Getting a professional sales coach for the sales team of a business can help improve the team’s performance. The coach can evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the salespeople and work from there. He can help the sales team reach their maximum potentials. He can help get rid of negative attitudes and reinforce positive ones. The sales coach may also determine what kind of technique will work for certain situations, employees, and customers.

The business world is competitive, so a company must always try to stay in the game. A sales professional’s work involves numbers and quotas that need to be met; there is also the pressure of time. With proper sales coaching, sales professionals can become more goal-oriented. In the long run, the performance of a business can improve.

Why Pennsylvania Needs Sunday Hunting

Few states have a stronger hunting tradition than Pennsylvania.

As the firearms deer season approaches, for example, whole neighborhoods smell like Hoppes #9. Wives search vainly for husbands, who have quietly disappeared to get in a few hours of pre-hunt scouting. On Opening Day, schools close because so many students, not to mention teachers, are absent anyway. By nightfall, deer camps are full of bucks hanging from meat poles and every other pickup you see on the road has deer hooves or antlers sticking up over the tailgate.

At least thats the way it used to be.

But the number of hunters in Pennsylvania is dropping, as it is nationwide. In Pennsylvania, there has been a 28 percent decline in license sales between 1981 and 2006. There is a long list of reasonsurbanization, expense, lack of time, overly restrictive regulations, anti-hunting attitudes, etc.

Of these reasons, lack of time, might actually be one of the easier problems to solveby allowing citizens to hunt on Sunday.

Currently, all Pennsylvanians can hunt on Sunday is coyotes, foxes and crows, and it is one of just seven states with such a severe restriction. Arguments against Sunday hunting usually focus on supposed safety concerns, clashes with landowners, church disruption or the idea that hikers and horseback riders need one day a week they can be in the woods without worrying about hunters.

All of these arguments can be debated, but for the moment lets not even bother. They were the same arguments used in 43 other states where Sunday hunting was debatedbut reason prevailed and now it is allowed. None of the predicted calamities in those stateswhether regarding human safety, religious upheaval, landowner relations, privacy invasion or run-ins between hunters and hikershas occurred significantly. Not one of the states where lawmakers allowed Sunday hunting has seen any reason to change its policy due to any of those claims.

Whos Against It and Why?
Among the most vocal opponents of Sunday hunting in the state is the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau. Some of their stated positions include:
Farmers do not get weekends off. Sunday is the one day they tend to relax their schedule to spend time with the families.

Many farmers only get Sundays to use their own land for recreation.

Posted land does not mean hunters will obey the signs. Trespassing hunters can endanger others who are not expecting to see them.

Farmers need one day they can move about without getting between a hunter and the target.

For the record, farmers who let people hunt their property do a great service for hunters, and they deserve our thanks for it. Even farmers that dont let hunters in often enhance habitat to support various kinds of game. Whether you know it or not, NRA has a Hunters Code of Ethics, and its very first point is, I will consider myself an invited guest of the landowner, seeking his permission, and conduct myself so that I will be welcome in the future.

That said, its worth remembering that hunters perform a service for farmers, too, by controlling the number of deer and bears that would otherwise damage crops. A 1997 Penn State University study estimated crop damage by deer at $75 million. And farmers are not the only people who work long hours anymore. Thats why the average guy needs Sunday it may be his only day to hunt. Regardless, farmers who dont agree could always put up a NO SUNDAY HUNTING sign. Maybe there would be some trespassing and maybe there wouldnt be any at all.

What Are the Benefits?
Many of the benefits to Sunday hunting in Pennsylvania are economic. Studies show that if Sunday hunting were allowed during all seasons, it would:

Stimulate $629 million in additional spending
Create 5,300 new jobs
Generate $18 million in additional state sales and income taxes.

Plus, 38 percent of Pennsylvanias hunters (both lapsed and active) said they would hunt more or hunt again if Sunday hunting were allowed.

But we dont really need a study to tell us that Sunday hunting would give people more time to hunt. Nonresidents would obviously be more willing to hunt Pennsylvania given the extra days. Kids who cant hunt on Saturday because of school functions, football or jobs would at least have one weekend day to get out. And parents and kids would get an additional opportunity to hunt together.

And all of this connects to the most important point made at the outsetthat license sales have dropped 28 percent in a state with a powerful hunting tradition. Giving people more time to hunt is one of the easiest ways to start turning that trend around and breathing new life into that tradition.

Voice Your Opinion

Pennsylvania Rep. Edward Staback, chairman of the House Game and Fisheries Committtee, has introduced House Bill 779, which would allow the Pennsylvania Game Commission to regulate Sunday hunting, instead of the General Assembly. Visit: http://www.pahouse.com/staback and click on “Sunday Hunting Still Under the Cross Fire” to voice your opinion.