In this fast-paced culture where dollars often speak the loudest, it can be easy to get lost in the shuffle of jumping on the current of ‘busyness’ and not keeping the focus on the grass roots elements of business: people.

Relationships will always be the fundamental success of any prosperous business, whether small in operation or Fortune 500. If your focus is to keep your eye-on-the-proverbial prize of enhancing and developing relationships, you in turn will benefit your bottom line. So how does one make connections and master maintaining connections? Answer. Share your connections!

The internet represents significant operational, marketing, and growth opportunities for retailers, wholesalers, and manufacturers, but the strategic challenge has rapidly evolved from “which channels do we embrace?” to “how do we create channel synergy?”

Operationally, a “multichannel” orientation integrates systems, strategies, and business processes to generate new efficiencies. At Blair Corporation, a publicly traded apparel and home furnishings retailer, we leveraged our ability to cost-effectively promote out-of-date merchandise through our hyper-growth Blair.com business to increase gross margins and eliminate a costly and unproductive offline liquidation channel. A multichannel retailer with a more significant brick and mortar presence—such as Best Buy, for example—should integrate its systems so that customers can order online and pick up their selections in a local store. In both examples, metrics such as ROI, profitability improvement, and customer loyalty will validate success.

As a follow-up to the article on how to write a good mission statement, highlighted below are critiques of a few mission statements, including some familiar ones.

Example: We provide pick-up and on time delivery of important documents worldwide.

Verdict: Very good. The service is one of delivery to a worldwide market. But the mission statement does not cover all customer shipments, only small packages on an urgent basis. “On time” talks to the issue of reliability. While the specific of “how” isn’t discussed, it is implied that an efficient ground and air distribution network is in place and is operated on a continuous basis.