Not all testimonials are created equal.  Done well and used the right way, a strong testimonial can be an absolute gold mine and drive tremendous sales to your business.  Poor testimonials can be ineffective – or even turn people away.

“If they’re offering a bottle for free, it must be good!”  – Jean from Springfield

“It was better than CATS, I’d go see it over and over again!”  – Joe S.

Everybody’s run across a product that you suspect is sketchy anyway and a questionable testimonial is usually enough to confirm that you want to stay as far away from it as you can get.

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Here’s to wishing you and your family all of the best during this holiday season!

May your family be happy, healthy and safe. 

May your business be prosperous and fun.

Best wishes and looking forward to 2008.

Shawn Kinkade   www.aspirekc.com

Photo by Hamed Saber

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about a workshop that I’m pulling together that will help small business owners build on their success.  As you know, running a small business is really complicated.

There are a lot of hats involved.  Marketing, Sales, Finance, Leadership – and that’s just the stuff you focus on in the morning!

So as I was working on the workshop idea, I found myself drifting all over the place in terms of the most important content and decided to pull together a summary of the key points.

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Back in the early 90′s, there was a series of computer games called ‘The Incredible Machine“.  The games were a series of intricate puzzles that required you to create complicated, off the wall Rube Goldberg machines to solve simple tasks.

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My friend Terry over at Powercore (nice new website by the way!) passed along a great article on Innovation.  Apparently in Japan it’s not just the trains that are super crowded, it’s also the grocery stores.  And in those crowded stores they don’t have room for watermelons…unless somehow…they can stack them!

So they developed square watermelons!  As you can see, the solution wasn’t too hard once they accepted it was possible – simply grow the watermelon inside a square box.  A very elegant solution to an unusual problem.

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