Photo from Library of Congress collection 

Do you ever feel like there’s not enough time in the day to get everything done?

Sometimes you just feel flat out tired.

As a small business owner, you’ve got it worse than most.  You’re wearing a bunch of hats, a lot of times you’re covering new ground and ultimately the buck stops with you (to paraphrase President Truman).

There are a lot of strategic ways to work smarter, you can work on systemizing your business, you can get a coach to help you focus and prioritize or you can hire the right people and delegate stuff.

But your first step should probably be to work on your Personal Effectiveness and finding more effective ways to getting things done.  Here are 10 ideas / resources that might help to get you started.

Read More…

If you’re in the market to sell something (product or a service), you know you’ve got a huge competitive advantage when you can give your customers a unique experience.  Just this last weekend, the Kansas City Zoo offered up an opportunity to see and experience something totally different.

If you live in Kansas City, then you know that the Zoo has had a rough go of it for quite a long time – including most recently a lot of issues with funding.  However if you haven’t been for a while, you ought to go check out the recent improvements (with more on the way).  The changes to the front entrance are mostly cosmetic, but they do a great job of streamlining entry into the Zoo proper and really add to the overall welcoming feel.

More importantly, the addition of a nice North American Otter exhibit right at the entrance is a great step in the right direction.  Everyone likes Otters and they’re usually doing something interesting and playing with each other.  It now feels like there’s stuff to look at throughout the Zoo, not just the far corners.

Read More…

Push versus Pull

Which one of these options sounds better to you?

Option 1:  You develop an extensive advertising and marketing campaign, complete with direct mail, ads in the local media and maybe even a radio campaign.

Your name, your message gets pushed out (hopefully primarily to your target market) and you get a response rate of 1 – 2%, filling the top of your sales funnel.

Option 2:  You create an interesting website that has a lot of useful information.  You publish some articles online and maybe get something published in a local paper.  You do workshops and seminars and people start talking about what they’re learning from you.  It happens slowly, but people start finding you and putting themselves into your sales funnel.

Historically, when people have talked about marketing, they generally are referring to Push marketing (option 1 above).  That’s still a very valuable strategy to use depending on the circumstances, but the evolution to Web 2.0 and the continued decreased effectiveness of mass media means that Pull marketing (option 2) may be a more effective strategy for a lot of small business owners.

Read More…

I had a great conversation the other day with one of my BANG clients about the need to get some systems in place to help automate processes.  It’s a pretty common problem faced by a lot of small business owners, but before you can really make a call on what the right solution is, you really need to start thinking about a different question.

How big do you really want your business to be?

That may sound like a silly question, you might be thinking “I want my business to be HUGE!!!”, but do you really want that? Read More…

Photo by fabio_pinheiro 

This is a bit off the beaten path of a regular post, but it does illustrate the kinds of things you can learn as a business owner (and if you’re not learning something new all the time, you should be…).  Specifically I have learned how to infuse Pineapple (pictured above) into Vodka to make a tasty and different type of drink!

Here’s some background:  I’m having a client appreciation Open House / party this week – by the way, if you would like to be invited to future such events, I would be happy to talk to you.  I’m not saying that people would or should become clients just because of things like this, but I’m certainly open to the proposition…! 

Actually it’s just going to be a nice get together to learn more about these great folks that I’m working with, meet their significant others (and vice versa) and just relax for a couple of hours.

Having said that, I wanted to do something a little different in addition to kind of ‘standard’ entertaining fare, so I decided to try creating a Vodka infusion. 

Read More…