I had a chance to re-watch The Shawshank Redemption recently and remembered why it’s one of my all time favorite movies. 

It’s got a compelling, gripping story that will stay with you long after the lights come up.  It’s got great acting and narration from the incomparable Morgan Freeman.  And it has lots of great messages – the importance of integrity and decency and hope, how having friends can make all the difference, the need to be driven by a dream and the importance of a sound financial education! 

For those that haven’t seen it – go out and buy the DVD today (don’t rent it – you’ll want to watch it more than once).  It’s story of a young man, Andy Dufresne, with a promising career who is accused and convicted of killing his wife and her lover.  Although Andy maintains his innocence throughout, he’s sent to Shawshank prison for a life sentence.  Despite his miserable surroundings, he stays true to his code of decency and continues to search for his own redemption.  It’s truly powerful.

On top of all that, there’s one idea that really stands out:

Read More…

  photo by Capture Queen 

Time management may be the single biggest curse for most business owners (it’s right up there with hiring good people, marketing, sales and building processes).  It’s such a prevalent issue because as a business owner you have dozens of things that you could or should be doing and there’s never enough time in the day to get things done.

A recent comment from a client of mine went something like this:  “I’m spinning my wheels, I have a list of critical stuff to do and at the end of the day, I find myself moving all of the stuff from today’s list onto tomorrow’s list…and so on, and so on.”

Time slips through your hands and it seems like there’s always something that comes up (or that you’d rather be doing) than those critical projects. 

However there are strategies that can help you minimize this problem….

Read More…

  photo by christian.senger

We had a great discussion the other day in one of my Peer Group Advisory Board meetings on marketing ideas for a typical small business.  There are lots of things that are important when it comes to marketing:

• Understanding who is your best target market,
• Understanding the benefits and outcomes you deliver to that target market,
• Effective ways to communicate those benefits and outcomes (message and medium)
• A brand and a style that fits your core values and strengths

However in terms of succeeding with those marketing efforts, nothing is more important than being consistent.  Just like you can count on the sun setting this afternoon (with or without the beer and the view) you should also count on consistent marketing efforts if you want to keep moving forward with your business.

Read More…

Outbound sales and marketing are dying…(or at least becoming a lot less effective!).

The folks over at Hubspot pointed this out almost 2 years when they talked about Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing.  To me it’s intuitively clear  the internet, along with caller-id and sophisticated phone systems have made it much more difficult to successfully sell a prospect that isn’t currently in a buying mode.

However if you’re like most business owners, you’re spending a good portion of your time thinking about how you can ‘sell’ your stuff to your target market.

Stop selling and start educating!

Read More…

I do a lot of workshops on using Social Media for business owners and my number one tip / place to start for anyone that’s a business owner or professional is to have a quality LinkedIn Profile (find me at http://www.linkedin.com/in/shawnkinkade).

There are other great Social Media sites and depending on the type of business you have, they may be great strategies as well.  However, LinkedIn is the place to start, the foundation for business focus for several reasons – here are the top 3:

1. It’s designed to support business networking online…period.
2. There are over 45 million users, heavily skewed towards professional decision makers and business owners.  These are people you want to connect with.
3. The tools and capabilities give you a huge boost when it comes to finding people, prospects, strategic partners, vendors, prospective employees.

Unfortunately even though the platform continues to grow quickly there are lots and lots of profiles out there that are totally camouflaged and don’t stand out at all.

Here are some quick ideas to help pimp your profile!

Read More…