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….

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  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.

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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!

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  photo by Striatic 

I came across a great video (thanks to My Venture Pad) by Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon) that has some really impactful and timeless advice.  It’s only a short 8 minute video, but there are a lot of really important ideas that come out of this.

The first thing that stands out to me is the confidence and the credibility that someone like Jeff Bezos has.  The purpose of the video is to give some background on why the recent purchase of Zappos by Amazon makes sense – primarily based on a shared culture and values of customer service and creativity.  This is a guy that launched one of the biggest success stories of our time 15 years ago (it’s amazing that it’s been that long) and he comfortably admits that they made mistakes along the way.

That’s how real life and business work – you learn from your mistakes and you get better.

However even bigger than that is his clear belief that everything stems from giving the customers what they want!  It’s not a revolutionary idea, but I can think of only a handful of companies (Amazon and Zappos among them) that have really put the idea into tangible practice. 

See the rest of the post for a summary and the actual video:

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Networking for your business is about making friends (you don’t have to kiss them…).

Unfortunately most people don’t really ‘get’ the whole networking thing, which makes going to networking events sometimes very painful.  As an example, at an event I was at last week there was a woman that was waiting in a corner and if anyone made eye contact or walked to closely to her she immediately jumped into her sales pitch.  Sadly she may have felt like she had a productive meeting – she cornered at least 3 different people that I saw, but I guarantee none of them left with a positive impression of her.

Networking is a great strategy for small business owners – people want to do business with other people (that they know, like and trust) not with some faceless company, so the playing field with the big guys is really leveled.  Networking is a marketing strategy that facilitates developing relationships that can generate referrals or business.

But what’s the right way to go about doing that?  Read the rest of this article and feel free to download my in-depth (18 page) report if you’d like to learn more.

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