A friend of mine does a really cool thing every summer.  Once his kids are officially out of school he starts ‘Summer Hours’ for his business.  Basically he takes every Friday off during the summer – primarily so he can spend it with his kids, but also so he can recharge and attack his next big thing with inspiration and energy!

In his particular case, summer works out well, both for him personally, but also for his industry where his clients and prospects tend to be harder to reach due to travel, vacations and kids being out of school. 

In my case, I could potentially do a variation of summer hours but a better idea might be when things naturally slow down during the winter holidays (basically the time between Thanksgiving and the end of the year).  Taking a big chunk of that as time off wouldn’t cost much in missed opportunities and would give me a great chance to breathe and look at the big picture!

What about you – do you have Summer Hours?

Read More…

Any small business owner who wants to grow their business and eventually free themselves up from the day to day grind is going to have to solve a few things.

You’re going to have to learn how to market your products and services effectively.  I’m differentiating marketing from sales as the activities and efforts that draw interested, qualified buyers to ask about your product or service.  Without marketing…the process of getting people to come to you, you have a major uphill battle when it comes to growing your business with strictly outbound sales efforts.

You also have to figure out how to systematize and automate all the major components of your business.  Ultimately it needs to run like a machine…you build the framework and all the components, set up the systems that other people can run (or are automated) and it continues to generate money (and grow) even without your daily input!  It’s the only way to scale your business.

One step in this direction is the combination of these two things – Marketing Automation…building a marketing machine…a system and automation that will help your marketing run (mostly) on it’s own.

Read More…

  photo by dimnikolov

Being a business owner often feels like being in a race…only it’s a race that never ends and it seems like you have to keep running harder just to keep up as you go!

The one thing that most business owners fantasize about, maybe even more than having more money, is having more time!  Think about an average week for you – how much time did you have to just sit and kick back without your mind racing, or the phone ringing?  Staring at a list of 100 things not getting done doesn’t count!

Imagine if you could find a way to free up 1 hour of your week while still getting the same amount of things done?  What about 10 hours a week?  What would you do with the extra time?

Read More…

As a business owner, there will come a day when you’re just flat out tired.  You don’t want to get out of bed, and if you do get out of bed, you don’t want to do much.  All in all, you’re struggling.

Assuming it’s not some form of the flu, you’re probably feeling overwhelmed or just worn down.  You need to find a way to recharge and get back your motivation – it’s likely only a temporary setback for your business, but if it continues it could turn into a big deal.  Unfortunately it’s not as simple as ‘willing’ yourself to get excited again – however there are some things you can do to turn things around.

Read More…

The Cloud…it’s everywhere!  You can’t walk down the street, check your twitter feed or shop (at Amazon) without hearing about the Cloud!  The Cloud of course is cloud based computing…basically it’s the ability to do stuff online without knowing the physical location of where all that computing magic is happening.

Cloud capabilities can include services (Google Apps is probably the most well known), data storage (I previously told you about Dropbox) and Entertainment (Netflix anyone?).  The Cloud is getting bigger every day and it’s opening up a bunch of amazing opportunities.

Check out these 2 really cool, cloud powered applications that will really rock your business productivity!

Read More…