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1- Offer a guarantee.

You might feel like offering a guarantee is taking on a lot more risk than you’d like to, but this is a myth. When you offer a guarantee, you help to lower the perceived risk your client feels they might have when deciding to do business with you. This greatly increases the number of clients who will take that chance, even if they don’t know you very well yet. The surprising truth is that very few people will take the time to ask for a refund, making the increased sales far more valuable than the few returns you’ll need to process, if any.

Set limits, qualifications, and perhaps money on your guarantee, such as time frames, restocking fees, and requiring products to be mailed back in good condition. That way, you reduce your risk of running into the few people who will take unfair advantage of the system.

2- Offer affinity discounts.

I’m not sure why this one isn’t done more often in service businesses or in the bookkeeping industry. Any company can partner with another company to offer discounts to their entire client base, yet mostly only membership organizations take the time to cut affinity deals with vendors. If you are a veterinarian, could you offer all the grooming salons in town $15 off a puppy checkup? If your company is a flower shop, could you offer a wedding dress retailer a discount for brides?

If you do tax preparation or bookkeeping, your clients may need to chill out. Consider doing a deal with the nearby movie theater, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, or a spa where clients who owe too much could forget about their issues for a while.

3- Little black book.

Share the names of your favorite vendors with your clients. We’ve created a 27-page book of the vendors I work with, and this is a bonus that goes with all my products. Not only do my vendors love me for the referrals, my clients get a great resource that saves them lots of research time.

4- Backup copies.

In case of an emergency, can your clients count on you to have copies of the work you did for them? Build this into your service, mention it in the proposal, and charge a bit more for it. After all, storing the client documents you need to keep is not free.

5- Education.

Build in explanations of what you did and why you did it if the client is interested. When I write a document for a client, there is literally a reason or every word I use. I’m happy to include this explanation for a couple of reasons: 1) the client appreciates the richness of the product they just received, and 2) the client gets smarter about what we’re trying to accomplish together and becomes a better collaboration partner.

6- Toys.

I know we’re grown-ups, but we each have a kid inside us. Leave behind a toy or gift of some sort, like you would get from a promotional company or a toy store. It’s just fun.

7- Learning aids.

If your client needs to learn something as a result of your services, produce a cheat sheet that you can leave behind to accelerate their learning.

8- Access.

Offer follow-up access to you to answer questions that came up after your project was over.

9- Take on more risk.

Taking on more risk is the gold standard for being able to command a much higher fee. The more risk you take, the more you can charge, and risk is the fastest way to getting a higher fee. Think about how you can apply this one to your services. Your experience level and ability to generate consistent results client after client will give you the confidence to increase your risk and also your prices.

Which one of these nine could you try in your business?

I’d love for you to post the ways you’ve been able to increase your value and your prices. Share your stories and ideas on my blog or on my Facebook page here http://www.facebook.com/sandismithleyva.

1- Five Senses

What does your customer taste, touch, smell, see, and hear when they do business with you? If you have an office, could you bring fresh baked cookies in on days that clients will be coming to visit? Line it up with your local caterer and leave your client remembering that your place smells just like Grandma’s.

What does your client see when they first enter your office? Do you have a beautiful Oriental rug, nice mahogany furniture, and a delightful waiting room? Do you have a nice stereo system that pipes in contemporary music? (Or do you have stacks of loose papers everywhere that need to be filed?)

If you have a home office, what do clients hear in the background? Does your phone system headset cut out or sound crystal clear and high quality?

How can you spend a bit of time pleasing your client’s five senses?

2- Surprise

Everyone loves surprises. Delight your client with a gift, anniversary card (of doing business together), or a unique surprise or bonus that they are not otherwise expecting.

I’ll never forget The Oriental Hotel in Bangkok. When my laundry was returned to my room clean, it was gift-wrapped. That just floored me, and it happened 23 years ago. It’s such an easy thing to do to be remarkable.

Think of the best surprises you’ve gotten and how you might be able to apply it to your clients. It could be a project completed early, tickets to a much-desired event, gift certificates to a nice dinner, a public recognition in front of peers, or anything that’s completely unexpected. A really good administrative assistant can arrange all of this for you.

3- Image

One surefire way to get the price you want is to make sure you look the part. This means your image needs to match your price. If you charge premium prices, it’s not a good idea to wear shoes from Target or to get a $7 haircut. Your image includes your car, office, yourself, your staff, and anything that is customer facing.

4- Special

How can you help your client feel special? This one’s easy and costs nothing. In the presence of your client, turn off your cell phone, be prompt or early, and give them your full attention. Do not interrupt your client meeting for anything; this disrespects your client and their time.

Be sure to personalize and customize your service as much as possible. Have staff learn faces ahead of time and call clients by their name. Include the client’s name on proposals, handouts, and prospect kits. One of my pet peeves is how often my name is misspelled. Be sure you spell and pronounce your client’s name in all your emails and documents. It’s a small yet extremely important detail.

You can also make notes of client’s kid’s and pet’s names and ages, so you can ask how the family is doing. Consider noting hobbies and other comments you can refer back to. It’s fine to have a fancy CRM system for this, but don’t make excuses if you don’t have one; just open a Word doc and start typing.

5-Fun

Have a good time with your clients. Laugh a lot if you can. Keep your comments positive. When your clients can have an enjoyable experience, they will remember you.

Try these five easy ideas to create an exceptional experience for your clients.

I’d love for you to post exceptional experiences you’ve had as a customer. Share your experiences and ideas on my blog or on my Facebook page here http://www.facebook.com/sandismithleyva.

1. Wear t-shirts with your logo.

I wouldn’t have believed it myself if I hadn’t seen it.   If you wear a t-shirt with your company logo and tag line clearly stating what you do, people will stop you in the grocery store.  The most common comment:  “I have been looking for someone who does what you do!”

Similarly, if you have a car door magnet or sign advertising your business, people will stop you in the parking lot and start talking to you.  And don’t worry if you have no idea where to get car door magnets.  Intuit sells them!  Plus, you don’t even need a designer when you select a pre-formatted style.   http://intuitmarket.intuit.com/fsg/marketingmaterials/personalizedcarmagnets.aspx

If you’re an accounting professional with software certifications, you can list not only your company logo, but also your certification logos, such as QuickBooks ProAdvisor, Intuit Solution Provider, and others.  People will recognize these and will start a conversation with you.

These old-fashioned offline ideas will kindle new customers and new friends.

2. Volunteer to be on a panel of experts.

What’s great about appearing on a panel instead of speaking to an audience is the short preparation time.  All you generally need to do is be prepared to answer questions in your field of expertise.

When you can answer an audience member’s question intelligently, they will often follow up with you to discuss what else you can do for them.

Appearing in front of an audience of individuals interested in your field of expertise is a leveraged form of marketing.  Instead of having 100 individual conversations like you do in networking, speaking allows you to demonstrate your expertise to many individuals at once, saving you tons of time.

3. Appear on TV, radio, or in the news.

This one is easier than it looks.   What are the most common questions your clients are asking?  Make a list of these, turn it into a press release, and send it to the business editor of your local small town newspaper.  Let them know you’re the local expert on this topic, and you’d be happy to field questions for any articles they write.   You can even offer to supply articles for them, which provides them with content they don’t have to pay for.

Do this in the form of a “top 10 mistakes” list or a “7 things you need to know before you hire a __.”

Then, relax and enjoy your 15 minutes of fame.

4. Leverage the marketing channels you are already using.

If you have your social media accounts set up, send out a tweet or post letting people know you are looking for new clients.  For best results, describe the type of client you are looking for.

If you have your newsletter set up, send an email letting your list know you are looking for new clients and who to send you.  A common mistake with newsletters is to send only articles.  Periodically, you’ll want to send announcements of specials you’re having, which will boost sales, or other special announcements, such as an open house, a training class, or a request for testimonials.

Last, if you’re active and known in networking circles, use your elevator speech time to describe your ideal client.  The more specific you can get, the better your results will be.

5. Keep in touch with current clients.

The more you can reach out to current clients, the better.  When is the last time you’ve sent a client a thank-you card for no reason or on no particular occasion?   Proactively plan to connect with your clients throughout the year, and not just for invoicing!  You’ll find that your client retention, revenue per client, and referrals will all go way up when you increase the number of times you reach out to clients.

Those are five fast and fun ways to get new clients.  Let me know what works best for you.I’d love for you to post some of your favorite and fun ways to get new clients.  Share your experiences and ideas on my blog or on my Facebook page here http://www.facebook.com/sandismithleyva.

Deciding on a theme for the year will give you a focus and a new perspective on your work and your routines.   It can be highly rejuvenating to look at things through the lens of your new theme.

Ideas for themes are limited only by your imagination.  Some possible themes include:

• Abstract themes, such as abundance, creativity, or diversity. At the risk of sounding a little fluffy, an esoteric theme might be just what you need in 2012.  A theme with abundance will allow you to think big, be abundantly generous with others, and search for large contracts.   A theme with diversity will challenge you to be more open-minded.  I’ve been doing a lot of work lately in the area of forgiveness.  You may also want to consider gratitude or humility or service. 
• Relationships. Your year might be dedicated to meeting new associates and building business relationships.  Your action item might be to spend more time networking, participating in groups, and going to accounting conferences or meetings.
• A new service. Perhaps you’re launching a new service, such as financial services for the elderly, and need to focus on developing this new line of business. 
• Giving back. On a personal note, you might value volunteering and decide to organize your year around a couple of volunteer opportunities.  
• Growth. You might want to consider a growth-related theme, such as productivity or profitability.  You might also want to develop a new skill such as learning a new language, developing your people or communication skills, or taking a philosophy class at your local junior college. 
• Exploring. If you’ve retired or the business is starting to run smoothly without your day-to-day input, it might be time for that trip around the world.
• Organizing, detoxing, or cleansing. Consider cleaning out your garage (or your office), upgrading your systems, re-designing your filing system, auditing your own books, going on a cleanse or a vacation to an ashram, or another project that will leave you feeling clutter- and worry-free.

As you choose you goals for 2012, make sure the majority of them support your theme for the year.  Themes can bring an overarching focus to our practices and our lives.

My theme for the year is “higher self.”  My challenge for myself in 2012 is to be my best self always in everything I do, say, and feel.

What’s your theme?  I’d love for you to share yours on my blog or on my Facebook page here http://www.facebook.com/sandismithleyva.

1. Multi-tasking.

It’s so interesting how multi-tasking makes our brains feel like we’re accomplishing more. But scientific studies show how inefficient multi-tasking really is and that we’re accomplishing quite a bit less when we multi-task.

The quintessential example is driving while talking on a cell phone, which is actually so life-threatening that we have laws against it in many states. In life or death work settings such as hospitals and airplanes, multi-tasking can also have fatal effects. In the typical workplace where lives are not at stake, then multi-tasking is simply a waste of time, money, and energy.

Taking steps to move from multi-tasking to developing superior time management practices in your business workflow will allow you to plug this common money leak. It’s a habit we need to consciously work on breaking.

2. Marketing on the fly.

In many service businesses, it’s feast or famine when it comes to clients. That’s because when you have work, you’re too busy to market, and when you don’t have work, you may be reacting to the next marketing idea that falls in your inbox. The result is a money leak that has you paying way too much for marketing that often does not return your investment.

The answer is twofold. One is to get enough marketing training so that you know what marketing investments are going to return the most value for your business. The second is to create a year-round plan to smooth out your marketing efforts.

3. Lost customer opportunities.

In just about every business I’ve worked with, there are opportunities within your current customer base that have not been harvested. When you offer multiple services or products, it may even be that some of your clients do not know everything you do.

Here’s one of dozens of quick “aha” exercises I provide in my Accountant’s Accelerator program that is bound to uncover some revenue opportunities for most of you. Open a clean spreadsheet to get started. In the rows, list each current customer you have. Along the columns, list your current service lines. In each cell, drop in the revenue you received from that customer. The blank cells should reveal some opportunities for 2012 revenue.

Get started on the right foot in 2012 by plugging these three money leaks in your business.

1. Take on more profitable work by knowing your opportunity number.  In order to do this one, we need to know our gross margins by service or product line.  When we know our numbers, we can figure out what projects we can take on that increase the margins rather than lower them.  One example of this is to know your opportunity number.  Right now, my opportunity number is about $3,000.  I can’t easily take a new client in the door for less than that or I don’t give myself a raise.  When you know what kind of work you should be going after, you can give yourself permission to stop chasing after the small stuff and pursue the work that will give yourself a raise.2. Create new revenue streams.  This might sound hard, but it can be really simple.  Let’s pretend one of your core skills is writing, like it is for me.  At first when I sold my writing, I did it by selling articles.  Lately, I have had to get more creative.  I now sell my writing half a dozen ways:  I offer products in the form of binders I have written.   I perform marketing copywriting services for client’s websites and marketing materials.  I offer a client newsletter.  See how I can take one skill and make several different products out of it?  What skill do you have that you can make different products out of?  By thinking about what your clients need that you can offer, you can create new revenue streams and give yourself a raise.
2. Upsell to current clients and improve your revenue per client.  Can all of your clients list every service you offer?  I know mine couldn’t!  My web design clients probably don’t know about my coaching services, and my copywriting clients probably don’t know about my speaking services.  That’s something I need to do something about!  How about you?  Do all of your clients know about every service you offer?  If not, you’re probably missing out on some revenue opportunities.
3. Boost your marketing skills.  OK, I realize this one is a bit self-serving, but increasing the effectiveness of your marketing will lower your costs and give yourself a raise.  Every lead lost because of a miss in your sales call, a poor website, or an ineffective elevator speech makes you go after more prospects, which increases your costs and time.  Just getting an effective elevator speech can allow you to collect about 10 times as many cards for your time spent networking, and that’s a nice pickup in productivity.
4. Use your time better.  By implementing some advanced time management techniques that aren’t all that well known, you can improve your productivity, increase you billable hours, and make more by working less.  Your stress level will also go way down, and you will have more energy.
5. Work on your mindset.  The world we live in, and especially the U.S. culture, sure does a number on our poor brains.   It’s a surprise any of us are still sane after we take in the horrific news stories, negative or controlling people at work or in our lives, and advertising designed to make us feel inadequate.  No wonder 85% of Americans suffer from low self-esteem.  If you feel you lack confidence at times, you’re not alone.  It’s an epidemic.  We need tools to help build our confidence so we can live up to our potential and become all we can be, as the army says.

Are you ready for a raise in 2012?  Try these tips and watch your income grow.

1. Build your brand.  In accounting, professional services, and coaching, our brand is our name.  We can build it up by building our reputation for delivering results to clients and becoming a thought leader in the profession.  Do this a number of ways:  write articles, make speeches, offer teleseminars, post your testimonials and case studies, get interviewed by the press, serve on a committee or board of directors, and become a well-respected business leader in your community, to name a few.  When you build your brand, people will come asking for you by name and won’t consider others.

2. Make clients money.  Offer your services in a way that not only provides the compliance work that clients need, but that has them saving money or making more money so that your fees pay for themselves in the client’s eyes.  This is best done by getting clear how your services provide a return on investment for a client.  Often clients don’t even know how much you’ve saved them, so sometimes you need to overtly communicate this.  When you turn your final deliverable over to a client, add a report that summarizes how much you have saved your client.  This will go a long way toward getting great testimonials, more referrals, and increased client retention.

3. Stop hourly pricing.  It’s far too easy to have a prospect ask your price and compare you with someone lower.  Which is totally ludicrous, because no one can know how fast you are compared to someone else.  So if you do hourly pricing, you have to let prospects know you are faster (if you are).  The best way to get out of the whole price conversation is to bundle your services and develop fixed fee packages.   Clients love the certainty of a fixed fee, and you totally sound like you know what you are doing when you have a package.

4. Become more client-centered.  Listen.  Develop your services at the intersection of your skill set and your client’s needs.  You will benefit from constantly rolling out new products and services, and your client will think you can read their mind.

5. Learn marketing.  If you are a great technician and a lousy marketer, you’re a best-kept secret.  If you’re a great marketer and a lousy technician, you’ll have a lot of customer turnover.  You need both skill sets to succeed in this economy.  If your competitor is better than you at marketing and is an average technician, they’re likely to do just as well as you if you are a lousy marketer and a great technician.  Sad but true.

6. Put some fun into your products or services.  Last year, I had a contest and gave away an iPad.  This year, we’re taking our top tier clients to a fancy resort in Phoenix and maybe even to the Bahamas.  People are craving to have a little fun in their lives, so especially if you offer dentistry or taxes, it’s a great idea to make it as fun as possible.  Figure out what your clients will like, and add it to your service package.

Try these six strategies to beat the competition in 2012.

First, here are the five steps to get more clients:

1. Define your service.  Whether it’s computer training classes, facials, QuickBooks consulting, tax returns, or web site design, you’ll need to know the scope of what you offer.
2. Define your ideal client.  Who do you serve best?
3. Find your client.  There are 22 places to look.
4. Speak to your client.  Knowing what to say and how to say it can mean the difference between poverty and prosperity for many business owners.
5. Put it all together in a plan.  Having a marketing plan saves time and money in the long run and moves you form reactive to proactive, which is far less stressful.

Guess which step everyone does first?  You’re right if you picked number three.  Many people go straight to the chapter on finding your client without doing steps one and two first.  Are you guilty?

Here’s why that approach is going to cost you.

If you go straight to step three to look for your client, you’re looking for everyone.   Everyone could be your client.  If you’re marketing to everyone, then you have to look everywhere, and that’s going to be exhausting.

If you’re marketing to everyone and no one in particular, then your prospect feels pretty generic, pretty vanilla.  They don’t feel special because you take everyone.  And no one in particular.

The big thing that’s changed in the last few years, is that you can’t market to everyone anymore and get away with it.  If you’re still doing that, then you’re making it 50 times harder on yourself than you need to.

My Five Simple Steps helps you get more clients.  But you really have to do all five steps.

The funnel can be pictured like a big “V.”  At the top, wide-open part, there are a lot of prospects interested in your services and products.  At the bottom, narrow part, there are a few select customers who buy the most from you.

Near the top, you will have all of your lowest-cost offerings, perhaps those under $100.  In the middle, your medium-priced products and services will be positioned, and at the narrow, bottom, you will have your most expensive offerings.

The funnel is a fairly simple concept; however, we can glean quite a bit if we ask ourselves these questions:

1. Where is your funnel empty?

If you have any places in your funnel that don’t have products, then you have opportunities.  For example, if you don’t have any high-end products, then you’re likely missing out on some easy high-dollar sales.  At least a few of your best clients will want the top offering you have, so your action item is to develop a high-end product.

If you don’t have any products in the middle, then you might be having trouble getting clients to make the leap between your low-end offerings and your high-end ones.  Your action item is to create some medium-priced products or services.

If you don’t have any products at the top, then you want to develop some so people can sample you at a lower cost (and therefore risk).

2. Do you have some free offerings at the top?

The biggest challenge in getting new clients these days is building their trust.  You can more easily do that if you allow prospects to sample you for free.  This could be in the form of a free report, free consultation, free newsletter, or more.  The goal here is to remove the risk from a prospect seeing what you are like to work with.  Your action item here is to develop something you can provide for free.

3.  Do you only offer hourly services and find yourself scratching your head about this whole funnel thing?

If the only way you price is hourly, then you really only have one thing to put in the funnel, and that’s your hourly rate.  You have the biggest opportunity of all: to develop some packages and products to fill all the holes in your funnel and to provide you with a competitive edge.

Take a look at your own marketing funnel to see where the opportunities lie for you.

In any case, building a prospect kit will help you become even more consistent in the presentation of your company’s strong points to prospects.  And, it’s absolutely essential as you move into larger and larger business deals.

A prospect kit is a sales tool that you can use to communicate information about your business to prospects.  Here’s a list of the most basic items that can go in an initial prospect kit:

• A fact sheet about your company
• Bios of the team that will be working with the prospect
• Information sheets on your business’s products or services
• Testimonials, case studies, a client list, or references
• White papers, especially if your product or service is complex or unusual
• Copies of magazine or newspaper articles or reviews about the company or product
• Sample contracts, credit applications, or order sheets
• A personalized cover letter to the prospect

That makes up a standard prospect kit.  The question is, how can we make our prospect kit stand out and get noticed?

To create an attention-getting kit, here are just a few things you can consider adding to yours:

1. Your newsletter if you write one.
2. A handwritten note.
3. A demo, instructional, or portfolio CD or DVD.
4. A book you have published.  Books make the perfect “business card.”
5. A calendar if your company holds events.
6. Artwork.
7. A lottery ticket.
8. Photographs.
9. Toys or stress relievers.
10. A product sample, especially if you sell food or flowers.

Try to tie these ideas to your product or service, and see if that gets you in the door.

Once you can get the prospect’s attention with a thoughtful and unique prospect kit, then you can begin the dialog that leads to bigger things such as that first sales call.

I opened the Neiman’s envelope. It invited me to a one-day event, and it assigned me a number from one to nine. I had to open a flap to get my secret number. If I bring the card in the store, I’ll get a gift that corresponds to the number. For some reason, I liked this offer more. It piques our curiosity. On the back of the card, the legal disclosure listed what the gifts would be: cuff links, wool scarves, frames, dishes, gift sets, and gift cards. Not too shabby.

That’s just two examples of hundreds of deals we’ll be exposed to this holiday season. How can you apply these ideas to your company? Could you get a revenue boost or increase in client appreciation by implementing a creative promotion?

Here are some ideas from retail that we can apply to our non-retail companies:

Gift with purchase

Select a couple of products or services that are quite small that can be used as giveaways along with a purchased service. They can be indirectly related to your service. For example, if you do tax returns, you can have a lot of fun with this. For large enough accounts, you could throw in a celebratory dinner (restaurant gift card) for those clients getting refunds or a stress-reducing spa massage (spa gift card) for those who owe money to the IRS. This is called gift-with-purchase in retail.

Gift drawing

You can have a secret gift promotion like Neiman’s. Think about what behavior you want to encourage in your business. For clients who do that behavior, such as go to the store in Neiman’s case, they get the gift. The behavior might be to complete a form, attend an event, visit your location, or send you a referral. Select three or more small gifts for this purpose so there will be some element of surprise and randomness. It can be surprisingly easy to get these gifts donated from nearby local businesses who want to advertise their goods. You can also give your own products or samples away as gifts.

Let’s say you’re having an open house, or even a holiday party. You could send out invitations that include the code for one of the gifts. They can redeem them at the party. The gifts can be serious and related to your product or not. A PR firm could give away one press release or TV interview coaching. An accounting firm could partner with a banker to waive checking account fees for a year or give away software or consulting. An IT firm could provide small pieces of hardware such as routers, cabling, or a tablet. Or you could keep it lighter with universal appeal and provide sports tickets, concert tickets, or a fruitcake. Just kidding on the fruitcake.

Gift raffle

At an event I held in 2010 with two other entrepreneurs, we were thrilled to get quite a bit of luxury merchandise donated for a raffle. Just by attending the event, you were entered in the drawing. We had about a dozen items to give away, and a dozen very thrilled winners by the end of the evening. Jewelry, spa gift cards, inspirational books, coaching sessions, and food items were among the gifts.

Gift bags

Every star who attends the Oscars receives a brim-filled gift bag of goodies from vendors that have paid big money to get their stuff placed. You can come up with your own gift bags to give away to your clients. At my event mentioned above, every participant received a gift bag with a free massage certificate, a motivational book, cosmetics, and more.

Add a charity angle

Donate a fixed amount or percentage to a major client’s favorite charity. You could choose the top five clients who spent the most with you in 2011, or those who sign up with you by a certain date. At a recent event hosted by Anne McKevitt, a wealthy humanitarian and entrepreneur, the entry fee was a donation to Kiva.

These promotional ideas will certainly get your clients talking, especially if they are not routine in your industry. Try these to wake up your prospects, turn up the buzz from your clients, and ring up the sales during the holidays.

Wisdom and Knowledge: Creativity, Curiosity, Judgment & Open-Mindedness, Love of Learning, Perspective
Courage: Bravery, Perseverance, Honesty, Zest
Humanity: – Capacity to Love and Be Loved, Kindness, Social Intelligence
Justice: Teamwork, Fairness, Leadership
Temperance: Forgiveness & Mercy, Modesty & Humility, Prudence, Self-Regulation
Transcendence: Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence, Gratitude, Hope, Humor, Religiousness & Spirituality

The science objective was interesting. Since Chris was a psychologist and most psychologists focus on nasty diseases like depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and the like, I could see how he could get pretty sick of working with sick people. There was a brand new field emerging called positive psychology, which strangely enough, studied how to get us normal people from, well, just being kind of normal or not sick to a higher form of wellness called thriving where we were not only healthy but having a satisfied, meaningful, engaged, and happy life.

The 24 character strengths are a way to measure how we can tap into our natural character and leverage our best traits to become even better. The fun part is you can take a free test to see what your top five strengths are.

Millions of people have taken this test already. You can go online here, register for free, and get your scores immediately: http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Default.aspx
The test you want to look for is the VIA Survey of Character Strengths, under the Engagement Questionnaire section.

Now what does this have to be with your work day? Everything. I’ll share with you my top five strengths:

1. Creativity, ingenuity, and originality.
2. Curiosity and interest in the world.
3. Gratitude.
4. Love of learning.
5. Leadership.

If you know me at all, you are probably nodding your head right now. I use my strengths every hour of the day. From helping my clients think of new revenue lines and new ways to help clients (creativity) to the “I appreciate your business” and “thanks” lines that I put in almost every email (gratitude) to running a group training program (leadership and love of learning), I “walk my strengths.”

Take the test. Then see how you can change your perspective to see your daily routines through the eyes of each strength you have. For example, if your key strength is curiosity (actually the most common #1 trait for people), are you always wondering how things are working, how you can do something better, or asking why? Doing more of that will fulfill you even more, and when you can do that in light of improving the client’s condition or your boss’s condition, then you have harnessed your strength for the good of your workplace.

The next step, once you become aware of your strengths and how you are currently using them, is to tap into them even more. How can you begin to use your strengths more throughout your day in the work you do and at home? You may want to write each of your top five strengths on your calendar, one per week, until the end of the year, so you can have fun with leveraging their usage.

It’s so refreshing to focus on the positive aspects about ourselves for a change instead of the negative. Give yourself the gift of knowing your strengths and using them more and more each day.

Let me know what yours are; you can post them right here on my blog. You know I’m curious to find out, of course!

One way to move off this treadmill is to create a “money maker hour” in your business. Look at your to do list and identify the highest return item you can be doing in your business. There might be something in the back of your mind that hasn’t even made it onto your to do list that you know would make you money.

You’re probably not going to find this high-return item in your email inbox. Your highest return item is not necessarily going to be found serving existing clients, although that is going to be bringing the revenue in, which is essential. You’re not going to find it in designing your logo or getting your website done. You’re not going to find it when you answer an unscheduled telephone call. You’re not going to find it going to a networking meeting. And you’re not going to find it when you’re double checking an employee’s work. None of those are high return.

What might be a high return would be going to lunch with a college friend that works in a position where he can refer you a lot of business. Now s/he’s not going to probably call you up one day and say, “Let’s go to lunch.” You’re going to have to take the initiative to call them, and it might feel a little uncomfortable, but it could result in a huge amount of business. Another money maker hour item could be taking time for coaching. Another idea is to work your LinkedIn network to find someone you know at a company that can bring you a big account. These high return items – money makers — are a little bit scary, so we avoid them with the excuse that we are too busy serving current clients. By staying in the safe routine, we miss any chance of actually crawling out of the grind and taking our practice to the next level.

Please carve out an hour every day to come up with and do these money makers. If that sounds too overwhelming, start out with an hour a week. When you put these tasks on your to do list and get started, you’ll be shocked at how your revenue is going to change.

Here are a couple of other examples:

• Calling an influential industry contact to see what we can do together.
• Setting up a speaking engagement and going out to speak to 1,000 of your ideal clients.
• Calling your top client to see how you can help him or her further
• Coordinate an event with a couple of other partners and get some sponsors to help cover the costs.
• Making time to design a new program or a new revenue stream.
• Sending that email to a public relations company, journalist, or TV/radio show host.
• Submitting a speaking proposal for an annual event where all your clients are.

What can you do that is going to bring in a significant amount of business across a multiple number of clients? That would be a money maker hour task.

Keep your money maker hour pristine. Avoid the temptation to check email or answer the phone during money maker hour! It’s certainly easy to fall back on comfortable habits instead of doing the uncomfortable, but once you get started on money maker hour, you will eagerly anticipate it.

Try out money maker hour on your schedule, and let me know what you think.

As you go through the list, check them off to see which ones you are doing, and which ones sound good to add to your business.

1. Offer add-on peace of mind services

If you are in the information business, offer to run or setup a backup system, store a backup of what you just did, or otherwise keep copies of your work so that the client does not have to worry about recovery issues.  If you offer products, this may translate into an insured package that can be tracked and monitored. What kind of safety net can you think of to create for your clients?

2. Leave a cheat sheet behind

When I was in college taking statistics, the professor allowed us to bring in one sheet of paper and we could write anything we wanted on it.  You should have seen how tiny I could write.  For the final, I wrote every formula down from the whole course.  The sheet was literally covered from top to bottom with all the magic formulas from the world of statistics.

If you are in software sales or training, leave your client with a laminated short-cut list or handout that will help them fast-track their learning curves.

3. Return calls and emails within a specified time such as 3-4 hours

One way to offer a higher level of service is to set and announce service level metrics on tasks such as returning client phone calls.  In a call center, one measure that’s similar is called average speed of answer.  Define what metrics that will add value for your clients, set the values, and announce it as part of your services.

4. Offer follow up troubleshooting

Once you’ve performed your services, a client might have some follow-up questions.  Define the post-project access they will have to you in your initial contract.

5. Offer a guarantee

Do you guarantee your work?  Spell out your return policy so it’s clear up front.  The more liberal you are, the more your prospect’s trust level will go up.

6. Require a signed contract

When you submit a written agreement for a client to sign, not only is your insurance company happier, but your business looks professional and structured to your prospect.  A contract communicates business strength and expertise.

7. Set goals with the client ahead of time so expectations and direction are not assumed

Ask the client exactly what they want and put their exact words down in writing.  After you’ve completed the project, pull the clients’ words out, and ask them if they are happy with the result.  This reinforces that you’re “on their side,” helping them meet their goals.

8. Communicate your intangibles.

Let clients know about things you do for them that they can’t tangibly see, such as your commitment to continuing education, maintaining certifications or expertise, etc.

9.  Offer 24/7 on-call support

Some industries like retail and restaurants keep long, hard hours.  If you can be available to them in their hour of need, then you are more valuable to your client than someone who is less available.

10. Provide scheduled access such as taking calls at a certain time each day

Can you be available to clients every Monday from 10:00 AM to noon?  Having instant access to you during certain hours is another way to transfer value to clients.

11. Pick up the phone

Most of us routinely give new strangers 30 minutes of our time free in exchange for the goal of offering our services.  We should do the same thing periodically to existing clients.  Reach out via phone or email and offer clients a free no-obligation call once a quarter, twice a year, or whatever works for you.

Those are my eleven ideas to add more value for our clients.  What are yours?  I’d love for you to share on my blog below or my Facebook page here.   http://www.facebook.com/sandismithleyva

As you go through the list, take an inventory and make a list of all of the resources you have available to you in one form or fashion.  By the end of the article, you might be amazed at how wealthy you really are.

• Your financial wealth is measured in currency.  This includes cash, all bank accounts, retirement accounts, annuities, stocks, bonds, commodities, and other market investments.
• Your property wealth includes real estate and personal property such as furniture, dishes, clothes, jewelry, and a car.
• Your wealth of abilities, experience, education, and skills provides you with a livelihood and is what you can trade others for other categories of wealth.
• Your social wealth includes the friends you have and the financial wealth, property wealth, and abilities they are willing to share with you.
• Your organizational wealth includes any companies you own and run and/or that you are an employee of.
• Your community wealth includes the value you have accumulated within the groups of people that you frequent and services you qualify for from nonprofits.
• Your civic wealth includes services you qualify for as a citizen, such as police protection, fire department.
• Your family wealth includes the family you have and the financial wealth, property wealth, and abilities they are willing to share with you.
• Your spiritual wealth includes your faith and your actions to support the divine.
• Your emotional wealth includes your ability to feel and act out of love, sharing, and unity.
• Your physical wealth includes the state of your body and how you nourish and support it.

Do you feel richer already, just seeing the multiple categories that you can draw wealth from?  There is an abundance of sources that are ready to support your wealth.  And if you felt that you would like to strengthen any of the areas above, then you can now make plans to do just that.

1. Find support.

Is your overwhelm related to your packed schedule? If so, one solution is to get some help in the form of contractors, employees, or volunteers. A quick fix is to list five to ten of the most mundane daily or weekly tasks you do, and hire and train an intern on a part-time basis to do those tasks for you. Even a few hours a week to start will be a big relief.

2. Set boundaries.

Is your overwhelm due to client demands? Learn how to control the flow and limit the channels of inbound requests for your time and expertise. A couple of ways to do that include cutting off certain communications:

a. Schedule all phone calls. Don’t answer an unscheduled call. If this sounds impossible, try doing it one day a week to start with. Let your clients know you’ll be available for them four days a week, but the fifth day is for you.
b. Limit the communication channels that you will respond to. Don’t answer faxes or social media messages, as an example.
c. Check email only twice a day. I know. We’re addicted, and this is much harder to do than it sounds.

There are many other ways you can set boundaries, but this is a start.

3. Prioritize.

Is your overwhelm due to wanting to have it all? A lot of times we stay busy doing things that are urgent but not important. Then we get overwhelmed because we do not get to the important things. One way to solve this is to put your to-do list in priority order. Carve out at least one hour a day to work on the most important thing on your list. Some coaches call this your Power Hour. You’ll be thrilled at how much progress you will make in just one week.

4. Carve out de-stress time.

Is your overwhelm mostly emotional (for whatever reason)? Critical for your emotional well-being is to make time for laughter, relaxation, friends, family, and whatever you do to blow off steam. Our mindset, moods, and overall mental state can contribute mightily to overwhelm. We now know from neuroscience that learning how to de-stress is a set of skills everyone can acquire and significantly benefit from. It’s a field called resilience if you want to Google more about it.

5. Perspective and purpose.

Is your overwhelm due to a variety of factors? When times get overwhelming, what keeps me going is maintaining perspective and understanding my purpose in life. It’s important not to blow little things out of proportion. If I’ve had a tough day, I remember that I don’t live in a war zone, I’m not in prison or held hostage, there hasn’t been a hurricane or flood, and I haven’t been a crime victim. My “tough day” suddenly becomes a great day, and if I got to spend even a minute helping someone or serving my purpose, then all the better.

The crux of it is that many entrepreneurs procrastinate when it comes to implementing changes in their businesses because they are afraid to fail or afraid of what people will think.

A great example in my own business occurred while I was in the program last year. It took me a while to get around to writing my “Living Fearlessly” binder, which was my first attempt at productizing what I learned in my neuroscience program about how our brains process fear. I found my emotions around “putting myself out there” quite interesting: it was scary to think I might be rejected and the product might not sell. So I would delay finishing the product.

It’s no coincidence that most people stay stuck in jobs because they are too afraid to make the entrepreneurial leap. It’s no coincidence that many entrepreneurs don’t get away from hours for dollars to packaged, leveraged systems because it requires putting yourself out there in a new way. It’s no coincidence that most entrepreneurs stay stuck at a relatively low revenue level because they don’t learn how to systematize their business, which requires giving up some control, which is scary.

So how do you fail fast?

1. Know it’s OK to fail in the first place.

In the last 18 months, I’ve created nearly a dozen products. Two have been real winners, one has been a real flop, and a few are just too much trouble to market. Before I did them, I had no idea what would work, what would sell, and what would flop. I had to fail fast on a few to find the nuggets of gold in the winners.

2. Don’t wait until it’s perfect.

I am sure that there are typos in every one of my products and on my web pages too. I am also sure that typos will turn some people off. But as long as they don’t impact my client’s results or get me in trouble with the government, I’m going to continue delivering imperfect products with typos. Being perfect can delay entry into the marketplace and increase the price I have to charge my clients.

3. Give yourself permission to fail.

So what if no one bought your last idea, and you thought it was going to be bigger than pet rocks. It’s not the end of the world. Your family still loves you. In a month, your clients won’t remember. Your business will go on. We tend to catastrophize what will happen, but it hardly ever comes true.

4. Take massive action.

Success is a numbers game. The more things you try, the more successes you will have. It’s as simple as that. Get out there, and get out there fast. When you fail, get out there again, fast, with something else. There’s no time for wallowing in past failures when you are an entrepreneur! You have to keep moving.

Failing fast is one of the best lessons I learned last year. So if you’ve been waiting to try something, stick your foot out, lean forward, and get in motion.

1. Your first impression counts.

When I stepped into the yoga studio, the instructor wasn’t there yet. There wasn’t anyone from the studio to greet me. (None of the customers volunteered to help me or say “hi” either.) I stood there looking and feeling stupid for at least 10 minutes. By the time the instructor greeted me, I’m sure I had a really sour look on my face!

When a customer raises their hand to do business with you, what is the first impression they’ll see? Is it friendly and inviting? Or is there any point along the way where they feel awkward? Here’s a checklist:

a. Are new clients put on hold? Is there any fumbling going on with your phone system or transferring new prospects from employee to employee?
b. Is it simple or cumbersome for clients to turn in any “new client paperwork?”
c. How are clients greeted during an office visit? What if they are early? What if they are late?
d. Is there any time where customers are made to wait?

One reason why mystery shoppers have become so popular is they can help business owners identify the awkward moments and make suggestions to change them.

2. Keep the risk of doing business with you as low as possible.

At the yoga studio, I was able to sign up and pay for one class at a time. That way, if I didn’t like them, I wasn’t out a bunch of money.

How risky is it to do business with you? Will new customers be out a lot of money if they don’t like you? Is there a really high switching cost for them to move their services to you? If there is, then keeping the risk as low as possible will help clients take the leap. Here are some ways to reduce their risk:

a. Offer a money-back guarantee.
b. Offer an initial get-to-know-you service that is lower priced than your main offering. Kind of like an appetizer before the meal.
c. Provide prospects with references in the same industry they are in. A prospect values a testimonial from someone exactly like them. When they can see you’ve had success with someone exactly like their business, it provides peace of mind.

3. Give your business a face.

People hate to do business with large, faceless organizations. So make sure your organization, whether large or small, is not faceless. Show the people who own and work in your business, especially those who serve clients. Here are a few ways how:

a. Post photos and bios of all employees on your web site.
b. When answering the phone, identify who you are: “This is Sandi.”
c. When customers are visiting your office, make a point to introduce yourself. Just that little gesture is huge when it comes to making a person feel comfortable.

How approachable is your business? Give these tips a try, and see if more prospects come your way.

It was pretty unavoidable not to hear about last week’s job report and the wringing of hands that followed. If you’re interested in simply opting out of all that mess and creating your own economic success, then here are three tips.

1. Take your customer service up several notches.

Don’t just serve your customers; wow them with an exceptional experience or product that they will remember and tell their friends about. You can implement this one a couple of different ways: by delivering speed, quality, personal service, customization, extreme value, or memorability.

You’ll need to spend some creative time thinking how you can improve your customer experience, or ask your customers what they want, and deliver it. If you need to send employees to communications or customer service school or hire new ones who are already trained, then get it done. It’s an investment that will pay back.

When you can create raving customers who tell their friends, you will have your own economic boom going on.

2. Take more responsibility.

The more responsibility you are willing to take, the higher fees you can command. A lot of people don’t make this connection, so you may need to think about it for a little bit before it really sinks in. CEOs get paid more for responsibility they take on related to company performance. Entrepreneurs get paid more compared to employees because they take more responsibility. Taking more responsibility means taking more risk, and many people shy away from that. Which is why it’s such an untapped opportunity.

At the basic level, provide some guarantees of your work. You might consider guaranteeing satisfaction, accuracy, or results. The more you guarantee, the more value your client will receive. In order to provide these guarantees, you’ll need to make sure both parties perform at some agreed upon level. And you’ll need a way to measure what you are guaranteeing.

There are lots of ways you can take more responsibility. Be more proactive. Make suggestions outside your scope of services if you see an opportunity for the client. Don’t always be a “yes” person; disagree if you know the client will lose money on a decision they just made. Offer improvements when you notice them. Keep your skills updated and sharp so you can offer new solutions to the client.

3. Maximize resources you have already acquired.

It’s a rare meal that I don’t eat everything on my plate. I learned it from my dad who grew up in the Great Depression. In the same way, we need to use all of the resources we already have access to in our businesses. That way, we can keep our companies lean and mean. Here are a few examples:

• Utilize all the benefits that come with association memberships. This includes vendor discounts, online profiles, and more.
• Implement ideas you learned from training seminars and conferences.
• Take a look at any staff you may be underutilizing.
• Rent out any unused office space and collect some extra revenue each month.
• Watch the number of software licenses you own and don’t oversubscribe.
• Drop phone lines that are not needed.
• Use interns if you have the staff to train them.

Take a look around, and see what you already have that you can benefit from. I’ll bet you find gold.

If you’re ready to make your own economic history, start with these three ideas, and let me know what you think.

In this article, I present you with a checklist so you can compare your behavior with the list.  I’ll give some tips on how to break the bad habit, and the rest will be up to you.

1. Forgetting to write down or log your time spent.

I can’t be the only one who has shorted themselves in this way over the years.  The answer is to muster up all the discipline you can and create a routine that you will stick to, come h*ll or high water.  Create a checklist for yourself when you start on account and literally write out the steps you need to follow. (Step one, write down the client name, step two write down the clock time, step three, etc.)

The real challenge comes when you go into “fire” mode for a client.  This is often when the time recording slips past everyone’s mind, but don’t let it.  Go back to your familiar checklist, and take a deep breath.  When an emergency occurs on an airplane, the first thing pilots do is fly the airplane, and the second is they go to the checklist.  So even when you’re in “fire” mode, the routine and checklist are your friends.

2. Doing tasks as they come into your inbox without batching work by client

I know you want to be responsive and fast for the client, but you’re cheating yourself and the client is getting a freebie.  You respond to that email quickly, and you think, that’s not enough time to write down.      The problem is, you don’t realize there were 20 emails form that client for the week, which took a total hour.  Multiply that by 30 clients, and that’s a lot of time not written down.

Slow down, and group the emails by client, to be answered all at once, using the checklist mentioned in #1.

3. Not billing for calls.

The information you give on the phone may be your most valuable information you give to the client on the whole project.  Why aren’t you billing for it?

This is an easy fix; simply don’t take unscheduled phone calls.  All calls need to be scheduled through an assistant, and logged on your bill.

Extra hint:  Don’t let the experts in your business answer your phone.  They tend to give away too much and lower your sales conversion rates.  Instead, train a non-technical receptionist or customer service individual to handle your incoming phone calls.

4. Not taking into consideration team time.

The more team members that are on the project (whether on your side or the client’s side), the longer the project will take, period.  If you’re billing at a fixed fee or preparing an estimate, be sure you add some time to the project based on team size.

A great classic book on this is The Mythical Man-Month.  I got my project management experience back when IT mainframe projects took several years and dozens of team members to complete.  The essence is that you get diminishing returns for each additional person you add to a project and at some point, you are just making the project go on forever.

5. Not billing for setup time or project management time.

As a coach, I’ve pointed this out to my clients and let them decide what to do.  Somehow, whether in your billable rate already or as additional hours, setup and project management time should be included in the estimate or billing as a part of the project or account.

6. Shaving time off the bill to meet your estimate or because you like the client.

Who do you *like* better, your client, the child you need to put through college, or your 90-year-old self in avoidance of eating cat food on your fixed income?  I believe this is your brain trying to keep you from any short-term argument you might anticipate with the client on billing, but this really doesn’t make any sense when you take a step back and look at it for the long term, does it?

7. Guessing without really tracking clock time because you forgot or got interrupted.

Discipline.  Enough said.

8. Doing work outside the scope of a fixed fee job or doing rework and not billing for it.

Even before you start the project, teach your client what will happen when they ask for work outside the project.  Hotels ask for a credit card for incidentals, and we’re all duly trained.  Show your client the change order process and how they will be billed so it’s smooth when (not if) it comes up.

9. Prices that are too low to cover costs.

I see this in the first year when an employee who has been laid off (and still has an employee mentality) and is just starting their own business.  They bill like they were paid as an employee.  Surprise!  It’s such a dramatic change in mindset to realize the enormous risks entrepreneurs make and the costs they have to cover.

Some of you who have seen rising gas costs and other vendors raise their rates but haven’t raised your own are giving yourself a cut in pay every year.  No self-respecting employee would stand for that, and neither should you.

Be sure to do your math, watch your margins, and price accordingly.

**

Be careful with your current, spoiled clients as you implement these changes if you have been materially guilty of any.  When their bill goes up, they are likely to notice and grumble a bit, so you’ll need to figure out what you’re going to tell them.

As you get new clients, you can *train* them right from the beginning, so they have accurate expectations of what their account will cost them on a monthly basis.

I hope your billings go up after you implement these tips; let me know which tip you like best.  You can post your comments, successes, and questions right here on my blog

This year I picked a dozen or so peaches and brought them in. I managed to eat a few of them, and two days later, the rest were all spoiled.

I think some companies approach marketing just like I picked the peaches. We spend a lot of energy going after the fruit that is out of reach, and most of it spoils before we can get our act together. Then we wonder why marketing is so expensive, we don’t close the deals, and we are left with a big expense.

So that’s why I want to share some tips about how to go after the low-hanging fruit. You won’t even need a ladder for these revenue-builders.

1. Learn who sends you the most business and reach out to them.

Here’s a play-by-play of this first peach: Get a list of current customers. (If you only have 5 customers, do this anyway.) Make a column and note how you first got each customer right next to each customer’s name. Add up the sale for each referral source, and now you have identified your top power referrers. These people are sweet peaches for more revenue in your business. Thank them, gift them (if your profession allows it), let them know you love them, and do them a favor. Then ask them for more business and how you can make it even easier for them to send you clients. You are bound to get a couple more accounts this way.

2. Reach out to people who already trust you.

The biggest barrier today to get new business is getting over the trust hurdle that prospects have about wondering whether they should trust you. Eliminate that barrier by piggy-backing onto people they already trust that already trust you: for example, your clients already trust you, their friends trust them. Email your clients and ask them for referrals.

Most people are too afraid they are imposing on their clients. But in the end, most people like to do other people favors. So let your clients do you a favor, and ask them for referrals. They may not even know you want new business if you don’t let them know.

Converting these prospects to clients will be faster than converting strangers, and you are sure to pick up a few new clients by just sending a few emails and calling in some favors.

3. Make an irresistible offer.

People love discounts, so put together an offer that saves your current clients and prospects money while possibly introducing them to something new. You might offer 10% off one of your services for the month of August, or have a coupon people can cash in. I’m just about to have a close-out sale on some older inventory items that are not actively being marketed.

With the popularity of Groupon, people are primed to act when they see a deal. Give people a deadline so they can make a decision, and so you don’t get left in “maybe” land.

Offer a discount, and watch people come out of the woodwork to snatch it up.

4. Cross-sell current customers.

Could you serve your current customers better? Most of us could. With long-time clients, I find I sometimes get into a reactive rut, where I just do what clients tell me they need. However, that’s not really what most good clients hire us for. They hire us to be more proactive than that. They hire us to keep taking them to the next level. But most of us quit too early or get comfortable with our routines.

Once you’ve taken your client to your initial level of service, offer to take then to the next level. This gives you ample opportunities to continue to cross-sell and upsell your current clients, until every client has every service you offer or they have said no thank you.

Plug the holes you have with current clients who are not taking advantage of everything you have to offer, and watch your revenue per customer soar.

5. Offer current customers a new way to pay you.

A lot of people cannot afford to pay in full these days. If you’ve never offered payment plans before, it may be a way to expand your client base (and your revenues) to people who can afford to pay you in a series rather than a lump sum. If you’ve never taken credit cards, then it’s way past time to add this payment method for your customers. You might also want to consider payment via PayPal, or even bartering if you are just starting your business and trying to build your referrals.

Offer multiple ways to pay, and you’ll be introduced to several new clients this way.

Back at my peach tree, it would have been easier to leave the ladder alone, pick the low-hanging peaches, and enjoy them with very little effort.

Could the same be true in your business?

How many times have you hung up on your customer by trying to patch in a third person using the unfriendly 3-way calling or your own telephone set? Would it sometimes be useful to record a call that you have with a client while you are teaching or explaining something so they could listen again if they wanted to? Would you like to offer recorded calls as part of your services or products? Do you have a mastermind group or simply some pals that you want to share goal-setting and accountability with on a regular basis?

Freeconferencecalling.com does all this and more at no charge. I have recorded hundreds of coaching calls, used it for several masterminds up to 10 people attending, recorded marketing and teleseminar calls and much more. Sign up to get your own private access code. As the host, you’ll enter an additional host code each month. It’ll take a few seconds to learn the commands. (Press 5* to record, for example.) And the user interface to download the mp3s is super-easy to learn. No appointment-setting is necessary; you can use the codes anytime you want to.

I don’t know how these companies get by without charging, but I’m happy they do.

2. FileZilla

We just started using FileZilla, and we use it to update websites as well as to move files from a local computer to our web sites where we store products and program audios for our customers. It’s an FTP program. That stands for File Transfer Protocol, and it sound more complicated than it is. It’s easy to learn and a great tool that everyone should learn how to use.

3. Google Calendar

As my company follows the global trend to move everything off the desktop, Google calendar is easy to use and share with virtual or onsite team members and partners. You can have multiple calendars for multiple businesses, projects or partners. You can have your personal calendar separate from your business calendar, but see them all overlapping and in different colors.

4. Ning

For those of you who have membership groups, following, or want to start a community, Ning rocks. OK, it’s not free: I paid a whopping $2 and 95 cents for the entire year. My 100+ Accountant’s Accelerator members are finding accountability partners, posting tips, making friends, and networking for their business’s benefit.

I was shocked at how easy it was to set up, add people, and post all of our program deliverables. If you have this specialized need, Ning is a great solution.

5. WordPress (.org)

WordPress has changed the face of web sites forever. Gone are the days where you need to pay $20,000 for a good content management system; WordPress offers one for free. It’s not perfect, but the search engine juice WordPress provides allows me to look the other way at some of its imperfections.

It still requires a techie to install (IMO), but there is so much you can do to keep your webmaster’s bill low. I have my clients entering their own photos, search engine optimization tasks, testimonials, and blog posts. WordPress is another one that moves the files off the desktop so that anyone anywhere can see and edit the latest version of the post or page.

BTW, WordPress plays best with Google Chrome; stay off IE8, or you will go crazy.

6. Skype

Skype is an oldie but goodie. If you are still paying for long distance phone calls, you can cut that expense out entirely with Skype. It’s the only way I can service my clients from Europe, Australia, and Asia. It also allows residents in those countries to access my U.S.- phone-number teleseminars with no long distance. Now if we could just do something about the time zone differences, we’d be rocking.

Even if you’re paying an extra $20 a month for Canadian access or other out-of-country access, drop that plan, use Skype, and treat yourself to a steak dinner once a month instead.

7. Gmail (or Yahoo! mail)

As an Outlook user for over a decade, I’m finally getting off my desktop and moving into Gmail. It does everything Outlook does: filters, rules, folders, priorities, and more. The main thing is it allows me to be platform-independent; I can check email from my phone, PC, Mac, or iPad whenever and wherever I want.

Those are my 7 favorite freebies. Do you use any of these? What are yours? Post your favorites below. I’d love to hear your comments.

1. Don’t give up

Thomas Edison performed 10,000 experiments before he discovered the light bulb. Friends asked him what he would carry on after getting no results.  Edison said, “I got lots of results.  I now know 10,000 ideas that don’t work.”

Beethoven had his share of critics during his time and was in constant conflict with the royalty that hired him to write his works.  His response:  “A few fly bites cannot stop a spirited horse.”

Henry Ford lost money in two companies before he built the Ford company of today.  He also had the idea to mass-produce watches before he applied it to cars, so sometimes the “big idea” takes a few iterations before the winner is shaped.

2. Recover quickly from setbacks

Edison’s lab burned down when he was 67 years old.  He said, “I’ll make a fresh start in the morning.”

Samuel Goldwyn lost bother parents before he was 11.  He escaped Poland, begged across Germany, and made it to England where he got a job.  By age 13, he made it to New York and worked as a glove cutter.

Quite a few famous names lost one or both parents at a young age.  Here’s just a sample:

• Marie Curie lost her mother at 10.
• Michelangelo lost his mother at 6.
• Isaac Newton’s father died before he was born.
• Thomas Jefferson lost his father at age 14.
• Leo Tolstoy lost his mother when he was 2 and his father when he was 9.

3. Don’t worry about what other people think

At age 7 Albert Schweitzer joined a group of boys that were hunting birds.  Albert shooed them away before any of the boys could take aim.  The boys beat him up, but Albert took “Thou shall not kill” to heart.

Verdi got kicked by a priest when daydreaming about music.

Pasteur received mediocre grades in chemistry.

Cezannes the impressionist painter was enrolled in law school by his father.  He spent his leisure time putting the French legal code into verse.

Galileo wrote the laws of motion in secret after he was imprisoned.

Albert Einstein’s teachers said he was mentally slow.  He failed his college entrance exams, and he was rejected because he was Jewish.

Churchill was last in his studies and failed his military exam.

4. Think big.

Thomas Jefferson made a point to “see beyond the horizon of his own existence.”

Mother Cabrini said, “Anybody can do the possible.  The real fun is to do the impossible.”  This is one of my favorite quotes.

Da Vinci’s motto was “Good but do better.”

5. Give back.

When Verdi was asked what his best work was, he answered, “A home for destitute musicians that I have endowed at Milan.”

Albert Schweitzer said those who have sought happiness and found it have learned how to serve.

Which history maker do you admire?  Post your favorites below.

1. Put together a whiz-bang welcome package.

Remember the good old days when we used to bake a pie for the new neighbors who just moved in across the street?  Women used to one-up each other to win the unofficial title of who baked the yummiest dessert on the block.  Meanwhile, new neighbors were swarmed with goodies to make them feel at home in their new strange house.

Use the same concept to wow your prospect.  An unhealthy-by-today’s-standards sugar-filled pie is not necessarily what I mean, though.  Instead, gather your best case studies, testimonials, copies of recommendation letters, sample products, books, CDs, and the like into a delightful basket of goodies that will impress your prospect.  Whipped cream and cherries are optional.

2. Respond at the speed of light

Never brag about how good your service is.  Instead, show it with your speedy and knowledgeable response to any prospect’s inquiry.  Here are some best practices before your brain tricks you into thinking you already do this one.

1. Measure.  Do you have a report that shows all prospect calls are answered in less than 2 hours?
2. Accountability and training.  What have you taught your staff about prospect inquiries and how to process them?  Do they get logged anywhere, even if it is an inquiry from an existing client?  Is there a script for every service inquiry?
3. Follow up.  Is there a follow-up system to measure closing success?
4. We all hate being put on hold, transferred, and given the run-around when we’re on a support call.  But do we do the same thing to prospects in our offices?  How many times does the prospect get transferred before s/he gets to the right person in your company?  How long does it take to talk to a decision-maker, owner, or partner?
5. How long does it take before a sales meeting is held or a packet is sent out?

Measuring these ideas will give you a hint of how good or bad your service really is when it comes to serving prospects.

3. Connect with their problem.

How well do you understand your prospect’s problem before you provide a solution?  If you have a needs assessment checklist that you talk each prospect through, give yourself a gold star.  If not, here’s an opportunity to develop one.

4. Offer prospects a no-risk way to sample your services.

Think about the 30-day trial for software packages.  How can you apply that to your company?  It might simply be:

• 100% money-back guarantee on all services.
• A 30-day return policy with no questions asked.
• A free report, book, CD, video, checklist, or webinar.
• A free half-hour consultation.
• An open house.
• A free seminar.

People are more likely to be interested in trying your product if you give them a no-risk way to sample it first.

5. Shower them with proof.

Show your prospects that you have performed your services many times before for people just like them.  If you are speaking with a contractor, provide testimonials and case studies from the contracting industry.  Always tailor your testimonials, case studies, and stories to the industry of the person you’re speaking with.

You can’t overdo this area, I promise.  The more you “overdo,” the faster the prospect will be convinced you are the expert.

6. Do a personal favor.

There’s nothing more compelling than a person that helps you out of a personal bind or makes you feel special.  There are some amazing customer service stories from social media:  the woman who tweeted about getting stood up on a date and the unrelated-to-the-date company that sent her flowers, the personal apology video of 2 pizza place employees who screwed up on a late pizza order, and anything related to Zappo’s.

Watch and listen for your prospects’ personal needs, and wow them that way.  But use good judgment on this one, and be careful not to get creepy; stalking is against the law, last time I checked.

7. Listen

Gosh, what happened to plain old-fashioned listening?  Employ this one, and you won’t need to do the other six.

How do you like to wow your prospects?

Send me your stories of how you wow your prospects and I’ll post them in a future newsletter.

All of these approaches are well and good to help you keep more of what you make, but there are far more options to grow your take-home dollars besides raising revenue and lowering costs.

Here are six more ways to get more profit out of your business.

1. Change your revenue mix.

If you offer more than one service, chances are one service or product is more profitable than another one that you offer.  If possible, look at ways you can increase sales of the more profitable service while reducing sales on the less profitable services.  When you do, you’ll instantly have more take home money than you do now.

2. Change your price.

Interestingly, increasing your price doesn’t always generate more revenue.

Rather than increasing your price, you might be able to actually lower your price, increase your volume, and make more overall revenue.  This technique is more effective for product sales than service sales, but you never know until you try it.  Experiment with this on a test basis to see whether lowering your price generates more profits for you.

If you’re working too hard with long hours, your price may be too low.  Raise your price to adjust demand, and you’ll be able to stop working so hard but still have just as much revenue coming in.

3. Change your customers.

If you have lots of different customers from varying industries and sizes of businesses, it might be fun for you but also exhausting.  The more different your customers are, the harder it will be for you to get up to speed to serve them well.

To increase your profits, attract a very similar customer over and over again.  For example, all lawyers or all hypnotists.  You’ll be better able to serve them because you already know their business and industry and the common problems they all have.  You’ll also become an expert and it will be easier to market to your new niche.

4. Change your volume.

If you’re constantly struggling to cover your overhead or reach your revenue goals, you might have a volume problem.  This means you’ll need to market more to get more customers or sell to existing customers and increase your revenue per client.

5. Change your measures.

Be sure your accounting system is delivering the type of reports you need in order to track your revenues, your costs, and your margins for each service, each product, and even each customer.  That’s the only way you’ll have the detailed information you need to act in a fiscally responsible way and fine-tune your business profits.

6. Change your mind.

If you haven’t taken a look at where you are now and where you want to be so that you can have a plan to bridge the gap, then you might be in denial about your business.  Taking action will get you out of “dream” mode where you might be wishing your take home pay was higher and into reality mode where you can make it happen.  Take action by planning and executing your plan, one change at a time.

Those six ideas will “show you the margins” and help you find some more summer income in your business.

We don’t think about rituals much when it comes to business, but I think we should.  What rituals could you create in your business that will rev up your revenues?  Here are three ideas to get your engines started.

1. Your Daily Question (the ritual of the raison d’etre)

Start every day with a question to put your mind in a big picture frame before you get too immersed in your daily grind.  The question can vary by the biggest need you happen to have that week or that day.  Here are some sample questions to try out:

• What is the top income-producing opportunity available to me right now, and do I have time allocated to work on it?
• What am I willing to give up that isn’t working?  (Sometimes we need to look up to realize the cheese has moved.)
• What skill can I get better at so I can serve my clients better?
• What 10-minute task can I do that will bring me the quickest cash?
• What can I do to bring my energy up today?
• What favor or compliment can I pay forward to my top referral source?

I’m sure you can think of more questions to ask based on your business needs, whether it’s revenue, cash, time, or inspiration.  You can work the same question for a week or a month, or have a different question for each day of the week.

Asking yourself your daily question will keep you focused by providing you with your anchoring thought of the day.   It will help you keep working on what’s important and not so much what’s urgent.

2. The Report Card Ritual

There’s nothing better than accurate, cold, hard metrics to set things straight, kill procrastination in its tracks, and create excitement about meeting or exceeding goals.  To practice the report card ritual, identify a number in your business that you are continually missing and are growing tired of falling short.  Here are a few options to get you thinking:

• Revenue (in total or for a particular line you are growing)
• Billable hours
• Total hours worked
• Net income
• Take home pay
• Number of customers
• Number of leads
• Revenue per client
• Revenue per employee
• Sales conversion ratio

Now, track it at the end of every day.  Your ritual should consist of measuring, recording, and analyzing this metric at the end of each day.  Make a spreadsheet and chart your progress over time.  Are you gaining on your goal or losing?

You can’t improve something until you measure it.  When you can spend time and attention on the metric you want to change, you’re already 90% there.

There are many more rituals to enjoy:  employee celebrations, client celebrations, signature rituals that are your own, seasonal rituals such as the company picnic or the annual Christmas party, a gratitude ritual, a peace and quiet ritual, and even billing rituals, collection rituals, and customer service rituals.

Take a look at where you can practice rituals in your business, especially the ones that will rock you revenue.

I’m currently reading Chip Conley’s book, The Rebel Rules: Daring to Be Yourself in Business. Despite its name, the book doles out fairly standard business advice, except for a handful of tiny tidbits of sheer brilliance. One is the list of items that investors are looking for when considering providing startup money to new businesses (on page 81).

Chip says your management team should consist of a “brain trust that includes a passionate visionary, a “get-your-hands-dirty” operator, and a responsible, finance-minded executive.”

Even if you’re never going to seek venture capital money to help to fund your business, this tidbit of advice makes a great strategy question to consider for your business, especially if you are an entrepreneur. How are all three roles being served in your company?

Passionate Visionary

The passionate visionary is a creative idea person. She has the technical knowledge that supports the service or product that will be created and offered. She sees the market need and just how to sell and position the product so that clients or consumers will want the offering.

The visionary often has more ideas than budget. The finance role can help the visionary evaluate the profitability of their idea and prioritize the projects. The operator can help to execute the visionary’s ideas.

The visionary provides strategic direction for the company and keeps the market offerings fresh.

If your business is missing a visionary, then you might find yourself getting stagnant with your service offerings and falling behind the marketplace. You might also struggle to keep your practice full as often (but not always), the sales function could fall to the visionary. The fix is to develop a sales and marketing team and/or a research and development team that can serve these functions.

“Get-your-hands-dirty” Operator

The operator is an executor. She gets things done. She can find and hire the right team. She is a systems builder who can develop the systems, job descriptions, procedures, and processes that makes the company unique.

The operator takes the visionary’s ideas and makes them happen. She needs the visionary’s ideas because she would rather take someone else’s ideas and work with them than create her own. She also needs the support of the finance executive to stay on budget and to focus on one project at a time or avoid hiring too many people.

A business without a good operator never gets the product to market and may also constantly be short of team members.

Responsible, Finance-minded Executive

The finance expert helps to make the dollars work for the company. She can tell us how much we need to sell and how much we can spend. She can also provide capital sources for the company via investors or loans.

The finance executive loves numbers and can help to make sure the company’s operations are profitable. She’ll work closely with the operator to make sure that the right number of people are hired at the right salary levels. She’ll work with the visionary to plan and budget for new sources of revenue and new product lines.

Without a finance executive, a company often spends more than they bring in and may not have a viable profit plan. They may also run out of cash which can cause problems with creditors and investors.

Your Brain Trust Trinity

As you were reading, which role jumped out at you that might need shoring up in your business? You might be strong in one area and need to outsource another while keeping a strategic eye on things overall.

You might also be great at performing these roles for your clients, but do a lousy job on your own business. Enough said there.

Take a look at each of these roles and objectively assess your business. How are all three roles being served in your company? Which ones need more development in order for your business to grow?

Getting clear on your company’s roles can very well take you to the next level of success.

When it comes to websites, there is a surefire formula you can follow to make sure your web site brings you business, no matter what your business.  I call it my 5C formula.  Let’s take a closer look:

1. The Caffeine Factor

Did you know you only have about 2 seconds to get the attention of your web visitor these days?

One of the biggest problems in marketing is getting your message through the noise of all the other messages out there.  Your message won’t even reach your prospect unless you have the prospect’s attention, and it’s competing with hundreds of other messages that are bombarding your prospect daily.  The first goal of any website – any marketing media, for that matter – is to stand out and get the prospect’s attention.    That means that your web site must have what I call “The Caffeine Factor.”

Add items to your site that will get your web visitor’s attention.

2. Credibility-Builders

Especially for accountants, your reputation is absolutely critical.  People will hire you (or not) based on reputation alone.

One of the challenges of the web is that it’s not face-to-face.  Some salespeople will insist a sale be made face to face, and generally, that’s a good rule.  But the internet changes all that, and your website is a chance for people to virtually “meet” you and learn about your reputation and your credibility in the privacy of their own space.

Fill your site with these credibility-builders, and you’ll have an easier time closing the sale when you do interact with your prospect.

3. Calls to Action

One of the biggest mistakes of millions, maybe billions of sites is leaving people hanging.  The hard part was done: people found you, and they fell in love with you.  Now what?  They are too timid to call, and if your site has no other way for them to stay in touch and get to know you slowly, you’ve likely lost them forever.  Like ships passing in the night.  After all, most of us don’t like one-night stands; we need to get to know you over time.

Don’t leave people hanging; tell them what to do next to get to know you over time. Do this by including calls to action on your site.

4. Charming the Search Engines

Ahhh, build it and they will come.  Right?  Wrong.  My first three Cs tell you what content to put on your site, but it’s not enough.  If you want your site to be found by your ideal client, you’ll need to learn what to do so that your site will rank high for the keywords that your ideal client will enter to find you.  Certainly, you can plow through your Google Adwords account, spending thousands, to pay for search engine placement.  But there is a better way, and it’s surprisingly clerical to implement once you know the formula.  It’s called organic SEO.  Be glad hardly anyone does it, because then we’d all have to buy AdWords.

5. Crowd Control

It’s now time to attract a crowd, to your site, that is.  This is a series of steps you do to bring people to your site.  Unfortunately, that task on our “to do” list labeled “Get web site done” should never get checked off.  I know this idea will drive a few of you crazy, but we have to market our site (and any other channel we use) just like we have to market each of our services.

Gamble on all 5 “C’s,” Caffeine, Credibility, Calls, Charms, and Crowds, and the odds are in your favor that you’ll have all the leads you need to stay busy in your business.

The 2 huge advantages to WordPress are:

1. Users can easily add pages and blog posts.  The dashboard user interface is easier to use than most CMSs (content management systems).
2. The search engines rank WordPress sites higher than regular websites because they are considered a blog, and social media ranks higher than anything else.

So it just makes sense to embrace it.  The problem is it’s not exactly free, and I want my customers to understand what these hidden costs are before they jump into the “free: solution everyone is raving about.  Here are 8 essential things to know about the WordPress platform:

1. Installation.  WordPress installation requires hosting setup, database setup, encryption key generation, FTP (file transfer protocol), and parameter editing in a php file.  Not exactly a piece of cake for a non-technical person, expect 30 minutes time from a webmaster to help you get WordPress installed.
2. Backup.  Unless you have a special piece of software, you are NOT backed up if you are running a WordPress blog.  We were so lucky a few weeks ago; one client was making a change and got locked out of their dashboard.  Luckily we had made a backup about 3-4 weeks earlier.

   Surprise! You may not be backed up (it’s the database portion that’s tricky); check with your webmaster, and get this resolved immediately.  (We have a little package if you want us to do it.)

3. Moving hosts.  This one may never apply if you do not move hosting companies.  But if you do, it’s tricky to move a WordPress site to a new host.  You’ll need expert help if you decide to change hosting companies.
4. Themes.  You can control the look of your WordPress site with a theme.  There are hundreds of free ones and you can spend hours looking through them and learning them.  We can cut our bill substantially by installing the same theme for every client and then customizing it for the colors and banner preferred by the client.  Look for a WordPress expert who knows the theme you are using, or expect to pay more for their learning curve.
5. Customization.  What’s brilliant is you can pretty much get your WordPress site to look like anything you want to.  What really adds up is the extra graphics and style changes that we have to make to get your site looking great.  This is the part where it’s not free any more.  Expect 1 to 10 hours of webmaster time depending on how complex your site is.
6. Search engine optimization.  Although this is a strength of WordPress, there are many more things you can do to make your WordPress site even more attractive to the search engines, however, this requires a plug-in and more time from your webmaster.    The good news is it’s always a fantastic investment to make your site attractive for search engines.
7. Adding your own pages and posts.  It’s very convenient to add your own pages and posts, and some clients love the fact that they have control at 4 in the morning to change something if they want to.  Without a webmaster to help you decide what should go where, you might miss out on maximizing your site’s response if you make too many sweeping changes.
8. Upgrades.   WordPress is constantly evolving its platform, so there are frequent upgrades that are available in WordPress.  They often fix important security issues, so sometimes they are important.  The problem is, they can cost money to install.  They can also conflict with any customization your webmaster has done.  Themes also have upgrades, and it can be even more dangerous to upgrade a theme and wipeout important changes.  Get an expert’s help before you click yes to upgrading WordPress or your theme.

Even though WordPress is not completely free, I am 110% in favor of embracing it as the best website/blog platform going today.

I hope this helps you make a smoother transition from your existing site to a WordPress site.

Are you ready to move to WordPress?

Each of us has 24 hours in one day.  Most of us have annual revenue goals.  A few of us have monthly, weekly, daily, or even hourly revenue goals.  Hopefully you know what your revenue goal is.  (If not, you should!)  If you don’t pull in that level of revenue for the week or month, then you’ve missed your plan.

Let’s say you want to generate $1 million in sales for the year.  On average, you need to pull in $20K a week.  That’s 4K a day.

Now what if 4 out of 5 people who contacted you about your services were ready to pay you $200 for a one-off job?  You might spend an hour speaking with them and 10 minutes on their contract, with your team spending an hour on legal and accounting compliance.  You or your team perform the work; then the client has another hour of questions.  You just lost $1,000 on a $200 job.  It’s just better not to take it.

Instead, how about if you spent those couple of hours on a $50K proposal?  Even if it takes you 10 times as much time to finally close the deal, it’s time well spent.  Spending $5K to win a $50K deal is time well spent.    The problem is we don’t look at unbillable time that way.   We usually just chalk it up to overhead.

Here are a couple of tips to think about when you are bringing in new clients and going after new business:

1. Know exactly how much it costs to bring on a new client.  You might still take an unprofitable engagement assuming the value/profitability of that client increases each year you serve them.   But don’t take on a client who argues with you on fees, wants to change your contract, or is far below a good project size for you.
2. Spend your time wisely.  Stop doing things for free for people who have not helped you financially in some way over the years.  Stop writing off your time.  Stop answering client emails for free.  Stop spending hours doing something for free unless it will lead to an excellent relationship or good revenue down the road for you.
3. Compute your opportunity number.  That’s the number by which you will suffer too much loss if you take on that client.  It might be $20, $2,000, $20,000, or $2 million.  For example, your number might be $5,000.  Any project below a revenue of $5,000 is not worth your time.  Any opportunity at $5,000 or above, you should actively pursue.
4. Post that number on a sticky note, or better, on your vision board.  Every decision you make should factor in your opportunity number.  The way you spend your time on an hourly basis should factor in your opportunity number.
5. Set up a filter in your marketing funnel to direct clients below your opportunity number to low-end products, group programs, or low-end services.  Do not let them gobble up your owner’s time or your overhead.  It sounds mean, but if you do, you won’t make your numbers, or you will have to work long hours to do so.
6. Take a look at your to-do list in light of your opportunity number.  You may have a lot to cross off, and a few new tasks and prospects to add.
7. To get the quantum leap, work your top opportunities.  Check out who lands on your doorstep, but make more time to go after who you want.

What’s your opportunity number?

Compassion has a different definition in Asia than it does in the U.S., and frankly, I like Asia’s take on it much better. The primary difference is that in the U.S., we can have compassion for others, but not normally toward ourselves. In Asia, the term compassion includes self-love and love for others. I think this is a critical distinction.

I like to define compassion differently than everyone else. Compassion is one of the highest emotions we can experience. It is 100% pure unselfish love. In my definition of compassion, there is no fear. There is no pity. There is no sadness. There is only positive love in the highest vibration. It helps others far more to project our highest positive emotion rather than to spread our negative emotions of fear, sadness, and pity.

And this takes practice to perfect.

In the U.S., we’re not even too used to “practicing” our emotions. They kind of just ooze out of us. Once we start practicing compassion, we can get really awesome at it. We might be lifting the 20 pounder at the beginning, but once we start exercising regularly, we can lift more and more. The benefit of practicing is that we feel more and more love each time. The feeling of love gets more intense, and that feels good.

Here are five steps to experience compassion more intensely than you ever have before.

1. Focus on yourself. Center and ground yourself. If you feel afraid, deal with that first before projecting your emotions on others. Compassion is not a negative emotion. Sending compassion because you are having a self-pity party about “what if it happened to me” is not a good reason for sending compassion.

2. Fill yourself with compassion first. Most of us need to work on this far more than we realize!

   If you need help being more intentional about your emotions, draw from the past: bring to mind a time when you felt tremendous strength, and re-live that emotion through savoring.

3. Focus on the person you are sending compassion to. Make sure that in your mind, they are equal human beings to you in every way. This avoids bringing negativity into your compassion through pity or feeling sorry for the subject of your compassion.
4. Send compassion to your recipient from a place of pure strength and love.

5. Check to make sure your experience of compassion is purely positive, with no fear, no anger, no comparing, and no sadness.

   Revel in the fullness and strength of your compassion now compared to how you have sent it before.

Because emotions are contagious, practicing compassion grounded in pure positive emotional vibration will help your recipient far more than compassion generated out of fear. You will feel less drained as well. You may even feel rejuvenated.

Go through these steps a few times until you become used to this new way of practicing compassion. Not only will you feel amazing each time you practice, the world will benefit from your high vibration and positive energy.

When more of us come from a place of high positive emotions more often, the world will move from chaos to calm and from fear to love, one person at a time.

Wouldn’t you love it if your web site did the same thing to people as caffeine does? If your web site woke people up, had them paying attention, and focused on your message, you would get far more prospects wanting to know how to work with you.

To add the caffeine factor to the home page on your web site, here are three tips:

1. Create an attention-getting headline. Your headline should be the biggest attention-attractor on the entire page.

   For best results, there are a couple of forms your headline can take. I like to ask a question the best, such as “Do you want to make money?” Others like to create a command, like “Make Money Now.” In either case, make it catchy and attention-getting. Give it some caffeine.

2. Keep your design clean with a lot of white space and breathing room. It will be a refreshing change from today’s overcrowded everything. Your design should direct your web site visitor to exactly where you want them to pay attention. Do this through quality graphical elements.

   Take off anything you have that’s blinking or moving. It makes you look desperate, and it’s so 2006.

3. Create a header for your web site that has one purpose: to let your web visitor know if they’re in the right place or not. If your visitor is looking for a dry cleaners and you’re a florist, no need to waste their time or yours. Make it clear who you are and what you offer by using common generic labels in your header. You’ll distinguish yourself from the competition later, but for now you’ll gain trust by reassuring the web visitor that they’re in the right place.

The Caffeine Factor is one of five of my “5 Cs” formula that I’ve used for over a decade to help my clients generate over a million dollars of new revenue. To discover what the other 4 are, you can listen to my free call here: http://www.mywebsalesmachine.com/

If you’re ready to have your web site visitors wake up and smell the coffee, then put the Caffeine factor to work on your site today.

One of the most important characteristics of our business is the reputation that our business earns with others. What clients, employees, vendors, partners, and competitors think about our business matters a great deal. Our business’s reputation directly affects our success as well as our self-esteem, our pocketbook, and our pride.

It’s also something we don’t have complete control over.

We know how we feel about our business, including what motivates us, what level of service we aim to deliver, and the quality of our products. We have our own truth about our business’s reputation. We can never be completely objective about assessing our own business’s reputation, yet, it’s essential that we take the pulse of our clients and know how they feel about us.

The real challenge comes in when the reputation of your business is not what you’d like it to be. It can become more complex when employees are representing your business and they do something that you as the business owner would never have done.

Stepping into Our Client’s Truth

What can we do when our client’s “truth” differs from ours? First, we need to learn how to step into our client’s shoes to understand their perspective and how it differs from ours. This requires us to be objective in a potentially emotional situation. Let’s take a couple examples.

I had a client tell me that she was extremely upset because my web designer misspelled a word on her website. It was a legitimate complaint: it was clearly a mistake on my employee’s part. My employee’s second language was English, so these mistakes happened. However, my client was right to feel upset because she taught spelling and grammar and could not have a typo on her website without compromising her own reputation. Two different truths challenged the severity of the error. In my employee’s eye, it was a small mistake. In my client’s eye it was monumental.

I had another client come unglued when her website ranked number two in Google. I had taken the steps to get her site that ranking. She thought she should be number one. If I hadn’t done anything, she wouldn’t have been ranked at all. Her site was brand new, and Google gives preference to older sites. My truth was that I had done a great job, and her truth was that I failed miserably.

If we are to deliver excellent service, we must step into our client’s shoes to see what is important to them. When we can align our client’s priorities with our service quality and delivery, our reputation will excel.

Here are the steps to take to get there:

1. Become aware that what’s important to your client will be different than what is important to you.
2. When starting to work together, understand what your client values, and define what a good job would be in their mind (not yours).
3. Assign staff that most closely values what your client values.
4. Keep the channels of communication open. Periodically ask the client how you are doing.
5. If a difference arises:

a. Breathe, and detach yourself emotionally as much as you can.

b. Ask the client for a report of what happened and what went wrong from their perspective. Find out why it’s important to them.

c. Ask the client if they were you, how they would like it to be fixed. If you agree, implement the fix.

d. If you don’t agree, you have some options. You can explain to the client your perspective. You can disconnect with the client. Or you can make a counter offer. Whichever you decide should attempt to leave you, the client, and your reputation the best off.

In the case of the typo, we apologized, fixed it, and added an extra level of quality control for this client. The better thing to do would have been to have the conversation up front, and to put the extra level of quality control in at the beginning of the project. The client could then decide whether they wanted to pay for the extra step.

In the case of the search engine optimization, we attempted to education the client on how search engine optimization works, and it didn’t work. We undid what we did, gave a refund, and let that client go, putting her on the “do not do business with again” list. (Yes, we have a list, and so should you!)

Money, Honey

Staying objective when money is involved can be a huge challenge. Follow the same steps as above, with one added twist: make sure your price tag lines up with the value your client perceives your product or service to be worth. Since pricing for products, programs, and services can vary wildly, it’s imperative that we check in with our clients to determine that the value they perceive that they will receive in turn for their price will be fulfilled.

When you and your client have similar truths about the reputation of your business, then you’ve taken a quantum leap in your business success.

1. Spend a lot of time developing individual relationships until people trust you,
2. Provide a complimentary sample of value up front,
3. Spend a lot of time in the proposal stage wooing the prospect.

Of those three choices, the complimentary sample is the lowest cost, especially if it can be massed-produced and delivered automatically via a web site or email. Even if you have to do all three (which in some cases, you do), providing something for free will shorten the time you need to spend doing the other two things.

What can we offer for free?

1. A free newsletter (no less frequently than every other week).
2. A free report.
3. A free video or DVD.
4. A free audio, MP3, CD, or podcast.
5. A free consulting, coaching or phone session.
6. A free proof-of-concept.
7. A free 30-day trial, as is common in software and memberships.
8. A free sample, such as toothpaste or shampoo.
9. A free serving of food.
10. A free quiz or evaluation.

As you can see, you have numerous choices depending on what you have for sale. The point is to allow your prospect the ability to sample or taste what you have to offer, providing good value, but not giving away the farm. If you offer information, coaching, or consulting, then your free offer will need to address one of the following:

1. The 3, 5, or 7 biggest mistakes that people like your prospect make when they use your services. For example, if you sell flowers, offer the 3 mistakes when giving flowers – one could be never send poinsettias to a cat owner because they are poisonous.
2. The 3, 5, or 7 things you need to know before you hire a person like you. For example, if you are a coach, offer the 7 things you need to know before you hire a coach – one being never hire a coach who hasn’t paid her coach as much as she is asking her clients for.
3. The 3, 5, or 7 most overlooked secrets to performing the service you do. For example, if you are a tax accountant, offer the 3 most overlooked tax deductions for 2011 – one being the making- work-pay credit that no one has heard about this year.

An important element to successfully attracting prospects with your free offer is to make it irresistible. Unfortunately, that also means taking a negative or dramatic slant. No one likes to make a mistake, and we’re completely curious as to whether we are making a mistake, so we will be drawn to a report that helps us avoid mistakes, more so than a report that gives us 3, 5, or 7 tips. If you can provide tips that will keep us from losing money, that will get our attention as well.

Here are a few more best-practice tips for positioning your free offering:

1. Always require something from your prospect in return for your free gift, such as their email address or phone number. Don’t forget your privacy policy and the can-spam laws.
2. Remember that you will need to market your free offering just like you do your regular service.
3. If you offer something that takes up your time like a free call, have your prospect self-qualify by requiring them to complete a longer form than just their email address. Ask questions that will give you good information about their situation relative to the service you offer. Turn the call into a sales call after you’ve provided value. People will expect this anyway.
4. Once prospects have accepted your initial free offer, move them up your marketing funnel into a low-dollar purchase or collect more information from them, such as address. Keep moving them up the funnel as they build their trust in you.

Try these tips to get people’s attention as well as to get past the low-trust barrier with prospects who are strangers.

One – Keep Your Power

The times when I still get the wind knocked out of me, even after 15 years in business, are the times when someone has criticized me.  When you’ve been in business long enough, someone will criticize you for something.  The key is not when it happens, but how you react to it when it happens.

Entrepreneurs that are perseverance-challenged may stop creating.  They may not give the speech again, sell as hard, or write their book because of criticism they received.

One of the reasons we react so strongly to criticism is our foundational need to be accepted and included in a group or tribe.  This need goes way back to cave man days when being alone was certain death, literally.  There was safety in numbers:  more food, shelter, and companionship.

How can we counteract this hardwiring in our brains that screams at us to stop and withdraw?

The first step is simply to remember to breathe.  Then:

1. Be aware of the struggle that’s occurring inside your brain.
2. Remind your brain it’s no longer cave man days and you’re safe after all!
3. Listen as objectively as possible to the criticism and make any corrections necessary in your business.
4. Build a team of support around you that will protect you from the petty details you don’t need to know about.
5. Stand in your power, remember who you are, and keep creating.

Two - Challenge Your Beliefs in Adversity

Have you ever received some bad news and then couldn’t stop thinking about it?   Your energy can be drained for days when something bad happens and your brain doesn’t stop ruminating about and exaggerating the negative consequences.

Our brains tend to blow our thoughts out of proportion or create inaccuracies, especially in the heat of the emotion.  To help calm your mind down and practice resilience and perseverance, examining your beliefs about any negative situation along three scales.  Ask yourself:

     a. Is the adversity due to me or not me?  This will help us understand how much we can control or correct it.

     b. Will it always be present or will it never again be present?  Chances are it’s the former while our brain exaggerates it to the latter.

     c. Does it affect everything or just this one situation?  We can narrow the scope of worry to one situation in many cases.

Each of these questions is designed to bring the brain down to a narrower field of concern, which is closer to reality.  When we practice these thinking tips, we’re less likely to get knocked off course as an entrepreneur, and we’re more in control of our beliefs.

Three – Maintain Great Boundaries

A number of my coaching clients have issues with needing to be liked by their clients.   They may avoid raising their rates, forget to write billable time down think they will do the client a favor, and perform too many freebies.  The client may or may not like them after all that, but you can be assured that the entrepreneur’s business growth will suffer if she needs all of her clients to like her all the time.

How can we persevere and grow our business without feeling the natural need to be liked?

1. Stand in our own power, and love ourselves. Self-love is sooooo important for women entrepreneurs!
2. Know how much we are loved by family and friends, and get our strokes from them.
3. Set a clear scope of services with clients and deliver accordingly.  Know that what you do for clients has value and you must be fairly compensated for your services.
4. Stay aware of the natural wiring we have to be liked, recognize when we slip back into old habits, and course-correct.

Four – Rise to the Challenge

When I was younger, I had the unique opportunity to co-pilot a single-engine airplane around the world.  I said yes without reservation, because I knew it was the right opportunity for me.

About one-third of the way into the trip, in Africa, I was way in over my head!  I knew it would be hard; I knew we had a one percent chance of dying.  But I didn’t count on so much going wrong.  Our GPS failed, the radio failed, the air conditioning failed, the ground navigation in Africa didn’t work, the air traffic control systems were dismal, and our safety was threatened on the ground as well.

It’s amazing what we can pull out of ourselves when we have to.  Somehow I found the strength because I had to.

Know that when the time comes, you’ll surprise even yourself with how much perseverance you really have.

All of these deadlines may be a headache to business owners and accountants alike, but they are a marketer’s dream come true.   How can you use deadlines to your advantage in marketing your services?  And what if you are selling a service that is not in the accounting profession?  We’ll answer these questions in this article and provide you with 5 ways to woo your prospect with deadlines.

1. Add compliance deadlines to your marketing message.

First, take a look to see if you have any deadlines you can leverage in your industry, and bring them into your marketing message.   Here are some examples:

“February 14^th is Valentine’s Day.  Go home with one dozen roses for her.”

“Who is preparing your W-2s this year?  Did you know they are due end of January?”

“Hurry!  Only 10 days left until Christmas.”

“Will you be ready for the IRS by April 15^th?”

In your elevator speech, it’s much more powerful for the prospect to be asked whether they have their W-2s handled versus you simply bullet-point listing the services they offer when you first meet a prospect.  Your prospect will be instantly engaged because you positioned your message in their world.

2. Fabricate deadlines that reward fast action.

“Register by March 10^th and save $100.”

“You’ll get 3 bonuses if you act by midnight.”

“I’ll give you 25% off if you decide before you get off the phone with me.”

“The first 10 people to sign up get an autographed picture of the celebrity.”

One saying I learned from the internet marketing world is that “Money loves speed.”  I don’t know who first said this, so please let me know if you know so I can properly attribute it.   I love to reward my early purchasers, especially for my events.   Offer discounts to individuals who register early or take the first version of a product.  The go up on your price as the product matures or the event approaches.

Make these fabricated deadlines as real as you can, so that they are believable and don’t feel arbitrary.

3. Offer payment plans that expire early.

This is something I noticed that Lisa Sasevich does with her promotions.  She offers numerous generous payment plans initially, then the longer ones disappear as the promotions progress.  For example, the deadline to sign up for the 5-payment plan might expire on February 1, the 3-payment plan disappears on February 15, and the 2-payment plan is no longer available after March 1.

4. The more deadlines, the more sales.

Department stores have long had a sale during every holiday weekend.  They know the more deadline-driven sales days they can pack into their annual promotion calendar, the more sales they will generate.  It works for other businesses too.  The more deadlines you can pack into your promotion, the more sales will peak at each deadline.

5. The shorter the deadline, the more sales.

Not surprisingly, peoples’ attention spans are getting shorter and shorter.   If they don’t buy right away, they might never get back to remembering about your amazing offer.   Give people enough time to act, but not so much time that they forget.  A few days, no more than a week, is a good window for most purchase decisions.

Think about how you act when there is and is not a deadline.  Every year, there is a line of cars at the main post office just before midnight on April 14^th.  Every year, there are shoppers that close down the stores on Christmas Eve.  These two are the mother and father of all deadlines, but there’s no denying that deadlines of any kind move people off their couches.

Try incorporating deadlines in your marketing messages and materials, and you might just be amazed at the difference a little deadline makes in your bottom line.

Are men’s and women’s brains different, when it comes to the workplace? The answer is a resounding YES, and more importantly, science is finding that men and women work differently. When a woman works like a man does, her health suffers.

Here are three things that are different in men’s and women’s brains.

1. Women Are Soooo Emotional

Yes, women are more emotional than men, both on the positive and negative side. That’s because women are designed to feel emotions for intensely than men. This also makes women more susceptible to depression than men, which bears out in the statistics. The good news is, women can feel happier than men. But that doesn’t mean men are heartless creatures. It just means that women have a bit wider range of emotions than men.

On a related note, women have more wiring available to detect facial expressions than men. So women, you might have to give your man some extra clues to let him know if you are suffering and need his support. Men simply don’t have the wiring to know when you might be sad until the tears start flowing. Then they get it. The good news is, men can learn to detect facial expressions. Jobs like the police, detectives, attorneys, judges, ministers, and poker players all require exceptional people-reading skills, and men who lack these skills can go through special training to pick them up.

2. Honey, I Don’t Need to Ask for Directions

Generally speaking, men and women navigate differently. Men take more of a bird’s-eye view to get somewhere, relying on an allocentric approach. Women rely on local landmarks and how they are related to their own physical location in order to get from point A to point B, taking an egocentric approach.

On a related note, men also perform better on a task called spatial rotation. It was on our IQ tests in school, and it involved being able to mentally change the perspective of a 3D object in our minds and identify what it would look like when it was turned.

3. Darling, You Hardly Said a Thing All Night

Women have it all over men in the verbal department. The brain is functionally organized and there are two parts on the left side of our brains (sometimes the right if you are left-handed) that control our speech and language processing. Women’s are bigger. Women are also able to remember things better when the thing they are trying to remember can be associated with words.

Please remember, these are all generalizations, so there will be individual differences that defy the averages.

Men and Women at Work

Because of these brain differences, men and women’s differences should be honored and celebrated in the workplace. Women who try to succeed at business using men’s techniques will likely have health problems. One example is in sales: men tend to “conquer” or “capture” the prospect to close the sale. It’s like hunting. If men have fear or stress on the job, they simply force their way through it. They can do this, being testosterone-laden. Women can’t.

Women need to build relationships. They need to embrace their fears and be supported, not fight their way through things. If they fight, they will burn out their adrenals sooner or later, or they will get sick frequently.

When we can honor the differences of each gender, we can also leverage the unique strengths men and women bring to the workplace, without trying to fit into one another’s mold. It’s the differences that make it far more fun anyway.

When I started my first business at age 13, I ran an ad and was able to get clients. It was no big deal.  When I wanted to earn some part-time money during college doing bookkeeping (before I passed my CPA exam), I answered an ad and found clients. It was no big deal. When I started a part-time photography studio in the 1980s, I sent out press releases and direct mail and got clients. It was no big deal. I was doing all of this on the side while I had full time jobs paying the rent and everything else.

But when I got laid off in the 1990s and needed clients in order to go out on my own and pay my own rent, something in me snapped. I was scared to death. I suddenly had no idea how to get started getting clients. I could have run an ad, but I didn’t. I could have sent out direct mail, but I didn’t.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know the nuts and bolts of marketing. I did.

It was that there was an ingredient to marketing that was missing for me. The problem with marketing is that you can take all of the Marketing 101 classes in the world, but still be lousy at marketing and not have enough clients as a result.

The problem is that there is an ingredient missing they don’t teach you in school, and that’s confidence.

What made marketing harder in the 1990s for me were three things:

1. It was important. My business now had to pay the rent. I had to live off of my own self-employment for the first time in my life. This is pretty scary to most people.
2. I was selling myself. I was no longer selling bookkeeping, photography, or horseback riding lessons. It was personal. When they rejected my business, they rejected me.
3. I had the know-how, but I didn’t have the mindset. I lacked the level of confidence I needed.

As an entrepreneur, here’s where you need to be completely honest with yourself. Ask yourself how much of your marketing challenges are:

1. From lack of hard skills. Do you have no idea where to begin, really? You don’t know what networking is, you don’t know how to hire a webmaster, and you don’t know how to get your business cards done? This requires a Marketing 101 class.
2. From lack of implementation. Do you know you need to go to networking meetings but you don’t? Do you know you need to send out direct mail, but don’t? Do you know you need a web site, but haven’t updated it? This requires a Marketing and Mindset 101 course. You need a mindset shift along with what to do. You need a boost in confidence and a support system that will help you change your reluctance to market.

Here’s a great example of what you need in #2: A regular marketing course will give advice such as “You need to have a follow-up system.” A marketing course with mindset coaching will give advice like, “You might feel like you are bugging them if you follow up. Here’s how to get around that.”

It’s not easy to develop the confidence to sell yourself. It’s tough. Even after 16 years of self-employment for me, rejection hurts. Losing the prospect is painful. Criticism aches. Returns are bummers. Even unsubscribes sting. But life and business go on, and you learn to deal with it in a constructive and businesslike manner. Most importantly, you can’t let it throw off your rhythm.  You have to implement; you have to execute.

You’re unlikely to get rich in this economy with just the hard skills of marketing. Having the right marketing mindset, with confidence, is the missing ingredient that will make you incredibly wealthy.

Instead, why don’t we focus on our strengths?  Chris Peterson underwent an extensive research project to discover 24 positive character strengths that each person has to varying degrees.  They are:

You may or may not be familiar with the DSM: the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders.  It is the standard encyclopedia of mental illnesses that is widely accepted among doctors and psychologists in the mental health field.  It lists categories of illnesses such as schizophrenia and depression.

The people who birthed positive psychology, the study of mental wellness and flourishing, decided they needed a manual too.  They decided to focus on character strengths as one way to measure and record mental wellness.  The VIA (Values in Action) Survey of Character Strengths was developed to fill this need.

I’d highly recommend you take the free VIA Survey of Character Strengths at the University of Pennsylvania’s Authentic Happiness web site:

http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Default.aspx

The multiple-choice test will take less than 30 minutes and will rank your own strengths based on your answers.  You’ll learn what your top six strengths are.

You can read more about what they mean in your test results as well as on this page:

http://viacharacter.org/VIAClassification/tabid/56/Default.aspx

Once you know your strengths, you’ll be able to use them as a positivity filter in your life.  For example, many people have curiosity as their top strength.  If curiosity ranks high for you, spend a few days thinking about this trait, and notice how it manifests in your actions.  You’ll soon find yourself explaining your behavior by saying “I was just curious.”

When you can seek out ways to bring curiosity, or whatever the top strength is for you, into your life more, such as through cooking a new dish, reading a new genre, or exploring a part of town you didn’t know before, you will improve your emotions.

You may also be able to change your stress level by acknowledging and re-channeling your strengths.  “I’m so curious that it looks like I accidentally committed to too many things this month. I think I’ll call one of them back and cancel so I can relax more and use my curiosity in a different way that doesn’t increase my stress.”

Take the strengths test, and study your results.  List your top six strengths below:

_______________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

Next, think about how your strengths manifest in your actions.  Think also if they tend to stress you out as you fulfill them.

Ask yourself how you can use this information to enjoy your life more based on your strengths, and put that plan into action.

[This is an excerpt from my book “30 Days to a Stress-Free Life.”  Find out more here: http://www.stressfreestrategies.com/]

“I’m not nervous at starting a business. I know I can follow the plan,” says Kiyla.

Kiyla has a healthy respect for plans and systems. She was exposed to entrepreneurship as a teen working in her father’s franchises. One was a Subway, and Kiyla can still recount how many ounces of lettuce and onion to put on each sandwich and how to fold the napkins around the sandwich.

She took what she learned about systems and designed them in her own businesses. She wrote a script for a sales call in one business. “I knew I would sell one of four.” Much of business, and especially sales “is a numbers game,” says Kiyla. “I knew how many leads I needed to get every day to make my revenue goals. Then you just execute.”

It wasn’t always easy or comfortable. Kiyla remembers women screaming at her to “Get a real job” when she went door to door for one business.

But that is one of Kiyla’s biggest success tips. “I made good business decisions even when I didn’t want to.” If an employee is dragging the entire team down and the holidays are approaching, Kiyla didn’t wait until after the holidays. Once she discovered what was best for the business, she did it immediately. She didn’t worry about what other people would think.

“If I had no outside factors applied to the decision, what decision would I make,” Kiyla explained. “You have to stop traveling down the wrong road and correct it quickly. The net effect is you move ahead rapidly.”

Kiyla was making cold calls – those things we dread as adults – when she was 16. Her bed was her desk. She would call big companies to ask if she could deliver Subway sandwiches to them for lunch. At the ripe old age of 20, she was demonstrating vacuum cleaners door to door. But she admits she hated selling M&M boxes in middle school.

When Kiyla was very young, an elderly man, Paul McIntyre, sat her down and said, “I’m going to teach you how to build an empire.” Kiyla had the good sense to listen to Mr. McIntyre as well as several other “amazing mentors.” As a teen, she just knew that she “was going to do something big with my life,” recounts Kiyla.

Here are a few other tidbits of success for those of you who strive to accomplish 6- and 7-figure success in your business:

1. Develop good discipline, good habits, and stick with your values.
2. Treat staff and patients (customers) fairly and honestly.
3. Don’t feel like you have to win at anyone else’s expense.
4. Reward those who help you.
5. Work in your strong areas, not your weak areas. Study up in your weak areas. By the time you become a millionaire, you won’t have any weak areas.
6. Live a little below your means while you are building your business.
7. Go for long-term success and make decisions that support that. Do not go for flash success.
8. Help your staff be successful.
9. Play the same game over and over again to be successful – with systems, habits, and discipline.
10. Develop immunity to fads, gimmicks, and impulse purchases.

Kiyla’s current project is helping people streamline their staffing and hire their dream team in 3 days. And, of course, she has a system for that.

Check her and her system out here, and know that since Kiyla and I were in the same Mastermind group last year, that I have an affiliate relationship with her. (Since I am a CPA, that entitles you to give me a call and consult with me should you want further advice about purchasing any of her products.) http://bit.ly/kiyla

Here’s some breaking news: You won’t get there doing tasks that are worth $10 per hour. Even if we drop a zero and aim for six figures in a year, you won’t get there doing $10 per hour tasks either. At six figures, you’re worth $100 per hour.

The difference between poor people and rich people is simple: one values the scarcity of their time and uses every minute wisely, and the other doesn’t. Here are some tips to help you start thinking like a millionaire, which is the first step to becoming one:

Step 1: Identify your “nonprofit” tasks

Take a look at your to do list. Eliminate any activities you are doing during your work day that are not profit-making. Some of you will feel resistance to giving these up. Here are some examples:

1. Watching TV
2. Poking someone on Facebook
3. Going to the post office and standing in line for 20 minutes to buy a $1 stamp
4. Playing Cityville on Facebook, or even responding to others’ requests
5. Looking at competitor’s web sites
6. Reading and answering email requests on email lists you subscribe to

Here are some more examples of nonprofit activities.

1. Working for free: Not writing your time down as billable or writing off time you worked.
2. Going to a workshop where you really already know everything but you feel insecure about your knowledge
3. Trying an idea from a peer for your business when you have no idea whether it will pay off or not
4. Staying on the phone for half an hour to dispute a five dollar charge
5. Answering emails of people asking for favors but that have not paid you anything
6. Attending a networking meeting where all your friends are when you haven’t gotten business from the group in a year

Do you feel resistance to considering giving any of these up? It’s normal. We do most of them because either that’s the rule or habit or we want to be liked. If we really want to grow our income, we need to make a conscious choice.

Step 2: Delegate or delete your “nonprofit” tasks.

The only way you will make it to a million is if you start delegating everything you’re doing that is worth lower than your current billable rate. This includes both personal and professional tasks. Delegate the lowest hourly tasks first, which will free up your time but won’t cost you a ton of cash.

Step 3: Focus your newly freed up time on high-profit tasks.

Here are some examples of high-profit tasks:

1. Calling a power partner to discuss a joint venture project that will make both of you money and serve both of your client lists.
2. Writing content for a book, course, or program
3. Making sales calls
4. Speaking or preparing a speech
5. Appearing on TV to spread your message
6. Teaching a workshop or designing an event
7. Hiring staff
8. Strategizing your business
9. Listening to what your customers want and need

If you have some changes to make to your to do list, then congratulations. You’re three steps closer to becoming a millionaire.

I’d love to hear from you: post the tasks you are giving up, and let me know what tasks you’ve labeled as your must-do high-profit tasks.

In any case, here’s a sampling of vendors we have used for our teleseminar, social media, and email list management. You’ll notice some great behind-the-scenes systematization secrets sprinkled in below describing how I use these technologies, if you are astute. Shhhh, don’t tell!

HootSuite

http://www.hootsuite.com

If you think I am on Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin all day long, you would be mistaken. But it looks like that because I post all of the time. In actuality, I post once or twice a day. The rest of the posts are pre-written and loaded into HootSuite about once a month by Mika, my amazing assistant. What’s more, my Twitter account, my Facebook, and my LinkedIn account are all tied together so that one post updates all three places.

My blog is tied in too using Networked Blogs. I never blog. Mika posts my newsletters to my blog, and that takes care of my blog content. She also sends the article out to several article portals so that I get great search engine juice. Manta, a popular business portal, recently picked up an article of mine and I converted numerous incoming calls from otherwise cold prospects into paying customers during the time the article was featured.

I’ve had a single Facebook post earn me four figure deals with prospects that didn’t previously know me. It’s all in how you associate with other Facebook accounts that’s the key to social media profitability.

This type of social media marketing is the only way to get social media to pay back for you; otherwise you can easily end up playing Farmville all day long.

1ShoppingCart

http://www.1shoppingcart.com/app/?pr=1&id=53779

I use 1ShoppingCart to send my weekly newsletters as well as to track my affiliate program sales and to use as a shopping cart. Full disclosure: I am an affiliate of 1ShoppingCart and do receive a consulting fee for suggesting the product to clients.

I love the fact that it is completely integrated and has so many bonus marketing features that many carts fall far short of. We have clients on 1ShoppingCart, and we also have clients on Constant Contact (those just starting out) and Aweber (those extremely worried about deliverability), the only two others we work on and recommend. We also have clients on MailChimp, iContact, and a few that are quite obscure, but we do not recommend these for various reasons.

I know my QuickBooks readers do not like the way 1ShoppingCart integrates with QuickBooks software, but there are ways around it, none of which are great, but they are workable. If you’re doing nearly a million in sales a year in 1ShoppingCart, it’s time to switch to Infusionsoft anyway.

Sound Forge

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/

I love my Sound Forge software. It allows me to practice my teleconference classes before they air, get them transcribed, and see what I need to change. I can record MP3 after MP3 using Sound Forge and my Logitech USB headset without even calling into a phone line. My voice is recorded straight into the PC. I can later upload the MP3 to the Internet for replay, download, or conversion into an audio product.

Black and White Communications

http://www.blackandwhitecom.com/

We use Black and White Communications for our public preview calls and our teleseminar classes. The service is much higher because a live operator handles all calls coming in, so my clients can get a real person to troubleshoot if necessary. Although there are many great reasons to use them, there are two things that I really like about them:

1. If you need a spike in the number of people you have on a line, you can call them a few hours, even a few minutes in advance, and they will patch everything together.
2. In the case when I have a time conflict with one of my calls and my schedule, I can pre-record the call and B&W can replay the audio file as if it were live. (Shhh, that’s one inside secret you are not supposed to know about.)

B&W also has operators to handle the queue of participants asking questions so that all other participants remain muted while the host and a caller gets their question answered. This maintains recording quality so that the call can be used later in product or for other reasons. I found out about B&W through my coach Ali Brown.

The quality of the phone you use to record the calls can be a really big stumbling block when you first get started. For best results, use a land line with a corded phone that has a headset button, and buy a nice headset. I am using an AT&T 993 with a GE headset. Some swear by Plantronics, but I could never get the frequencies to be loud enough. My only complaint about the 993 is that it drops calls fairly often; I believe this is a quality issue with the keypad tones.

Free Conference Calling

http://www.freeconferencecalling.com/

I use a second conference calling company primarily for my coaching calls. My clients and I dial into a private line and all calls are recorded. My assistant, Mika, who found this service for me, downloads the calls from freeconferencecalling.com and uploads them to a private directory on my web site for each coaching client. The coaching client can then grab their calls and listen to them over and over again. The nice thing about Free Conference Calling is the free part.

Those technologies should give you some behind-the-scenes tips and ideas on the marketing technologies I am using in my businesses. I’ll cover additional technologies in a future article; there are many more but this article is already too long!

The authors of the articles that covered the study (in Time http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/12/30/who-cares-not-college-students-study-finds-co-ed-empathy-decreasing/ and Scientific American http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-me-care) conjectured why today’s kids might be less empathic:

• An increase in social isolation
• Less desire to join groups
• Social media technology precluding the face to face interaction
• A sharp drop in fiction readers

Since we’re all born with empathy as a trait, it’s clear to me that the environment of the young adults is causing the trait to decline. If you’re a teacher, a parent, or an employer, you’ve likely seen the decline in empathy in certain individuals first hand.

Does this affect the workplace? You bet:

• More training will be needed to develop relationship building skills, such as communications, customer service, and teambuilding.
• The gap among the generational differences in empathy is likely to cause increased friction and misunderstandings.
• Expectations of employees will need to be crystal clear. Some things older employees take for granted may not be obvious to younger workers.

Here are a few tips I recommend to prepare your workplace for the generational differences in empathy:

• Use hiring tests to assess levels of empathy in candidates, especially when they will have interaction with clients.
• Conduct training that will build customer service skills.
• Encourage socialization among employees and discourage isolation.
• Start a fiction book club.
• Reimburse employees who join groups of professional associations and become active on a committee or in an officer role.
• Allocate part of the performance review to assess socialization and communication skills so that learning is encouraged and financially rewarded.
• Designate workers to be responsible for social activities such as recognizing birthdays, awards, accomplishments, celebrations, holiday events, and competitions.
• Encourage volunteering and develop a program that supports employees who donate their time to nonprofit work or philanthropy.

Building a supportive environment in the workplace will be key to reversing the trend of declining empathy in young adults.

1. If you bill your time by the hour and sometimes forget to write your time down (I know I’m guilty), put in some extra procedures to capture that time. That’s a big cash drain in your business that needs plugging in 2011.
2. Check all of your insurance policies to see if you can raise the deductible. Check both your auto insurance as well as your health care, and for that matter, any other policies with deductibles. I bet you’ll find at least $50 in savings. Also, check with your agent to see if you qualify for any other discounted savings, such as low driving miles, good driver discount, customer loyalty programs, and more. I just picked up a cool $300 with one phone call.
3. Look for unused gift cards that might be lying around in a kitchen or desk drawer and cash them in for things you need.
4. Take a good look at all the memberships you belong to. List ALL of the benefits of each one. Are there some free benefits you could use to save time or money? For example, both my WIC and NAWBO-SV memberships allow me to send in a press release about my business. Taking advantage of that could likely bring me more exposure and more clients. One of my memberships offers discounts at the office supply store, and another allows me to bring a friend for free. All of these benefits will save me money.
5. Using your QuickBooks profit and loss report, scan your expenses for 2010. Is there anything you can do without (that didn’t pay back)? If so, take steps to cancel or not spend that money in 2011. If you don’t have the information to make the right decisions, take steps to better classify your expenses for 2011 so you can see where the money is going.
6. Get to know the programs that your friends and family are associated with, and see if you can help them for mutual benefit. For example, if your cousin’s work has an employee referral bonus of $4,000 and you have a friend who would be perfect for the job, make the connection. If you have a friend at HP who can get you a computer at a discounted rate (legally and morally), then go for it. Use social media to look for new connections where you both can profit.
7. Do you have thousands of unused air and hotel miles? Sell them or start using them on trips you have planned.
8. Does anyone owe you money from 2010? Give them a call and collect those old receivables.
9. Make a list of restaurants where kids eat free on certain days, and visit them on those days. You can do the same for 2 for 1 or BOGO meals. Eat at the “nicer” fast food restaurants instead of the more expensive sit down restaurants. We like places such as Baja Fresh and Chipotle for great values and healthy food.
10. Plan to bill faster for 2011 so you can get paid even faster. Better yet, offer prepay discounts and reward those who pay early with “fast-action scholarships” as they’re called in the internet marketing world.
11. If your grocery bill is getting a bit high, make some simple swaps. Choose frozen over fresh and regular over organic to save a few dollars every week.
12. Create a new program, product or service that brings in a whole new revenue stream for 2011. I created four new revenue streams in 2010: one-on-one private coaching via phone, four new information products, the Mind Body Style event, and my brand new program Accountant’s Accelerator.
13. Cancel memberships, newspapers, and magazines that you are not reading or no longer need.
14. Shop around for new vendors that you might not be getting the best service from. I continually get new web design clients who have had lousy service from their old web design company.
15. Make part of your business green. Allow employees to stay home one day per week to save gas, adjust the thermostat to save heating or air conditioning, or go paperless.
16. Participate in an affiliate program and sell someone else’s products. It’s easy money and you’ll be rewarded with cash commissions when the products sell. (If you want to get paid by Sandi, check out her affiliate program here: http://sandismith.com/affiliatecenter.html)
17. Look in your closet, car, garage, storage, or around your home to see if there is anything you can use, repurpose or sell for cash.
18. What do you need to finish that would bring in some cash if you just got around to finishing it?
19. Enter contests that will bring you good public relations exposure. One example is the Silicon Valley Business Journal’s Women of Influence awards.
20. Find events that are free in your area and that will teach you some new skills and sign up. You can find them through government agencies, the Small Business Administration, coaches and consultants, via social media Facebook and LinkedIn events sections.

How much did you save? I’d love to read your blog posts about what you did to keep more of what you will be making in 2011.

1. Resilience. Do you ever wonder why some individuals can breeze through hardships and come out stronger on the other side while others languish, move into a depression, and take years to recover? Science has been studying this field of resilience, and now it can be taught just like math. If you’re one of the ones who takes a while to recover from setbacks, you will greatly benefit from learning resilience. Best applications: sales people dealing with rejection, negotiators, real estate professionals, emergency scene workers.
2. Deliberate Practice. To get from good to great, high performers apply deliberate practice, a form of expert performance that refines and perfects their craft. Best applications: surgeons, actors, entertainers, pilots, speakers, and trainers.
3. Neuroplasticity. The discovery of the decade is that our brains are constantly learning and growing new brain cells every day of our lives until the moment we die. Best applications: teachers, tax accountants, medical professionals, and IT engineers.
4. Mindfulness. Thanks to Ellen Langer’s research, we have a partial glimpse into how incredibly powerful mindfulness is. Her research has shown the exact steps it takes to reverse the effects of aging, including reversing eyesight losses and physical strength. Hollywood is so impressed they are making a movie about her life and Jennifer Aniston will star as Dr. Langer. Best applications: health care professionals especially those in long term care facilities such as nursing homes, home health care workers, and retirement communities.
5. Positive Psychology. Thanks to books such as Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness, CEOs are finally getting an understanding of how happiness can significantly improve the workplace. Even my nonprofit, the American Happiness Association, has made the PBS and Fox news this year. The key is not just staying happy, but being able to manage your positive and negative emotions for high performance results. Best applications: dealing with difficult employees, bullying, large corporations where employee satisfaction and customer service are the focal points and the senior management wants to reap the benefits of a positive workplace.
6. Nature vs. Nurture. Science is crystal clear about how nurture can override nature much more than we previously realized. With all the talk about cracking the DNA genetic code, we are now finding out that RNA can express almost any old way it wants with a little help from the environment. Best applications: architects, landscape designers, interior decorators, furniture designers, relationship therapists, life coaches, nutritionists, and fitness coaches.
7. Multi-tasking. A very cool new study found that only 3 percent of the population can multi-task well. The rest of us are actually costing ourselves time and accuracy every single day when we multi-task. Interestingly, some corporations are pushing multi-tasking. One that hired me recently had me tone down my chapter showing how bad multi-tasking really is for performance because their top management promoted it. We need to get real about what multi-tasking is costing us. Best applications: Any worker who is frequently distracted can benefit from this science.
8. Insight. We now know how to create the ideal conditions to help employees generate more “aha moments.” Best applications: R&D, marketing, artists, writers, anyone who needs to be creative and innovative.
9. Focused Attention. Science has made significant breakthroughs in helping us understand exactly how we can focus our minds so that our attention spans can be lengthened. A nice side effect is that when we strengthen this part of our brain, we expand our consciousness, allowing us to tap more into the wisdom of our subconscious. Best applications: surgeon, pilot, IT engineer, gamer, police.
10. Decision-making. There continues to be new insights into how we make decisions, not to mention Daniel Kahnemann and Amos Tversky’s Nobel prize-winning research in the area of heuristics. Here we can learn where our decision-making blind spots reside and train ourselves to see them. Best applications: negotiators, deal makers, stock brokers, merger and acquisitions consultants, and senior management.

Although the decade of the brain is long gone (1990s), breakthroughs in research discoveries continue every day. It’s a very cool time to be alive, especially if you learn how to harness the power of these scientific discoveries. It’s never too late to get a fresh start for the new year of 2011.

1. Excellent, professional, persuasive copywriting matters more than most entrepreneurs realize. I see this every day in my web site business. The client web sites that I am able to write copy for outperform the ones where the owners do their own writing. But you can almost tell the entrepreneur’s income level by how well s/he writes copy. It’s that dramatic of a difference.
2. Selling and marketing online in the internet marketing model is more formulaic than you would ever guess. Each Internet marketing entrepreneur is following a strict process that has worked for them over and over again. It feels casual when you interact with them, but there are solid, proven procedures and well-defined systems behind the success of these individuals.
3. It’s tremendously personal. The internet marketers are selling themselves, and personality has a huge amount to do with it. Emotional control and maturity is required for success in this industry.
4. The skill required to become an internet marketer is enormous. Most of the internet marketers were highly adept at speaking and teaching skills, performing under extreme pressure, organizing and delivering data, marketing and selling, writing, conducting group programs, hiring and managing staff, and juggling aggressive public relations schedules and TV appearances. The stress management and mental skills needed to become an aggressive marketer and to take criticism are challenging as well.
5. I could still learn from them even if I disliked their advice or methods. Most of the internet marketing events were so far from what I am used to with content delivery, structure, and pricing, that it was a whole new world from the conservative corporate and continuing education world I inhabit. But that’s OK, because I can still pick up new tips. I don’t have to implement everything I learned. I can choose what works for my value system and act accordingly. My alternative was to close my mind, make a judgment call, and leave, like most people would have done. But that wouldn’t have been nearly as useful.
6. The marketing was more important than the product or service. These truly were marketing-centric organizations. This was one of many things I disagreed with this year, but the priorities, structure, and decision-making –and resulting issues — were fascinating to watch.
7. These multi-million dollar businesses were all bootstrapped. Most Internet marketers funded their own business and never relied on outside financing. This is an amazing feat when you think about it.
8. The more risk, the more reward, and the more headaches. The more aggressive marketers expect some amount of buyers’ remorse, returns, and people not paying their remaining installment payments.
9. Business can look any way you want it to. Many of these entrepreneurs are doing multi-million dollar revenue levels from their home on limited staff, many of whom are virtual. Your business can pretty much look however you want it to these days with technology, globalization, and a mobile workforce.
10. In the “new normal” that we’re all living in, it pays to go outside your industry to learn fresh new ideas. One thing that was important to me was to learn a new idea, filter it for my values, my vision, and my way of doing business, and implement what feels right for me, my clients, and my team.

Too often, we see something radically different from what we’re doing and judge it negatively just because it’s different. When this happens, I think we shortchange the entire world. We don’t benefit from any learning the other person could offer us. But most importantly, we sell ourselves short by not trusting ourselves to be able to discern and choose what’s right for our businesses. There’s always a nugget to be gained, and in today’s new normal, it pays to look in places you might not have looked before.

I know I am smarter from this year of intense learning and will be able to serve my clients at a higher level in 2011.

1. Drink plenty of water. A large amount of the aches, pains, and low energy we have these days is because we are not fully hydrated. Keep a glass of water on your desk at all times and drink up.
2. Listen to your favorite music in the morning instead of the news. If you watch the news in the morning, it can already be draining as you hear about murders, falling stock prices, and scandals. Try popping in a relaxing CD instead. Do this while you are getting ready as well as during your commute time in traffic. I listen to instrumental music (without lyrics) such as classical, new age or new earth (Steven Halpern), and Reiki healing (Deuter). [Reiki is a form of energy healing, in case you are not familiar with the term.]
3. Get a massage on a regular basis. A massage will move around the stress that is stuck in your body. This can sometimes make a big difference in freeing up your energy. You can also exercise vigorously to keep your energy moving.
4. Eat healthy foods. Keep a mental note of how you feel after you’ve eaten particular foods, and you will be able to see what foods affect your energy levels. I always feel great with no digestion slump after eating healthy foods such as salmon/spinach salad, egg whites, whole grain oatmeal with berries, and green tea, to name a few.
5. Stay as relaxed as possible. The stress hormone cortisol can give us energy, but if we rely solely on it, we end up damaging our bodies in the long run. An instant relaxation tip is to breathe deeply three times, right where you are. This completely changes your physiology in an eye blink.
6. Meditate. Sit comfortably still, close your eyes, and go inside your mind. Let your thoughts pass by, and focus only on your breathing, an object, or a chant such as “I am present.” A few minutes of meditation has been shown to be more refreshing than a nap. The benefits are increased focus, better memory, a quieter mind, and contentedness.
7. Stay positive. If you can increase your positive emotions (love, gratitude, hope, joy, peace, pleasure, fun) and reduce your negative emotions (anger, fear, rage, disgust, jealousy, sadness, greed), then you are ahead of the game. Negative emotions sap your energy, and positive emotions refuel your energy. You may decide to choose to eliminate some negative things from your life: negative people, violent movies and TV, and events that take your time and don’t serve you well.
8. Clear your clutter. If every time you walk by the dining room table that is stacked with that unfinished project, you feel drained, then make a change. A little bit of your energy is draining each time you walk by a project that you feel you need to spend time on. If you have five or ten projects like that, you will soon feel like a zombie. Commit to wrapping them up or put them away so you don’t see them every day.
9. Reassess your to do list. Do you really need to do everything on your to do list? For example, do you really need to go to the store for that one item or can you hold off another day? Do you really need another pair of shoes? Do you really need to spend an hour listening to your friend’s break up woes again? Take a look at how you spend your time in light of how that event/task/person is serving you in your life. You may find oodles of freed up time which will free up your energy as well.
10. Sleep well. One of the keys to great health and energy is to get a good night’s sleep every night.

I’m sure you know about many of the items on the list already. Perhaps this article can be a gentle reminder for you to take a look at what habits you’d like to renew that will revitalize you. A change in your daily routine might give you a great boost in your energy.

1. Move from reactive to proactive. Work on fine-tuning your marketing plan so that your results improve at each step of the way: Getting people in the door or in your funnel, qualifying leads, the selling process, improving the number of people who buy from you, and customer retention. If you don’t have a plan, then the first place to start is to get one, even if it’s not perfect or not complete. You can always improve, and my coach Ali Brown says when you take the first step, even if it’s a baby one, you’ve made a tremendous amount of progress toward your goal rather than if you just stood still in inertia.
2. Look at one part of your marketing and make a small improvement. Readers tell me they like my newsletter, and I plan to make some improvements to the format over the next few weeks. That’s one example of a really small change that I can make in my marketing that will improve it for my readers.
3. Systematize something that’s worked in the past and repeat it. No need to reinvent the wheel if you’ve found the magic formula. Do the magic formula over and over again, perhaps more often, and you’ll increase your results. For example, if you’re good at convincing people to buy from you once you have them on the phone, find out how to get more qualified prospects on the phone with you.
4. Listen to your clients and roll out a new service offering that they are asking for. A huge part of the battle for getting new clients is getting people to trust you. Why not leverage the people who already trust you – your current clients – and serve them in a new way. Increasing your revenue per client is a great way to help your clients even more and to boost you bottom line at the same time.
5. Hone your skill. We spend a lot of time working on our core competency – the service we deliver to clients – and getting better at it. Why not get better at a marketing skill? This could include working on your public speaking skills, writing skills, selling skills, negotiation skills, and a host of other skills that will help you become more effective at representing yourself to potential prospects. Sometimes we forget marketing is a skill we can learn just like math – especially those of us who are reluctant marketers.
6. Measure. How do you know something is working unless you measure it? Add procedures to measure your marketing effectiveness at each step in the process; then you can begin to see where you need improvements. These include numbers such as conversion ratios, sales per client, and return on marketing campaign. When you do this you’ll naturally be able to improve your return on investment for your marketing dollars.
7. Celebrate. Stop for a second when you reach a goal and celebrate all the hard work you did that paid off and got you there. Give yourself a reward, practice gratitude for what you received, and then set your next goal.

Which one of these tips speaks to you the most? Mark your calendar right now to take one step toward working this tip into your business so you can envision a brighter 2011.

In spite of all that, let’s stop and think about this one for just few more seconds.

• If your 2-year-old touched a hot stove, do you think he would need to touch it for the next 21 days to learn to modify his behavior? No. That habit got formed in less than a second.
• If you just got a brand new Lamborghini Murcielago Roadster, are you going to need 21 days to force yourself to drive it all around? LOL, I don’t think so. I think you’ll be sleeping in that puppy the first night.
• If you cooked yourself broccoli for a year, and you hated broccoli but wanted to force yourself to eat it, how many days would that take? Probably more than 21. Probably more than a year.
• If you were a gambler, smoker, or drinker, how long would it take for you to change that habit?

It’s easy for our brains to take the shortcut answer of 21 days. We use fewer resources that way and have the problem solved. The problem is that 21 days is a nonsense answer that doesn’t mean anything.

How long does it take you to learn something to the level of a habit? It depends on your motivation, your age, your brain power, task complexity, and meaning. Repetition is only one of many learning variables.

In her book “The 24-hour customer,” my friend Adrian Ott from right here in Silicon Valley describes the origin of this myth. A book written in 1960 by a physician stated that amputees took 21 days, on average, to stop reflexively attempting to use their missing limb. She got this story from an Internet site PsyBlog (http://www.spring.org.uk/2009/09/how-long-to-form-a-habit.php), which I haven’t validated, so I have no idea if this is true. The web page goes on to say that research was done in 2009 by University College, London that measured various tasks from drinking a glass of water to running and found that the habit formed after a mean of 66 days, with a range of 18 days to 254 days (Lally, et al, 2009).

OK so why does this matter and how is this going to change my daily life? It matters when you supervise people, teach children, start a new job, communicate with your spouse, help someone learn something, or want to change a habit yourself. Want to move into more of a success mindset? Wipe the 21-day belief from your memory banks.

Instead of counting the days, practice with discipline toward a level of mastery, not a time frame. That’s more fun anyway and is more in line with a growth and success mindset. Make a difference in yourself by changing your mind about how you acquire your habits.

Make a difference in the world by challenging the next person you hear that repeats this myth.

1. Give your prospect a deadline. Christmas is the retailer’s built-in deadline, April 15 is the tax preparer’s deadline, but most of us entrepreneurs aren’t so lucky to have services that come with deadlines. If your service does not come with a built-in deadline such as a project deadline, an implementation date, a government due date, or a holiday, then make one up or associate with one.

   For example, when you raise prices, send out an email that allows people to sign up for your services at the old rate for a limited time. You’ll be surprised at how many people get off the fence and sign up!

   Tie your service to a holiday or tradition. Many coaching, gym memberships, self-improvement, and weight loss programs are sold this time of year because people are thinking about New Year’s resolutions.

2. Repetition is key. During November and December, we’ll see stores’ advertisements on TV over and over again. We don’t see that kind of repetition in the small business arena, but we should. Only 2% of sales are made on the first contact, and 3% on the second. So if you’re not following up with prospects in your marketing or sales process, you’re leaving 95% of your sales on the table.
3. Go on sale. Everyone loves a bargain. Offer a special discounted prepay price, have a sale on your birthday, or throw in a free bonus with a volume purchase. We see this with products all the time, but there’s no reason we can’t do this with our services too as long as we watch our margins.
4. Pay attention to timing. Retailers wait all year until the demand is present. We could do the same. What attracted me to Ali Brown’s coaching program was that she received commitments from her coaching members in November and December, then she closed the program. Imagine having $2 million in receivables booked before the year even started. (I wanted to learn how to do that!) You can really keep the marketing costs down when you don’t have to market all year.
5. Make it easy for us to buy. Retailers have longer hours for our convenience. They have extra salespeople. The parking lots have traffic personnel. They take credit cards, debit cards, and all sorts of payment methods. They will even open up a store credit card account for us. There is entertainment in the mall for us to make a special visit to see. Santa Claus is available for the kids.

   What could you do? Take a look at your new customer intake process and see if you can streamline it. Offer multiple payment methods. Offer educational sessions that are entertaining and relevant your business services. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and figure out what they’d like to have to make it easy to work with you, or better yet, ask some of your trusted clients how you can make their experience even better.

Try out these 5 tips for a more prosperous business.

What’s stopping me?

In 1988, I attended a class hosted by my employer, Frito-Lay, Inc., (and created by Basadur Applied Creativity in Burlington, Ontario, Canada). The class got employees thinking about cost-reducing ideas for the company. However, I applied the techniques taught in the class to my personal goals. Here is my favorite technique from that class.

Ask yourself “What’s stopping me from doing what I am not doing (stopped at, stuck at) that I want to do?” This question, “What’s stopping me?” gives you a chance to bring some rational thoughts to what is causing you to stop, which is probably some kind of subconscious fear. It also helps you get to the roots of what you really want to do. Ask it repeatedly in a drill-down fashion for best results. Here’s an example.

• What’s stopping me from traveling? — Having only three weeks of vacation a year.
• What’s stopping me from having more than three weeks of vacation? – Not quitting my job.
• What’s stopping me from quitting my job? – Fear of not finding another one.
• What’s stopping me from being able to find another job when I return? (This was in 1988, please use caution with this example today.) — Nothing really; my fear is not realistic. I had a masters degree, great references, Fortune 50 experience in two stable industries, and enough savings. It didn’t make sense for me to be so fearful about losing my job and not being able to find another.

This idea was so powerful for me that I did go ahead and quit my job (that I loved), stored my furniture, sold my car, rented out my house, dumped my boyfriend, asked my parents to feed my cat, and left to backpack alone around the world in 20 countries for seven months. I had never been out of the country before that trip. Not only did I get a job within two months of my return, my employer offered me a position to return to as well. Asking myself “What’s stopping me?” was the keystone that got me off my couch and into living my dreams.

“What’s stopping me?” is a much better question than “What’s the worst that can happen?” “What’s stopping me?” helps you uncover the blocks that are keeping you from a future that you want. It propels you forward and gets you to go after what you want.

Coaches, take note. We’re now seeing brain research that shows that comments like “Tell me more” expressed by a coach after a client has expressed an issue actually shut the client down:

Client: I can’t seem to get a raise.
Coach: Tell me more.
Client shuts down and feels defensive.

Instead, try asking your clients (or yourself!) what’s stopping you? The client will be much more likely to have a breakthrough when you continually ask the question.

Here are some areas to use this:

1. Where are you procrastinating the most?
2. What project has been sitting on the dining room table for months?
3. What’s on your to-do list that’s been there a while?
4. What are you putting up with in your life for no good reason and that’s not bringing you happiness?

Try the “What’s stopping you?” exercise for yourself. You might just have a dream come true like I did.

We all hope we will have enough referrals so that we will never have to sell ourselves. But in the last few years, referrals, even for those of us with huge followings, have slowed down. It’s (past) time that we work on more fully developing the marketing and selling function of our businesses. As you do, here are 5 mistakes to avoid.

5. Offering every service in the world, including the kitchen sink.

It’s hard to convince prospects that you are the best at one particular service such as tax returns for corporations doing business outside the U.S.; it’s even harder to convince prospects that you’re the right person for anyone’s payroll, tax return, bookkeeping, management consulting, budgeting, and accounts receivable factoring.

Plain and simple, its’ better to specialize. It sounds counter-intuitive, but here’s an example from my own practice: My “Five Simple Steps to Get More Clients for Accountants and QuickBooks ProAdvisors” product outsells my “Five Simple Steps to Get More Clients for Service-based Business Owners and Self-Employed Professionals” 5 to 1. The first one is more niched. The accountants feel like the product was made for them (and it was). Coke did not get to be Coke by selling coffee, bananas, or cake.

4. Not having (or showing) a track record.

Discerning prospects need to know you’ve done business and created results for people just like them. Ask for, compile, and publish testimonials and other reputation-building tools to show that you’ve produced results for dozens of clients in the past.

3. Overselling

Selling and marketing are learned skills, just like the skill you learned that you now offer to clients. If you don’t have those skills, people notice. It manifests in overselling, which looks needy; selling to the wrong prospect, which is costly; and most crucially, low confidence, which repels just about everyone around you.

There is no Fortune 100 business without a huge division of sales and marketing people that are trained and have degrees in their expertise. What would happen if they tried to wing it like entrepreneurs do?

Once you learn the skill of marketing and selling, the payoff is usually immediate. You can practice consultative selling and easily find the people who need what you have.

2. Taking the “freedom” of being an entrepreneur a little too far.

As an entrepreneur, you can have it your way. However, that doesn’t mean you can be successful while avoiding pieces of your business just because you don’t have the skill or don’t like doing it. I hated project management so much when I was doing it in corporate that I avoided it in my business for years – and I suffered great consequences of my avoidance. What if Google’s founders said, “No project management allowed here. We don’t like it.” Pretty ludicrous, right?

All businesses need a solid marketing and selling function that is professionally executed. The only part that is a choice is whether you do it yourself (assuming you have the skill set your business needs) or hire someone with the right experience and skill set to do it for you.

1. Having the belief that selling and marketing are “dirty” or sleazy, or whatever label you are putting on it.

There may be some of you (perhaps many of you) out there that have a belief that salespeople are sleazy. You avoid them like the plague when you go into a department store. You think they are pushy even if they just say hello. You would rather die than ever have to cold call, or even ask a current client for something. If this is you, then you might be getting in your own way of your success.

In this economy, a business will not succeed without sales and marketing. It simply won’t be heard through all the noise that’s out there, and you will stay the world’s best-kept secret. You will wonder why everyone else is doing better than you, even when your solution is better. Does Apple say, “Selling is sleazy?” No, they’ve made it a beautiful art.

Your solution (and only hope) is to undergo a major mindset change. You may be best off hiring a salesperson to grow your business, or keeping your job as an employee until your mindset changes.

When your business is below its capacity of serving clients, you cheat the world out of the gift and talents you have to offer. Start sharing who you really are so more people can benefit from your services.

Let me know what you think. Do you agree or disagree? What other mistakes do you see people making? How do you handle sales and marketing in your business?

Yep, it turns out the harder you try to think of something brilliant, the more you will fail. One of the keys of the aha moment is relaxation. You must stop trying to deliberately solve the problem. Instead just relax and let the idea “come to you.”

There is a saying that we get our best ideas in the shower, and it’s not a myth. It’s not an accident either. We are our most relaxed in the shower, so ideas and connections come easily and plentifully. Also, think about when you forget a name, you try so hard to remember it, and it still doesn’t come. But when you forget about it, it comes. There’s no coincidence there. When you can recreate that relaxed feeling all day long, your aha’s will multiply – even quantum leap – and you will get some great new insights for your business and your life.

The science of the aha is especially important for me as a coach (and for other coaches reading this), because science now tells us that there are certain phrases that shut down clients. According to David Rock, one of them is “Tell me more…” Apparently, when clients are asked to tell their coaches more, the brain wiring defaults to a defensive posture. David didn’t say what to tell clients instead of “Tell me more..” but perhaps we should ask them to relax a lot.

If you are like me and do your days at 90 miles an hour, conditioning yourself to produce more aha’s requires that you slow down, unplug, and take time to relax. Especially if you are stressed, you will need to reverse the stress and relax into whatever you are stressed about. (I realize easier said than done, but I can’t resist suggesting my “30 Days to a Stress-Free Life” binder, which is not only fabulous for your health but will increase your aha’s, too.) Increase your relaxation time through self-care or simply quiet meditative time. In any case, you will likely need to book an appointment with yourself to have aha time.

This is pretty cool implementation homework: just relax. Try relaxing at key times during the day for a week, and see if your aha’s increase.

In July, I announced that I would be having a free call titled “20 tips to work less, play more, and surge your summer business income.” It was designed for people who felt like they were struggling a bit and felt like they should be doing better. I announced this in my weekly newsletter, in my social media pages, and to anyone who would listen at local network events. 125 people signed up.

I held the call and delivered valuable content that was free of charge and not salesy. At the end, I discussed my coaching program. I also offered a free coaching session to anyone who would fill out my VIP coaching application, and many filled out the form. I conducted my free coaching sessions, and just about everyone signed up to continue with me for paid coaching. And it was as easy as that. My practice is full, and there is now a wait list for coaching with me.

More importantly, I’m thrilled at the high quality of individuals who are coaching with me and I am tickled pink at their results and dedication to their “assignments.”

Instead of having to have 125 sales conversations, I had one, demonstrating my value at the same time. The listeners self-selected themselves into the cream of the crop: the ones who filled out the application. How many times, as sales people, do we wonder who to pursue as far as serious leads? The call to action from the free call took all of that ambiguity away.

My sales page is still selling 3 months later. Just a few days ago, I had another form come in, and someone told me they listened to the recording. You can see the sales page and listen to the call here:
http://www.growthstrategiesforyourbusiness.com/

Let us know how we can help you quantum-leap your business. There’s still time in 2010 to close it with a bang.

Here’s an example: Mary says to John: “I had a fight with my boss today. He overrode me on a decision I made and ridiculed me in front of the client.” John starts ranting and raving, telling Mary what to say to her boss tomorrow. Mary shrinks at each word John says. Even if she might agree with him, she still finds herself resisting his ideas, thinking to herself, “That’ll never work.”

Why do we resist being told what to do, whether it’s hiring a coach or innocently conversing with a friend? The answer is in how your brain is wired.

You can see it in toddlers. They resist being told what to do, instead preferring to flaunt their independence and explore and learn on their own. By the time we’re adults, we’re still prominently wired for independence, and anything that remotely resembles a threat to our independence generates resistance on our part.

Learning by Doing

But it’s not the independence so much that has created our bias for resistance to coaching. It is the practice that we get from figuring it out ourselves that makes our brain stronger. When we practice or act out whatever problem we are solving, then our brain can learn. It can’t learn without doing. We are naturally hard-wired to “do,” so that we can benefit from our brain’s plasticity and create new neuronal pathways that support the new task.

Being Coached Is a Learned Skill

It’s not natural to be coached, or to take advice from others. We resist it, just like we do pain. It’s a learned skill, and a very mature one, to simply sit there, take feedback from another human being, receive it gracefully without ego, and thank them for it. Most people can’t do it. They naturally feel like they need to defend themselves. Think about the last time someone gave you criticism and you’ll understand what I mean.

Do You Want the Default Setting?

The question is whether the default setting – resisting advice – is really good for us in the 21st century. If we choose our coach wisely and find someone who has done something we haven’t, then they might be able to save us time. In order to benefit from others’ advice, we need to learn to override the default setting of resistance.

Coaching is not for everyone. Some people get the lesson much stronger by figuring it out themselves, even if it takes more time, money, and effort to do so. Others see a benefit and choose to override their default setting of resistance. Either way is fine, as long as you know you’re choosing.

Know What You Want

The first step is to define what freedom means to you. For me, it was taking a walk every day at 2PM. I block out my calendar from 2-4PM so I can do a workout or a walk, or even errands that are urgent. I work into the evening so that I still get my hours in. I am refreshed and do better work all day long because I take a break at the right time for me.

Perhaps you have an office that you’d prefer to go in only 2 or 3 days a week, but you have clients all week. I re-arranged my schedule so that I see clients back to back all day long on Mondays and Tuesdays. I don’t have to go into the office on Wednesdays now. There are no holes in my schedule. I have longer blocks for strategy time on my non-client days. Clients seem fine with the change. It might even help my clients be more responsible for their time slots as I am less available now and clients value their time with me more.

If you work for someone else and you want to propose a change in your schedule, all you have to do is come up with some options and the courage to present it to your boss. There is usually no penalty for asking, we just have to be willing to have the scary conversation.

To get started on your road to biz freedom, define what freedom looks like to you. You could start with what you don’t like about your schedule. Or it could revolve around a client, employee, or service that you’re offering. Nothing is out of bounds. Take a look at what’s constraining you and see what you can do to solve it.

Brainstorm

Once you’ve defined what you want to change, think of alternative ideas and solutions. If it’s big, think big. You may have to trash a service line, a client type, or an entire office, and replace it with something that works better for you. It’s your business after all.

In 2009, I was doing face-to-face coaching. I would have to get up early, get dressed, fight traffic, go into my overpriced office, and meet my clients. I loved coaching, but I could not see a way to profit from it the way I was doing it. Today, I have a full coaching practice with a waiting list. I do this with back to back calls that are bundled on 1-2 days a week. I’m making three times as much money in far less time and effort. Plus I have no rent to cover, and I’m even using less makeup and dry cleaning services!

How can you change your service line to fit your needs and still provide excellent services to your clients?

Implement

Once you’ve brainstormed creative ideas to build the freedom into your business, choose the one that works the best for you and take the steps to implement it.

Over time, your likes and needs as an entrepreneur change. I still love “slinging HTML,” which means coding web sites. But the easier pages don’t excite me anymore, they bore me. I’ve built a team that can do the easier code, while I still do some of the more difficult programming. I don’t do much anymore, but when I do I love it instead of dread it. The client still gets served very well, and I’ve trained my team to code the secrets that make our sites so special and effective. Everyone wins, and I have my freedom. By the way, my team is virtual and on hourly contract by project, which means I don’t pay for any overhead or waste, and I can pass on lower prices to my clients for this reason.

Some people feel that having employees and making payroll each week is anything but freedom. But if you are doing low-level tasks and not performing your highest skills, you are far from free. A compromise is to use a contractor who has many other clients and can do a portion of your work. They can also be virtual, so you don’t give up your physical freedom, and many are part-time who pick up a range of hours depending on your needs.

In this internet age, freedom is more attainable than ever. If you don’t feel free in your business, stop and define what it means to you, brainstorm how to fix it, and implement your new ideas. When you feel freer, the quality of your work will go way up and so will your happiness and your profits.

One of the pieces I recently looked at in the role of one of her business coaches was her sales process. She offers a free 30-minute consultation with each new prospect and asks that they complete an intake form prior to the phone call. I reviewed the form as well as the phone script that Renee uses and offered my suggestions.

Not only do I like to look at these items from a marketing standpoint, I also put myself in Renee’s client’s shoes and ask myself “How easy and fun is it to do business with Renee?” A few of my suggestions were around streamlining the process, reducing any unnecessary paperwork, and making bookkeeping services as fun as possible. We accountants love paperwork – it’s our strength – but the clients who hire us usually don’t, so we often have to keep that in mind when we design our customer interfaces. The best customer interfaces will help us get the job done but will also do it from the frame of reference of the customer’s comfort as much as possible.

Each of my coaching clients has homework every week, and Renee’s was to revise her form and her script. When her next coaching session rolled around, I received those changes plus a beautiful, illustrated PowerPoint presentation from Renee. It was fun!

It now looks like fun to get your books done with Renee. She included photos that remind you of your peace of mind, photos of her team, a funny cartoon about the IRS, and fun descriptions of her services using a metaphor based on her book, “Your Financial Flight Plan: Pilot Your Business To Profitability.”

Here’s what we can learn from Renee:

1. If you don’t have a sales process, get one and systematize or proceduralize it. Create a prospect intake and follow up process including scripts, handouts, price sheets, and welcome packets.
2. Use ideas from other industries. Not all entrepreneurs use a presentation in their sales process, but there’s no reason why you can’t.
3. Make it fun. Your clients will love to hear you joking about the IRS or something very serious in your business and will appreciate you when you can show them more of your personality and humor.
4. Use your creativity (not when you’re booking journal entries, but in other ways!) in your business. Add some fun to your web site, forms, processes, and any other places you can find to do so in your business. It helps to reduce the stress of all those deadlines we work with, especially the accountants.

If you’re not an accountant, I hope you can still relate this story to your type of business and find the benefits. Putting the fun back into your business will help you, your clients, and your employees enjoy the work day just a little bit more.

Adaptability

Mastering change is very difficult for many of us. When we can become more adaptable and flexible, then our success becomes more reachable. An example of this is believing too much in the fate of genetics. We may have a belief in our heads that our personality is fixed and was inherited from our father and mother. From there, we can stay stuck, believing that we can’t change ourselves.

Luckily, genetics are not the last word in our abilities to change. Neuroscience shows us that the environment that we wrap ourselves in – including the friends we hang out with, the activities we spend time on, and the thoughts in our head – controls who we become. This is not only critical for ourselves but comes into play when we hire employees and contractors to join our team. One employee with a fixed mindset will not adapt well with a team full of change-loving individuals.

Learn to embrace change yourself and seek others who do as well. A key point to remember when change is hard is that change is just another form of learning, and we can all do that.

Recharge

An entrepreneur with a positive and determined outlook will outperform someone who is negative any day. Controlling that inner voice of self-doubt can be tricky, but it’s essential. That criticizing, small inner voice that is trying to keep you safe needs to be replaced with a powerful, determined, winning mantra that you can listen to over and over again to give yourself strength. Moving your inner voice from negative thoughts to positive thoughts is only one example of the many ways to recharge your brain for success.

Rebalance

Mastering decision-making is a critical component of running a business, since we make hundreds of tiny and huge decisions every day about our practices.

The successful entrepreneur has a beautiful balance between the logical, thinking side of their brain and the emotional, feeling side. When these two sides of your brain are in balance, you make better, smarter decisions for you and your business. If you are too emotional, you can end up making decisions out of fear or that are irrational. If you are too logical, you can end up with decisions that don’t bring you what you want.

What do you feel is important for mental mastery when you are growing your business?

Here are my suggestions for how to get your business card working as hard as you do. If you want to play along, pull out your business card, and see if your card is guilty of any of these first four no-no’s.

1. Missing email address. Believe it or not, many of the cards I receive via networking meetings are missing email addresses. This is most common with new business owners and individuals in the personal care business, but still, there’s no excuse.
2. An email address that ends with aol.com, gmail.com, yahoo.com, or your ISP’s domain name. Everyone in business for themselves needs to be using their own domain email (such as @sandismith.com). This is free advertising of your web site, so why are you advertising Yahoo!, Comcast, or AOL instead of yourself? Advertising a free email account as your business email is just plain unprofessional.
3. Glossy cards you can’t write on. Okay, this is my pet peeve. Yes, you can get these cards printed for free on the Internet. That sends a loud message that you don’t even have the money for business cards and that you do everything on the cheap. That’s not what I want people to think about my business.
4. A web site address printed on the card that isn’t up yet. When I get a business card from you, I’m likely to visit your web site to find out more. If it doesn’t come up, it tells me one of two things: you either didn’t pay your hosting company or webmaster, or you haven’t gotten to that project yet. Both are bad messages to send.

Okay, how are you doing? These are very basic, so if you’ve been in business for a few years, you’re probably doing well. So now let’s ask whether your business card looks like it’s from a small operation or a Fortune 500 company. How about these small company no-no’s?

5. Missing job title. Every business card should list your job title, especially if you are President or CEO.
6. Photo of you. This is tell-tale small business. I disagree with some people who feel that it helps during networking; you can go to the web site and see their picture there. A picture takes up valuable card real estate and screams “ego.” It’s just not the most effective thing to have on your card.
7. No logo. Every business needs a logo for branding its image.
8. Clip art. Your logo should be the only art on your card.
9. Weird shape. I don’t feel the way to stand out is through odd colors or shape of your business card.

Now, let’s get to what really matters: the marketing. Here are some things to consider that very few others are doing that will help your results with prospects:

10. One phone number. Prospects can get confused as to what number to call. List only one, or make it clear when to call what number. Don’t keep us guessing.
11. The business you’re in. If you said nothing and handed your business card over to a stranger and asked them what business you’re in, could they figure it out? If not, neither can your prospect. Make sure your tag line or business name clearly describes the business you’re in and if it doesn’t, you’ll need to add something on your card that does.
12. What to do next. Get prospects into your funnel by telling them what to do next right on your business card. Can they get a free consultation? A free white paper? Make it clear on the card how they can sign up for the next step to get to know you better.

How’d you do? I hope you passed, and if not, I see a trip to your printer in your near future.

1. Get credentialed, certified, or educated. A good credential, and the CPA is pretty much the gold standard, will get you instant credibility with your prospects and clients. You are simply treated better and respected more when you’ve earned a credential that others recognize.
2. Create a results-oriented biography. Let people know what you’ve accomplished so far in your career and what you’re capable of doing for them by writing a great bio that represents you well.
3. Collect testimonials. The perfect time to ask for a testimonial is when a client tells you the results they’ve gotten from your services or compliments you in some way. Simply ask, “Could I put what you just said in writing to use for future clients?” and do the work for them.
4. Give a speech. Make a list of the top things you are always telling your clients, and that’s your speech. Present it to local clubs, chambers, and networking groups. Speaking is face-to-face, the hottest marketing there is, plus it’s leveraged, meaning you’re talking to far more than just one person at a time. So it’s a great way to get business and get known.
5. Track your online reputation. If you enter your name in Google, what comes up? It should be your web site, Linked In profile or an article about you. If not, you have some work to do to boost your online presence.
6. Boast and post your client list. There are very few things better for credibility than seeing a full list of happy, well-known clients. If you don’t have confidentiality issues, post your client list with pride, or at least include it in your prospect kit.
7. Get press. When you get quote by the New York Times, Oprah, or Wall Street Journal, not only will you get new leads, but you can say “As seen on Oprah” in your marketing materials for the rest of your life.
8. Build your following. The least expensive ways of staying in contact with thousands of your fans is to build a mechanism for them to stay in touch with you through social media, a newsletter, or blog.
9. Get published. Write articles or a book and have them published by an independent third party for instant credibility.
10. Win awards. The key is you have to find them and apply for them. Once you do, you can say “award-winning” in your bio.

Many professions, such as accounting, finance, legal, coaching, consulting, and health care, rely more heavily on reputation-building than traditional advertising, and these are some tips on exactly how it’s done.

What is a Mastermind?

A mastermind group is composed of eight to twelve highly committed noncompeting peers who meet regularly to discuss each others’ business successes, failures, and challenges.

The members are carefully chosen by a facilitator or coach who runs the program. The characteristics of a great mastermind member include:

• A willingness to grow and an ability to take coaching or constructive criticism
• Complete confidentiality
• A team player who is willing to contribute to the other members’ successes

The characteristics of a great mastermind group are:

• Members that are at the same revenue level.
• Members from all different industries so that new ideas flow plentifully and perspectives are always opened wider.
• Complete commitment to the group: on time, present, and engaged.

Benefits of Masterminds

As many of you know, I’m in a mastermind group this year. Just a few of the benefits I’ve received include:

• A peek into other company’s revenue models, processes, and team structures so that I can learn and apply great ideas to my business.
• A forward look at what is selling and what is not selling right now (and that’s pretty priceless info).
• Killer advice and feedback from smart “A” players who are committed and serious about their business.
• Instant clients and project partners (half of the mastermind group is now doing business with me).
• Red carpet opportunities.
• Lifelong friends.

A Mastermind Agenda

If you are looking for an edge for your business and possibly feeling “lonely at the top,” a mastermind is the perfect solution. It provides a safe sounding board for you to air your issues as well as bounce your craziest ideas off of. The best mastermind groups allow for:

• Time for each member to be spotlighted so that other members can get to know their businesses.
• Hot seat time, where members invite the group to coach them on a particular issue.
• Informal, get to know each other personally, time.
• Training that is relevant to the group and timely for the issues they have.
• Professional facilitation so that all members have equal time.
• Coaching by a leader who has been where the others are trying to go.

You Don’t Have to Do It Alone

There is enormous synergy in bringing great entrepreneurial minds together that can fast track your business’s growth.

If you’re interested in a group like this for yourself, please visit http://www.leveragegroupgenius.com or email me at support@sandismith.com. I’ll be facilitating mastermind groups in early 2011 for individuals who are earning less than $1 million in revenues and who are serious about taking their businesses to the next level. If you’re interested or just curious, please contact me so I can invite you to a complimentary sample strategy meeting so you can see for yourself how these mastermind meetings work.

Just about everyone I know needs more customers. To that end, let’s take a look at the tried and true web site. An article I wrote several years ago still rings true today, whether you use WordPress, have set up a blog for your main site, or have a traditional site.

You CAN get more business, more clients, and more profits from your web site. But not if you make these common mistakes! See how you do with the top 10 biggest mistakes to avoid on your web site in this article.

The 10 Biggest Mistakes to Avoid on Your Website

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and 365 days a year, your website is presenting your company’s image and message to prospective clients all over the world. With this phenomenal reach, you want to make sure your best image and best message are coming across.

Perhaps your website is not generating the interest you’d like it to and you’d like to find out why. Maybe you’re just getting started in your new business and know you need a website, but don’t know where to start. Possibly your website is doing great, and you’d simply like to take it to the next level.

Whether creating a new site or updating your existing site, here are some common pitfalls to avoid.

1. Unprofessional writing. It’s easy to get so wrapped up in the web design portion of a website and forget about the words that go on the pages. Maybe the web designer does the design but not the writing. You might even find yourself writing the content at the last minute. Good writing is far more important than bling, and great copy from a professional copywriter will get your phone ringing.

2. Looking like all the other sites out there. Your business has something unique and different to offer its customers. Is that evident on your website? If not, you could be attracting the wrong type of customers, or worse, none at all.

When you hire a Webmaster, you’ll want to make sure that s/he will design your site for you and your customers and not for himself/herself.

Your website will shine when it emulates your company’s personality.

3. Not maximizing the eight seconds you have. Web visitors – your potential prospects – will give you only eight seconds to wow them. Do you have your best stuff at the top of your home page? I mean the really good stuff, not just the stuff your mom is proud of!

You’ll want to capture the attention of potential customers using the item that brings out the best in you. It might be a great tag line, a killer testimonial, a big award, a blue chip client list, or the like.

4. No credibility. Can web visitors check out your reputation on the web? You’ll want to make sure your website comes as close as possible to feeling like a warm, personal visit with you. Do this by posting content that is designed to build your credibility.

As an example, this can include content that shows you have a track record of success: testimonials, case studies of current clients, and a client list.

If you have been mentioned in the press, include a press page on your website that lists the newspapers, magazines, radio talk shows, and other places where you’ve been mentioned.

5. No way to capture interested leads. People warm up slowly. Your web visitors might be interested in you but are not quite ready to call you or buy anything yet.

You’ll want a way to keep track of these warm leads who will be ready to buy a few months down the road when they’ve gotten to know you better. There are several ways to gather leads from your website, depending on what you’re willing to offer them. One method that is completely ineffective for capturing leads is to ask for information on your contact page. Just don’t do it!

6. Not marketing your site. If you’ve spent all your money doing everything right, but you don’t market your site, you may not get any visitors.

You’ll need to spend at least a little time marketing your site through offline and online methods. For example, add your web-site name to the bottom of every email that you send. You can do this automatically by modifying the signature file in your email software.

You may also want to delve into the more advanced fields of search engine marketing and optimization.

7. Under construction. Many people’s pet peeves is to click on a page and see an “under construction” message. It’s inconsiderate of people’s time to lead them down a dead-end alley, plus your website screams the message, “This person can’t finish what they start.” I’m sure that’s not the message you wish to send.

8. Too much bling. In the name of being cute, many websites display obnoxious moving parts, flashing signs, or vacuous videos. Did you know most people hate that stuff?

Bling doesn’t impress clients, except in three cases: kids’ sites, sites that sell luxury items, and entertainment sites. If you have one of those sites, then you need bling. Limited bling is OK, timeless style is better, and meaningful, benefits-filled content is best.

9. Nonworking links, typos, or other mistakes. A site filled with errors tells people that its owner probably makes a lot of mistakes when delivering services. Even if the message is compelling, the red flag is there for people to see. People’s intuition will tell them not to do business with you. A quick and thorough testing of the site will avoid this pitfall.

10. No goals. A lot of people come to me saying, “I want a website.” I ask them, “What do you want it to do?” And they don’t really know.

It’s important to think about what you want your website to accomplish because that goal should be integral to the design of the site. The best sites lead their visitors to a certain outcome that is beneficial for both themselves and their customers.

When you can overcome these 10 common problems, your website can start to become a powerful and effective marketing tool for your business.

1. Slash headcount with huge layoffs.
2. Have solely a short-term focus.
3. Employ executives who take a loss-minimizing approach.

This approach is too short-term and defensive in nature. Companies and leaders that take this prevention-focused tack often get acquired or go bankrupt. Being too extreme on the other end is a problem too, though:

1. Aggressive spending on promotion, such as the old wives’ tales about how companies need to spend more on marketing during down times and they will get ahead.
2. Rolling out too many new products.
3. Employing executives who take too long-term of an approach and neglect the short-term.

This approach focuses on the long-term to the exclusion of the short-term and is offensive (vs. defensive) in nature. This promotion-focused, aggressive approach also fails. A big-company example of this was HP under Carly Fiorina’s leadership.

So what’s the right answer? A middle-of-the-road balance among these 4 strategies:

1. Operational efficiency to streamline costs and patch money leaks.
2. Market development, R&D, investing in new revenue lines, making existing products better.
3. Investing in yourself and your business for the long-term. Buying new equipment, skill development, resource accumulation.
4. NOT cutting talent because customer service and quality suffers too much, which causes a mass exodus in clients.

Take a strategic look at your operations to see how you can course-correct to not only weather the storm but to make your own sunshine in your business.

Here are my top three money leak sources for you to look at and see what you can find:

1. Indecisiveness or saying yes when you should really say no. This manifests in a number of ways: slow hiring or firing processes, saying yes to projects that do not have a high return on investment, and getting stuck in ambiguity or uncertainty and delaying the unavoidable, to give a few examples.

   Why we do it and sabotage ourselves: We don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. OR We get caught up in the emotion of the moment and think we can be Super-entrepreneur. OR We don’t do the planning or analysis before we make a decision, we just act. OR we’re really stuck and don’t know what the next step is, but are afraid to reach out and ask for help. OR We want to be liked.

   Action tip: Take a look at where you’ve said yes or maybe in the past and change to a more decisive action that better supports your business and personal growth.

2. Underpricing, overserving, and giving too much for free. Everyone is so scared to raise prices in this economy and millions of businesses have been discounting like mad. Why not turn it on its tail and raise value along with price instead? It’s all about the perceived value your client believes they get from your service. When you start discounting, they start questioning. Don’t get sucked into that cycle. Build huge trust instead and you won’t have trouble.

   Why we do it and sabotage ourselves: Fear, pure and simple. Money is tied to survival (which is the biggest myth on the planet). The economy has sent millions of people into a scarcity tailspin, and a huge percentage of this black hole is completely emotional overreaction.

   Action item: Get your groove back. Find confidence, be assertive, and get on with your life. Run from clients who are nickeling and diming you and find clients who value your smarts and expertise.

3. Reinventing the wheel. Where could you further leverage and systematize your processes via checklists and how-to guides so that you are not continually reinventing the wheel? Everyone could take a look to discover where they could tighten up their processes a bit more. When you do, your business will run smoother, more proactively, and more efficiently.

   Why we do it and sabotage ourselves: Entrepreneurs are so creative we like to create, create, create. We don’t like to get fenced in which may be the attitude you have toward systematizing. The paradox is systematizing is total freedom. Without it, you can’t delegate and grow your team, so that you can have even more time to create.

   Action item: Look for processes that are sloppy and get them documented, systematized, automated, and delegated so you can free up your time to be more strategic in your business.

Take a look in your business for these money leaks and let me know what you find and fix, so others can benefit from your stories and we can all prosper.

I’ve met a lot of business owners recently who have trouble getting their employees to sell while they’re on site, and I’ve also heard from some customers who’ve remarked that their vendors don’t stay in touch with them. So here are some tips to mine the pot of gold that lies right before you: your current clients who already trust you and are eager to hear about new solutions that will ease their pain and problems.

1. Change your attitude about staying in touch with your client. You might feel like you don’t want to “bother” your client, but I bet your client would be delighted to get a phone call out of the blue, especially if you have an idea that will save them time or money. They already trust you, so find out how you can help them even more than you already are.
2. Do the opposite of what everyone else is doing and offer your existing clients a coupon, gift certificate, or discount off their services instead of offering new clients a great deal. I get so mad as a current client of AT&T and never understand why they want to give new people a good deal when they should be giving me a deal for staying with them for 10 years.
3. Give your team checklists and scripts to follow. When they are wrapping up the service, have your team member get used to selling by starting them with questions such as “is there anything else we can do so that you are thrilled with our service?” Then move them into reviewing a checklist for each client. For example, if they are a carpet cleaner, they could notice if the client needed their windows washed too and could say, “Now that it’s summer can we help you tackle those windows for you and get that off your spring cleaning list?” The checklist will be items your team member can easily look for on the client’s site.
4. Take your top revenue-generating clients to lunch on a regular basis. Compliment them and say genuinely “I’d love to have 3 more clients just like you.” Usually your client will think of some referrals they can help you with, and if not, you can less subtly ask. “Do you know of anyone who is looking for the type of services we offer?” Your best clients can be your best source of referrals. Also, as you get to talking with them, listen for problems you can solve. There may be more business for you. Just about every time I called or emailed a client, they would think of more work for me. When you’re top of mind, you’ll get more work.
5. Partner with your clients when possible. Send them referrals, introduce them at your country club, do events with them, go to conferences with them, or participate on boards with them. The more you get to know your clients, the more possibilities open up for you to help each other.
6. Have multiple contacts that you get to know at each client company. The larger the company, the more contacts you need. If one of your contacts gets laid off, then you won’t be scrambling trying to get a return call.
7. Gift your top clients periodically with free reports, new findings, whitepapers, audio recordings, or ebooks that are useful for their business.

The good news is that most of this can be done systematically and by trained staff, so it doesn’t have to take up much time or budget to implement. Don’t be that vendor who didn’t make the phone call and lost the account. No one can afford to lose good clients these days, especially the ones who pay on time!

Although it’s exciting to get new clients, none of us would be where we are today without the clients we’ve had for years and years. Rather than take them for granted, take the opportunity to expand the relationship in new directions, and watch your business grow.

Have you ever held on too long to an employee that was underperforming, hoping that s/he would turn it around, and wishing you never hired them in the first place?

Or have you, like me, had an employee quit via email and wonder how you hired such a person? Sheesh!

Or have you, like me, put off hiring someone because you couldn’t stand the thought of wading through stacks of resumes or even writing an ad?

Employees can make or break our business, and to me, the critical success point is HIRING the right ones in the first place. We want to avoid turnover, keep from bringing in someone mediocre, and get loyal stars on board our team so that our company prospers. But the question of HOW to do this over and over again without disrupting our business flow can be a mystery.

The way I look at it, a business owner with exceptional hiring skills will be able to build a stellar team and in turn and outstanding business. A business owner with no hiring skills, and worse, no process, will suffer from high turnover, flaky staff, and low productivity.

So, I have a couple of questions for you:

1. How important do you think hiring skills are to growing your business?
2. What are some specific scenarios where better hiring skills would be helpful when adding a new team member?

Post your comments below and you WILL be rewarded. Here’s why…

In August I plan on holding a LIVE teleseminar with hiring diva and serial entrepreneur Kiyla Fenell. Kiyla has hired and inspired hundreds of employees in her million dollar businesses spanning seven industries. Her interesting entrepreneurial story starts at age 17, includes once hiring someone on America’s Most Wanted list, and goes on to build teams that have won awards and broken sales records.

She has developed the most unique hiring system I have ever seen that cuts out the resume stack, saves hiring time by up to 90 percent, and hires stars every time. Before Kiyla gets hired by every HR department in the country to revamp their processes (which I am positive will happen – I know a star when I see one), I want to introduce her to all my readers. This session will be free of charge, BUT I do need some input into what topics you would like Kiyla to cover during this call. Could you help me by posting your comments?

Have you ever bought a clothing item you never wore after you got it home? Take a look in your closet now and see if you have any articles with the price tag still on. Yeah, me too.

Have you overbought at the grocery store only to throw it out a few days later? Guilty as charged.

So I guess business services are subject to the same waste. This is something I just don’t understand, nor do I like. Here’s my story.

I had a CPA who filled out his form for a free consult with me. He had some questions, and I knew I could save him $10K a year for sure. The problem is he never called. He never re-scheduled. He never took advantage of what was free. He didn’t hear from me how to save $10K.

I had a teleseminar recently where several of you may have been on it. The first 10 people got a free consult with me. Two people responded, set up their calls, and got their questions answered. Eight people had the chance and didn’t take it.

I have consulting clients who periodically prepay for blocks of time. I have 90-day expiration dates on these purchases, and often the client doesn’t finish their hours in time. (And believe me, we follow up on this one.)

I have clients who don’t complete their packages.

I have a free offer with one of my product where I custom-write a document for the client, and only three people have taken me up on it (and it’s a huge seller).

Believe it or not, this is NOT how I like to make my money. I don’t understand why people don’t take advantage of what they pay for. Not in this economy. With as much whining going on as to how tight money is, why are people throwing it away?

I believe there are a couple of possibilities, but I’d love your feedback on this one.

1. They’ve lost interest and have gone on to the next bright and shiny object, throwing more money at something new, only to discard it later.
2. They don’t see the value they are throwing away. Perhaps they’re too busy to notice, or I’m a little too soft spoken about my track record.
3. They’re scared of me. I wouldn’t be surprised at this one. I really don’t bite, y’all.

I don’t know about you, but I hate loose ends.

Take a look in your business. Where could you be benefiting from money you’ve already spent? Here are some places to look:

1. Club membership benefits you are paying for but not using fully.
2. Unused equipment: extra phone lines you don’t need, extra computers, etc.
3. Vendor features. That subscription you’re not using. (Oops for me it’s Salesforce.com.)
4. Package deals you could scale down.
5. Software or web applications you’re no longer using.

It may be because I’ve spent so much time in third-world countries that I hate seeing such blatant waste in this country. Use it or lose it, but why lose it?

The best investments I’ve made have not been in true blues like GE or red hot Silicon Valley start ups like Red Hat. They haven’t been in bonds or real estate either. They’ve been in me, and they’ve been in my business. The same is likely true for you.

With your own business, you have the potential to generate far more return than anything else you’ve ever invested in.

You have far more control over the outcome than you do with stocks when you have to depend on a fund manager or an overpaid corporate CEO for your nest egg.

The news is catching on. Not the stock market channel but the entrepreneur channel. Entrepreneurs are starting businesses in record numbers. With all of the layoffs, people have an opportunity to reflect, remember their passion and talents, and take back control of their lives.

I continue to learn and grow as I invest more and more in myself. One of the best ways to do that is by hiring a coach who has taken her business farther than you have. Just seeing how someone else does it is priceless. And what most people don’t understand is the money you pay the coach is an investment in you, not the coach.

The bigger the price tag, the bigger your business growth: this is because it uplevels how big you play.

I started investing in my health the same way this year, by getting into a VIP program with a coach. I have more energy, am finally getting leaner, and love what I am eating. Sometimes I just need to give myself permission, and put my health first.

When you do the same, whether it’s business or personal, you’re likely to get an amazing return on your investment. It’s all about getting a hand up from successful women who are ready and willing to share their expertise. You get to take a quantum leap instead of baby steps to success.

Looking for a coach? Check out our programs at: http://www.GrowthStrategiesForYourBusiness.com

When it comes to selling, your product or service is often secondary to the connection you can make with the prospect. The main thing clients want is to trust us.

The truth is, most people have a hard time evaluating the quality of what they are buying and what you are offering compared to another vendor. Unless they’re an expert, how would they know? So the main thing they can go on to make a good decision is how they like you. It’s what their gut is telling them.

Rather than try to look all polished, perfect, and expensive (which brings up alarm bells in our gut instinct), why not ask your client, “Do I have anything in my teeth?” You’ll do more to endear yourself to the person with a human foible than you will with a hundred Armani suits or a dozen pair of Christian Louboutin shoes.

Sandra Yancey started the most popular women’s business network, which now boasts half a million women business owners. She’s won all sorts of women’s advocacy awards and travels all around the world speaking to hundreds of thousands of people.

Yet she became just another “one of the girls” when she asked me about her teeth. The gesture that connects us the most is often just the opposite of what we try when we’re in a sales meeting with a prospect.

You’ll connect on a deeper level when you:

1. Find a common bridge between you and your prospect. It could be a shared hobby, a pet preference (beagles or Maine coons), your kids are the same age, or you live in the same neighborhood.
2. Stop being slick and start being more human. Express your credibility, of course – don’t get sloppy – but be human at the same time.
3. Keep your relationship at the highest level of honesty and integrity. One example of this is to admit when you don’t know something.
4. Can share with your client where you are coming from. Perhaps you have a similar past, or a great story that people can relate to.
5. Can share a resource or favor with the prospect. Perhaps you know a good babysitter you can refer or you can offer a Chamber of Commerce introduction.

It’s about being real. I hope we don’t get into such a hurry that we forget to be real in our businesses and our lives.

Many adults reported not knowing what to do to change their lifestyle so they could reduce their stress, so it just makes sense to talk about this a little. Here are the most common stress-reducing tasks that some people do, according to the survey:

1. Listen to music.
2. Exercise or walk.
3. Read.
4. Watch TV.
5. Spend time with friends or family.
6. Surf the internet or play video games.
7. Nap.
8. Pray.
9. Eat.
10. Spend time on a hobby.
11. Go to church.
12. Shop.
13. Smoke.
14. Drink.
15. Play sports.

Most of these activities do reduce your stress slightly, and a few are excellent for stress reduction (exercise and spending time with friends and family). Some of them actually increase your stress (watching TV, playing video games, eating, smoking, and drinking even normal amounts).

It’s important to take a big picture perspective to understand stress better. Chronic stress is a negative emotion rooted in fear. It’s your fear system – your fight or flight system designed in cave man days — gone haywire for the 21^st century.

When we can get our fear under control, we can get our stress under control too. Here are some tips you might not normally associate with stress, from my latest book “30 Days to a Stress-Free Life: Simple Strategies for Women Who Want Balance, Bliss, and Big Bucks from Their Business.”

1. Breathe deeply. Do this several times a day or make a habit of it. When you learn how to really breathe, you’ll be taking a micro-vacation each time you do.
2. Set an intention for the day. Do you have a question for the universe? A problem you’re working on at work? A goal you want to achieve? Or even just a theme for the day that you could share as a game with the kids? Set a statement, question, or keyword for the day. As you move through the day, look for things that support your intention. Listen to what your intuition is showing you. Have fun with your theme.
3. Be extra polite to wait staff, service people, receptionists, and customer service agents. This act of kindness will help you feel better yourself.
4. Learn how to change any catastrophic thinking you might have. This is when your mind thinks, “I’ll never be ___.” “I’m always ___.”
   etc.
5. Find something in your day that makes you feel awe-inspired.
6. Avoid talk radio and loud rock music, especially first thing in the morning and late at night when your brain is extra sensitive. Instead play soft instrumentals, classical, or Reiki music that is calming and nurturing.
7. During the 3:00 afternoon blahs at your office, pipe rock music (which is okay at this time) over the sound system or simply turn up your iPod and dance or conga your way around the office.
8. Get rid of any clutter in your environment that when you walk by it, your inner nag voice goes off saying you need to do it.
9. Connect with a coach, mentor, mastermind, or someone who is a support for you.
10. Water your plant and prune its leaves, or stare out the window at a nature scene. Or sit on a park bench and watch the butterflies, birds, babies, or passersby.
11. Sing or whistle. At 87 years old, my dad still whistles every day.
12. Go to bed earlier (at 10:00PM).

Try these low-cost ideas to reduce your stress so you can enjoy summer. If you’d like to find out more about my new book, you can go here:
http://www.stressfreestrategies.com.

Why not apply the concept to your business? You can do this whether you have your own business or a job, although you have a bit more control when you’re the boss. What do you want to do before you retire or sell your business?

Here are some ideas:

1. Appear on TV or have your own show talking about your business.
2. Serve 100 customers (or maybe 1,000 or 10,000).
3. Have your own patent or trademark.
4. Do business in a foreign country.
5. Speak to an audience of 500 people about your business.
6. Write a book about your business.
7. Participate in a mastermind or hire a coach.
8. Win an award.
9. Sell your business for $1 million (or $10 million).
10. Run for office.
11. Hire your first (or tenth) employee.
12. Become a mentor for others.
13. Serve on a board of directors of a Fortune 500 company.
14. Learn to quantum leap your business.
15. Break six figures a year (or a month).

What does your business bucket list look like?

My mistake was in being lulled to think that this vendor could work at about the same rate of speed and production that I could. Boy was I wrong and it cost me.

It’s so easy to fall into the trap of comparing hourly rates of vendors and nothing else. For example, let’s take the task of hiring a bookkeeper. Let’s say your last bookkeeper worked for $30 per hour and you needed him for two hours each week. Now you want to find another, and you’ve found one for $30 an hour. Great, you think, problem solved.

The problem comes later when you discover your new bookkeeper is twice as slow as the last one. Now your bill has doubled. Not such a bargain anymore.

How many times have clients compared your hourly rate with other vendors, only to say “you’re too much.” It happens to me all the time when I have to resort to hourly billing rather than a package. My fee is not quite three times as high as the ordinary web designer. The problem is I get three to four times the work done per hour that other web designers get done. But explain that to a new client, and they give you a double-take. I don’t blame them. In this economy, trust is lower than it ever has been, and the pride we all have in not wanting to be cheated is stubbornly protective.

Besides the obvious answer (don’t bill by the hour), what are some things you can do when you find yourself selecting or selling your services and comparing or being compared?

1. Be sure you ask or point out that knowing an hourly rate is worthless if you don’t also know how much one vendor can do per hour compared to the other. No two vendors are alike in this area.
2. Get or give a range on a project so that your decision-maker can choose more intelligently.
3. Ask what will be billed and what won’t be. For example, do you get or offer free phone calls and free email access? (I do.) Are there extras like phone support or warranties loaded into the rate that make it unequal in comparison? You might not be comparing apples to apples if one vendor includes more than the other.
4. Will you or the vendor bill for mistakes or learning curve time?
5. How does experience and education factor into the rate?
6. Are the service levels equivalent?

Return on investment is a term most accountants are familiar with, but not all entrepreneurs are. This is an equation that compares all project costs including your time and expenses with the expected revenue that completing the work will pull in. For example, if you invest $1000 in a website, you should expect to get at least $10,000 in business from it over time. Simplistically speaking, your return on investment (ROI) for that project is 10 to 1.

A bookkeeper is typically considered overhead cost, but a great bookkeeper can generate a return on investment by showing an owner how to save money by reducing expenses or increasing income. She can get her ideas from looking at the books and asking good questions.

When you begin to think like a million-dollar business owner, your decision-making will become more sophisticated. One step is the move from comparing hourly rates to making decisions based on return on investment instead.

The three high school teachers I met with last week work with the District’s toughest youth – those who have been expelled from their regular school and who are given a second chance in these special classrooms. We’ve been meeting with the Board of Education since September, 2009, and in April, we finally got the chance to visit the classrooms.

Last week, we had the honor of making a presentation to these hard-working teachers on how we could teach them life-saving emotional resilience and positivity skills that they could, in turn, teach the kids. It was a poignant, strangely timed meeting as we all got the news that morning that one of the former students committed suicide.

These teachers are fantastic, committed caring individuals who are dynamite in their classrooms. The point of our meeting wasn’t how good or bad they were as teachers, although certainly a meeting like this where we want to teach them something about their classroom skills – we, having never spent one hour teaching in the classroom — could be perceived as threatening to them, increase defensive behavior on their part or, in worst case, could be taken as downright insulting to think we knew more than them. They were more than good sports to be there and listen with an open mind, knowing it’s all about the kids.

We made our presentation, and in August, we’ll be delivering a workshop for the teachers on the latest applications of resilience work, social cognition, positive psychology, and neuroscience. They’ll in turn, be able to share these ideas with the kids. Even more exciting is we’ve found a way to measure before and after results so that we can quantify the effect these tools are having.

After a while, the teachers let us know one of their biggest challenges: the “not my fault” syndrome. For example, “I missed the bus, it wasn’t my fault.” Boy do I have some tools for that one. You can’t take a single-engine airplane around the world and live to tell the story with the “It’s not my fault” thinking pattern.

I love the tools that help move people along the continuum from being victims of their circumstances to taking full responsibility. They’re not just for kids; this is a lifelong lesson that is so powerful it can move people out of poverty (or even middle class) and into glorious wealth. It’s initially counter-intuitive to take responsibility for things you don’t think are your fault, but that’s the only place where the “power” is. Without responsibility, you can’t fix it.

If there’s something in your life you’re “putting up with” or feeling a victim of, then the answer is to move farther along the continuum of taking full responsibility. Take the economy. Most people feel like they are a victim of the economy. In that place, you only suffer. When you change your mindset to take responsibility, you can begin to plan new solutions and activities to rise above your suffering.

In flying this is taken to the ultimate level. A pilot could say, “engine went out, not my fault, let’s crash and die.” Or he can be prepared with checklists, contingencies, great training, and a second redundant engine. When I speak publicly, I take all sorts of extra equipment I usually don’t need, such as an extension cord. I don’t want to get to the event and have my laptop run out of batteries because I didn’t have a power source. I take responsibility; I don’t leave it to chance. I can create and improve my chances of success by anticipating my failures and being ready to avoid them when they happen.

That’s a snippet of what we’ll be teaching the kids in August. They’ll be learning it at the bottom rung of the ladder, but the real secret is that there are hundreds of rungs on the responsibility ladder. What I’ve found is people apply responsibility intermittently in their lives and especially in their businesses. There’s always another rung of the ladder we can climb.

How can you apply resilience and responsibility to your business to boost your profits? Here are some take-aways:

1. Know what drives you, and make decisions from that place and not from ego or from fear, like most people do. For the teachers, it’s all about the kids.
2. Be and stay coachable. Being coachable never takes away from how good you already are. No one on the planet can know every tool they need at the rate science and knowledge is expanding. When we’re not coachable, by default we become defensive, stubborn, and set in our ways. It’s more fun to give in to our natural curiosity and to be lifelong learners, especially if you’re a teacher or an entrepreneur.
3. Go where the power is. Take responsibility and come up with creative solutions to control the situation.
4. Understand there are levels, layers, and rungs of responsibility. See if you can find a blind spot in your business when it comes to responsibility and shore up the gap.
5. Know there are concrete tools now in science where we can now learn emotional resilience skills. These are the same skills that help people gain control of losing weight, making more money, and achieving their dreams. It doesn’t have to be a big unknown black mystery box any more. It’s learnable, just like math, reading, and science, and when we master this, the results produce the highest paybacks I’ve ever seen in business. This is my core message and service to others.

Although we’re good at knocking out the items on our business plans or to-do lists, the ideas above often never make it to our lists. We read the articles, and soon we forget. Don’t make that mistake. When you finally start developing these soft skills rather than continuing to work on your hard skills forever, that’s when you’re going to see true and amazing transformation in your business and your life.

1. Use it or lose it. Take a systematic look at all your resources to see if they have empty capacity. Do you have an extra office, PC, phone, or conference room you can rent out and collect a few extra bucks for? Or could you work at home and rent a temp office just for days you have client meetings? Look for a vendor like www.regus.com to dramatically reduce your overhead and still maintain your professional image.

   No one likes to lay off staff; however, if you need cash, you sometimes have to face drastic measures. A full time employee who is no longer fully busy can be replaced with hourly contract individuals who can wax and wane their hours with your workflow and profit margins. If you have more time than money, bring in an intern to save payroll expenses.

   Review all of the resources you have in your business: buildings, office space, people, vendors, customers, equipment, contracts, connections, information, products, services, etc. and think creatively about how you can more fully utilize them to bring in extra cash.

2. Bargains. Everyone loves a bargain. To raise some fast cash, offer your customers a one-day sale on selected products and services. The deeper the discount, the more cash you’ll raise. Promote it a week ahead of time to build excitement and anticipation, then hold it to a 24-hour period. Have customers buy discounted hours of time they can use next month for bookkeeping or offer ten to 20 percent off services for a range of time. Your long-time customers will snap it up and tell their friends. And you’ll have some quick cash in the bank.
3. Ban busy work. Is your staff (or are you) doing work that doesn’t directly generate revenue? Look for things you or your staff are doing for clients that you are not billing the clients for. Why aren’t you?Look for marketing activities that don’t pay back and stop them.Look for $40 an hour employees doing $10 an hour work and re-delegate it to the right staff level.

Rev up your cash reserves right before summer by looking in these three unexpected places in your business.

Send us (support@sandismith.com) your success stories of how you found some unexpected cash in your business and we may publicize your business for a future article.

Time is the great equalizer. We all have the same number of hours in a day, yet some entrepreneurs, many of them self-made, become wildly successful, while others languish. Only one in twenty business owners in the U.S. (2002 numbers) make it past $1 million in annual revenues. I believe the way they use their time is a big factor in their success or failure. Here are three better explanations of your time problem:

1. You are not delegating enough. This could be on a couple of levels: you might not be delegating enough tasks, but you also might not be delegating enough authority. This problem is based in fear of letting go of control and trusting. (If you don’t think you can afford a team, then you have some kind of marketing problem that needs to be addressed.)
2. You are doing everything from memory without having documented, automated, or systematized your business to the extent that makes you competitive with others. Read Michael Gerber’s The E-Myth. This one is more of a skills issue than a fear issue.
3. You remain in a reactive mode, fighting fires all day. There could be many reasons for this, and fear is at the root of most of them: we tend to do what we already know how to do, we may have some boundary issues with clients we need to work on, and we might be doing #1 and #2 above which contributes to this one.

(There are several more, but I have to leave some content exclusively for the benefit of my coaching clients!)

When you can go deeper to root out your so-called time problem, then you have something you can work on to improve your business. What can you do to better leverage your 24 hours each day?

1. Be crystal clear about what you do and how people can use you. Also know exactly who your ideal client is in case you’re asked. If you don’t do this, you’ll leave people scratching their heads about you and they won’t know how to connect with you even if they wanted to.
2. Follow up like crazy. Write on the back of the business card what you talked about and email the new contact the next day. Offer a free, short session over the phone to see how you might help each other. (I don’t’ recommend meeting for coffee; it’s too time-consuming.) I followed up several times with a prospect who couldn’t afford me and who then turned around and referred a friend to me. I would have never gotten that referral without following up several times.
3. Be in a giving frame of mind. Ask the people you meet how you can help them. You might be able to make an introduction, share a tip, or give a referral. Always ask people who their ideal client is and keep a note in your database.
4. Be open-minded. Don’t just look for prospects who could become clients. Look for potential partners, vendors, and friends. I will likely end up doing a terrific project with a “competitor” because we were open-minded and saw how we complemented each other with different specialties within the same field of business.
5. Bring an agenda to a national or international networking opportunity such as a conference. Know who will be there and invite them weeks in advance (so they can adjust airfare and hotel if necessary) to a one-on-one meeting to discuss possible partnerships.
6. Face-to-face trumps all other marketing methods. When possible, be visible. Go to meetings, accept speaking engagements, volunteer, and display your products at an exhibitor table when they are available.
7. Keep going to the same group over and over again rather than flitting from group to group once. It takes three to six months before people get to know you well enough to refer you. Choose a giving community that best matches your ideal client, and if for some reason you haven’t gotten business after nine months, cut your losses and find another group.
8. Use tools such as an ezine, FaceBook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to stay in touch and keep you visible once you’ve met in person. Friend, follow, and connect with each entrepreneur you’ve met at your networking meetings.
9. Offer something free that is compelling so people can get a low-risk taste of your product or service. A free newsletter that helps people make money, a free workshop or teleseminar, or a free no-strings one-on-one phone session are three options that work great to help people get to know you better, which will increase referrals.

Try these power networking ideas to bring new clients into your business.

For more networking tips, grab your copy of my book “Get More Clients”
http://sandismith.com/getmoreclients.html.

Over half of the entrepreneurs, mostly women, considered marketing to be their greatest challenge, and only six percent of women felt they needed to work on mindset. I’m going to make a bold statement here and say that those two percentages should be reversed.

In other words, most people should be working on mindset, and for very few is the issue really marketing. The problem is they can’t see it from where they are in their business.

It wasn’t until I took a giant leap and joined a very expensive, high-end coaching program that I saw what I needed to do in my business to gain a quantum leap. After I got behind the scenes and studied how these women got a net change in revenues of anywhere from half a million to two million in one year, I finally figured it out. I would never have figured it out on my own. And so, even though I do want more clients, I’m not working on marketing; I’m working on something else in my business.

Only a coach or someone much farther along than you in your business can help you take a quantum leap; I feel that it’s almost impossible without help.

So until these women figure out that they what they really need to do is work on mindset and not marketing, time, or even staffing issues, they will continue to work on getting more clients. Are you one of them?

What was interesting is I got eager comments about fear from all of the *men* in the room. The women just stood silent (except for two later in the conversation).

Well, that’s telling, I thought.

I’ve had similar brush-offs at NAWBO with a couple of the women who I know just had to lay off staff. Come on, now, who isn’t scared when something as dramatic as a layoff rips through the company you created with your bare hands?

So what’s going on here?

The only thing I can think of is that some women are too afraid to admit they’re afraid. Perhaps because some people perceive it as a weakness to display fear, they aren’t willing to admit it in public.

Whether you are willing to admit it in public or not, I want you to know right now that fear is normal (the lack of fear is abnormal, that’s for sure). What’s important is that you admit it to yourself.

A majority of the more than 100 women I am around in these pressure-packed, high-growth coaching, training, and mastermind programs are all freely, openly scared to death. They’re also growing like mad, taking on astounding business opportunities including TV, keynote speaking on a big stage, running their own events, and connecting with celebrities and millionaire business owners that are past the stage they’re at.

So what does fear have to do with running your business? The short answer is, just about everything.
Fear is a sign of growth in both yourself and your business. If you’re not afraid, you’re stuck, and so is your business.

In future newsletters we’ll provide some tools for dealing with the fears every woman has in running her business. But the first step is to acknowledge that it’s there.

If this sounds like you, you’re not alone. This is a tough area to crack for many entrepreneurs, and the reason it’s tough is that it’s not completely a marketing problem. Here are three things you can do immediately to get clarity in this area of your business:

1. Understand that marketing can be systematized, and until it is, it will continue to drain your time and money. For example, once you get your main marketing message clear, you will want to select three marketing channels to find prospects. Then you’ll develop a set of procedures that staff can execute to attract those clients within those channels. Include steps for measuring results, and you’ve greatly lowered your marketing costs. You’ll know what works and what doesn’t and you’ll be able to refine. Even better, you can delegate marketing tasks and free up your time for client work or strategy sessions.
   
   Let’s say you offer a monthly open house at your office to attract new clients. Each step can be systematized and delegated to staff. All you should have to do is show up.
   
   Another example might be using local networking events to attract clients. You’ll want to create procedures for your elevator speech, follow up system, and community interaction. Once you approach this systematically instead of attending the next networking meeting that looks good (and leaving the business cards you got in a stack by the computer), your results will increase.
   
2. There is great synergy in completing foundational work before you begin to market. You’ll want to know exactly who your market is, how they think, and why they would use your services. From there, you can develop a message that is coherent and consistent that will work across all marketing channels.
   
   Once you complete your foundational work, which you only have to do once (until your offering or the market changes), your message will be crystal clear to your prospects. Then you can market your message everywhere.
   
3. Executing your marketing strategy is your last step and one that will be continually repeated. (The two above steps only have to be done once.) This step follows the procedures laid out in #1 and communicates the message created in #2.
   
   This is actually going to the networking meeting or conducting the open house, or running the ad.
   

The take home message in this article is that most entrepreneurs have “marketing” grouped together with systematization, messaging, and the actual marketing execution. That’s why it’s so expensive. When you can separate these and make each area efficient, you will greatly reduce costs and increase the effectiveness of your marketing programs.

When you run a business there are a certain set of skills that you need to stay afloat:

1. Product or service development so you have something to sell
2. Project management and customer service skills so you can deliver on time
3. Marketing and selling skills so you can get customers
4. Bookkeeping and accounting so you can make a profit
5. Human relations skill such as hiring and supervising
6. Manufacturing and distribution if your business is not a service business or distributor/franchise
7. Negotiation, legal, and contract knowledge

I’m sure you can think of more, and some of the skills vary by type of business. As you develop your business, you’ll need varying combinations of these skills as you move through certain phases of your business. A couple of questions to ask yourself:

1. What is my report card in each of these areas?

I suggest you take a minute right now and rank yourself on a scale of 1-10 (10 being perfect) how you are doing in each of the above areas. What is your personal skill level in each of the above levels?

2. What is my company’s overall report card in each of these areas?

Go through the seven functions above again and rank – in terms of implementation – how your company is doing in each area. This includes both you and your team’s talents together.

You will probably find some discrepancies among #1 and #2. For example, I am strong in project management because of all my time at Fortune 500 companies running $100 million projects. However, I was so burned out after I left my corporate job that I didn’t do a good job of practicing that skill in my own company. My mistake was not in not doing the skill (because I probably would have done it poorly), but was in not hiring someone to do it for me. I totally ignored it.

If you feel like you need some help in making an accurate assessment of your skills, here is a very objective approach:

Your Biz Scorecard

In this market, it’s critical that you tighten up any leaks. Check your report card and see where your company’s weakest areas are. If you’re not sure, get a coach to help you make an objective assessment.

Since 70 percent of businesses suffer from a skill weakness, it’s highly likely you have identified an area you could improve on. That’s the first step in strengthening your business and making it fail-proof. The next step is getting the right help in shoring up the skill.

Let us know how we can help you take your skills and your business to the next level.

But not everyone will make it.

Why do some experts who do what they love succeed wildly while others languish? I believe it’s because of fear and not because of lack of planning or lack of skills like the Small Business Administration reports. Hear me out; I know we hate to talk this stuff, but it’s costing you plenty if you’re not dealing with it.

There’s another skill you really need to succeed in business besides your expertise, and it’s a skill most of us love to hate: marketing. Fifteen years ago, we could get by without it. But not today. And especially not in the last 18 months. In addition to being great at what you do, you have to get the word out about you and your business. You have to be a smart marketer (or you have to hire one), in addition to your core expertise.

So where does fear come in? Because we hate marketing, we don’t do it. We hate putting ourselves out there, exposing ourselves to rejection and vulnerability. We approach marketing emotionally and often with fear and trepidation. This causes us to make poor choices, fail to plan, and spend our marketing money unwisely.

This fear and lack of execution in marketing leaves tens of thousands of dollars on the table each year that could otherwise have boosted our revenues. What’s worse, that money was probably spent on someone who was not as expert as you but was simply a better marketer. This should make you mad; I know it does me.

The truth is that marketing can be learned, systematized, measured and improved just like anything else in business. But we just don’t approach it rationally because fear gets in our way and clouds our otherwise good business judgment.

Do what you love, but make sure the money follows by being smarter about both your marketing decisions and whatever personal growth issues you need to address around marketing. If you hate marketing, examine why you do, and get the tools you need to adopt a more resilient thinking pattern about it. It’s an important part of the success equation for those of us who want to stay in business for the long haul.

If you have to, get mad. Then get yourself known and get clients. When you embrace marketing, you’re likely to see a huge growth jump in both yourself personally and your business’s bottom line.

When she told me about what she did, I was just thinking how many organizers I have met in the last few months (several) and how in the world did they all stay in business, when she said something really cool. “For the stuff you no longer want, I put on EBay so you can make some money.” Now that’s a twist. And it’s her extraordinary extra.

I hired an individual to help with things around the house and to run some errands for me. It just turned out that she also had a background in nutrition. When she goes to the grocery store for me, I know she’s going to do a better job than I would picking organic produce and gluten-free goods. You just don’t get that in a regular personal assistant. That’s her extraordinary extra.

OK, now I have to make a confession. Since I am a geek, it’s just not a good idea for me to choose my own clothes, so for several years now, I have hired a wardrobe consultant. Although some people might think this is a costly thing to do, it’s actually one of the best investments I have ever made. If you add up all the time you spend shopping and dollarize it to your billable rate, that’s a sizable number. If you add up all the bad purchases you made that are sitting in your closet, that’s another pretty good number. On top of that, I had a few clothes from Nordstrom in my closet that I had never worn. She suggested we return them (which I would have never thought to do), and I got back over $100. That is her extraordinary extra.

I hired a VA (virtual assistant) recently. As I started working with her, I found out her web skills, which are not normal VA skills, were terrific. Another extraordinary extra.

What’s your extraordinary extra?

When you offer your products and services to your clients, what edge do you have that saves clients even more than they originally thought about? In this market, it’s a great idea to have one. So if you don’t, I challenge you to discover and create yours today.

The typical networker recites their elevator speech by listing everything they do. For example, I recently heard an insurance agent say, “We insure your auto, car, home, life, …” Well, I heard part of it. She listed a dozen more things – the kitchen sink may have been in there – and I bet some of those services haven’t been sold in years.

Tip #1: There’s no use in listing every single thing you do, so drop the laundry list.

I know that you want to make sure you don’t miss every opportunity. But this isn’t the result. The result is a buyer who tunes you out. All you have to mention is the service that gets 90% of your customers in the door. They’ll buy the rest when they get to know you better, so focus on the one thing that gets prospects in the door to become customers.

Another thing I see at networking meetings, especially with people brand new in their positions is presentation fright. They are so fearful they cannot get their message out with clarity, much less confidence. Fortunately, networkers are amazingly forgiving and polite, but unfortunately, very few people are going to buy from someone who is not confident.

Tip #2: Work with a coach to build your confidence before you attend networking meetings.

I know how everyone tells you how nice you are and how great you did. But if you are not getting sales, then the true message should be loud and clear: you need to exude confidence and positive energy about your product or service before anyone wants to hang out with you, much less buy from you.

A more subtle form of nervousness (or boredom) is when you deliver a fairly decent elevator speech, but it sounds like the 4 millionth time you’ve said it. One participant was looking all over the room, laughing in all the wrong places, and horsing around while perfectly executing her speech. Talk about gestures that didn’t match the message; our internal skeptic meter goes off when people are inauthentic.

Tip #3: Slow down, and regain the passion about what you do.

Another symptom of boredom (or nervousness) is to repeat your name, company, and phone or website so fast that no one can understand you or has time to write it down. A couple of remedies: practice pausing, rewrite your elevator speech so that you have a new one, and take some time off to re-kindle your excitement about what you do.

Could your elevator speech use a, well, lift? In a very short time, I’ll be announcing a new product that will help you collect every business card in the room with your punchy elevator speech. Stay subscribed; details coming soon.

According to a study by The Guardian Life Small Business Research Institute as reported in FoxBusiness, women’s skills provide:

1. More focus on customers
2. More opportunities for others
3. More community involvement

Women’s increased attention to customers allows them to create a stronger, more loyal customer base. Their employees feel more passion and are in turn more productive as women create more opportunities for them and others around the business. Women also involve the community more, building an interdependent network of supportive relationships.

Interestingly, science backs up these study conclusions. Women have more ability to decode the facial expressions of others than men do, which gives them a head start in showing empathy and building relationships. Men simply lack the physical wiring that women have to pick up subtle cues in other’s emotions. These differences are evolutionary in nature and gave women the skills they needed to serve the needs of the offspring they bore.

In today’s boardrooms, women can use the same skills to read, provide, and anticipate the needs of customers, employees, and other stakeholders.

This skill is now crucial in marketing your business, too. As consumer and buyer trust erodes further, marketing is moving from an informational, educational, and entertainment model to a relationship model. Individuals who have terrific relationship-building skills will have the edge in marketing and selling their products and services. And now, there’s finally some hard science behind learning these soft relationship-building skills.

When you can strengthen your relationship skills, the payoff is high: a devoted, highly-productive, low-turnover team, and a marketing edge.

There are two flavors of WordPress: WordPress.com and WordPress.org. I’ll take each one in turn.

WordPress.com

Originally, I was thinking that a few of my customers with really small sites could save hosting fees if they switched to WordPress.com. I’m always looking for ways to save my customers money, especially now. But then I looked into it with the help of my very smart assistant and found out about all the limitations, and it just didn’t make sense.

WordPress.com is a web application that you can use to start your blog or online presence. It requires no hosting platform, no downloading of files, and no programming. That’s the plus side. Unfortunately, the con side is huge: you cannot use your own URL or domain name (www.yourdomain.com). You are limited by what you can put on your site, including selling links. And you are very limited in formatting your blog.

WordPress.com is good for these things: if you are running a hobby and not a business, if you want a personal or family blog such as for Christmas letters or to document the kids’ progress.

WordPress.com has too many limitations for a serious entrepreneur.

WordPress.org

WordPress.org is a very robust programming application that you can download, load onto your hosting platform, and set up and use as a web site. Thousands of people are doing it.

You still need to pay a hosting fee. You don’t need to know HTML, but the application is so robust that there is a learning curve. If you are not technical at all, then you will need to hire someone who is technical to set it up for you. Someone – you or a contractor – will need to go through the learning curve.

It took me about 1-2 hours to download and load the WordPress.org files to my web site. If you use GoDaddy as your host, the file load is automated. After you load the files, you’re ready to get your WordPress site set up. The time it takes to set up varies on how many pages you have, what plug-ins and themes you want, and a myriad of other factors.

WordPress.org is extremely flexible and there are many plug-ins that you can use to increase its robustness. One of the big benefits is that your web visitors can be much more interactive on a WordPress site than they can on your web site. That’s a great reason to convert.

The next good reason to convert is the search engine ranking. If you’re setting up a new site, your rank will be higher than if you set up a web site. If you have an old site that is ranked highly, then you can move your URL to a WordPress site and maintain the ranking. What you don’t want to do is start over with a new URL if your old URL has some years on it, because Google values age very highly.

If you have a huge site that you have not updated in a long time, then I don’t recommend moving to WordPress. You need to be actively adding content in order to benefit from WordPress. If your web content is very active, then it may make sense to move to WordPress.

You can also add WordPress on to your existing site, which is what I did. It causes my site to rank even higher than before (and I have a highly ranked site because it’s so old). Here is my WordPress.org site so that you can get an idea of the layout:
http://www.sandismith.com/blog/ (Yes, it’s this site!)

I hope this explanation helps you make a better decision when it comes to implementing WordPress in your business. Let me know your thoughts.

I wondered if wealthy people, or at least the people in this group, lacked creativity and individualism? But that wasn’t it. On the contrary. These were amazingly creative, fun, and sharp minds that I was privileged to spend 2 days with at the Ritz in Miami.

And then it hit me. How can you make money by changing your ring tone? You can’t. You don’t.

In any business owner’s day, there are a million things to do. We all have so many choices about what to do first, what to do at all, and what to delegate. It’s a really simple concept: the millionaires don’t do “ring tone” tasks. They don’t do the tasks that don’t yield them a healthy return.

How do you organize your day? Do you work on the things that scream at you the most? Do you work on the things you like the most? Do you work on the things that you are most comfortable with? Or do you have some other method for working your inbox and your to do list?

Because successful people organize their days differently from all that. They work on the highest payback tasks. They don’t even bother with the tasks that don’t net them a return.

Take a look at your own to do list. How can you prioritize it in a way that brings you the most return? What “ring-tone” tasks do you have on your to do list that you can get rid of?

When you can reorganize your day to match the habits of multi-millionaire business owners, you come that much closer to becoming one yourself.

So if you’re not following up, you’re walking away from 98 percent of your sales.

Here are my tips to maximize sales and take the pain out of following up:

1. Understand the difference between a real prospect and a new contact. You will make several new contacts, but many of them will never buy from you. Both are valuable: a new contact can refer you business, while a prospect may become a client. But you need to know the difference so you don’t turn them off when you send follow up messages.To a prospect, you would ask them about their problem that your service or product will solve. To a contact, you will ask them who their ideal client is so that you can be a good referral source for them.
2. Create a follow-up system. This can be a spreadsheet, a web app such as salesforce.com, or would you believe I use Ziploc bags (to put the business cards in)! It doesn’t matter what it looks like; you just want to know when to follow up. I recommend sending the first follow-up email right after the first meeting. Then plan to send a second one 1-2 weeks later. Plan out up to 6-30 touches, as marketers call them.
3. If you begin to interact with a prospect for business, always ask when you should follow up before you wrap up the present conversation. That way, you’re not worrying about whether it’s too soon or too late or too pushy, etc. Just ask.For example, when someone expresses interest, ask when they have time to have a more detailed conversation. Then before you hang up from that one (if you haven’t gotten the business yet), agree on when you should follow-up and how (email, phone call). And so forth. This idea takes the guesswork (and especially the angst!) out of the process.
4. Better yet, learn how to get people coming to you, rather than chasing them. There are several terrific ways to do this depending on your industry, and is best mastered with a marketing coach (like me) because it is so breakthrough and you have to make some habit changes.

Following up can actually be fun. It’s all about getting to know people, building respect and trust, and working together for mutual benefit.

But there isn’t any magic to being a high performer, you don’t have to work your fingers to the bone, and you don’t have to be born with something special. Anyone can be a high performer.

The reason that most people are not high performers is not only simple to understand; it’s the key to becoming a high performer. I believe you’ll love the answer because every single one of you can do something about it as soon as you realize it.

Take dieting. Why do people have so much trouble losing weight? There are only two possible actions that result in dropping pounds: 1) eating less, and 2) exercising more. Why can’t people shed their excess weight quickly and simply?

The answer to that question is the same as the answer to my first question: Why aren’t we all successful, high performers?

Before you can be successful as a high performer or a dieter, you have to get a handle on your emotions. High performance is emotional. Dieting is emotional. There is an emotional component that people don’t recognize, don’t understand, and have no idea what to do with.

Inside our brains, our emotional and logical wiring are so interconnected, it’s impossible to separate them. Your decision-making system is like an iceberg; a little bit is visible from the surface, but the bulk is underwater or subconscious. A big factor in why we underperform has to do with the emotion of fear – fear that we might not even realize we have.

The key to high performance is in understanding how our brains are wired as human beings. Our brains control everything we do, think, and feel. You may feel your heart flutter, but it’s your brain that sent the signal to your heart to beat fast. You may be aware of a gut feeling you have, but your brain initiated that feeling before it reached your gut. You may be able to wiggle your toes, but your brain first sent the command to start wiggling to your toes from its motor cortex. Your brain is your master command center for everything.

Throughout history, our brains have been wired by default for survival ; success as we tend to measure it in our contemporary society is simply not in our natural wiring. Our wiring dates back thousands of years and was brilliantly designed to keep us alive at all costs in our cave man days.

Once you understand why this cave man wiring causes you to act the way you do in today’s modern world, you can decide if you want to “override” your default wiring so you can live more powerfully as a high performer. The good news is that it takes only a little bit of understanding and knowledge – and actually a lot of fun – to adjust the natural wiring so that we can become the successes – the high performers – we want to be.

In future issues, we’ll go more in depth on how to rewire your brain to win instead of just survive. For now, start becoming more aware of how you make decisions and when fear (or just hesitation) comes up for you. With this increased awareness, you’ve mastered the first step of rewiring your brain to win.

Recently, a CPA, a banker, and a mergers and acquisitions specialist worked together to hold a seminar for individuals who want to turn a business idea into a startup. They had a great turnout and the M&A expert continued to meet with 4-6 highly qualified leads. Who could you partner with that expands your business offerings and provides a broad solution (or options) for the client?

Partnerships are a great way to generate additional revenue streams. What ideas do you have for new projects with new partners to boost your revenues?

Peter’s boss had quite a reputation of being hard to please. Peter’s co-worker, Molly, had just been yelled at and was developing a fear of him. She was assigned to develop a presentation for him and was scared.

Peter learned about motor imagery a few days before Molly was to present. He asked Molly to visualize every detail about the way she wanted the presentation to go: seeing how it would start, practicing what she would say, visualizing how she would gesture, crafting what the slides looked like, noticing the pleased look on the boss’s face, listening to his praise about how well she did during the presentation, answering questions well, and walking out with a smile on her face. She imagined this mental rehearsal in her mind over and over again the night before the presentation.

On the day of the presentation, Molly nailed it. Peter’s boss melted and felt Molly did an outstanding job, increasing his confidence in her and her credibility in his eyes. Molly felt competent and gained confidence as well. Peter was very pleased that the whole thing worked out so well for all.

What Peter showed Molly how to do is motor imagery, and it’s something you can learn too. Motor imagery (MI) is defined as a mental representation of movement without any body movementⁱ. It’s also called mental imagery and mental simulation of action. Motor imagery has been shown to be very effective in motor skill learning.

Here are a couple examples of how it’s been studied in the lab.

• One scientist had new piano players try this method. The imagining players were as accurate after two hours of practice as ones who actually practiced for five days.ⁱⁱ
• MI has been used to helped paralyzed individuals become more independent by designing machines that can read their thoughts.
• When one scientistⁱⁱⁱ had subjects imagine running on a treadmill at speeds of 5, 8, and 10 kilometers per hour, both heart rate and breathing rate went up relative to the imagined speed, powerful evidence that imagery alone can engage the autonomic nervous system.

Olympic gold medal winner Peter Vidmar spent years visualizing the same scenario every morning. He would imagine himself walking into the gymnasium, performing his routine, hearing the crowd cheer, seeing his judge’s score, and accepting the gold medal. It happened as he imagined it.

How can you apply motor imagery to your life for improved learning and performance when it counts?

ⁱ Guillot, A. and Collet, C. (2005). Contribution from neurophysiological and psychological methods to the study of motor imagery. Brain Research Reviews, 50, 387-397.
ⁱⁱ Norman Doidge. (2007). The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. Viking, New York, 201-207.
ⁱⁱⁱ Decety, J., Jeannerod, M., Germain, M., and Pastene, J. (1991). Vegetative response during imagined movement is proportional to mental effort. Behavioral Brain Research, 42, 1-5.

]]> http://www.sandismith.com/blog/secrets-from-the-olympians/feed/ 0 http://www.sandismith.com/blog/a-dozen-ways-to-make-more-money-in-your-service-business/ http://www.sandismith.com/blog/a-dozen-ways-to-make-more-money-in-your-service-business/#comments Wed, 10 Feb 2010 07:00:03 +0000 Sandi Smith Leyva http://www.sandismith.com/blog/?p=30

1. If you have an hourly business model, ask yourself how you can sell more hours. I just spoke to a group that spent only 30 – 40 percent of their time on billable work for clients. The rest of their time was spent on admin and marketing. That’s too low; it should be double. This group needs to either delegate their admin to assistants or sell more of their billable time.
2. Raise your rates. In this economy, you’ll want to be careful about this option. One example of a good time to raise your price is when you’ve gained new skills or a new certification that your client values.
3. Go after a different type of client that will pay more. If you currently sell to small businesses, try moving up into medium-sized enterprises, which will pay more. (This is counter-intuitive, but right now, if you serve large businesses, drop down into medium-sized businesses. Their budgets are less likely to be frozen.) Also, look to do more business with businesses in industries that are recession-proof.
4. Raise your total sale per client. Sell more to each client you already have. This greatly reduces marketing costs and time.
5. Teach people to do what you do. This gives you a whole new service line and opens you up to a different client base. If a lot of your competitors are out of work and you are a leader in the field, this is a perfect way to reposition yourself in the new economy.
6. Sell other people’s stuff and receive a commission. A good example is an accountant who helps clients with QuickBooks can sell them QuickBooks and receive a commission from Intuit from the sale. This is also called becoming an affiliate. If you have a great following, take a look at what they need, and see if you can find a product that fits their needs.
7. Develop a new service line that complements your business. If you’re a speaker, you may be a great speech coach for others who have a talk coming up and need help. It’s no small task to develop a whole new service line, of course, but the businesses who have all their eggs in one basket will take longer to recover in this economy.
8. Develop a product that clients can buy to implement your service. If you’re a writer, write a book to teach people how to write.
9. Build a team. Add employees or contractors so you can serve more clients and bill for both their time and yours.
10. Consider new revenue models besides the traditional service model. In a service model that is priced by the hourly rate, you serve clients one at a time. How can you serve more than one client at a time to leverage your knowledge and time, and to boost your income? One idea is to hold an event.
11. Make your service time more efficient. Do you travel from client to client, losing time that you could be billing? If so, see if you can use technology to meet with the client remotely, cutting down your unbillable time.
12. Automate or delegate as much marketing, admin, and even billable hours that you dare to, to free up more of your time for your higher-paying, thought-provoking work.

]]> http://www.sandismith.com/blog/a-dozen-ways-to-make-more-money-in-your-service-business/feed/ 0 http://www.sandismith.com/blog/when-the-engine-stops/ http://www.sandismith.com/blog/when-the-engine-stops/#comments Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:00:51 +0000 Sandi Smith Leyva http://www.sandismith.com/blog/?p=84 It really did happen when I was flying around the world in 1995. The small airplane engine stopped while we were over the 50-degree waters of the Atlantic Ocean, 1,000 miles from any land. Silence. Nothing.

My heart started racing so fast, and for a split second I didn’t know why. My conscious brain hadn’t caught up with my body’s survival response. I immediately went into checklist mode, like any good pilot would (like Scully did – he was pretty much just running a checklist and did everything perfectly). Number one is always the same thing:

1. Fly the airplane.

So many accidents occur when pilots are distracted by any number of things: a red light in the cockpit, a weird Air Traffic Control instruction, even a passenger. In an emergency, the best thing to remember first is to fly the airplane.

It’s not a bad lesson to remember for 2010. We can get so distracted with the economy, the government’s messes, a needy client, a too close for comfort bankruptcy of a friend, and our own fears that we forget to “fly the airplane.”

Where in your life do you need to remember to get back to just flying the airplane? Your business, your marriage, your life’s purpose? I’ll leave it to you to apply where it resonates most.

Sometimes, we need a jolt to get re-aligned with our core. Even though we fight it tooth and nail while it’s happening, we end up growing so much from a really good scare. I don’t necessarily recommend you cut the engine when you’re over the Atlantic. I do recommend you take some risks that scare you once in a while. There’s nothing wrong with getting good at flying the airplane.

]]> http://www.sandismith.com/blog/when-the-engine-stops/feed/ 0 http://www.sandismith.com/blog/seven-tips-to-wow-your-current-clients/ http://www.sandismith.com/blog/seven-tips-to-wow-your-current-clients/#comments Wed, 27 Jan 2010 22:31:01 +0000 Sandi Smith Leyva http://www.sandismith.com/blog/?p=24 A few years ago, I had the pleasure of sailing into the Yokohama harbor at daybreak. The British cruise ship I was on was greeted with much fanfare by the harbor police boat, two fire boats that sprayed six water jet streams each a hundred feet into the air, and the Japanese people who waved furiously from the bridge and the docks as we sailed into the port. We were further indulged dockside by lovely ladies in kimonos, Koto harp players, Japanese drummers, and a full band.

I chose to spend the day at Tokyo Disneyland with a brand new friend that I met on the ship. We went on one or two rides, and then went to a hamburger stand for a snack. I spent a great deal of time trying to sign language my way through a request for French fries to get the Japanese waiter to understand me. He patiently waited until I was done and then asked “Small or large?” in pretty good English. (Hmmm, why do I make everything harder than it needs to be?)

Even if the Japanese alphabet was different from ours, often the numbers were written out in English so that you could see what the price or time was. English numbers were imprinted on the yen coins also. This made trading money a snap.

As we sailed out to sea that night, I had a fond memory of the day, and a lasting positive impression of the people of Japan.

With the economy still questionable and new business very competitive, we can learn a few things from my trip to Japan.

1. Greet a current client with much fanfare, even if they’ve been with you for years. Make them feel special all over again.
2. Speak your client’s language (don’t make them try to speak yours). If you are an accountant or attorney, you may be especially guilty of this! Get to know your client’s business or industry and learn their buzz words. It doesn’t take too many buzz words for you to sound like an insider.
3. Periodically do something very special for your current clients. If you know your client has an anniversary coming up, send them a gift certificate to a Japanese steakhouse.
4. Protect your clients. Be the harbor police and escort them safely into harbor. Be proactive about helping your client avoid disasters, whatever that means for your line of work. If you’re an accountant and you see their profit margin dropped 10 percent from one year to the next, don’t assume your client knows or understands this even though you do. Ask them if they’d like to explore this issue further.
5. Put out fires. Be helpful by helping your clients put out those little annoying daily fires. Ask them how you can help in this way. You might be able to show them how to systematize, delegate or automate a task that frees up their time.
6. Keep your client informed of ongoing costs. Make it easy for your client to read the English figures on your Yen coins. For clients who I know are tight on budget, I provide estimates of work even though they may have been working for me for a decade. They appreciate being able to plan their cash flow and knowing what to expect. (No one likes uncertainty.)
7. Create a lasting positive impression for your clients. In all interactions with your clients, be sure you and your employees are creating lasting, and especially positive impressions of your firm. This will boost referrals and increase repeat business, which are two things that are really nice to have!

]]> http://www.sandismith.com/blog/seven-tips-to-wow-your-current-clients/feed/ 0 http://www.sandismith.com/blog/five-ways-to-get-good-at-the-basics-in-2010/ http://www.sandismith.com/blog/five-ways-to-get-good-at-the-basics-in-2010/#comments Wed, 13 Jan 2010 21:44:53 +0000 Sandi Smith Leyva http://www.sandismith.com/blog/?p=9 A great theme for 2010 is to get good at the basics and forget all of the frilly attention-catching fads out there. I believe the people who are going to do well this year are the ones who are working on focus and clarity, whether they’re running a business, holding onto a job, or managing their family.

Here are some high-level trends to get you moving in the right direction:

1. Focus on improving your decision-making. Risk enters into every decision we make, and there’s a fine balance between not taking enough risk and taking too much risk. Both are dangerous. One of the keys is to learn the right balance of self-control and emotional discipline (emotional skills) while evaluating return on investment or some quantitative aspect (accounting skills) of the judgment. Interestingly, if you ask any 90-year-old, they’ll always say, “I wish I took more risks.”
2. Move from reactive to proactive, top-down to bottom-up, working a plan instead of your inbox.
3. Tighten your business processes. If you have leaks, plug them. If your processes are sloppy, they’ll cost you in this economy. Get an expert to help you if you don’t have the skill.
4. Watch who you listen to this year. Make sure your advisors have a track record of the kind of results you’re looking for with clients like you. This is where you can really practice your emotional control and see through some of the noise that’s out there. Just because they can market well doesn’t mean they can serve you well. Doing your due diligence will help you save money. I’ll have to say, in the last two years, I’ve really made some mistakes in this area myself, and it’s costs me several thousand dollars of pain.
5. Be persistent and consistent. I see a lot of people with short attention spans getting really excited about something and then going in a whole new direction a week later. Finish some of those projects before you start something new. Don’t buy something unless you are going to use it fully. Hang in there and don’t give up just because you get stuck.

]]> http://www.sandismith.com/blog/five-ways-to-get-good-at-the-basics-in-2010/feed/ 0 http://www.sandismith.com/blog/one-tip-that-saves-me-hours-a-week/ http://www.sandismith.com/blog/one-tip-that-saves-me-hours-a-week/#comments Wed, 13 Jan 2010 21:43:13 +0000 Sandi Smith Leyva http://www.sandismith.com/blog/?p=6 One Tip That Saves Me Hours a Week

One thing that happens on my computer is I tend to check my email too often. It’s almost addictive. (And if you’ve been on Twitter, that’s even worse.) Do any of you do that? (Or maybe, worse, you have email coming in all day long with a little bell sounding because you have it set up to automatically check every five minutes.)

It only takes a second, but all of the distractions add up. The stats are crazy on this: we’re interrupted every 10-15 minutes, but the worst part is it takes us nearly an hour every time we’re interrupted to get back on task. The cost of checking my email so much is really higher than I want to admit.

So my one tip is to keep your Outlook or mail application closed all day long except for three times: 10:00, 2:00 and 4:00 like the Dr. Pepper commercial from the 1970s. OK now I am really dating myself!

Imagine how much you would get done if you did this one thing. (Kudos to you if you’ve figured this out earlier than I have!) I started this two weeks ago and my productivity has soared.

Give this a try and let me know what you think.

]]> http://www.sandismith.com/blog/one-tip-that-saves-me-hours-a-week/feed/ 0 http://www.sandismith.com/blog/seven-tips-on-how-to-make-money-from-social-media/ http://www.sandismith.com/blog/seven-tips-on-how-to-make-money-from-social-media/#comments Wed, 13 Jan 2010 21:41:40 +0000 Sandi Smith Leyva http://www.sandismith.com/blog/?p=3

Social Media – Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, to name a few — should be considered additional marketing channels – no more, no less. There are other marketing methods that are cheaper – referrals, to name one. So my first tip is to add social media to your marketing mix, but only after you exhaust other lower cost methods.

Just like any other marketing method, you have to build and maintain relationships. The content you post should be ½ value-added tips, quotes, and links to high-content pages, ¼ personal or relationship-building, and ¼ sales pitch. Social media is a great way to keep in touch, but unless you direct-message your contacts, you don’t know if you have their attention or not.

Use a scheduling tool such as Social Tomorrow to pre-load your content and have an assistant do it from a Word file that you’ve created that has a full week’s post in it. Be consistent and keep up with it every week. Repetition is key because the attention factor is so low. Two to six Facebook statuses a day are enough during rush hour. Ten to twenty tweets per day aren’t too many, but one LinkedIn status a day is enough.

Keep business and pleasure separate. It seems so ridiculous to advise you not to whine about your personal life in front of your business contacts, but I see all ages doing it, and it doesn’t make them look good.

Use Twitter to announce limited-time specials, such as one hour free or half off a package. Your followers will love it when you do it randomly and infrequently.

Tara says to go one step further when it comes to doing research on your prospects. She explains that in the 1960s we learned how to define our prospects in terms of demographics – gender, economic level, education, age, race. In the 1990s we added psychographics – trying to guess motivation and why they buy. Today we add socialgraphics – the details we can find out about our prospects. Using social media tools, we can research and collect information on hobbies, likes, and habits to further develop details about our potential client. We can use this information to create new ways to interact, form bonds, and develop roles to enhance value on both sides of the equation.

Learn what your social value is by trying live search tools such as www.topsy.com. Enter your name and view all of the social media links about you and how popular they are. Interesting, huh?

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