Ideas You Can Use

Thanks to Karole Sutherland over at Sutherland Consulting Group for these ideas we can all use.  A witty commentary on simple things to do to fix communication issues in your life:

1.  Stop using triangle communications – step up and fix it yourself.

2.  Quit using verbal ornaments that hide your real meaning.

3.  Build personal interaction – it works.

Read the whole article here.

Know Your Payoff

Just finished a session with a client who is struggling with procrastination.  She has a great opportunity in front of her but keeps putting off what she needs to get done to succeed and then beats herself up for not getting it done.   The pressure is becoming unbearable.

We came up with a simple solution today.  Instead of drawing up elaborate timelines or berating her for not getting it done, we focused instead on the payoff she would get from getting this project done.   Some were obvious – more revenue coming in, the prestige of this company as a  client.  Others were a little less obvious:  the confidence that would come from completing this large project, the credibility she would have for going after other large clients in that market sector, the peace of mind that would arrive when she was no longer beating herself up, the sense of relief that she could close bigger deals and get the work done.

Once we had gone through the list, she was completely motivated to get the work done!

Lesson learned: Focus on the payoff you’ll get once the work is done.  Write down those things and keep them in front to you to remind yourself not to keep avoiding it.

Business Development As A Habit

Whether you’re a brand new entrepreneur or you’ve been running your business for a while, having a system for business development is essential to maintain momentum.  It is especially easy to fall into the trap of “coasting” when our initial marketing efforts start paying off, and we end up busy serving current customers and forget about needing to continue to prospect new customers.

Regardless of how busy you are, make sure you are spending time doing business development.  For example, your time may currently be divided amongst the following activities:

• Money-making/Billable Activities
• Business Development Activities
• Skills/Personal Development Activities
• Administrative Activities

How much time are you spending in each area?  I’ve found that a 60/20/10/10 respective percentage split works well in a business-as-usual state.  You spend 60% of your time on activities that contribute to your bottom line, 20% of your time on business development and strategic planning, 10% polishing or acquiring new skills, and no more than 10% on administrative tasks like paperwork, invoicing, and e-mails.

You may decide to have a different allocation, which is great.  The important thing is to know where you are and where you would like to be, so you can make the necessary changes to ensure you are leveraging your time intentionally.  What do you need to do to get to where you want to be?

INSPIRING WORDS FOR A MONDAY MORNING

A Pulitzer Prize Winner’s Speech…

Thanks to my good friend, Su Grimmer at Flycatcher Communications, for passing this inspirational piece along to me.  A perfect Monday morning piece I thought to myself.

We are all faced with a series of great opportunities, brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.This was a speech made by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Anna Quindlen at the graduation ceremony of an American university where she was awarded an Honorary PhD.

“I’m a novelist. My work is human nature. Real life is all I know. Don’t ever confuse the two, your life and your work. You will walk out of here this afternoon with only one thing that no one else has. There will be hundreds of people out there with your same degree: there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you will be the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life.  Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk or your life on a bus or in a car or at the computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank accounts but also your soul.

People don’t talk about the soul very much anymore. It’s so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit. But a resume is cold comfort on a winter’s night, or when you’re sad, or broke, or lonely, or when you’ve received your test results and they’re not so good.

Here is my resume: I am a good mother to three children. I have tried never to let my work stand in the way of being a good parent. I no longer consider myself the centre of the universe. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh. I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make marriage vows mean what they say. I am a good friend to my friends and them to me. Without them, there would be nothing to say to you today, because I would be a cardboard cut out. But I call them on the phone and I meet them for lunch. I would be rotten, at best mediocre, at my job if those other things were not true.

You cannot be really first rate at your work if your work is all you are. So here’s what I wanted to tell you today: Get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheque, the larger house. Do you think you’d care so very much about those things if you blew an aneurysm one afternoon or found a lump in your breast?

Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze at the seaside, a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over the water, or the way a baby scowls with concentration when she tries to pick up a sweet with her thumb and first finger.

Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. Pick up the phone. Send an email. Write a letter.. Get a life in which you are generous. And realize that life is the best thing ever, and that you have no business taking it for granted. Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around. Take money you would have spent on beer and give it to charity. Work in a soup kitchen. Be a big brother or sister. All of you want to do well. But if you do not do good too, then doing well will never be enough.

It is so easy to waste our lives, our days, our hours, and our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the colour of our kids’ eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of to live.

I learned to live many years ago. I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to look at all the good in the world and try to give some of it back because I believed in it, completely and utterly. And I tried to do that, in part, by telling others what I had learned. By telling them this:

Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby’s ear. Read in the back yard with the sun on your face.

Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness, because if you do, you will live it with joy and passion as it ought to be lived”.

Walk in peace, love and gratitude.

Friends are blessings that come into our life originally disguised as strangers.

Remember to always listen to the wisdom of your own inner voice, and follow your heart.”

Commit to your Marketing Plan

Are you the type that gets attracted by new shiny objects?  The latest gadgets, marketing tools, ideas and opportunities that come your way that take you (or your mind) off course?  It’s tempting to switch course when you think what you’re doing isn’t working, because you’ve tried it once or twice or a few times and you’re not seeing results.

Don’t switch course, just yet.  Marketing takes time and requires commitment to a strategy for a period of time before seeing results.  Just take a look at the excerpt below from Jay Conrad Levinson’s Guerilla Marketing on responding to advertisement:

1. The first time a man looks at an ad, he doesn’t see it.
2. The second time, he doesn’t notice it.
3. The third time, he is conscious of its existence.
4. The fourth time, he faintly remembers having seen it.
5. The fifth time, he reads the ad.
6. The sixth time, he turns up his nose at it.
7. The seventh time, he reads it through and says, “Oh, brother!”
8. The eighth time, he says, “Here’s that confounded thing again!”
9. The ninth time, he wonders whether it amounts to anything.
10. The tenth time, he will ask his neighbor if he has tried it.
11. The eleventh time, he wonders how the advertiser makes it pay.
12. The twelfth time, he thinks it must be a good thing.
13. The thirteenth time, he thinks it might be worth something.
14. The fourteenth time, he remembers that he wanted such a thing for a long time.
15. The fifteenth time, he is tantalized because he cannot afford to buy it.
16. The sixteenth time, he thinks he will buy it someday.
17. The seventeenth time, he makes a memorandum of it.
18. The eighteenth time, he swears at his poverty.
19. The nineteenth time, he counts his money carefully.
20. The twentieth time he sees the ad, the buys the article or instructs his wife to do so.

These steps were written by Thomas Smith in London in 1885, but I’m amazed at how accurately it describes our buying thought-process today.  There are no short cuts when it comes to your marketing plan.  Once you have come up with a sound plan, commit to it for at least three to six month as a minimum.  It takes at least that long to build awareness and conversion!

Late Bloomer Blossoms in Business

In my latest column of Make it Business, I profiled a woman who at the age of 57 began her own business of networking marketing. The 5 tips that Mary shares as essential to business growth are:

1. Be consistent. Show up for work every day and do the work.

2. Don’t be afraid of selling. Enjoy getting out there and talking to people about what you have. Don’t take it seriously if not everyone buys from you.

3. Set daily marketing goals and stick to them.

4. Follow up on all your leads. New business is what grows your bottom line, so don’t allow yourself to get too busy to follow up.

5. Never quit. If something isn’t working, figure out another way to make it work.

To read my full article, please click here.

Boot That Guilt!

Gotta love this blog posting by Lisa Watts on kicking the guilt gremlin to the curb during a recent vacation.  And she set aside her Blackberry and the world continued to run with no catastrophic consequences!  Read it and smile.  More of us need to shake those guilty feelings – they’re a waste of time!

Leaving the Comfort Zone

Successful entrepreneurs constantly step out of their comfort zone.  You know, that artificial and mentally restricting area that sometimes paralyzes us?  As the theory goes, that false sense of security creates inertia. To step out of a comfort zone, you have to experiment with new and different behaviors and then experience the results. You might respond with, “I’ve already tested my comfort zone by making cold calls,” or “I’ve stretched by doing presentations to groups,” or “I raised my rates.”

I think the key is to recognize that every new step leads to another comfort zone; once you’ve raised your rates, where do you go from there? Try different approaches to the dreaded cold call, think of new and creative ways of making concise and memorable presentations, focus on bringing added value to the work you do at little or no expense to yourself.

Planning to achieve goals that make you stretch will release you from the fear of leaving the comfort zone.  How have you jumped out of your comfort zone lately?

A Formula for Progress

In business, there are factors that move us forward and factors that move us back.  I came across and now love using this formula:

Growth = Attitude + Competency + Action – Fears

Having the right attitude, developing competency in running and operating your business, plus taking action, move us forward.  Feeding doubts and fears move us back.  What are you doing today to add positively to the equation?

Blow Your Own Horn More Often

Too many people out there resist talking about what they are up to, what they have accomplished.  They don’t want to brag!  But this often means they downplay their accomplishments to themselves.  Not a good thing.  You need to be aware of what you are good at, what your successes are.  How else do you give yourself a pat on the back?  More importantly, how do you successfully land new clients, get that promotion or sell people on the idea of working with you if you aren’t confident about your own abilities?

There is a big difference between being a braggart and being confident about your abilities and your value.   Too many women end up making less money than they should because they undervalue themselves.  So get ready to start blowing your own horn by taking these simple steps:

If you aren’t prepared to blow your own horn, no else is going to.