Today, I have guest post from Ben Johnson of Logoinn, a UK based company that provides design services to small and start-up businesses around the world. What three mistakes in logo design can destroy your business identity? While establishing a startup, one of...
Most of us have set revenue goals for the coming year. But do you have a system in place to keep track of the actions you take to reach those goals and the results of those actions? There are many reasons to track your activities and the results, but I think the...
Today I want to talk a little about three other items from Tim Berry’s 10 Business Fundamentals post: #2 Strategy if Focus #4 The more priorities in a plan, the less likelihood of implementing that plan. #10 Everything you do in a business rules out something else...
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I am re-launching The Biz Academy, my service for the True Small Business owner – typically owners with 1-5 employees. I’ll be sharing more details of the program shortly (you can read about the details of The Biz Academy here),...
When professionals strike out on their own, they seem to face their biggest challenges in the areas of sales and marketing. I know that sales has been a difficult area for me. The skills and attributes that make us good at technical and consulting work are not the...
Does this ever happen to you? I receive 3 or 4 e-mail “offers” a week that make me think “why in the world are you sending this to me?”. These messages are what I call semi-personalized (they use my name and maybe my business name) but I don’t know who they are. It’s...
I see a lot of marketing advice about how to "make my small business look big". Before you go about making your small business look big, ask yourself if that is what you really want. Or, more importantly, is that what your customers really want. I would bet that in...
CRM and other business automation tools typically allow you to personalize the messages you send to your prospects and customers. This is usually done using some sort of field code and mail merge process. You create a template that looks something like this: Dear...
This post is mostly a reminder to myself but may benefit others as well. Not everyone wants to grow their business. Of course I know this intellectually, but, it is easy to assume that everyone does. These assumptions creep into our language and we may not even be...
Today's entry in The Daily Drucker is about the importance of feedback in continuous learning. Here's a short excerpt:"Whenever a Jesuit priest or a Calvinist pastor does anything of significance (for instance, making a key decision), he is expected to write down...