This ‘honesty’ permits you to ask for help and suggestions from other people, your employees, advisors, peers, family, etc.  They can’t, and won’t help if you aren’t honest about the situation. Just like anybody else, you’re not expected to have all of the answers, just the ability to ask for advice.

2.  Dealing With Your Business Challenges.   Nearly always, your business finances are a reflection of problems and issues buried deeper within your organization.  Is cash flow bad? Then start asking questions and getting answers.  Why is it bad?  Are people not paying my bills?  Are my expenses too high?  Are we not selling our products/services?  The objective is to zero in on the specific root causes for each problem.

One of the best ways of doing this is take this opportunity right now to  sign up for a subscription at www.MentoringSuccessGroup.com.   They have a powerful assessment and analysis system that you use monthly, which is specifically designed to identify potential root cause issues in your organization.  Best of all, I’ve been told that for the next few months, its completely FREE of charge (normally they charge $249.95 / month).  When you register, use the Subscription Code of  FF90TRIAL to get your FREE access.

Do it right now, I’ll wait….

Once you begin identifying and isolating the specific challenges your business is facing, you’ll find it easier to conquer them one at a time.  The old cliche is appropriate, “How do you eat an elephant?”  The answer is, “One bite at a time”.   Identify the root causes of your specific problems, then begin solving them, one ‘bite’ at a time.

3.  Dealing With Your Personal Challenges.  It’s so common for business owners to look up and wonder why their personal life has gotten out of balance over the years.  Many times we begin our business to chase that illusion of freedom and independance…working when we want, financial freedom, personal fulfillment, etc.  Then, after years of working 80 hour workweeks, we look up, and realize that our kids grew up and left home with barely an acknowledgement from us.  It’s so easy for us to get sucked down that black hole of “I’m doing this for me and my family”, when in reality, we - and our families - have been deprived of the one thing they’ve needed most….us.

So, the final thing that I want you to do, is go to www.Pay-My-Bills.com and again sign up for a free subscription.  Don’t let the name of the website fool you.  This isn’t a bill payment website, or a request for someone else to pay your bills.  What it really is, is a holistic assessment (and ongoing mentoring) of your quality of life from a financial, mental, physical and spiritual perspective.

Pay-My-Bills.com takes the perspective that our quality of life is like a piece of precision machinery.  When one aspect of our life gets out of whack and overtakes other aspects of our life… it’s kinda like washing your jeans in the  washing machine, and they’re a bit unbalanced….thump, thump, thump.

How many thumps do you need in life before you take action to turn things around in your personal life?  Like I said earlier, sign up now at www.Pay-My-Bills.com.  At the moment, they’re in the middle of beta testing their new assessment engine, and your signup is free (at least for a limited time).

Survival is the most basic of all human instincts.  But it requires positive action and decision making on your part.  Take advantage of the adrenaline rush from your own personal ‘flight or fight’ syndrome.  Sign up at both of these websites now, and refocus your efforts on specific activities that will achieve the biggest impact in your personal life and your business.

I wish you all the best!

However, its my belief that a far more dangerous problem that we’re faced with are the catastrophic, gut-wrenching changes in the way we actually do business, and even communicate with each other. Who heard of Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter 3 years ago? Yet they, and the Internet platform that supports them, are responsible for dramatic changes to the entire media industry. Care to guess how many newspapers in North America have disappeared during 2009? How often do you listen to the radio anymore, when you have so many other choices of listening to the music you like, when you want it.

Still have one of those phones at home that hangs on your wall (or sets on a desk)? Now we carry individual cell phones with cameras, video, texting and more computing power than mainframe computers had 25 years ago. Heck, even the US Postal Service is flirting with bankruptcy; when’s the last time you wrote a personal letter (remember those?) or mailed a postcard?

Here’s the dilemna these market dynamics are causing…the technology revolution has rapidly changed the way we communicate with each other during the past five years. The problem is that the traditional methods of communicating via television, radio, newspaper, or even direct mail with our clients and customers is disappearing into the sunset. Meanwhile, the replacement channels or processes for a business to communicate with existing clients and prospective customers isn’t nearly as well defined or developed. In fact, implementing some of these same technologies such as texting, email, etc, can be either socially unacceptable, or downright illegal.

Given the current trend of media businesses like radio, and newspapers going out of business, my challenge becomes communicating my next big 50% off sale to my current clients and new prospects. How am I going to grow my business, or even survive if I can’t effectively communicate with my clients? What’s an entreprenuer to do?? Oh, I suppose I could give you some explicit advice, but it’d be obsolete by the time you read this. So instead I will offer three basic suggestions…plus one bonus!

1. Go where your customers are. If you’re looking in all the wrong places, any form of communication will be adequate. You likely won’t be selling snow blowers or snow shovels in Florida, so no form of communication will yield results. Does your product or service have a niche? Is there a place on the internet or in the offline world where they congregate to socialize or to network?

2. Once you find them, figure out the best way to communicate with them. Is it the internet? Direct mail postcards? Twitter? Don’t get too wrapped up in any specific method of transmitting your message, be flexible and adaptable to new developing methods of communicating.

3. What you communicate is always more important than how you communicate. Your messages to clients must always articulate the value, or they simply won’t respond; the silence will be deafening no matter what medium you use to transmit the message.

4. Don’t be pressured into quickly adopting new technologies to communicate with clients. 96% of the world’s inhabitants aren’t identified as ‘early adopters’ of new technology. Make sure that the new method or technology to communicate actually works for you, achieves some sort of measurable ROI before you jump in. Just because its there, isn’t a valid reason to include a new technology in your communications strategy.

The first task is to analyze and discuss the sales data and the sales processes with each key manager in your company, and not just from the sales and marketing department.

• What specific strategies can we do to improve our sales?
• Are there customer segments or marketing segments that we are overlooking?
• How can we focus the entire company around implementing sales improvements?
• What are the easiest and most rewarding opportunities that we have (the ‘low hanging fruit’)?
• What are the obstacles that currently confront our sales team which need to be eliminated or removed?
• Are there sales territories or customer / market segments that are underserved or overlooked?
• Where are our best opportunities and how profitable are they?
• How are our sales teams aligned to best capitalize on those opportunities?
• What is the individual performance of each of our sales people?
• What corrective action are we taking with sales people who are not meeting established sales expectations or quota?

Effective sales and opportunity management is the key to improving results. A lot of companies struggle with identifying and prioritizing the best sales and marketing opportunities for them. Best in class companies do a great job at sales opportunity management by continually analyzing their pipeline, analyzing each customer opportunity, and prioritizing the allocation of resources to focus on the best opportunities.

A quick way to organize your best sales prospects is to consistently maintain and update a top ten opportunity list for each of your sales reps.  A simple spreadsheet which is updated once a week by your sales reps and reviewed by management is a great way for you to do a top ten account review. Have your reps focus on those ten accounts every week.

Make sure that you’re consistently and regularly holding your sales team accountable for achieving progress with each of their top ten accounts. They need to quickly articulate the sales plan and goals for each of their top ten accounts.

Get each sales reps to realize that they need to focus their time and energy on the best opportunities, as opposed to just churning out the sales activity. Many sales reps can get overwhelmed by the volume of activity that they need to generate in order to do their jobs effectively and achieve the necessary results. They quickly get lost in the volume of activity and soon begin equating activity with productivity. Being productive in sales means being able to qualify your best opportunities and focus your time and attention on moving those opportunities forward.

As a business owner I’m sure you know of inferior products and services that do a lot better than yours. You gripe and sigh and wonder how can people buy those lower quality products while yours rot on the shelf?

It’s all about marketing.

I always wonder about the miracle that takes place in the life of the winners of the American Idol show. Possessing all that talent how could these winning contestant remain hidden for so long?

The answer again is lack of marketing.

Once they enter the competition millions of people suddenly become aware of them and the rest is history.

There are so many business owners who think a great or even superior product will guarantee their success in the marketplace. But if life were only that simply. If people don’t know that your product exists, you’ll remain undiscovered like an American Idol winner before entering the show.

This reminds me of the poem:

‘The codfish lays ten thousand eggs,
The homely hen lays one.
The codfish never cackles
To tell you what she’s done-

And so we scorn the codfish
While the humble hen we prize.
It only goes to show you
That it pays to advertise!

- Anonymous

Products don’t sell themselves and talent isn’t worth squat if people don’t know how good you are. There are no ‘entitlement tickets’ that you can use to enter the halls of business success.

And in this attention age where you are competing with millions of other business owners for consumer attention, modesty is no virtue.

I’ve seen many marketers who have separated themselves from the crowd by just being ‘wacky’, crazy and a little off the edge. Are these marketers really out of their minds? No. They are cackling!

About six years ago when I started marketing my copywriting services online, the number of other copywriters advertising in Google could be counted on my fingers. It was easy way back then
to get a top 10 position in Google’s natural search results without even trying.

Today the tables have turned. You have to be intentional to get those high rankings because your competition is trying to bury you alive.

Nobody cares that you are better. You may lay a thousand eggs compared to your competition but the question is, ‘Can you cackle as loud?’ Are you advertising in the places you should with the consistency you should? Are you striking those Joint Ventures you need to stay competitive? How about your social marketing? What are you doing to get the word out?

It’s hardly likely that you’ll get a show like American Idol to give you instant publicity, so you have to break through the barriers for yourself and the internet provides unique opportunities to this. Just one popular video on YouTube can skyrocket your business into the record books.

I’ve learned in my short life that success in any area has more to do with hard work than inspiration; more with effort than talent.

So how is your cackling?

-Ray Edwards

Contact: Tom Tubergen, President & CEO
Company Name: Mentoring Success Group LLC
Telephone Number: 800-480-8843 x400
Fax Number: 866-216-4545
Email Address: tomt@MentoringSuccessGroup.com
Web site address: www.MentoringSuccessGroup.com

Detroit, MI, June 17, 2009 — Tom Tubergen, President and CEO of Mentoring Success Group LLC., today announced the completion of significant updates to its core business diagnostic engine, located at www.MentoringSuccessGroup.com.

During the past four years, Mentoring Success Group has developed and refined a highly sophisticated Business Performance Analysis Engine (BPAE) that is designed to measure every aspect of a company’s operating performance. As the client updates their information each month, the diagnostic tool uses its artificial intelligence technology to predict their future viability and success during the upcoming 6-12 months.

In addition to an analysis of their own internal performance data, the BPAE provides the client with competitive comparisons to similar businesses from around the world, identifying every possible strength and competitive advantage to maximize, as well as weaknesses and vulnerabilities that need to be fixed.

The latest revisions and updates to the BPAE diagnostic engine now provide banks and commercial lenders, accountants and consultants, venture capital firms, and franchise operators, etc., with a viable method of measuring and tracking the overall management ’soft skills’ performance of their clients to minimize their risk.

The monthly Portfolio Performance report identifies each client and their monthly Viability Score, and a quick comparison to industry and worldwide metrics. If needed, the user has the opportunity to drill down into each client’s detailed diagnostic information for additional information about issues that may exist.

The BPAE diagnostic engine monitors 23 different management categories, from design engineering to personal leadership issues. As of June 2009, it has thousands of monthly records from companies in 49 different countries on six different continents, generally with $1 million to $25 million annual revenue. Performing a monthly analysis requires approximately 30-45 minutes per month.

For additional information contact:
Tom Tubergen, President & CEO,
800-480-8843 x400
tomt@MentoringSuccessGroup.com

Mentoring Success Group LLC is the developer for a unique diagnostic tool using artificial intelligence technology to predict business success. The product is used by individual small/medium sized businesses, supported by our Certified Consultants worldwide. In addition, the diagnostic tool is used by commercial lenders, consultants, accountants, and the venture capital industry as part of their risk management strategy and on-going due diligence process.

# # #

A question raised or to be raised for inquiry, consideration, discussion, decision or solution … an unsettled matter demanding solution or decision and requiring usually consider¬able thought or skill for its proper solution or decision …a perplexing or puzzling question.

Why is this definition hard to understand?

Many of my business management students have difficulty in understanding this. They don’t grasp the point that a problem is always best expressed in terms of questions. “Any problem is open to question.” I ask them, as I ask you, to state some of their principal problems. Here are some of the answers I have received

- The main problems we feel we will be facing in the next three years are: the economy, financing expansion, maintaining a competitive edge, and the recruiting of qualified productive employees.
- Cash flow
- Poor cash flow
- Slowing of the economy
- Encouraging the public into the store
- Employee reluctance to change
- Employee motivation
- Competition
- Development of personnel suitable to our type of business.

Show me the question

None of these statements gives us a clue about what to do to improve any undesirable situation that may exist. Not one statement is expressed as a question. All the statements leave us completely up in the air about what to do about the problems that the economy, poor cash flow, competition, etc. might be causing. Clues to management action are created when the manager asks himself what he can do in response to a question that is perplexing him. He reviews the situation, asks himself what’s what, what he wants to change, etc., and then he has something to work on.

For example, one manager simply said, “encouraging the public into the store.” What was the perplexing question? It might be “What steps must I take to increase the flow of traffic in my store from an average of 100 persons per day to an average of 200 persons per day?” This gives him at least something to work on. The manager who described the economy as a problem was right, I’m sure, but his description of the problem leaves him nothing to work with. He needs to ask what it is that the economy is doing to him that he can work on. He needs to break down his situation and circumstances and ask how can I deal with this or that circumstance so that I can achieve what I want to achieve in spite of the difficulties? What he will get will not usually be simple questions, but perplexing questions. That’s what problems are. If he doesn’t think up the questions how will he ever get the answers? To tackle your problems, first put them in the form of specific, precise questions.

What do I do next?

Managers and owners of small businesses who are ready for samples of problem solving questions are sending a blank email with “your first name + P/Q” in the subject line, yesdocmiller@gmail.com

One: The first piece of advice you need to know is that it is important for you to research all of the different marketing methods that are available for you to use. By knowing the different methods, you will be able to choose the best ones for your business.

Two: Educate yourself on each of the promotion methods that you choose to use. Start with one method at a time and learn all you can about using it effectively. Then when you have that one method down, you can add another one until you have five to seven methods working for you at all time to bring traffic to your business.

Three: Take action with the methods you learn about. Too many business owners know what they need to do to market their business, but they never do it. If you don’t take action with what you have learned, then you will never find success.

This small business marketing advice is vital to you effectively marketing your business. Don’t make the mistake that so many others make. Don’t ignore this advice and assume that it is not important because you will quickly see how important it is to your marketing your business.

Hirer Internet expert Jeff Schuman to promote your small business online. His small business marketing strategy has gotten his own Team-Schuman.com website on page one of Google for over 3400 unique keyword phrases. This brings him thousands of dollars in free monthly website traffic and he can do the same for you.

View Jeff Schuman’s credentials and small business marketing program here: http://small-business-marketing.team-schuman.com

“Uggghhh” I thought to myself. Luckily however, a few clued up forum members had the presence of mind to check the website and concluded for themselves that my business concept was not as “fruit loops” as that one guy would have people believe.

But this brings me to my point which is that in business, big or small, as in life, there are those of us who are “conscious”, those who are not and those who fall at every point in between. And that’s all fine, they are where they are. My particular vision happens to be helping other small business owners really find themselves and get in touch with the choices and expression that will really help them create a working life filled with joy, freedom and abundance. And I don’t buy that that’s a Pollyanna-like notion either because I have been able to create it myself…yes, together with the more tangible, practical aspects such as sound business and marketing plans, systems which focus heavily on customer satisfaction, proven business strategies etc.

I believe that we all have a choice in business about who we want to surround ourselves with, whether it be customers, suppliers or staff, and that this contributes in significant ways to your success and happiness and that of your business as a whole. It may seem like a simple example but it’s not really possible to have a business that stays afloat and nurtures all who come into contact with it if everyone involved is negative and apathetic, is it? We CAN consciously reach in every area of our businesses for experiences that are richer, more rewarding, and indeed a privilege for whomever it serves. And the funny thing is, there are so many small business owners out there who simply aren’t aware that this choice exists.

Never mind the naysayers. I came to understand a long time ago that they don’t despise me or what I do. They really despise that they are unable to have it themselves. I do view them with compassion, for like I say, they are where they are and could be in no other place. To others however, I say “Jump on board and together we’ll have a whale of a time”. Life is just bursting with rich experiences for the taking. What a joy to be in the company of those of you who can be grounded in solid business practice, staying awake at the wheel AND letting your real selves soar!

Check out more on my intuitive work in small business at http://www.intuitadmin.com
© Advanced Intuitive Administration, 2009

Caroline Diana Bobart
Virtual Intuitive & HotDesk Genie
Advanced Intuitive Adminisration
http://www.intuitadmin.com

They said “Oh we couldn’t do that - no-one would pay us up front. No-one in our field does that.” I asked why and they didn’t really have a good reason other than being afraid that they would lose business if they asked for payment up front.

What I suggested next, however, brought on an immediate gasp and even more fear. But in fact, when they got past that fear and implemented this strategy, they easily got payment up front AND converted more prospects to paying clients.

The answer was to require payment up front AND include a guarantee. The word “guarantee” for some reason, makes a lot of entrepreneurs fearful. They are deathly afraid that if they offer an guarantee, they will end up refunding money to client after client.

But in fact, that’s just a fear. If you are 100% confident in the product or service you provide as a small business owner, offering a guarantee should be a no-brainer. Here’s how:

Guarantee the results:

If you have a track record of proven results in business, and you are confident in your ability to help your client achieve the result, then there’s no reason you couldn’t guarantee that result. One of my clients is a makeup artist. Having done hundreds of brides, she was confident in guaranteeing natural, flawless makeup application that lasts throughout their wedding day. That’s a result her clients are always looking to achieve, so it was a brilliant focus for her in converting prospects to clients.

Guarantee the service:

If service is of high importance to your client, it could very well be the thing to focus on in your guarantees. It can be the level of service you provide. For example, you can guarantee that your client will always get a response from you within a certain time frame.

Guarantee the experience:

Depending on the type of product or service you offer, you can also guarantee the experience your client would have. It’s similar to the service guarantee, but focused on what your client would experience after having done business with you. For example, if your clients tend to be afraid of the hassles in your industry, you can guarantee them a hassle-free experience.

Guarantee that they’ll be fully equipped:

For some services that depend on the client’s commitment to taking action, it may not be possible to guarantee the results. That’s because you have no control over how much action they take. However, you can certainly guarantee that they will walk away with everything they need to achieve the precise result they were seeking. For example, when I do a live workshop, I guarantee that my attendees will walk away with the exact formula for attracting a steady stream of clients like a magnet to their businesses.

So what’s your guarantee? Overall, it is important to pay close attention to the key objections or hesitations your prospects may have and insert some powerful guarantees around those objections so that you can easily convert prospects into paying clients.

And now I’d like to offer you the FREE one-hour audio seminar for solo entrepreneurs on “How to Create a Steady Stream of Clients And Cash For Your Small Business” at: http://www.greatsmallbusinessadvice.com. From Allison Babb.