Top 7 Basic Business Strategies

 

When you use the following seven basic strategies, you build a solid foundation upon which to grow your business.

1. Know Yourself

   You want to be in a business that calls upon your strengths and satisfies a passion. If you don’t feel the passion, success becomes much harder and takes a lot more energy. If you’ve lost the passion you once felt, take a hard look at what went wrong, then take action to regroup or move on. If you’ve never felt the passion, it’s time for a more in-depth look at what decisions need to be made.

2. Know Your Business

   How can you make important decisions if you don’t have the information you need? Put the necessary systems in place to obtain accurate current information about the financial, productive, interpersonal and market status of your business. Then put one day a month on your calendar to review the information, analyze it and make any adjustments to policy or practice you think are necessary.

3. Know Your Market

   What trends are affecting your market? Is your market growing, consolidating or shrinking? Who’s coming or going? What are your competitors doing? Which products or services are in demand, which not? This is valuable information to have when you conduct your monthly business review and when you are doing financial or operational planning.

4. Look at the Big Picture

   Passion is important, but there needs to be a growing market trend for what you offer. Trends are especially important for long-term planning. How can you best position your business to take advantage of trends both now and in the future? Determine both your present and your desired position within the economy and your market, then create a plan to get from here to there.

5. Use Technology Wisely

   Consider what technology you’ll need to accomplish your mission. A thorough, professional analysis of which technologies can best serve your needs, both now and in the future, is in order at least annually. Plan capital expenditure in conjunction with the technology you’ll be using. If you’re not an expert in this area, call upon someone who is. It’s worth it in the long run.

6. Hire Someone Else

   Plan to spend the majority of your time doing what you do best and will be most beneficial to your business. Fulfill the activities to sustain and grow your business by hiring, contracting or setting up strategic alliances with others whose strengths are in your areas of need. Lay the groundwork for their success by giving them adequate information and orientation and making it clear (in writing) what you are seeking from them. Then set time frames for a joint evaluation of their contribution. Reward significant contributors in the way they want to be rewarded (with time, money, recognition, etc). Do the same for employees and anyone else who contributes to your bottom line success.

7. Plan

   Where is your business now? Where do you want to go and how will you get there? Planning is easy if you keep in mind all you’re doing is gathering and analyzing pertinent information to answer these questions.

   Use your analysis of operating information, market and economic trends and decide where your best opportunities lie. Determine your goals, how you’re going to achieve those goals, what it’s going to cost and when those costs will occur. This is the basis for determining how many widgets you’ll have to sell each month to meet cash flow requirements as your plan unfolds and evolves. Now decide the best way to meet those sales requirements and what that will cost. Add that to your budget and adjust your sales goals accordingly. See how planning works?

 

Top 7 business strategies for 2012

 

Business Strategies for the Entrepreneur in 2012

I get asked questions all the time about how I have become so successful. I’ve had a great year in a horrible economy and want to share what has helped me be so successful. I’m not selling you anything here. You can read for yourself. Speaking of reading, here’s #1 on the list!

1. Read “The Success Principals” by Jack Canfield & “The E Myth Revisited” by Michael Gerber

If you’re in business for yourself or you’re a goal oriented person, “The Success Principals” by Jack Canfield cannot go unread. This was referred to me by a member of my Mastermind group and has changed the way I think about business.

My first business coach referred “The E Myth Revisited” by Michael Gerber, which changed the way I structured my companies and how I looked at business in general. Both of these are unbelievable reads and I revisit them every year around this time.

2. Get Your Team & Processes in Place

The ideal strategy would be to create a blueprint for every single job title you have working at your company. Figure out how you can automate each one of those processes and create a manual that explains everything in step-by-step fashion. This will make hiring employees easier and you can easily hold them more accountable for the mistakes they make. Use project management software like ProTasker (http://www.protasker.com) to organize your tasks. This will allow you to keep track of your projects, assign them to different users, keep track of time, make task templates to easily create a similar project process, and collaborate all online. My employees now work more efficiently and I save thousands of dollars and create more dollars.

3. Work On Your Company, Not For It!

Seven years into business I decided I didn’t want to deal with clients, do production or manage employees. I was burnt. I decided to train my existing employees to do my tasks, took a pay cut, and hired another person to take over my production while I focused on planning, selling, and marketing my business. My net increases have been 22% in 2009, 26% in 2010, and 33% in 2011. I still have to jump in and deal with clients, do production, and manage employees, but my total time doing this per week is around four hours. The best thing I’ve learned is to schedule time for myself. I’ll book time in my calendar to do things that I need to accomplish personally and professionally.

4. Marketing Online

If you’re a business in today’s world, you need to aggressively market online. Print strategies are seldom effective unless you are trying to build brand equity. Social media will be larger than life in 2012. Build a quality (not quantity) following by giving away great information that attracts your targeted audience. Consider the same strategy for getting better placement on search engines. Do not hire just an SEO expert – hire a marketing agency that can give you a well-rounded approach for an integrated strategy and a maximized online exposure (Paid Search, Social Networking, Search Engine Placement, Brand Recognition). If you’re too small of a company to hire a marketing agency, join some internet marketing forums and consider authoring on a few blogs outside of your own. I use Big Web Daily (http://www.bigwebdaily.com) and it’s in the top 10 list as a traffic referring domain. All the traffic I get has an extremely low bounce rate making the visitors quality. You can visit my website at http://www.cmdsonline.com.

5. Surround Yourself with Elite Professionals

I’ve created my network of professionals for business and personal use. I have experts in each field that I communicate with (two per field, just in case the other fails) and I’m always meeting with people to make sure I surround myself with the best team. Surround yourself with a good financial advisor, lawyer, mortgage agent, accountant, business coach, and other highly successful entrepreneurs that you look up to. I wasn’t saving for retirement until a few years ago. Now I put money away weekly. My accountant is great at keeping me conservative and on top of all the changes that take place. My business coach and I talk weekly about what I’ve accomplished during the past week and what I will be working on the next week.

6. Build Customer Trust and They’ll Keep Coming Back for More

Every customer is different. For some people buying a house is no big deal and for others going to the grocery store can set off cognitive overload. Take the time to get to know your customer. How do they think? How do they buy? What are their top concerns? How can you go about putting them at ease with you as their salesperson as well as your entire company?

Customers are smart and they know when they’re being sold to. As a result they are more likely to trust a recommendation from a stranger who has nothing to sell them and no money to take from them. Effective sales communication starts by avoiding general claims about products or services. A crowded marketplace full of nonspecific product and service guarantees has lost all value with consumers. A creative, specific, and consumer-focused statement of information will help you reach your customer in a meaningful way. One sure fire method to increase the weight of your message is to quantify your value.

7. Make Time for YOURSELF

I know the title says “Business Strategies” but what good is business if you don’t have health and happiness? This past year I was diagnosed with Lyme disease. I went misdiagnosed for six weeks and got pretty sick. I was mentally and physically handicapped. I couldn’t figure out how to open the door in my bedroom to get out. I’m almost 100% recovered, however it’s been a long journey. Luckily I have good processes and great employees and family which allowed me to take almost 2 months off and go back part time after that. All the money I have, my wonderful family, all the five cars, the houses… they all don’t mean a thing if you’re not able or around to enjoy them. Stay healthy! Eat healthy and organic when possible, exercise, go on vacations a few times a year (I do two small and two large) and work no longer than an 8 hour day. Productivity experts say that people are more productive working just 8 hours as opposed to those that work 12 hours. Your family, friends and business will thank you for it.

Have a stellar 2012!

Related articles

• New Book by Michael E. Gerber Examines the Ten Principles of the Most Successful Small Businesses in the World (prweb.com)
• JT Foxx Announces Mini-Mega Partnering Event in Austin, TX (prweb.com)
• Unique Pricing Strategies that Get Publicity and New Customers (amsterdamprinting.com)
• Best-Selling Author Jack Canfield Reveals to Mind Movies How He Used the Law of Attraction to Manifest the Success of His Celebrated “Chicken Soup for The Soul” Series (prweb.com)
• 6 Social Business Strategies to Improve Customer Retention Within 6 Months (customerthink.com)
• What’s Your Pricing Strategy? (smallbizdaily.com)
• Have you got your business model sussed yet? If not, I think you’re bonkers not to get it sorted! #EMyth [Georgina Lester] (ecademy.com)
• JT Foxx Announces Mini-Mega Partnering Event with Stedman Graham in Portland, OR (virtual-strategy.com)
• Planning for a Successful Customer Experience Journey (sazbean.com)
• The 5 Steps of Developing a Social Business (insideview.com)

 

Gmail: Adding Signature below Reply Instead of at the End of the eMail

I hate having my signature at the end of a reply but that is the default for Gmail. I spent a bit of time on Gmail Help looking for an answer but got nothing.

It took me a while and $20 but I was able to figure out a solution. Brilliant service. I typed in my question. Identified that I would pay $20 for an answer. Sent out the request. In about 10 min a techie guy replied. It took a few attempts but he figured it out.

1. Log into your gmail account

2. Click on Settings then Labs

Image via CrunchBase

3. Search for Signature Tweaks and enable

That’s it. Now when I reply using Gmail, my signature is at the end of my reply and not at the end of the entire message.

Interestingly, I now have a little green bottle right near the link to Settings, identifying that I’m using Google Labs.

Related articles

• 7 Ways Google Labs Improved Our Lives (greatfinds.icrossing.com)
• Batch Reply for Gmail Makes Replying to Email in Bulk Simple [Chrome Extensions] (lifehacker.com)
• How to Drive 100+ Pageviews for 20 Seconds of Work (life-longlearner.com)
• Gmail In Google Search Results Field Trial (searchengineland.com)
• Google+ hangouts integrated into Gmail (itproportal.com)
• Add notes to Gmail messages in Chrome (howto.cnet.com)
• Hey Google! I Don’t Care About Hangouts, I Just Want To Read My Email (techcrunch.com)
• FYI, You Can Insert Animated GIFs Into Emails with Gmail (betabeat.com)
• Email Smackdown: Outlook.com vs. Gmail (mashable.com)
• Behind the scenes in the Search Engine Labs (firstdigital.co.nz)

The Wandering Dreamer

Facebook.  Are we friends or aren’t we?  Like a BFF, wondering if she’s been replaced, facebook connections (whether from real life or not) will run the deepest and be the most hurt if (more like when) you decide to “unfriend” them.  Those darned decisions, right?  It seemed like a good idea to “friend” your entire family… at the time.  Until you realize Cousin Sally shares TMI (too much information) and Aunt Betty is trying to “friend” all of your friends to sell them cactus juice from Sedona.  And, oh by the way, if you are “friends” with your boss, may the force be with you.

Twitter.  Don’t tread on me.  Your Twitter followers will expect that you pick a style and live with it.  Like, forever.  If you tweet about Bob Marley, Hipsters and Donald Trump’s hair this week.  Don’t expect to talk about existentialism, Requiems…

View original post 368 more words

 

Yesterday, we talked about all the missteps that the Olympics had stumbled over so far in these games, highlighted by the four badminton teams who tried to lose intentionally. Well, today is a new day for these Olympic Games, a fresh start, a chance to really show us the best…oh, wait, no, nevermind. Just another scandal, this time in boxing, after Magomed Abdulhamidov of Azerbaijan was awarded the win over Japan’s Satoshi Shimizu 22-17 despite getting knocked down SIX TIMES in the third and final round. That’s not just a little fishy, that’s a beached whale in your living room level of suspicious.

View original post 638 more words

Ruminations on Love & Lunchmeat

Generally speaking, my husband and I are very lucky.  We agree on lots of things so there’s no need for us to battle.  However, on those rare occasions where we do disagree, we both play to win.  And if we get to mock each other in the process, that’s a HUGE bonus.  Funny is fair game in our house.

From the minute we married, my husband has accused me of wanting to live in a cave.  That’s because I never remember to open the bedroom shades and my idea of a beautiful house looks straight out of nineteenth century Europe.  (Brown leather couches, thick drapes, and mahogany furniture…)  Because nineteenth century European decor is not practical for us, my husband won that battle.

Besides home decor, we also like to spar, with clubs in hand, over our children’s names.  We agree on numerous tenets when it comes to naming our children……

View original post 408 more words

M u s i n g s

Most of us equate architecture with the idea of permanence; after all, it’s one of the three precepts espoused by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius – durability, utility, and beauty – that have propelled builders since antiquity. But a new phenomenon, “pop-up” architecture (also known as “temporary” architecture, or even “urban interventions”), has shaken that idea to its very — excuse the pun — foundations.

The scale of the concept ranges from huge to small, from boutiques and grocery stores to entire neighborhoods. The current London Olympics fall full-force in the supersized category, where the imposingly impermanent includes the Basketball Arena (detail shown above), which was intended as a temporary site since inception, with almost two-thirds of its building materials destined for reuse or recycling. The facility’s textured shell and portal frame will eventually travel to Brazil for the 2016 Games.

The realities of difficult economic times have played a…

View original post 265 more words

Mechanical Turk

If blogging led to early-onset writer delusion in a portion of the population that never suffered from it before, Pinterest is the domain of the visually literate. It says kudos to all those who asked ‘How do you read such thick books with no pictures?’ Users board images into cute piles of colour, metaphorical structures (bridges, tunnels, and doors), hairstyles, nails, typography, illustrations, and package design… It is possible to pin videos as well, yet most of the pins are images.

Although the gender and age profile differs from country to country, Pinterest is the first major social media tool where women are the majority. Earlier this year, 83% of the US users were women, with the typical age range between 35-44. In Great Britain, 56% of the users were male and their age profile was more youthful, on average 10 years younger than in the US. Since there are more…

View original post 579 more words

50 Beautiful Website Designs For your Inspiration

 

1). Feed Stitch

2). Tolingo

3). Snoop Media

4). Nine Lion Design

5). 45royale

6). Nathan Sanders

7). PRville 09

8). Let It Bleed

9). Michal Jarosz

10). Khaki Creative

11). Mad Frog Designs

12). Digital Mash

13). CTL Online

14). Agami Creative

15). The Bizzards

16). Squared Eye

17). Get Ice Berg

18). Icebrrg

19). This is Grow

20). We Love Icons

21). Esteban Muñoz

22). Brad Colbow

23). Deluge Studios

24). Live Front

25). Monty Lounge

26). Instabox

27). Newsberry

28). Big (D)esign

29). Inkd

30). Old Loft

31). Artificial Studio

32). Big Omaha

33). Mod Studio

34). Matriz

35). Rocket club

36). nclude

37). Foehn

38). Clear left

39). Habitaton

40). les Push Mail

41). Polargold

42). Lisa Moseley

43). RedBrick Health

44). Oxite

45). Tumblon

46). Common Good Radio

47). Brokly fare

48). Show & tell

49). Social Snack

50). Square Space

We are offering cheap vbulletin hosting services. Also join us for best 70-681 training tools along with free accessibility of 646-205 dumps and a+ certification practice test help to pass your ccvp exam successfully.

Related articles

• Knitted Burger Coaster Set (cutoutandkeep.net)
• Snoop Dog changes name to Snoop Lion (bigpondnews.com)
• Snoop Dogg? Snoop who? (chatterboxmediauk.wordpress.com)
• Bizzard scene on I-475 in Burton (minbcnews.com)
• Snoop Dogg has reincarnated to Snoop Lion (the-celebrity-buzz.com)
• Snoop Dogg is Now Snoop Lion (rhodyview.com)
• Stitches that Sing (chaintwo.wordpress.com)
• Say What? Stitchable Stationery Is DIY Fun! (fabsugar.com)
• I love product reviews! (fromthesidekick.wordpress.com)
• Snoop Dogg – “call Me Snoop Lion”: Snoop Dogg Releases Reggae Album, Changes Name (contactmusic.com)