Archive for Planning
Simple Marketing Solutions to Lessen the Pain – Part 1
Posted by: | CommentsMarketing is not always something small business owners embrace. For many it’s a necessary evil … like a root canal. You know you need to do it but you don’t have to like it.
There are a number of misconceptions people have about marketing that makes it hard for them to get results. In the SOS 4 Your Business
in Business Blog Talk radio show I discussed them with host Yvonne McCoy.
Topics discussed were:
- not putting all your marketing eggs in one basket
- using the marketing medium your customers use
- having a marketing message geared to your audience
- marketing is usually a long-term strategy – you’re a farmer not a hunter
- and more
Listen to the replay of the show at SOS 4 Your Business or here by pressing play below.
Are you measuring your business success?
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This morning I filled in for a friend at his BNI meeting (Business Networking International) and the “Education Nugget” was about measuring. The point is, you don’t know how you’re doing, nor can you improve, until you can measure it. And you can’t make smart decisions about your business unless you measure what you’re doing.
Follow the money
First, you need to measure your money. Are your books up-to-date? Bookkeeping isn’t just for tax time. You need to keep them current so you can predict cash flow and see what products and services are profitable.
Cash flow is obvious, but looking at what areas are profitable is just as important. I knew one business owner who upon looking closer at his books, realized his best selling product was actually losing him money.
While the direct cost of the product was less than the selling price, the cost of servicing it meant he actually lost about $100 per unit. By eliminating that one product, although his total sales went down, his profits shot way up.
Do you know what products or services are most profitable? Look at your books. If you’re not sure how to determine profitability, ask your bookkeeper or accountant. Read More→
Achieve your goals in the last half of 2011
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Depending on whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist, the year is half over or there’s half left. Either way, there is still time to achieve great things in 2011.
Step 1. Know where you are now
You can’t achieve anything until you know where you are now so pull up some stats. Print out your financial statement for the first six months of the year.
What? You haven’t done your books for this year because you just finished last year’s taxes? Then you need to take a step back and do step 0 – get your bookkeeping up-to-date! The first rule of business is manage your money!
Next, look at your RSS subscribers, your email newsletter list, daily/monthly visitors to your website or blog, your Facebook friends and likes to your page, your Twitter followers, your LinkedIn connections and what other stats are important to you. Record them on your calendar so you have a measuring stick to go by.
Step 2 Review your goals
Pull out your 2011 goals from January and see how close you are to achieving them. Are there Read More→
5 Reasons Why Imperfect Execution Is Better Than Perfect Planning
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hy is it that some people seem to move ahead by leaps and bounds while other people who are perhaps more talented seem to be left behind in the dust? Seth Godin said it best in Linchpin: Are You Indispensable. He wrote: “Real artists ship.”
What did he mean? You don’t have to be the best to be successful. The people who get ahead don’t worry about being perfect. They get off their butts, take action and get their products to market.
So here are my thoughts on why imperfect execution is better than perfect planning
Work your plan
While I’m the first one to tell you that planning is important, I know that too often planning can be a form of procrastination. Rather than getting down to the work, you keep tweaking the plan. Get a plan in place and start working it. Over time you can tweak the plan as you see what works and what doesn’t.
Beating the competition
How many times have you seen a competitor release a new product that is just like the brilliant idea you had a year ago but is still in the planning stages? Don’t you kick yourself when that happens? I know I have. Let’s learn from our mistakes; when you have a brilliant idea quickly create a plan then work on execution so that someone else doesn’t beat you to the punch. Read More→
Planning and Organizing Ideas With OneNote and Dropbox
Posted by: | CommentsI suspect I’m not terribly different from most entrepreneurs. I’ve got a lot of balls that I’m trying to keep up in the air. Not only that, I continually get new ideas. Some of 
them are crap, but some of them are actually things that I plan to implement. I’ve tried a number of ways to keep my planning, my projects, and my new ideas organized.
One of the things I do is use binders. Each project has its own binder, as does planning. This has been a relatively useful way to keep track of ongoing work (when the labels don’t fall off the binders).
New ideas were little harder to track. For a while I was doing the Post-it note method. Every time I got a new idea I’d write it on a Post-it note and stick it up on the wall next to my desk.
This didn’t work for two reasons. One, after a while the Post-it notes just became visual noise; I just didn’t see them anymore. The second reason is the mental clutter they caused me. Although I can block out the content on the Post-it notes, I still knew they were there. Although I wasn’t consciously aware of it, it was causing me constant stress.
I moved away from the Post-it notes to whiteboards. Now whenever a garden idea I could just write it on the whiteboard. The nice thing about the whiteboard is it’s one continual surface so it’s less visually cluttering than Post-its.
However, the whiteboard method isn’t perfect either. It’s great for recording an idea as it occurs to me, but what do I do later? Eventually the whiteboard gets full. I needed some way to deal with the ideas.
Then I thought about Microsoft OneNote. This is a software program that comes as part of Microsoft office. I knew it was part of the package but hadn’t looked at it. Last week I decided to open it and take a look. I’m glad I did. Read More→
