April is the beginning of the second quarter of 2013. If you haven’t done so already, now is a good time to check in with yourself and see how you’re doing with your goals for this year.
Did you achieve your first quarter goals – financial, list building and others? Yes? Yea! Take time to celebrate.
No? Take a moment to notice what worked and what didn’t. Where there things you said you were going to do but didn’t? Read More→
At this time of year, many of my customers are too busy just trying to survive until New Year’s to worry about marketing their business. I suspect this is true for many professionals who provide a service to other businesses.
If you find your business is slowing down or even drying up for the next two weeks, this is an excellent time to finish your 2013 marketing plan.
First, review how 2012 went. Did you meet your financial goals? If not, why not?
In many cases failure to meet financial goals comes down to marketing. Here’s a list of questions to ask about your marketing in 2012:
Wow! It’s April already and I’m sitting here wondering where the first quarter of the year went. Only 9 months left to hit my goals for the year.
I find that the beginning of each quarter is a good time to pause for a moment and look at your goals and results so far this year. Are your goals still relevant or have you made a decision to go in another direction?
If your goals are still relevant, have you been working towards them or did you get distracted by the bright shiny object and forget about your main objectives? I’m convinced the majority of people who start a business are at least border-line ADD and we easily get distracted by something new.
If you found you did get off track, sit down and create a plan for the next 90 days: what are you going to do each week that will get you moving towards your goals. Write them on your calendar.
Too many times we lose track of our major goals because we become over focused on the day to day minutia of our businesses. But if you schedule your major goals on your calendar, you’re more likely to remember to work on them. Read More→
W
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
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.
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→
I 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→
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