Small Business Digital CoachGROW REVENUES BY 25 TO 100% OR MORE IN 90 DAYS OR LESS while reducing advertising cost and effort

As you prepare to usher in the new year, I have a question to ask you.

Have you made absolutely sure that you maximized (extracted absolute, maximum, leverage out of) all the resources that were available to you?

And if, upon examination, you conclude that you did not, have you prepared yourself with plans to both appreciate and maximize your blessings in the new year?

Since I will be taking a break from this blog till the new year, I want to share with you my step-by-step plan for How To Prosper in 2010. Enjoy:

1. Count Your Blessings (Past And Current)
About 2 weeks ago or so, I posted a list of my “Teachers” for whom I felt grateful. It was an exercise in gratitude, and an exercise in creativity. I could not think about who they were without examining what explicit and implicit lessons I learned from them.

2. Be A Worthy Steward (Servant) Of Your Blessings
This means that you put your blessings in a “capital” context. The term “capital” has to do with a resource that can be invested in such that it produces a return over and above what is invested into it. Are you investing in your gifts, talents and resources such that they are producing a return over and above your investment?

3. Adopt a Leverage Mindset
There’s a quote from the Christian bible that comes to mind when I think about this point. In 1 Corinthians 3:21-23, Paul advises his “beloved Corinthians” with the following words:

…For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future, all are yours…

Are you wasting “your teachers”?
Are you wasting Google? Youtube? Facebook? Meetup.com? Jing (Techsmith.com)? Blogger.com? And WordPress.com? All of which are yours?

Are you wasting your social capital? Are you wasting your business networking contacts? Your client and prospect lists? Your vendor relationships?
Are you wasting time that could be better spent in the warm embrace of your friends and family?
Are you wasting your nearest public library? The business resource section? The free reading at Barnes and Noble? The local small business development office? The nearest business association or networking group?

ARE YOU WASTING TIME?

4. Set S.M.A.R.T. Goals
Now that you’ve gone through the steps above, it’s time to apply those to goal attainment. A S.M.A.R.T. Goal is:

S- SPECIFIC
M- MEASURABLE
A- ACHIEVABLE
R- RECORDED
T- TIME-ORIENTED

Set and record goals for your spiritual life, health, intellectual life, financial life, business life (if relevant). All these goals should meet the SMART criteria. Being specific means that instead of saying something like “I’ll be more grateful in 2010″, you can commit to “Sending X number of Thank you letters and notes in 2010″, or “Saying a prayer of gratitude every morning when I wake up in 2010″.

Being measurable means that your goal is concretely observable and track-able. For instance, “200 new clients in 2010″. You’ll either reach it, or you won’t.

Achievable – I struggled with this one when I first learned about S.M.A.R.T. goal-setting. Eventually I hacked out a meaning that resonated with me…If you can’t reverse-engineer your goal into a daily set of activities or investments of time, money and effort, then your goal is not achievable for you. Choose another one. Here’s what I mean. I set a goal to build a million dollar revenue business in 14 months (ending December 2010). However, For me to reach that goal, I have to draw out a plan of approach by which I can see that it is possible for me. That’s what I mean by achievable.

Recorded -This one means you should have it written down, recorded on audio, or even on your blog (like I did above). Some teachers and coaches even say you should tell others about your goal. Although I practice that, I’m not sure that’s the correct advice for everyone.

Time-delineated – “New year” goals tend to have deadlines by default. One year.
However, if you notice that you’ve been a “Serial resolution breaker”, you’ll want to make sure that you decompose your “new year resolution” into Quarterly, Monthly, Weekly Goals And Plans.

5. Forget About Motivation And Think Like Thomas Edison
Forget about “feeling motivated” before you take action. Resolve to “act your way into feeling motivated” instead. Nothing motivates like success and the rewards that come from success.
Stop waiting around for motivation and just take action on the plans you reverse-engineered from your goals. Remember that all things are Yours!
Convert both success and failure into marketing and business epics – Blog posts, videos, case studies, Ebooks. Do you realize you can make people pay you to hear all your “epic setbacks” (or failures)?
Stop thinking “Pass/fail” and start thinking “continuous, systematic improvement”. Every failure is just one more step toward your eventual success. Think like Thomas Edison (Read “Edison on Innovation”) who failed his way to success in finding the ultimate light bulb material.

The road to prosperity for you in 2010 will not be found in “searching for the far off wealth”. It will be in discovering your own wealth (already “here” with you) and mining it for maximum leverage.

As I thought about Tiger Woods, his wife, and the trauma to his family of his actions and the public nature of the revelations, it occurred to me that there are some lessons for small business in Tiger’s situation and how it has played out so far.

I’ve heard in the past, that there are 2 kinds of people we can learn from

Examples (role models) and lessons (“Don’t do that” case studies)

For years, Tiger has been comfortably entrenched in the “role model” category in the public mind. Today, he will have to serve as our lesson of the day.

On that note, here are 3 things you can learn from the Tiger Wood episode:

1. In the Age of Accelerated Information Transfer, there is no place to hide.
This applies whether you’re Tiger Woods, Inc or any other corporation (and yes, Tiger IS a corporation in addition to being a golfer). In today’s world, it’s best to live and do business congruently. Congruence means there should no misalignment between public message and your business strategy. The chances of cutting corners and being able to get away with it are slimmer than ever. Unlike Nike’s famous credo, I say, “Just Don’t Do It!”.

2. When you mess up, ‘fess up…quickly.
Part of the problem Tiger faced was the vacuum left by his absence and by the reluctance of his media management team to deal with the arising facts of the case. Whether you occupy a tiny sliver of the blogosphere, or you’re a Tiger-scale media colossus, the best damage control is to abandon any thought of concealment, confess, rectify the situation to the best of your ability and then get your new found piety in front of the public early and often.

3. Be excellent afterwards.
This final step means that you must continue to be good at whatever brought you into the limelight in the first place. If you were a good president before a misguided tryst with an intern, become an even better president. If you were an all-star basketball player before controversial allegations of extramarital dalliances, then become an all-world basketball player.

Lessons from Bill Clinton, Kobe Bryant and many others tell us that if you ‘fess up to your mess, make the media rounds and become even more “you” than ever before, the American public will largely forgive if not forget. These same principles apply to business scenarios.

Yesterday, I was a panelist at a forum meeting that explored the spiritual and emotional needs and hurts of the women present. It was a women-only group, and I was one of only 2 men present. We (the guys) had been specifically invited to answer some questions from a man’s perspective (How would you like to try answering for over 3 billion people?).

It was a tremendously thought-provoking experience and one that I’d gladly take part in If I’m ever asked to do so again. One of the things that struck me during that talk show-style forum was the fact that wise counsel is almost always within a short phone call away, and yet, most of the time, we hesitate to ask for help from those we know are in the best position to provide it.

For me, I have formed a habit of cultivating a network of “gray haired” friends around me. These are seasoned and experienced people I can count on when I’m facing a quandary. People who by reason of age and experience, aren’t afraid to ask the tough questions or tell you when you’ve been an idiot.

One of the most persistent challenges faced by small business owners who struggle is a lack of trusted and qualified mentors. And it’s a problem that easily solved once you make a decision to seek these people out and act quickly on the advice you get.

One of the most important resources for business success that is available in virtually every market is SCORE – Service Core of Retired Executives.

SCORE is an organization made up of mostly retired or semi-retired executives who volunteer their time and expertise to help business owners grow their business. If you haven’t tapped into a SCORE office near you, I advice you to do so.

It is effectively a principle of productivity, of prioritization, and business success.

So what’s the “Precious Pearl Principle”?

In Matthew 13:45-46 of the Christian Bible, Jesus tells a parable about a “pearl of great price” for which a merchant sold all that he had.

It was a parable meant to teach “priority management” in a spiritual context. The precious pearl principle is a productivity framework based on the metaphor of the “pearl of great price”.

In modern life and business, I often find that the greatest strategic challenge faced by entrepreneurs and CEOs is priority management. Priority management, in my definition, refers to that component of planning that determines the single most important element of a complex system, or the single most important destination for the investment and allocation of resources.

Such resources include but are not limited to:

1. Your Time
2. Your Financial resources (personal or business)
3. Your Attention (business or personal)
4. Your Effort (corporate or personal strategic priorities)
5. Your Staff (Using staff for highest leverage activities)

A billion dollar cottage industry has developed around time management and planning that would probably be more effective for people if they understood that the actual issue is “decision priority management”.

Asking these 3 questions can help you become a better, more systematic, priority-focused manager:

1. What’s the most important decision you need to make today?
2. What’s the most important action you need to take today?
3. What’s the highest yield, highest leverage function you have as an entrepreneur, manager, or CEO?

It is this underlying “priority logic” that makes goal-setting so important to the success of individuals and companies. To paraphrase Dr. Eli Goldratt, goals give a business a “decision procedure”. A way to decide whether to worry less about X than about Y.

For instance, as a business growth consultant, I emphasize marketing mastery as the highest return growth lever for any businesses I work with. I find that many small businesses delegate away far too many marketing decisions and skill sets. Creating a marketing system that you can optimize with each passing day is absolutely necessary to building true asset wealth in your small business.

The most common aptitude possessed by successful entrepreneurs and CEOs is consistently knowing how to set the right priorities and make the right resource allocation decisions. This simple skill is why the CEO gets paid the big bucks while a hard-working but misguided front line worker gets to sit and gripe about how much the CEO gets paid.

If you’re a fan of the movie “The Lord of The Rings”, you can identify the movie’s parable of the “One ring” as an updating of the precious pearl parable (not surprising since author J.R.R. Tolkien was a Christian interested in ancient narratives and metaphor). In “The Lord Of The Rings”, the One Ring was the goal worth tossing everything else aside for, because it was the “one ring to rule them all”. It was the one thing that if you could get it, you could get all the other things you needed and wanted.

By itself, the “One Ring” provided a decision procedure for daily action for all parties associated with it. If you’ve never watched “The Lord Of The Rings”, here’s a short scene that really explains the idea.

This Precious Pearl (Or “One Ring”) Principle is the most important idea in business, and finds expression in:

• Goal-setting
• Market Research
• Target Marketing and Selection
• Business Planning
• Business and Sales Forecasting
• Project Management
• Budgeting
• Exit and Succession Planning
• Work-life balance
• And much, much, more

Take goal-setting for example. If you’ve struggled with a “goal-setting” resolution you made after attending a weekend business seminar, it’s because you’ve never seen the connection between “goal-setting” and this principle.

Goal-setting setting is about choosing a precious pearl in the midst of a bewildering array of current and future choices. Going through the goal-setting process gives you the “faith” to stick with the destination decision you’ve made, and allows you to avoid wasting time, effort and resources on options that do not contribute significantly toward the goal.

If you examine current trends, you’ll discover that the years to come will only provide more bewildering options, not less; more choices, not less. While “more choice” is almost always taken to be synonymous with “better” in the western world, authors like Barry Schwartz (in “The Paradox of Choice”) and Jack Trout (in “Differentiate or Die”) have identified some of the pains associated with too much choice and not enough constraint in business and personal decision-making.

Applying the Precious Pearl Principle in a strategic marketing context for example, will force you to decide on your Golden Customer (your most wanted client), and that decision will cascade positively down and throughout your marketing system. How?

You’ll find it easier to know what they want, the most important message/promise they want to hear from you, and the most important operational shape your business should take to fulfill those promises.

Do you see how answering one question can help you answer one hundred (100) subsequent questions correctly? Do you see how it can help you do this faster and easier?

Today I signed up with Technorati. Technorati may be the single most influential website and directory service for bloggers. Of course I’ve been sharing my posts with my Twitter “followers” as well as my Facebook “Friends”.

In 1941, Joseph M. Juran, a management consultant discovered Pareto’s work and expanded it into a framework for use in quality control.

The 80-20 principle (also known as the Pareto Principle, 80-20 rule or the law of the vital few) was further popularized by author Richard Koch with the publication of his 1997 book “The 80/20 Principle”.

Since that time, small business owners have been subjected to various “experts” and “gurus” citing it as some sort of cure all for management headaches.

Many of these gurus have essentially taken what amounts to a useful observation and have made it a holy grail of management thinking.

In reality, there is another principle that I think has far wider application than even the 80-20 principle.

I call this principle The Precious Pearl Principle or The Rule of 1.

Let me illustrate this principle by presenting the following scenario:

Assume you are an emergency room doctor, and you have a gentleman before you who happens to have a cavity in his tooth, nerve damage in his arm, and a massive gash in his femural artery from which his life force is leaking out in a continuous red bleeding stream.

Which problem do you attend to first?

If you have any ounce of medical knowledge (or have ever watched more than 2 episodes of medical TV shows), you probably realize that you’ve got to stop his bleeding first and foremost.

The Precious Pearl Principle is named based on a parable told by Jesus (Matthew 13:45-46) in which a man/merchant went about looking for “Goodly Pearls” and after he’d found “a pearl of great price”, went and sold all that he had to buy the field in which he found the pearl.

The Pearl of Great Price was the highest priority action. In a business, your “precious pearl” is the highest return lever you can act on. In the emergency room example above, the “precious pearl” is closing up that bleeding artery. Everything else becomes subordinated to the priority of that action.

In the Theory of Constraints management philosophy first articulated by Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt, this “precious pearl” is known as the “Core Constraint”.

I plan a detailed treatment of the Theory of constraints later on. For this lesson, the important thing you should take away is that the core constraint finds its definition based upon a goal that you have set.

For instance, in the emergency room example above, your goal as the physician is to keep the man alive and nurse him to complete health. While there are at least 3 obstacles to your patient reaching his goal, the tear in his femural artery is the core constraint that should be dealt with.

What does this have to do with managing your small business?

Well, small business owners often struggle with priority and time management. Many of us spend hours and hours working on the “right things” in our business instead of the “most important thing”. If you find yourself multi-tasking, you’re probably working on the “right things” instead of the “most important” thing.

3 Important Questions You Can Ask Yourself Right Now

These are some of the questions that begin to come up when you focus on the “precious pearl” in your business.

In my marketing consulting practice, I take the approach that the highest return lever in most small businesses continues to be their marketing system. Within that marketing system, the “precious pearl” is to:

Develop, Define and Communicate Your Competitive Advantage; the idea, promise, or offer that differentiates your business from all other competitors (including “doing nothing”). This idea is also called your Unique Selling Proposition or USP.

If you haven’t properly developed an effective unique selling proposition in your business, every subsequent marketing effort and activity may yield sub-par returns. A USP makes every advertisement, every networking conversation, every marketing campaign work 5 to 20 times harder.

My work with my business growth consulting clients always, always, begins with an examination or development of a USP that actually works.

Yesterday I had a business brainstorm with a very impressive entrepreneur and general manager of a successful restaurant franchise right here in Colorado.

One of the things that came up during our conversation was the subject of taglines for business, product or programs.

A tagline or USP slogan is a short and memorable (hopefully) encapsulation of the unique value that a product or business delivers to the market place. It is not a USP (unique selling proposition), it is only part of a USP because a USP at its best should include a mini-argument supporting the claim or promise that is made in the tagline or slogan.

An effective tagline is important because it acts as an ambassador for your core selling argument. It helps you get the best response out of every advertising and marketing campaign, and helps you get the maximum number of referrals to your business possible, as well as boost the profitability of those referrals.

A good tagline or USP slogan should continually reinforce the central marketing promise or argument you want your business to be making in the marketplace. At its best, it provides your referral centers and referring clients with a ready-made and viral script for why others should do business with you.

In my opinion, the best taglines all successfully convey a believable promise regarding something the marketplace cares about. The first line of this article is from the product branding of Rice Krispies cereal, and that phrase has illustrated the longevity and power of an effective tagline since it was introduced in 1933.

The most compelling USP slogans encapsulate all the attributes of a good USP. These attributes, derived from Rosser Reeves in 1961, are as follows:

1. It must communicate a specific promise, offer, or beneficial claim to the consumer.
For example (GEICO: “15 minutes can save you 15% or more on car insurance”)

2. The promise, offer or beneficial claim must be something unique. To quote Rosser Reeves, something the competition “either cannot, or does not, offer.”
For example (FedEx: “When your package absolutely, positively has to get there overnight”)

3. It must be compelling enough, strong enough, to move people to action. This is even more important in today’s world than ever before because today’s consumers are absolutely inundated with choices in media they consume, in marketing pitches and in engagement options. An example of a tagline that cut through the clutter and snatched attention was the phrase that yanked Domino’s Pizza upward and into prominence (“You get fresh, hot pizza delivered to your door in 30 minutes or less — or it’s free.“)

Invest time, thought, money and effort in a system for finding the core strengths and core uniqueness of your business or products. It will pay off when you uncover a selling argument that meets the 3 conditions above. Once you have that selling argument or USP, coming up with a tagline that pops is just a simple hop, skip and jump away.

Till next time.

In his article, “Dead Men Don’t Blog”, he made a point that many internet publishers and marketers might agree with. He essentially points out that many of us have built web-based archives of our personality, our plans, our dreams and our intellectual property, without thinking about what happens to it all if we pass away.

I had actually been thinking about this a lot lately. Ever since my father passed away last year (that’s him in the picture on the left – My wedding day and he wanted his “Kalabari tuxedo”), I’ve wondered what to do with his archive of books, writings, papers (including written on newspapers – think “a beautiful mind” if you ever saw that movie).

You see my father was a scholar, minister, war-time rebel, developmental activist, government official and many other things during his time. He was most of all a thinker and writer. Apart from published scholarly works, he wrote tons and tons that were never (and may never be) published.

It wasn’t even hours after he died before close collaborators and friends in the academic world were reminding me that we should not toss out his work. In his case, it’s a bit easier because these materials are physical, and therefore easier to find (but not easier to organize, digitize or store).

Unfortunately it may end up costing thousands and thousands of dollars to archive, organize and store this material.

I’ve also found that I’ve picked up my father’s penchant for thinking and writing. I have notebooks and papers, poetry collections, business principles, theories and ideas all over the place. I know that if I died today my wife would not even know how to find all my websites.

I recommend you read the Ray Edward blog post, and let me know your thoughts here as well. What do you intend to do?

As for me, I’m going to create a backup system listing all my domain names, account info, etc.
I’ll also begin to create a system for re-organizing all my notebook content into separate notebooks for separate subjects…especially the money ideas. There are multiple million dollar ideas that I’ve removed from my brain and left lying around on notepads, and looseleaf binders all over the place.

We’ll see how it goes.