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

I, for one, am no longer waiting for my competitors to completely overwhelm me with smart video marketing before I jump in. I’m getting over my embarrassment (or is it fear?) of being seen on video in front of a world wide audience. Although I have 2 camcorders I bought in the last 2 years, I decided to pick up a “Flip cam” during the holiday season so I could make a lot more videos on the go.

I’m taking this opportunity to announce my Denver Social Media For Business Growth Meetup and our FREE Seminar.

Also, check out the video below:

Great location, great meetup, great collection of entrepreneurs. If you live in Denver, and are at all interested in learning fast-track business growth strategies, join our free Membership Meetup group.

Aren’t you excited?

In my previous post, “How To Prosper in 2010″, one of the last references I made was to how your wealth is not to be searched for “afar off”, but “is already here with you”.

I’m now going to go a bit deeper into what all that means. I have never before shared these insights with anyone outside my executive coaching or consulting clients. I hope you spend some time thinking about the implications and bringing benefit to your life from them. Here goes…

It is my opinion that every human being alive has direct access to at least 3 forms of “wealth” from which they can reasonably access a fourth (the vast majority of the time).

They are:

Spiritual Wealth (or capital)
Social Capital
Intellectual Capital

Whether these forms of capital are mobilized and accessed or just merely “present” depends on your ability to maintain an “ambient state” of gratitude. The practice of counting your blessings will allow you to see assets even where others might see only loss and devastation.

Believe it or not, this wealth matrix also informs my unique approach to Business growth consulting. The best businesses are living entities with spiritual capital (culture, values, mission, vision), social capital (client, vendor, strategic partner relationships), intellectual capital (Knowledge bases, patents, unique systems and processes) and much more…

These previously mentioned forms of wealth, are broader and much more powerful than the fourth – financial capital.

Financial capital (i.e. Money, credit line) is merely an expression of how well we’ve matched the previous 3 with the needs of the marketplace; with the needs of others.

If you’re an entrepreneur or business owner wondering how to apply this wealth matrix to yourself and your business, here’s a bit of help:

Your Spiritual capital can consists of:

• The elements in your belief system – Faith (A christian may assume God’s love for them for instance), assurance, vision, personal stability
• The elements in your personality – Courage, Initiative, Love of others, etc

Your Social capital is the most immediate expression of your spiritual capital.
Before ever you could say a word, you had at least one servant render you hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars worth of services. Most people call these servants “Mom” and “Dad”. They also weren’t alone. Many, many others likely contributed to your early access to your social capital.

Today, if you’re an entrepreneur, all your social networks are potentially available to you as:

• Clients and customers
• Referral and Strategic partners
• Investors and business partners
• Mastermind partners and teachers

Perhaps the most important early contribution of your social network is that it made the first deposit into your Intellectual Capital bank.

Your intellectual capital consists of all those things you know and the things you think you know…
These things you know can be packaged into professional expertise, speeches and talks, books, systems, etc that give you a platform of monetary exchange with the rest of the world.

A few weeks ago, I created a gratitude list of my teachers. You should try the same thing and see if you can isolate the most important lessons you have learned from them.

For my executive coaching clients, I have created what I call a “SHELL framework” to help them mine the intellectual aspects of “their hidden wealth”.

S.H.E.L.L. stands for S-Skills, H-Hobbies, E-Epics and Experiences, L-Lessons and Learning, L – Loves and Passions.

My coaching clients the Marriage experts – Ronnie and Jackie Calloway, turned their epic story of Adultery, betrayal, divorce and marriage reconciliation into books, products, seminars and more. Have you been wasting your personal epics?

Have you ever asked yourself “What’s in my shell?”

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.