Posted by Marie on December 30, 2011
Previously:
The last three days have been pretty active. Today, let’s sit and dream a while.
Imagine your perfect business year. What happens? What are you doing? What is your company like? What does your company feel like?
Let’s wallow in that for a bit, shall we?
From that vision, can you draw three big-picture goals? A goal has three requirements that makes it different from a mere wish.
- A goal is measurable. You know if you have completed it or not.
- A goal is time specific. There are deadlines.
- A goal is achievable through incremental steps.
Stating good goals is harder than it seems but once you get there, you will have a prioritization plan for the year. Those goals can drive your decision-making. You’ll just keep asking, “Does this take me one step closer or one step farther away from my reaching my goal?” If the work is put in ahead of time, it’s amazing how easily the day-to-day, nitpicky details tend to fall into place.
Now picture yourself at the end of 2012 and feel the glow of your accomplishments. It can definitely be.
Happy year’s end, everyone! And all the best for the next one!
Posted by Marie on December 29, 2011
Previously:
I bet you are not ending 2011 the same way you began it. We live in a world of quick changes, and that is affecting both our business lives and our personal lives. We update our budgets. We update our goals. But our daily and weekly schedules are often overlooked.
As Julie Morgenstern says, time is like your closet. Thinking of time in a physical sense makes it easier to handle. When you add a garment to your closet, a certain amount of space is taken up. Nothing else can go there. And once the closet is filled up, everything else is overflow and creates a mess.
True, right? So start looking at your days, weeks, and year as a series of time blocks. What are you going to fit in those? Do you want to devote more energies into improving customer response times? Adding additional services? Getting a new logo? Or perhaps you want to simplify your processes. Maybe even take more time off.
All of that can be visualized with a working schedule. It does not have to be your hard-and-fast rule, but it can certainly keep you on track and avoid wasted hours.
When do you wake up? By what time are you at work? On what day do you send out invoices? Report sales tax? The act of plotting it all out really helps decision making and the process of realizing what is possible and what is not.
Give it a try and plot out a single day in your life. Then you’ll see what a difference a schedule can make in your productivity and sense of purpose.
Tomorrow, brainstorm and prioritize.
Posted by Marie on December 28, 2011
Yesterday was a great day to clean up your physical workspace. So today, let’s move on to the business technology.
How does your computer’s desktop look? You’ll feel just as wonderful looking at an uncluttered screen as you do sitting at an uncluttered desk.
- Go through your contacts in your phone(s), email(s), and database(s). Update and delete.
- Create subfolders named 2011 and drag all your completed projects into them. Now that blank space is ready to receive your 2012 work.
- Tackle that email! Delete, file, archive, and back up.
Tomorrow, reconfigure your schedule.
Posted by Marie on August 23, 2011
Here at Detour Services, our tagline is “when A to B needs a little help.”
Quite often, business owners do not find it hard to describe where they want to be. The bigger question marks have to do with all those little steps needed to get there.
When this vision puzzle becomes too challenging, try to think of the journey another way.
Ask yourself: Where will my business be in [time frame] if things continue as they are now.
The truthful answer to that question allows the gap between what will be and what you wish for to become sharply defined. The puzzle can now be approached from a different direction, using a different perspective.
Sometimes it helps to take a 360 walk around a problem because looking at it straight on does not always work.
Posted by Marie on April 9, 2011
Buzzmarketing: Get People to Talk about Your Stuff
by Mark Hughes
256 pages, © 2005
Use to Small Businesses: Limited
In all fairness, I did not completely finish this book. I became frustrated that this is mostly about hype marketing rather than buzz marketing, in the organic word-of-mouth way.
Now there are general principles in hype that will apply to the creation of genuinely valuable word-of-mouth buzz, but the big difference is in the bottom line. Hype does not directly lead to sales and income.
Mark Hughes used to be the VP of marketing for Half.com. They did make a big splash once upon a time when a town in Oregon agreed to change its name officially to “Half.com, Oregon.” Undeniably, this brought a lot of publicity to this start-up website. Mark gives some numbers in terms of registered users as an example of what a big splash can do.
“Ah, yes,” a small business owner would say. “But what about their bottom line?”
This book came out in 2005. Do you know what ClearPlay is? This company is the example at the center of Chapter 9. Hmm. People are still talking about that Pepsi Challenge campaign but Pepsi just dropped behind Coke and Diet Coke in popularity. And do you really want to know how smart Britney Spears was with her buzz generation back in 2005?
I supposed it is fitting that this book is as dated as hype usually is. Hype flashes in the pan. Without purpose, it just comes and goes with nothing gained.
Small businesses that are watching every dollar and every hour in the day simply shouldn’t pursue hype as the main thrust in its marketing efforts.
