One Way Not to Market Your Expertise
Is this you? Are you trying to sell yourself as a consultant by sending general messages to people (or companies) you don’t know? Promising to solve whatever problems they have?
I don’t dislike this person. I just feel sorry for the enormous waste of time and effort spent in the wrong direction.
This morning I received a [...] 
5-Step Late-Business-Meeting Recovery Plan
It seems so simple: punctuality is a matter of respecting other people’s time. Be on time for meetings and appointments. This is obvious. Right?
Still, in many organizations it’s a cascading problem. Lag times creep up from five to 10 to 15 minutes. People hang back, composing one more email, because they know the meeting will [...] 
Your Personality or Your Brand?
Recently, blogger Penelope Trunk announced that she is separating her blog from her brand (Brazen Careerist). My first thought was, “is that even possible?”
Her blog bills itself as “advice at the intersection of work and life,” and given her peculiar life and work, it actually works. Every post attempts to offer some useful career advice, [...] 
Why I Hate Those Huge Market Numbers
It happens way too often: entrepreneurs proud of some huge completely unattainable market numbers. They show us billions of dollars. They think that’s a good thing, like it’s important. I hate it.
As an investor, as a business plan contest judge, or as a teacher, I don’t really care how many billions of dollars are spent [...] 
How To Burn Your Marketing Budget Without Really Trying
Tales of woe regarding small business direct mailing campaigns are all too common. A while back, a fellow Duct Tape Marketing Coach shared a story she heard from a prospective client regarding a failed direct marketing campaign. Here are some of the relevant numbers from the campaign:
• Number of pieces mailed: 9,800
• Response: 1%
• Inquiries: [...] 
Celebrities Save Which Endangered Species?
Much like global climate and habitat change threatens giant pandas and black rhinos, global socio-economic and technological change threatens writers. Print media outlets are slowly dying, literacy is gradually declining, and the book business is shrinking. Animals are threatened by global warming, and writers by global dumbing.
So I guess I’m glad to see that now [...] 
9 Ways Your Business is Like Baseball
Every year around this time, I find baseball analogies everywhere. Spring training is underway, and for a baseball fan like me, it’s a hopeful time when my team has the world ahead of it and anything is possible. Everything reminds me of baseball.
That said, business planning and baseball, spring training in particular, have a lot [...] 
Are You Happy, Or Just Remembering Wrong?
Here is another great TED talk, this one from TED last month in California. Are you happy? Here’s the TED summary:
Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our “experiencing selves” and our “remembering selves” perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, [...] 
Make a Referral Week
Palo Alto Software is once again joining John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing in a week long push to create 1000 referrals around the world.
Individuals around the globe are invited to make at least one referral to a small business at www.makeareferralweek.com and share the referral details, including information on why they referred a particular [...] 
Create an Online “Interest” Group and Watch the Leads Pour In
Until recently, if you had some expert knowledge in a specific area of business, you kept it pretty secret and only shared your hard-earned expertise with paying customers.
The Internet has changed that. Sites like Meetup.com, Flickr.com, Facebook.com, LinkedIn.com and Slideshare.com allow members to create interest groups around a niche or a topic and freely share [...] 
Has a Business Plan Saved Your Business life?
Many thanks to Lora Kolodny for this question she asked me in a comment to my post here yesterday:
But I have to ask — any other cases? Has a business plan ever saved your (company’s) life? (cue song: Last Night a DJ Saved My Life)
Yes, many times. With apologies for what might seem like tooting [...] 
Business Plans are Never Done
If your business plan is finished, your business is finished.
I’d like to think that this is obvious, but a lot of people don’t get it. A business plan isn’t supposed to be finished, ever. If it’s useful to your business, then you keep it alive. You review it regularly. You check assumptions and how they’ve [...] 
Immigrants, Job Creation, Good and Bad Politics
It’s about time. In the midst of cloudy partisan politics and shouting on both sides, with small business often in the middle like the foil for the arguments, here’s a federal government move that makes sense. TechCrunch has a good summary, called The Startup Visa: Create Jobs, Get A Green Card. As we used to [...] 
Where do your customers shop and what do they want?
The thing I love about sales is that success is easy to spot and very difficult to fake. Every sales team I have ever worked with has consisted of successful sales reps who delivered results and unsuccessful reps who delivered excuses. Somehow the successful sales people produce month in, month out, completely unaffected by the [...] 
5 Ways Business Is Like Olympics, and 4 Ways I’m Glad it Isn’t.
I’ve been thoroughly enjoying watching the Winter Olympics. The Olympic athletes are amazing. And not just the winners. The ones who finish way back in the pack are amazing, too. There’s only one sport in there that I know fairly well: skiing. I’ve been skiing since I was five, and I lived in Innsbruck for [...] 
To Tweet or not to Tweet
Wow, social media’s reputation with small business really took a roller coaster ride this year. First it was the “2009 Tribalization of Business Survey” by Deloitte, Beeline Labs and the Society for New Communications Research, in which surveyors found that 94% of small businesses plan to increase or maintain their investments in online communities. Great [...] 
Do you know a guy who knows a guy?
David Shear continues his series on the state of retail.
Very mafia, right? Well, I don’t think the comparison is very far off. Retail sales require that you know the right people, and that everyone gets their share of the revenue.
The people who sit on the top of the retail food chain are the buyers for [...] 
What about those added value New Year’s resolutions?
I love year-end posts where we see the flood of “Best of 2009” lists of tips, tricks and ideas to steal.
I actually love getting these. I like to review them and see if we’ve used any during the past year, and whether they have worked for us. There are always nuggets to mine, and in [...] 
The Retail Landscape
David Shear continues his series on the state of retail.
Success in retail depends on your company’s current understanding of the overall retail landscape.
You may have understood where retail was two years ago, you may have had your finger on the pulse in 2007, but the market isn’t what it was two years ago. Are [...] 
Be Realistic When you set your Measure of Success
All of us plan for success in our businesses. That’s IS the goal after all. To be successful. But how exactly do you determine IF you have succeeded? Regardless if you are a start up or an established business, you need to establish, right up front, during your business planning process, what success will look [...] 
Due Diligence is Necessary When Hiring Consultants
“Being big egzpurt, I am.” Just because someone bruits themselves this way doesn’t mean you should simply take them at their word.
It saddens me that I have to be mistrusting of people, but as one of my favorite aphorisms says, “Just because you’re not paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not after you.”
We start our businesses wanting [...] 
Precise, Accurate, Estimates are more than Guesses
When you are in the midst of creating your business’ planning forecasts, do you use Guess, Estimate, Accurate and Precise interchangably? I don’t. I believe there are very distinct differences in these words — they are not synonymous. Here’s how I see them.
Guess: Pulled out of thin air. "Oh yeah, sure, no problem, easy-peazy! I [...] 
The Weakest Link – Your Social Media Marketing “Killer App”
By helping you maximize "weak ties" Social Media Marketing provides small businesses with a powerful tool that doesn't need an overwhelming amount of complexity to be useful. Its power is based on the simple human desire to be connected and the tools that now exist to enable you, as an individual to fill that desire. 
Does your business have a disaster recovery plan?
That is a scary question for lots, if not all businesses. We spend so much time focused on getting our businesses started, and then successfully running our businesses, that we give very little thought to disaster recovery planning. Really, planning for disaster sounds like we are betting on failure. Betting against ourselves. Yet we [...] 
Want to be a player? Get a coach!
by Lindsey Enloe
Business Success Coach
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Whether you are starting a new business or growing an existing business, this is not a game. It’s real life, everything is on the line, and there is no room for error. You walk onto the field each day, armed with a business plan as your playbook, and the motivation to [...] 
Pay Attention when your Business Plan says NO
I’m sure almost everyone is familiar with the story that Thomas Edison discovered 99 ways to NOT make a light bulb. That’s 99 no to reach 1 yes. The point here is that a negative result, proving something didn’t work or was not so, is just as valuable as a positive result. Sadly, scientific research [...] 
Establish a Records Retention Schedule for your Business
All of us know, or should know, that we need to save and safeguard our business records. When we start up it’s easy to hang on to every document, receipt, invoice, and business record. But after a few years we find that all these records we’ve been keeping are taking up more floor space in file cabinets [...] 
Social Media Marketing: The Marketing Skills you can learn from Obama
I was fascinated by the analysis of the Obama campaign. In many ways, Obama’s campaign and its success is a big, bright, “LCD sign” of the times. New media has come of age in a very public way.
Most people seem to agree that the campaign used a number of techniques to capture an audience and even [...] 
Getting Investment, Key Factor: Initial Valuation
Last night we were talking about getting angel investment, and valuation, which is one of if not the most important points in the discussion. Valuation is essentially price.
Say you want to bring in $150,000 from an angel investor. The immediate question from the investor will be something like: “at what valuation?” Sometimes that’s called “pre-money [...] 
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