What Is ….. you just scribbled

When you find yourself stuck with a writing project, maybe due to the
need for a perfect outcome, then you can call on the words of award
winning author Frank McCourt (author of Angela’s Ashes) for inspiration
-

“I believe that as a writer you have to find your own style. Honesty is the
best policy. And scribble – don’t try to write a novel. Just scribble and let it
come.”

So what if you stopped “trying” to write the perfect piece and started scribbling from the heart.

What are Your Golden Rules?

 Golden rules, universal laws, personal mantras or just plain old commonsense – no matter what you call it most people have a set of rules that they tend to fall back on in most situations.

In the most recent edition of Business 2.0 they asked 30 "business visionaries" to share their personal Golden Rules.  Some of them made it into the print-version magazine, but you will find all of them online.

Some of the Golden Rules that resonated with me were –

Business Can’t Trump Happiness
Shelly Lazarus, chairman and CEO, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide

Remember Who You Are, Not What        
Brad Anderson, vice chairman and CEO, Best Buy

There Can’t Be Two Yous                       
Warren Buffett, chairman and CEO, Berkshire Hathaway

Once a Day, Take Some "Beach Time"    
Mireille Guiliano, CEO and president, Clicquot; author

Get Face Time With the Customers        
Anne Mulcahy, chairman and CEO, Xerox

Choose Your Mistakes Carefully              
Craig Newmark, founder, Craigslist

Be a Problem-Solver                               
Hector Ruiz, CEO, AMD

Learn to Trust Your Gut                         
Paul Pressler, CEO and president, Gap

Never, Ever Forget That You Are a Servant    
David Neeleman, founder, chairman, and CEO, JetBlue USA

What are Your Golden Rules? Personally I will take some time to ponder on this today and post my Golden Rules tomorrow.

100 Keys to Solo Success – #28 – Want More Clients? Solve Their Problems

The number 1 question that I hear solopreneurs asking is "how can I get more clients?"  Whether these business owners are struggling for clients or looking for ways to grow the business, the "more clients"  question always appears to be top of mind.

Let me give you a few hints …..

• It is not by having a product or service that YOU think is a good idea (you’ve gotta ask who thinks up some of the "new" products);
• it is not by having a product or service that has the most features (just ask Jason Fried at 37Signals);
• Taking industry standards for granted and not challenging the status-quo (aka Blue Oceans Strategy).  Let’s use the coaching industry that I am involved in for example – who was it that said you had to do it 1-on-1 and charge for coaching by the month and charge between $150-$500 for it.  It has become an accepted standard but what would happen to the coach that challenged that paradigm.

It doesn’t matter how many offers you make, if your prospects don’t want or need what you have to offer then you will be struggling for clients.

The answer to the question on how do you get more clients, is to solve their problems in a way that is more effortless, more cost effective or more interesting than the way the clients are doing it now.

The plain truth of the matter is that you need to offer a service or a product that will get your prospects reaching into their pockets and paying you with their hard earned cash.  If they are not willing to even reach for the pocket then you are going to struggle to get clients.

So what do you do ….

1. Change your target market till you find one with a problem you can solve
2. Change your target market until you can find one willing to part with the money you want
3. Change your product or service until it provides a real solution to a real problem in your target market
4. Change the price of your product until it is less than the cost of the problem to your target market

NOTE – Always remember that the solution needs to be priced less than the cost of the problem.

No matter what type of business you have you are ALWAYS in the business of solving problems.

Common Blocks For Solo Professionals

Over the past few years I have been compiling a list of the common obstacles that most women face when they are in the process of creating their business.  I would expect that some of the same obstacles face men when they are in start-up mode also.

Primary I have found that the obstacles fall in 3 main categories – Attitudes & beliefs, Behaviours, and Skills

Attitudes & Beliefs

• I’m not good enough
• Fear of failure
• Fear of rejection
• Fear of not being understood
• Not good enough
• Not enough experience
• If I’m not perfect…
• Fear that no one is out there
• No one is going to pay
• Market saturation
• People will not take me seriously

Behaviours

• Being lazy
• Not being persistent
• Procrastination
• Holding onto negative perceptions
• Lack of planning
• Lack of support
• Holding on …
• Getting bogged in detail
• Avoiding tasks

Skills

• Written and oral skills
• Disorganised
• Perfection
• Communication
• Networking
• Computer
• Selling
• Business management
• Relating Skills
• Time management
• Delegation
• Structures/Systems

What obstacles have you come across, in your business or others around you?

How Efficient Are you With Email?

Like it or not email plays a very large part in the life of most small business owners.  In just over a decade of mainstream use email has become a ubiquitous part of business communications.  You use it with clients, prospects, colleagues, suppliers, and even with people you don’t know (gotta love those spammers and their offers to increase or decrease something in your life -not!).

But how efficient are you in using email as a business tool – because that’s what it is supposed to be a tool.  Most businesses look to find ways to maximise their tools but email just seems to slip on by that productivity radar as a necessary evil.

Recently, Merlin over at 43Folders asked 4 very pertinent questions about how you and your business handles email -

• How efficient is your team and your company at using email?
• How much of your day is spent dealing with email that does Good Things for your job or helps increase the value of that for which you’re paid?
• How much is spent just sorting, shuffling, and mining?
• What one change in your team’s email culture would most improve the way you work together?

Do you control your email or does it control you?

Let’s do some very quick, yet very disturbing, calculations about the time that email takes up on your day.

Let’s say that out of the range of emails that pass through your inbox each day 30 are actionable items – ones that need you to respond, act, read, or in some other way take a chunk of your time.

Let’s continue making assumptions and say that each one, on average, takes 4 minutes of your valuable time.  This is a very low average for some people who might be more likely to need 5, 10 or 15 minutes each to action the item.

Those 30 emails have just sucked up 2 hours of your day.  Imagine what it would be like if each email took 10 minutes of your time, or instead of 30 actionable emails you received 60.  (BTW – those options would take up 5 hours and 4 hours respectively).

Think about it for a minute and do the calculations for yourself.
BING!!!
I think I just saw the lighbulb go on above your head.   So that’s where the minutes and hours in each day frit away to.

So if it doing that sort of damage to your day what do you think it does to your IQ.  “Now wait a minute”, you say, “these emails are full of important things they could only add to my IQ”.  Not according to the Poms!  According to a recent study emails “hurt IQ more than pot”.

Some people are very creative when it comes to email handling and as a solopreneur you have a significant amount of control over how you interact with your email inbox.

If you come up with any interesting ways of dealing with the email gremlin drop a comment below.

A New Roles for Life Coaches?

An interesting article at TheLawyer.com  … does it point to a new niche for life coaches?

What Would You Do?

Just wanted to introduce a new series of blog posts under the common title of "What do you do …?"

These posts will be twofold -

1.  to prompt thought on how you would deal with such a situation
2.  to encourage you to comment on them and start a conversation about how you and others deal with these things.

So let me kick things off today ……

What would you do if you could’t work for 4-5 weeks?  How would you handle your workload?  Covering your expenses?  Dealing with new opportunites?

Get More Clients by Playing in Their Sandpit

Time and again I hear clients and colleagues talking about the fact that they need more clients.  The constant demand for clients is what of the regular games in keeping any business afloat.  It is just part of the cut and thrust of owning and operating a small business.

The thing that surprises me the most is the amount of time people spend talking about clients they need and how little time they spend creating products and services that the client’s need, are willing to spend money on, and making offers of these products and services to the people that could use the most.

These business owners are spending so much time focusing on themselves and their needs they are not spending enough time playing in the client’s sandpit.

"Only when you play in a thing, do people listened and hear you and are moved."  — Brenda Ueland

I see this as the equivalent of the schoolyard for many people — too much complaining that know what will come and play with them, and too reluctant to step out of their sandpit in order to go and play with the others.

Your clients and prospective clients are too busy in their own world, with their own challenges, to spend too much tied to cupboards seek you out.  If you want more clients you need to be where the clients are.

Get out of your office, get to know your target market, know their challenges and the things they are willing to pay to have solved.  Play in their industry for a while, not yours.

When is Technology Bad for Business? Part 2

Just a quick update on the issue of my repetitive strain injury in
the right shoulder and the subsequent request by my chiropractor not to
use technology.  Now I know some of you would be laughing at the
moment, the concept of me not using technology is a hard one for most
people to grasp, and it has also been a challenge for me to step away
from the technology. But I must tell you that I have been following the
request of many of you to rest my shoulder.

There has been a tool to help me in this process though (you
wouldn’t think I would stay away from technology altogether would
you?).  Since Sunday I have been using the Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred Version 8.
This tool is a piece of voice recognition software that allows me to
dictate documents, spreadsheets, e-mail and even blogs like this.

I was surprised by how much you could do purely by voice — arrow
movements, function keys and even clicking the mouse.  I’m only been
using the software a few days now but already I am working at
a similar speed as I’ve would if I was typing the document myself.  So
it is saved both my shoulder and some time. I would imagine that even as my shoulder regains some of it is
movement I will still continue to use the software as a productivity
tool. 

The other thing it allows me to do is to dictate notes into a
digital recorder while I’m out on the road, load it into my computer
when I get back to the office and then have NaturallySpeaking
transcribe it into a document.

I’ll let you know how I find the software as I continue to access
more of its features.  Now it’s off to put another ice pack on my
shoulder.