If you have already made the transition to starting your business or are at this time thinking about it, you will definitely want to remember this one piece… It is a way to overcome one of the greatest challenges for most business owners especially when starting a business!
Before we dive in, it should be stated that the greatest benefit of working for someone else, especially for a large corporation is that everything is already set up.
If you think back to one of your first jobs you likely recall having a desk, going through training, having someone who could guide you to what you were supposed to be doing. You could speak with Human Resources about issues occurring between you and your employer or colleagues, you could speak with accounts payable about your paycheque, and you likely had all of the equipment you needed such as a computer, a phone, etc.
As a business owner however, you have to create all of that yourself: some type of organizational system, marketing system, files, financial planning, tracking inventory, paying employees including yourself, etc. It is evident that one does not typically simply create a successful business overnight. It can and usually does take a while to establish all of these new parameters, schedules, hardware, and software.
As that was one of the best parts of working for someone else – that it was all provided for you, this leads us to one of the greatest challenges for business owners when starting a business – Becoming used to being the one responsible for EVERYTHING.
If there is an issue with accounts payable, you would contact… YOU!
If there is an issue with scheduling… you would contact… YOU!
You can see where we are headed with this. And likely every business owner of both small and medium sized businesses would agree with me, this is the most challenging aspect of owning and running a business and the sooner you come to accept it, embrace it and dive into, the sooner your business with build and thrive.
Usually, the greatest challenge, is with scheduling and wondering, ‘what the heck should I be doing right now?’!
As much as this is likely the greatest initial and on-going challenge of running a business, it is also one of the greatest payoffs and benefits of running your own company. YOU decide what you do, when you wish to do it and in how much time you want to do it in.
When getting started, the best thing you can do as an entrepreneur is to set up some parameters as if you are working for someone else.
Although you may feel like you develop multiple-personalities when you do this, give this a go:
Put on your manager’s hat as if you were working directly for the President, and create an agenda for a staff member (that staff member also happens to be you… but we are not paying attention to that quite yet).
Create a weekly schedule of what is expected and needed of this employee who is essentially responsible for the many different aspects of the business, such as marketing, public relations, sales, admin, organization, and e-mails, etc.
Once you have created the schedule, switch hats and play the role of employee who has just been given this list and now needs to develop these different areas! You can pretend and even say to yourself, ‘this is why I get paid the big bucks here at this company’… that is the idea!... that you will be receiving the big bucks and a great income for doing what you are doing!
For most business owners, one of the greatest benefits of running your own business, if it is not the number one reason, is that you create your own schedule. You decide how much time to put into each area of your business, you decide how much to budget for advertising and marketing, you decide who you hire and how your business will develop.
In most cases there is a steep learning curve involved in the running of a business that flattens out as your business grows.
After running my own business now for almost 10 years full-time, I still learn new ways of becoming more effective and efficient, etc. With technology moving at the speed it is, and being a business coach, helping others with their websites and with their marketing strategy, I am always staying as up-to-date as possible so that I can help you my client to grow more smoothly, efficiently, and quickly.
I now have systems in place, part-time help, and so on, along with different marketing measures that allow me to move to higher levels of running my business, expansion, and working on new projects!
So now that you are hopefully a bit more prepared for what is to come, the HR manager told me he/she wanted to see you ;).
Here is to your business’ success!
You Business Coach,
Joshua
Sunday, 21 August, 2011
Saturday, 11 December, 2010
Marketing Successfully - The Honest Way
Welcome to my first blog in a long time and essentially, the first of what will be a plethora of hopefully useful, valuable, and incredibly insightful articles that will help you create a successful business with excellent staying power!
Today's topic is an introduction to honest marketing.
You may or may not know how much marketing goes into everything you see around you. For nearly every purchase you made today or will make today and likely every day of your lifetime, significant, or, at the least, a small amount of marketing went into persuading or convincing you to make the purchases that you made OR the purchases that someone made on your behalf. In fact you can thank marketing for the diapers you wore, the soother you used, and on and on it goes!
This applies to large and small items, expensive and inexpensive, helpful and useless items, and applies to both services and products.
Whether you purchased the item because someone told you about it (referral marketing) or because you saw an ad and liked what you saw, marketing was responsible.
When I teach business courses in Colleges, or give my workshops on business, I share the 8 main ways to market your business (stay tuned for a future article on these different areas). Just as you were influenced for some reason and in some way to make the purchases you have, whether it was conscious or not, you also want to be considering how you will be using marketing to promote your service and products.
With this in mind, we arrive at the topic for today... do you choose to be on the Light Side of the force in marketing or will you go over the line and move into the Dark Side of the force in marketing?
At this point, I can tell you that most large corporations are desperate for you to buy their product and they therefore use what are called Black Hat marketing techniques. Unfortunately, as more small business owners have learned from 'marketing gurus' the secret Black Hat marketing techniques that the large firms use, they are now using them as well. In fact my number one health mentor who has millions of followers now uses several of these techniques without even knowing that they were at one point considered black hat.
The truth is he is actually quite naive and has no idea that they were. In my opinion, meaning I have no evidence to prove this either way, he is so committed to his cause, for which I am aligned, that he sought out some of the top marketers on the planet to help him. The unfortunate side is that that top marketer uses these methods because they work and then teaches other people to use them as well.
Although they were initially called Black Hat Marketing Techniques, over time as people became used to them, the term Black Hat (which was not too attractive) lost its lustre in their eyes and therefore that part of the term was removed. Those techniques, however, were not removed or lost. So now it is quite common place to see small business owners applying them without any knowledge or second thought of the integrity behind them.
I prefer honest marketing for a couple of reasons. One is that I can sleep with a clear conscience knowing that I am being honest about my work. Two, I do what I do to help others and therefore being of service is my priority, not profit. Profit is my second priority!
Successful marketing, the honest way, comes down to three things - so get your favorite note making tool handy! (and bookmark this page!)
Successful Marketing the honest way comes down to:
1. Integrity.
2. Offering an exceptional product or service that is so helpful that it nearly sells itself!
3. Offering exceptional customer service so much so that your client or customer or patient wants to come back to you because of how warm, friendly, honest, and caring you are even if #2 is not the case!
Integrity is the priority. It means you care about your clients and therefore are honest with them in every way about what you do and why you do it. When you are of integrity you do your absolute darndest to walk your talk, stay open, and make service the priority over profit.
In case you ever wonder what marketing without integrity would appear as, it would be a business or business person making profit their priority and selling at all costs - honestly or dishonestly. This could include a hidden agenda, manipulation such as playing with your emotions and focusing on your 'pain', hiding important information you should have known before you made the purchase (it is usually in the fine print), etc. (believe me when I say this happens A LOT!!!!)
In future articles I will be sharing some of these 'black hat marketing techniques' so that you don't get taken #1 and so that #2 you don't use these techniques. I say this because if you do use these techniques and your clients begin to realize this, you WILL lose their business and likely forever!
The truth of the matter, these days, is that honest marketing is becoming taboo. Business owners are becoming more desperate, and are going further and further trying to make sales. There are multiple reasons for this including: a dramatically and constantly changing economic landscape, more and more 'competition', emotional insecurity, more people taking risks in starting a business without proper planning and without working with a coach to guide them along, and lastly due to bad teachers!
Actually, it is now common to receive from some of these marketers, 3-4 e-newsletters per week trying to overload you to get you to buy their products! And this is just the beginning.
With this said, if you can focus on marketing successfully the honest way by applying the three items mentioned above, you should find that business and profits flow to you more easily.
If you are following those three, but still not seeing great sales, then the issue is not in how you are offering those services, but rather whether enough people are finding out about your business or not. As I mentioned stay tuned for future articles on how to promote yourself using these 8 main marketing methods!
I hope this article stirs you to begin thinking about how you can come more from integrity, how you can improve your product or service, and how you can enhance your customer service through e-mail, by phone, and in person. ;)
Until next time, here is to your long term business success!
Today's topic is an introduction to honest marketing.
You may or may not know how much marketing goes into everything you see around you. For nearly every purchase you made today or will make today and likely every day of your lifetime, significant, or, at the least, a small amount of marketing went into persuading or convincing you to make the purchases that you made OR the purchases that someone made on your behalf. In fact you can thank marketing for the diapers you wore, the soother you used, and on and on it goes!
This applies to large and small items, expensive and inexpensive, helpful and useless items, and applies to both services and products.
Whether you purchased the item because someone told you about it (referral marketing) or because you saw an ad and liked what you saw, marketing was responsible.
When I teach business courses in Colleges, or give my workshops on business, I share the 8 main ways to market your business (stay tuned for a future article on these different areas). Just as you were influenced for some reason and in some way to make the purchases you have, whether it was conscious or not, you also want to be considering how you will be using marketing to promote your service and products.
With this in mind, we arrive at the topic for today... do you choose to be on the Light Side of the force in marketing or will you go over the line and move into the Dark Side of the force in marketing?
At this point, I can tell you that most large corporations are desperate for you to buy their product and they therefore use what are called Black Hat marketing techniques. Unfortunately, as more small business owners have learned from 'marketing gurus' the secret Black Hat marketing techniques that the large firms use, they are now using them as well. In fact my number one health mentor who has millions of followers now uses several of these techniques without even knowing that they were at one point considered black hat.
The truth is he is actually quite naive and has no idea that they were. In my opinion, meaning I have no evidence to prove this either way, he is so committed to his cause, for which I am aligned, that he sought out some of the top marketers on the planet to help him. The unfortunate side is that that top marketer uses these methods because they work and then teaches other people to use them as well.
Although they were initially called Black Hat Marketing Techniques, over time as people became used to them, the term Black Hat (which was not too attractive) lost its lustre in their eyes and therefore that part of the term was removed. Those techniques, however, were not removed or lost. So now it is quite common place to see small business owners applying them without any knowledge or second thought of the integrity behind them.
I prefer honest marketing for a couple of reasons. One is that I can sleep with a clear conscience knowing that I am being honest about my work. Two, I do what I do to help others and therefore being of service is my priority, not profit. Profit is my second priority!
Successful marketing, the honest way, comes down to three things - so get your favorite note making tool handy! (and bookmark this page!)
Successful Marketing the honest way comes down to:
1. Integrity.
2. Offering an exceptional product or service that is so helpful that it nearly sells itself!
3. Offering exceptional customer service so much so that your client or customer or patient wants to come back to you because of how warm, friendly, honest, and caring you are even if #2 is not the case!
Integrity is the priority. It means you care about your clients and therefore are honest with them in every way about what you do and why you do it. When you are of integrity you do your absolute darndest to walk your talk, stay open, and make service the priority over profit.
In case you ever wonder what marketing without integrity would appear as, it would be a business or business person making profit their priority and selling at all costs - honestly or dishonestly. This could include a hidden agenda, manipulation such as playing with your emotions and focusing on your 'pain', hiding important information you should have known before you made the purchase (it is usually in the fine print), etc. (believe me when I say this happens A LOT!!!!)
In future articles I will be sharing some of these 'black hat marketing techniques' so that you don't get taken #1 and so that #2 you don't use these techniques. I say this because if you do use these techniques and your clients begin to realize this, you WILL lose their business and likely forever!
The truth of the matter, these days, is that honest marketing is becoming taboo. Business owners are becoming more desperate, and are going further and further trying to make sales. There are multiple reasons for this including: a dramatically and constantly changing economic landscape, more and more 'competition', emotional insecurity, more people taking risks in starting a business without proper planning and without working with a coach to guide them along, and lastly due to bad teachers!
Actually, it is now common to receive from some of these marketers, 3-4 e-newsletters per week trying to overload you to get you to buy their products! And this is just the beginning.
With this said, if you can focus on marketing successfully the honest way by applying the three items mentioned above, you should find that business and profits flow to you more easily.
If you are following those three, but still not seeing great sales, then the issue is not in how you are offering those services, but rather whether enough people are finding out about your business or not. As I mentioned stay tuned for future articles on how to promote yourself using these 8 main marketing methods!
I hope this article stirs you to begin thinking about how you can come more from integrity, how you can improve your product or service, and how you can enhance your customer service through e-mail, by phone, and in person. ;)
Until next time, here is to your long term business success!
Thursday, 11 January, 2007
Welcome to my blog Small Business Marketing Success.
Stay tuned for new articles and opportunities coming soon.
Best Regards,
Joshua
Best Regards,
Joshua
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