I accept American Express in my business, as well as other credit cards. Some of my clients like to use their AMEX card and I want to accommodate them, of course. So I got a piece of snail mail just a few days ago from AMEX that promoted November 26, 2011 as “Small Business Saturday, a day when America comes together to celebrate the Shop Small movement and support small businesses like yours.”

They included a small decal I could put in the window of my business that proclaims “Shop Small – support your local small businesses.” AMEX is offering a $25 credit to card members who register their card for the Small Business Saturday and spend $25 or more at businesses like mine. “It’s all about YOU” proclaims their mailing.

Yeah, right.

I admit, I’m cynical on this one. A gigantic corporation is trying to hop on the small business/shop local movement. It motivates me even more to move forward with my idea to develop a local complimentary currency. If you really care about local small business, check out a RelyLocal in your area. Judy McKnight of Rely Local Hendersonville is a genuine LOCAL business person doing a fantastic job of supporting local small businesses. And you don’t even need an AMEX card.

What do I mean – “educate your customers.”? Well, consider this: many businesses focus solely on attracting new customers, but you NEED to spend a good chunk of your time retaining current and former customers. These are people you already know to be a good sales potential…they’ve already bought from you!

In fact, they are your goldmine.

Take the time to market and sell new products to your old customers and spend less time trying to sell old products to new customers and you will see a drastic change in your sales, customer quality and branding position.

Here are a couple of key elements to use to retain your current customers:

• Stay in contact: This means by phone, email, e-newsletter, even by snail mail (yes, it still works!).

• Post-Purchase Assurance: This means you need to follow up with customers. Your customers need to feel like they are being supported for their purchase and with the item they purchased. How many times have you purchased a product, then felt completely abandoned? Something as simple as a Thank You note with your contact or customer service information can go along way in retaining a great customer.

• Deals & Guarantees: Always offer your current customers the best deals and guarantees you have. Show them you appreciate their business or even come up with a club specifically to reward loyal customers. You can also do this with a preferred pricing option.

• Integrity: Using good business practices and simply upholding integrity, dignity and honesty go along way with customers. Let’s face it, there’s a lot of useless “smoke and mirrors” out there and the safer and more confident you make your customers feel, the more they will trust you and that makes for an amazingly supportive and loyal customer.

There are three cornerstone ideas to a successful business:

• Quality product/service
• Offering useful products/services that solve a problem for or enhance the life of a customer
• Providing products/services in areas that your customers find interesting.

Use this approach of educating your customers and offering them real information and insight and you will be rewarded with loyalty and success.

Stop wasting all your time on new prospects while your current customers fall by the wayside!

As Jay Abraham says, “Your best prospects are your existing customers. If you’ve been putting all your marketing efforts into acquiring new customers, stop and diverts some of your resources into reselling, upselling, cross-selling to those same customers. In every ways possible – through package inserts, regular mailings, special offers – stay in touch with those customers and get them used to buying from you.”

So, there it is!  I can help you put together the resources and tools to do exactly that. I can help you educate your customers and you can watch the benefits pay off many times over.

I always love when one of my clients gets some great publicity. My long time client, Alisha Navarro, owner of 2 Hounds Design and Wiggles, Wags & Whiskers, has one of her gorgeous dog collars featured in the holiday gift guide  of this week’s People Magazine (the one with Kate Middleton on the cover). Alisha is an amazing entrepreneur who’s hardworking team ( all her products are made in America!) creates beautiful custom dog collars and the best dog harness there is, the Freedom No-Pull Harness. I use the harness on my dogs and no more pulling – what a relief! And my dogs look great in their 2 Hounds Design collars.

Alisha uses www.helpareporter.com to take advantage of possible PR opportunities but this time she benefitted from her amazing “attraction” energy, as she had nothing to do directly with this latest media coup. Beth Ostrosky Stern (Howard Stern’s wife) is a big animal lover and she suggested Alisha’s collars to People magazine for the holiday gift guide.

Congratulations, Alisha!

You prospective customers and clients are unconsciously looking for any reason to say “no” to what you’re offering. Even though they may deeply need or want what you’ve got.

Yesterday I was about to make a purchase when my browser suggested there was somewhat of a problem with the security of the shopping cart. Now, I’m a veteran online shopper and never had a problem . . . until last month. I ignored a warning message and someone got my credit card number and immediately (and I mean immediately) charged a plane ticket on it.

Of course the credit card company issued me a new card, but what a hassle. So now I’m a bit gun shy. And when this site had a bit of a problem, I hesitated and decided to order over the phone. I called and got voicemail, so I left a message.

Then last night I realized that I could actually make do without buying that piece of equipment. I lost my willingness to shell out the bucks. So when they called me back almost 24 hours later, I wasn’t buying anymore.

Little things tripped up this sale for the company. A problem with their shopping cart. Then making me leave a voicemail on their toll free sales line. Then not returning my call for 24 hours.

In my small business coaching and consulting services, I help my clients take a magnifying glass to their sales process from start to finish. It’s not only, how do you GET a prospect, but also where can you LOSE a prospective customer? Where DO you lose them?

Never stop asking these questions – fix everything you can!

As someone who has been providing small business consulting services to small business owners for the past eight years, I have had the privilege of seeing what works and doesn’t work in many small businesses. Not to mention the 20 years I spent in small business before that, owning and running companies.

In order to help small businesses and their owners to thrive, I’ve put together this mini guide. I’m sure that whether you are just starting out or are a more seasoned business person, you will most likely get a few flashes of insight or recognition that will help you improve your business today.

Peter Drucker is famous for once saying that there are really only two core functions of any business: marketing and innovation – and that the rest are all costs. In this guide, I’m adding what I think are two additional core components for today’s small business person: productivity and planning for profitability. To me, this four legged stool provides you with a strong foundation from which to steer your business ship to continued and greater success.

INNOVATION: VALUE DELIVERY

First, our business must provide innovative products and services – ones that clients and customers need or want. The more we can put some extra value into our products and services, the more we can help people enjoy or benefit from them in a more effective or enjoyable way (innovation), the better we have served them and the better our business will do.

For example, I put extra value into my small business consulting services by giving my clients writing and editing help (this is very popular), free books when I think of one that would really help them (without overloading them with yet more to read!), birthday cards and other gifts to let them know I truly care about them and appreciate them being clients of mine, and in-person meetings when I am in their city or town.

Actually, innovation is typically what entrepreneurs love to do. So this one isn’t as tough, typically, as the other three legs.

MARKETING: GETTING THE WORD OUT, BRINGING THE PROSPECTS IN

I’d say a good portion of small business owners hate business development marketing. This is true despite the fact that they are in most cases the best ones to lead the marketing charge because of their passion for their products and services, their personal compelling story and their drive to have their company succeed.

Marketing for small business is, of course, how we get the word out to prospective customers, how we bring in the leads that our sales processes can then sell to. Small business marketing is of course a massive topic, and yet it’s easy to make it an overly
complex process, too. So here are three keys for marketing success.

#1. We have to start with WHO you think your target market is, or your “ideal client” as some like to call it, and work backward from there. There isn’t much in the world that “everybody” needs or wants. Even with such fundamentals as the food we eat, what one person chooses to eat can vary tremendously from the next guy or gal. So you MUST know WHO your business serves and then you must learn as much as you can about those people – their demographics, such as age and gender, location, and income, education, of course, but also their psychographics – attributes relating to personality, values, attitudes, interests, or lifestyles.

Then use all you have learned and make sure your marketing (including headlines and copy) really address the needs and wants of those people. Every business can be different, noteworthy and focused on a specific niche or demographic/psychographic.

#2. One key business marketing strategy is to use direct response marketing, not image or brand marketing (leave that to multinational corporations that sell to the mass consumer market like car companies, Proctor & Gamble, et al). You need marketing that incites the prospect to take an action and that action needs to be measurable. Then make sure you measure it! Track it. Tweak it. Rinse and repeat forever.

Remember the line about he business owner who says “50% of my marketing works great; I just don’t know which 50%”? You can’t afford to waste 50% of your marketing dollars or the time you and your team put into it.

#3. You need to be innovative, somehow unique, have a message. Don’t be afraid to be different – embrace it! It’s an interesting thing to me about the name of my company, Authentic Alternatives. I really liked it at the beginning, of course. A few years later I thought to myself “What a stupid name – nobody knows what it means, it’s not about business per se” – all those self-critical voices we get in our heads. Then a few years later I realized it really is a great name for my business, because it attracts the right kind of clients to me – business owners who march to the beat of a different drummer, who truly think outside the box, who want to be real (authentic) and who aren’t afraid to think a bit “alternatively.”

My advice to business is to make your business ABOUT something, like the way Subway repositioned itself to be about health and even weight loss. Pretty good trick for a fast food corporation!

It’s not easy getting noticed in this world of 7+ billion people and billions of marketing messages everywhere 24/7. So if you and your products need to be a little bit eye-opening and remarkable to reach the level of success you deserve.

PRODUCTIVITY: LIFE IS SHORT

As owner, if most of your day is not spent on innovation and/or marketing, you’re probably having a lot less success than you could be having. In the business coaching services I provide to business owners from a wide variety of industries, the same productivity principles apply, regardless of type of business. You must:

1) Manage your priorities
2) Manage your energy. (a better answer to time management for small business owners!)

Let’s look at each of these briefly.

Managing Priorities

Everyone knows they need to manage their priorities, but what does this really mean? The fact is, we all have too many priorities and too little time.

If you haven’t heard the story that Steven Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, passed along, it’s worth repeating. Pretend that a big glass jar represents your life. You have a bucket of sand and the sand represents all the hundreds of little things you need to do each day and every week. You have a bucket of big rocks and they represent your top priorities – the things that if you focus on them will bring you the true rewards you want from your business and life. If you put the sand in first, you won’t have room to cram in very many rocks. But if you put the big rocks in first, you can then pour the sand in and it will fill in all the space very nicely and it will all fit!

What this means is on a weekly and then daily basis you must decide what your big rocks are and then schedule them into your calendar. All the other stuff WILL either get done or if it doesn’t, your life won’t end.

In my small business coaching services, I recommend to my clients that they start by picking just three big rocks for the week and focus everything they can on those until they are done. My clients are high achievers, go-getters who set the bar for themselves very high. Most of the time – too high.

Even though they get a tremendous amount of work done, they continually feel either like failures or like they aren’t realty making progress. In fact, the opposite is usually true. They ARE making very good progress.

We need to open our eyes and be more aware of what the activities are that will truly move the ball forward for our business. If you know you really needs to upgrade your website for example but never seem to get around to launching the project, clear the decks!

Your email can wait, Twitter and Facebook can wait, your laundry can wait, doing someone’s performance review can wait.

You have to be RELENTLESSY FOCUSED on your big rocks. If you aren’t, the tsunami of “life” will roll over you and carry you far, far away at best and kill you at worst. So you must RUTHLESSLY protect your time and focus.

You have to develop a killer attitude toward your time, be as fiercely protective of it as a mother lion of her cubs.

If you have an open door policy, change it. You have to create chunks of time every day which are UNINTERRUPTED, meaning no drop ins (unless the building is on fire), no email (turn off sound alerts if you use them), no phone calls (let your voicemail take messages), no cell phone.

Think back to when you had a job and you went into the office on a weekend – how incredibly productive you were. Eliminating interruptions and distractions is a hugely important productivity strategy. Your customers, staff and family can live without you for a few hours. Really.

Managing Energy

What about managing energy? If you ever read The Power of Full Engagement by Loehr & Schwartz, you had your eyes opened about the fact that it’s not so much about time management as energy management.

Most small business owners run on adrenaline to fuel their endless activities. We know intellectually at least that long term a healthy and happy life cannot be sustainable if we run on adrenaline a lot of the time. None of us will fall apart if we have a cup or two of coffee, eat a candy bar now and then or short change sleep occasionally. However, if we overdo these, we will sooner or later start to be incredibly fuzzy and ineffective and head straight toward total burn out. Burn out can come in many forms, such as a failed business, a heart attack or a failed marriage. The Japanese even have a word for it: karoshi – death from overwork.

There’s been a ton written about work/life balance and the fact is running and growing a business is not for the land of “ideal work/life balance.” But what we can do is incorporate energy rituals into our daily lives. These are simple practices that take little time but serve to dramatically restore our energy and focus, our enthusiasm and commitment to the multitude of tasks at hand in running our businesses.

The term “creatures of habit” is incredibly important here – because all of us truly are creatures of habit. A huge percentage of what we do and think every day is habitual, meaning we don’t really think about it. This is a curse (if we have a bad habit) or a blessing (if we have a good one). If we can set up and program ourselves with just a couple key habits for positive energy management, we will experience a powerful and profound difference in how we feel about our business and in how well our businesses actually do!

So what am I talking about? An energy ritual will be unique to you and what it is that restores you. Since most of us overtrain emotionally & mentally and undertrain physically and spiritually, most of us need energy rituals that focus on the physical and spiritual.

Examples from clients of mine include:

- 10 minute break in your office doing a few stretches or yoga poses.
- Putting on your headphones and listening to music you love for 10 minutes.
- Reading 10 minutes from a book you find inspirational (e.g. the Dhammapada, the Bible, Tony Robbins, Martha Beck, etc.)
- 15 minute walk outside.
- 5 minute closed eye meditation break.

You want to put these into your daily routine and on your calendar when possible to take an energy break mid-morning and mid-afternoon. Also mid-evening if you’re working late. Implementing these energy rituals will take simple, small steps and will give you and your productivity a huge pay off.

Here are examples of the old paradigm (on the left) and the new paradigm (n the right):

Manage time ==> Manage energy

Avoid stress ==> Seek (positive) stress

Life is a marathon ==> Life is a series of sprints

Downtime is wasted time ==> Downtime is productive time

Rewards fuel performance ==> Purpose fuels performance (Intrinsic motivation provides more sustaining energy. i.e. wanting to do something because we value it for the inherent satisfaction it provides (versus extrinsic – money, approval, social standing, power, love)

Self-discipline rules ==> Rituals rule

The power of positive thinking. ==> The power of full engagement.
There’s a lot more to this, but I think even this info gives you an idea of how radically effective this new paradigm can be in your life.

PLANNING FOR PROFITABILITY: FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT

We’ve talked about the key things you need to know in marketing and productivity. The third leg of the stool is financial management. If you hate thinking about financial management, you have all the proof you need to understand why 90% of business failures are caused by a lack of financial management, not sales or marketing management!

Most entrepreneurs are great at innovation and creating new products, services and markets. They’re usually good at marketing and are able to be pretty damn productive, even if it may be in a chaotic way that’s less effective than it could be.

However, most of them struggle at financial management (in the beginning, at least, and often for years). The thing is, you don’t have to become a bona fide CPA! (You need a CPA, but you don’t have to BE one.) The cool thing is you’ll start to enjoy the feeling of power and control that you get once you have your arms around the basics and start to create and use some key metrics – critical indicators of how things are going in your business on a daily or weekly basis.

Yes, of course, you need to have your books done regularly, hopefully by a skilled bookkeeper. You need to review P & L’s monthly. But more than that you need to create a plan to be profitable, deciding what your financial goals are for the year and how you’ll get there and setting up a simple spreadsheet that compares your projections with actuals.

Although it is a popular tactic, it doesn’t actually help to stick your head in the sand when things aren’t going well. Knowledge – even when painful – is power. With the proper knowledge about how your company is doing financially, you can be successful. If not, there is a high chance that you’ll be closing your doors within a few years. Especially when times are tough. Like in a “great recession” (they aren’t going to say “depression,” are they?!)

In providing my advice for business, I make sure my clients have a solid profit plan and a good understanding of margins. And I help them identify those critical indicators they need to keep their finger on the pulse of their business.

IN CONCLUSION

Running and growing a small business can seem really complicated. So we have to apply models and systems that help us simplify things and get our arms around our businesses, both conceptually and then in actual daily practice. I hope that understanding these four legs of innovation, marketing, productivity and profit planning will help you do just that.

It’s easy to find companies making a multitude of business mistakes so I am happy when I find an example of a great business. A few months ago I wrote about my experience contacting a potential dentist after I moved to a new community. (If you missed it, you can read it here.) The very short version is they made a marketing error that at first blush cost them my patronage.

Several of you emailed me and suggested I send my article to the dentist. I considered this and hesitated because I didn’t want to come off sounding arrogant. After some thought, though, I went ahead and sent the article to the dentist, marked “personal and confidential” along with a short note with the intent of being helpful.

A day or two after I mailed the article and my note, the dentist called me up! He was not defensive. He took responsibility and appreciated my feedback. He said he had shared the letter with his staff in one of their twice a day staff meetings and they had a good discussion about it and how to rectify it in the future.

I was very pleased. The upshot was I scheduled my appointment. I was happy about this outcome, because his practice really sounded like a good fit for me.

If you’re like me, you get sick of marketing hype and are wary of claims. Although this dentist sounded good from his website and subsequent materials that were mailed to me, I was waiting to see how it actually was being there as a patient.

I am pleased to say his marketing was not overblown. It was indeed the most professional dentist I have ever been to. I was given a tour of the premises, the dentist introduced himself and I sat in an automatic massage chair for 15 minutes before my digital X-rays were taken. (Those things are pretty darn good!).

For their clients they have snacks and drinks available. I was shown some excellent videos on a computer about various topics. The dentist was very down to earth and open to my opinions. The dental hygienist gave me a terrific cleaning. A week later I had some fillings repaired and again I felt I was in very skillful hands.

This is one of those great examples of an unhappy customer who, when their problem is addressed and handled, becomes a happier customer than they were before. (Although in this case, I wasn’t a previously happy customer, I was an “almost never” customer.)

The takeaway for us business owners: When a customer complains, be grateful for the feedback, thank them and take action!

Here’s a quick story about how not understanding the long term profit value of your clients and customers can cost you dearly. Make sure you’re not doing this in your business!

Prior to our move back to North Carolina, I did some research for a progressive dentist who uses digital X-Rays and non-mercury fillings.

I found one who looked great and on inquiring via email about any new client specials was told that yes, they had one for $157. This included a full set of digital X-rays, a cleaning and exam. This seemed like a reasonable price to me. I told her it would probably be later in August since we would need time to settle in.

Last week I called to set up my appointment. Again, I was very impressed with how the staff talked with me as a new client. I even had the thought that sometime in the future I would write an Ordinary Brilliance article about how great this business is.

I mentioned that I had talked with someone earlier in the year and that she told me the fee would be $156. There was no specific response to this, so I thought all was well. They sent out a very nice welcome packet. In the packet it listed the fee for my visit as $212. This was 35% more than what I had been told, so I called up.

This time, I actually got the same woman I had talked to a few months prior. Oh, she said, that was a special going on at the time, but not now. Oh, I said, well I told you then that I wouldn’t be arriving in North Carolina until a few months later and you didn’t tell me that special would no longer be in effect.

“Well, do you want to keep the appointment?” she asked.

“No, thanks.”

“We’re here if you need help in the future,” she concluded.

I was really surprised she didn’t honor the special. The result? The dentist “saved” $56, but in actuality they lost thousands.

What is the Lifetime Value of a Customer for this dentist? I don’t know about you, but I tend to see a dentist regularly, and the same one. Since I plan to be here for a very long time, this dentist missed out on 20 – 30 years of servicing my dental needs. I’m not sure what his net profit margin is, but I’m sure we’re talking thousands of dollars of net profits. I think he was missing the forest for the trees, as the old saying goes.

What about you – are you splitting pennies and not focusing on the long-term value of a new customer? You MUST know how long the average client stays with you and what their average purchases are per year.

Then, and only then, can you make a reasonable guess as to what you can afford to spend to get a new customer. Don’t make the mistake this dentist did and “save” a few bucks and miss out on thousands of dollars of profits. Know your numbers and empower your staff to do the right thing for your long-term business success.

I scoped out a pet boutique in my new hometown of Brevard, NC and found out they’d only been open since the first of the year. It’s great to see evidence of the indominitable American entrepreneurial spirit – opening a retail store in the midst of a bad recession.

I did my part to support them and boost the local economy by getting some cat food. They did a good job passively upselling me at the checkout counter, as they had lots of cool little items for sale. I got two bumper stickers. Once says “Sleeps with dogs” which I gave to my partner and the other one is for me:

It’s on my desk, reminding me to keep the good energy flowing (I’m not a big barker, but sometimes . . .)

Nothing like something funny to sell stuff to happy customers!

Many of my clients and all of my coaching & consulting colleagues asks me: Does Twitter deliver results (as in bottom line results – profits!). And if so, how do you use it wisely and efficiently. I just read a great post on this very topic which gives a definitive “yes” to whether Twitter can yield good results for small businesses. In business & marketing we have to use our time incredibly wisely. It was very interesting to read about how a local pizza company is benefiting from Twitter.

The article also makes key differentiation between what to use Facebook for and what to use Twitter for. I’ve gotten some clients from Twitter. I think it can be used successfully by small business owners, but you must have and implement a good strategy.

I was on a business trip last week. Driving through the great state of Kansas on I-70, I approached a rise and suddenly saw the beautiful, huge blades of dozens of wind turbines. These amazing machines create electricity from the blowing wind.

While there’s no perfect solution for generating power, these babies rate pretty high in my book. I love looking at them, which cannot be said of the huge coal burning smoke stacks I passed by later in Tennessee.

Even just a few years ago, very few people were thinking about wind as a viable source of energy generation. Similarly, it’s amazing how many things we use or do or offer in our businesses today that we didn’t a few years ago. You’ve no doubt seen many changes in your own business. It may be changes in your products, services, location, ideal clients, production or operating processes, or other things. But change, as they say, is inevitable.

In business & marketing, we have to be flexible and open to new ways of generating revenue, serving our customers and delivering our products and services. There is usually some (or sometimes a lot!) of stress associated with change, yet we can truly see it for the positive expansions that it can bring to our businesses and our lives.

Let me share with you a couple of quick stories. As you read them, think about how you can evolve your own business game to benefit your customers and you.

Take residential real estate. One of my clients is the New York market manager for Redfin.com. Redfin is changing the traditional real estate game:

“Redfin is the industry’s first online brokerage for buying and selling homes, half Century 21 and half E-Trade. This means we know when you want to use the web and when you want to talk to a real person. Our goal is to change the real estate game in consumers’ favor by offering you more data, better-performing agents, and a significant commission refund.” I love it!

Here’s how a few of my other clients are shifting their businesses, embracing their equivalent of adding “wind power” to the mix:

* Buying a company that makes similar yet different (and patented) pet products when the owner of that company had to sell her business.

* Adding additional product lines, to stabilize and grow revenues for a home improvements business.

* Shifting from employee to consultant, with much greater flexibility and income.

* Working on a merger of two CPA firms to blend and mutually benefit from a tax expertise and an audit expertise.

Changes keep on blowing through!

So are you going duck for cover in the face of the winds of change? Or will you throw your kite into the air and maneuver it even higher? Opportunity is everywhere.

You wouldn’t think that my mom, age 77, a former college English teacher, would know much about business. But I’ve found that two of her life lessons contain some crucial things we business folks all need to understand and apply.

Lesson #1: Frugality for the good life

Mom was a child of the Great Depression. Her parents literally came over on the boat from Poland and both did manual labor to make ends meet for their family of seven. Yet, they always had a solid roof over their heads and good food on the table. (The other side of my family came over on the Mayflower, which makes me a typical American mutt.)

From this experience, Mom taught me the value of healthy frugality. She doesn’t waste things. And in business – especially in this recession – we need to be extremely good stewards of our resources.

Your greatest resource is people: you and your employees. When you truly get your employees on board with the vision and mission of your business, when you empower them, listen to them, and care about them, they can literally increase your business 25 or 50% or more.

Here’s an example: I just read in article in Inc. Magazine about a woman who owned a small upscale clothing shop in Missouri. She empowered her seven employees to get financially literate, teaching them about inventory turns and margins and how they relate. In October 2007 she did $55,000 in sales and a year later in October 2008 she did $81,000, in the midst of one of the worst recessions of our life times.

Lesson #2 Understand & use the wheel of life – wherever you are at the moment

Mom also taught me about the wheel of life. As a kid, I envisioned this as a Ferris wheel. She told me that things always cycle around – when you’re down, you will always come back up. Hard times cycle back to good times. My mom, an avid gardener, would probably put it in terms of nature – that winter always leads to spring and new growth. Keeping that perspective is vitally important at times like these!

Are you at the bottom of the wheel right now? Take heart. Remember the other times in your life when things looked bleak and you were ready to hang up the towel. Use that knowledge that you can get through anything.

Or perhaps you’re at the top of the wheel right now. Yes, even in our big, bad recession, some people are doing very well. I’m not telling you to start living in fear of the inevitable turn of the wheel. I’m reminding you to always have your Plan B, and Plan C. The most successful entrepreneurs are actually not really huge risk-takers. They take calculated risks, and hedge their bets.

One of my mentors recently reminded me that about 80% of the things you try in your business will fail, no matter how much you think they will do great. This means we will be “failures” most of the time!

Isn’t that amazing? In order to be very successful, you just have to fail more than others. You have to turn that wheel more times. So don’t be afraid of the low point of the wheel.
Just keep on turnin’. You’ll be at the top again before long.

You know moms are always right. So how can you apply my mom’s two business lessons today?

There’s one key thing you need to know to make 2009 a successful year for yourself. It’s something that never goes out of style, because it’s not about style. It’s about you being rock solid authentic in everything you do. There’s more hype than ever and we must all be diligent in avoiding hype and misrepresenting ourselves.

Your authenticity is a huge key to prosperity.

Marketing guru Gary Bencivenga talks about something he calls The Credo Technique. Credo is Latin for “I believe” and Gary believes, as I do, that we must never be afraid to say “with clarity and boldness” what we believe about our business, products and services.

The strongest marketing, says Bencivenga, tells the truth. It doesn’t have to exaggerate or lie to gather customers. It relies on the integrity of you and your business to set you apart in an overcrowded marketplace.

In other words, your authenticity.

The Credo Technique is an expression of our core values “which serve as a clarion call to gather the like-minded faithful of your marketplace.” Although people do buy products and services that are less than authentic, ultimately they respond well and for a long time to authenticity. Your product or service may not even be the best quality, but if your marketing conveys accurately your authenticity and trustworthiness, you and your enterprise will thrive.

New Coaching Club

I’ve launched a Green Business Coaching Club, designed for owners of small businesses with 0 – 10 employees to get vital help in growing their business and thriving personally.

There are monthly business development teleseminars on marketing, productivity and many other business topics, along with monthly phone-based mastermind groups where members get individual coaching from Coach Anne. Plus many more resources on the member-only website!

For a limited time there’s a $9.95 one month trial. Check it out at www.GrowYourGreenBusiness.com


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Gary Bencivenga, credo technique, authenticity, green business coaching
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How can incentives help your business not only survive these bad economic times, but thrive? Consider free gas certificates. Millions of Americans are feeling the effects of the highest gas prices we’ve ever seen. And they will only go up from here.

You have probably started to notice that some savvy business owners are helping customers and prospects compensate for this situation by offering free gas as an incentive to come into their stores or as a bonus when they make certain purchases.

In the past few weeks in my local paper I have seen a hearing aid that offered buyers a $100 gas card and a bank that offered new account holders a $50 gas card. A client of mine who does auto window tinting is offering customers a $100 gas card when they buy a $249 tint job. This promotion is bringing a lot of customers into his store where he sells 90% of them!

What these business people are doing is converting this reality of skyrocketing gas prices into an opportunity for their business by offering their customers free gas certificates.

Virtually every business in our community is offering some type of incentive — you see it every day. They’re used to promote business and lead generation. You have to have something that really gets people excited. Free gas is obviously something that most customers or potential customers can really use.

Using incentives like free gas certificates can accomplish a lot of things:
• Make your customers very loyal
• Increase your profit margins with no additional advertising
• Dramatically increase sales
• Promote higher margin sales
• Increase the length of service agreements
• Increase new customer traffic
• Offer promotions that tower above the competition
• Gain valuable information on potential customers
• Retain current customers
• Re-energize old customers
• Express appreciation
• Generate local media “buzz”
• Provide high-value, low-cost gifts

Whatever your business, you can offer an incentive. You can offer an incentive to test drive a car, to purchase a sofa, to spend X amount on golf clubs, to get your carpets cleaned, to upgrade a computer, to rent a car, to come in for a review of your tax, financial or estate situation, to try out a new health club for a month, etc.

As it turns out, oil companies are fiercely competitive. They are paying for loyalty. That is why business owners are not paying dollar for dollar for these certificates. These gas certificates cost pennies on the dollar. For example a $100 certificate costs as low as $10 and a $500 certificate as low as $14.

Banks, auto warranty companies, resorts, and many other kinds of companies pay anywhere from $10 to over $200 for a lead. Why? Because they know their conversion rates and the lifetime value of their customers!

Do you?

Whether you offer something like free gas cards or some other incentive, as long as you know your numbers, if you are making a satisfactory return on investment, you can afford to offer that type of incentive. Not only can you afford it, you’d be crazy not to do as much of it as you can!

It’s the same with the oil companies. They know people are habitual. And they want you to habitually choose their brand of gas, which is what the gas cards do.

So know your numbers: what you can afford to pay to bring in a prospect? You’ll need to know what percentage of them you can convert them to a paying customer. Then use a powerful incentive like free gas cards to bring them in and grow your business, even during a recession.

(And if you’re interested in gas cards, contact me at 970.672.4946 or visit here for more information.)