Times Are Getting Tough – Get Better At Marketing
With the slow down in the economy and tightening of the financial markets, times are tough in the retail and Small Business sectors. This could potentially result in a number of business failures. How do you protect your business from becoming one of the casualties? You have to operate better than you are today and […]
Small Business Strategy Made Simple
Many small business owners I talk to do not have a strategic or business plan of any kind. However, they do have reasonably clear ideas about where they’d like to take their business (and the challenges they face in doing so) and agree that some sort of strategic business plan would be helpful. So how […]
Creative Problem Solving
“Thank you for calling the Creative Business Seminars…. If you would like to become more creative …………Press 1 without touching your handset!” A cartoon by Randy Glasbergen caught my eye this weekend and it got me thinking – just what makes one person more creative in solving problems than another? Are there techniques that can […]
Decision Fatigue
My friend Patrick Halliday showed me this article on decision fatigue. I hope I’m not being too much of a geek showing it to you but it’s really interesting if you can get through it. For the attention-poor, here’s a summary: Making decisions is tiring. We get sick of it and less good at it […]
Who Is Your Target Market?
One of the biggest challenges in business can be identifying your target market. Who are they? Why do you need to know who they are? What benefit is it to you and your business? I have heard many people try to educate others on how to identify their target market and why it is important. […]
Business Travel – Friend or Foe?
Like a lot of people out there, I have had my share of corporate travel. In a previous life (one I left to join the world of small business to avoid) I was based in the Middle East for nearly 6 years and travelled internationally nearly every week. This takes its toll on lots of […]
The Single Most Important Question In Business
As business owners, we hear all the time that word-of-mouth is the best form of marketing. As a result, we focus on building our referral network – the group of people that know what we do, and can act as advocates for our business into the broader community. This is what word-of-mouth marketing is all […]
A Worthless Business Guru
Being a person who began writing with blue ink and a nib, I wish to know, if you have a blog that is 106 words long, is it technically a Twitter? Well now it is up to 145 words, so it must be a blog. Below is the juice. I was recently asked how to […]
Are You “Great” Or Just Doing OK?
In a recent article I posted to our Small Fish Blog ‘What makes a great business owner?’ the behaviours of great owners were discussed. To continue with this theme and to look at some more specific behavioural data, I have conducted some analysis of businesses I have had contact with recently as a coach. These […]
Thinking Is Free
The following passage is from a book called “Make Your Small Business Thrive” by Kevin Gilbert. “Thinking is free, so do it more often. It is amazing the amount of people who do things without knowing the reason why. Remove yourself from the hurley burley of day to day life, even for an hour, and […]
Are You Getting Referrals?
Spruiking BNI (Which Has Nothing To Do With Small Fish)
It feels a bit strange to write a story about another business, one which has many flaws and frustrations (bureaucracy, anyone?) and to be telling you all how helpful it’s been for our business. It has, though and this despite its flaws. BNI is a global franchise, thousands of chapters and millions of dollars of […]