Date: July 11th, 2012
Time: 5:30pm-7pm

Location: Studio E Gallery
4600 PGA Blvd Suite 101
Palm Beach Gardens, FL 33418

Charity: Global Refuge is an international relief organization that provides an emergency medical lifeline to innocent victims of war, infectious disease, and disaster.

1. The economy is expanding
2. Your business is growing
3. You are ready personally and financially

If you have survived the recession, stabilized your business, and are setting your sights on a healthy retirement, now is the time to begin focusing in on these three targets. Let us first consider timing your exit during an expanding economy.

Looking at past thirty years, we have seen the market start down at the beginning of each decade, run up to a peak, and then crash by the beginning of the next.

1980’s Started in recession – experienced unprecedented job/GDP growth – crashed with Savings & Loan debacle.

1990’s Started in recession – grew through globalization and technology – crashed with the internet bubble burst.

2000’s Started in recession – grew with low interest and inflation – ended with real estate market crash.

2010’s Started in recession – with 7.5 years to go?

While it is difficult to predict the future, we could assume that this decade and the next could cycle up and down much like the previous decades. If this holds true, you want to consider your timing during an expanding economy to be within a few years of 2015 or 2025.

Many of the owners I am working with today, I first met between 2004 and 2008. They invited me in to talk because they suspected it was a good time to consider a sale. Those that waved off the opportunity during that expanding economy and period of business growth did so because they were simply not personally ready.

As we discuss the recent past and look towards the future, they feel a little more anxiety about focusing on their timing. I understand why.

In the last decade, they were only 45 to 55 years old and feeling a little too young to retire. In this decade, they will be 55 to 65 years old, and they realize that by the middle of the next decade they will be 65 to 75 years old.

As we work towards growing their business from here, and recognize that economic forces could once again negatively affect their value in ten years from today, we are diligently focusing on preparing for readiness by 2015.

In every sales situation, your No. 1 job is to sell yourself to the customer. Here’s how.

Before anybody is going to buy from you or your company, they’ve got to “buy” the idea that you’re somebody worth working with. In other words, just like a job candidate, your first task is always selling yourself.

Here are a few ways to go about it.

1. Research the Target
Before visiting a customer, examine the company’s website. Notice how they communicate about themselves, how they view their market, and whom they see as their primary customers. Use Wikipedia and other online resources (like Hoovers.com) to learn the basics and the background of the industry and market. Then use LinkedIn and online news stories to learn about key individuals in the hiring firm, especially those working in sales and marketing.

2. Create a Story
At some point in the relationship, the customer is going to want to know what you’re all about.  The best way to give an impression of who you are is to tell a personal story about some event in your life that inspired your interest in what you’re selling: that is, your  company and your products.

For example, if you own a chemical wholesaler, start your story with the chemistry set that you had as a kid and explain how you’ve always been fascinated by how the chemical industry works.

3. Anticipate Inevitable Questions
Before buying, a  customer will want to know specifics about what you and your firm has accomplished.  “Tell detailed accomplishment stories that clearly illustrate the … challenge, what [you] did about it, what results [you] produced,” says Ford R. Myers, author of the newly published. Get the Job You Want, Even When No One’s Hiring.

4. Be a Professional
At the risk of stating the obvious, you don’t have a second chance to make a first impression. If your meeting with a customer is face to face, get lots of rest the night before, wear your best clothes, leave plenty of time for traffic, and arrive at least 10 minutes early.

Just before the interview starts, take a deep breath and focus on the task at hand. That’s not “making the sale,” but rather determining whether your offering actually match the customer’s wants and needs.

5. Ask Thoughtful Questions
Never ask questions that could be answered with a little research on the Web.  Instead, ask questions, and start conversations, that build on the research that you accomplished in Step 1–and which illustrate your business acumen.  Provide relevant examples of what you and your firm have accomplished in the past, and tie them into the requirements of the current situation.

6. Close on Next Steps
As the meeting comes to its conclusion, establish the way forward.  In most situations, this will be another meeting, or some form of communication.  Most importantly, you must follow up immediately on any commitment that you’ve made. A prompt follow-up tells your customer that you’ll do what’s necessary to make them more successful–without forcing them to wait for you.

Cost Effective Leads!!

As a business owner you don’t really care about the different tools, you just want to know your cost per lead/bid/closed sale. Since I utilizes all of the above tools, I wanted to share my thoughts:

• Before you spend it, decide how it will be measured- Always build the dashboard first. For instance, my cost effective, overseas telemarketers self manage everyday at the end of their shift. Variables tracked include quality of the list, % talked to, % long lead, % hot lead, etc. Bad lists are quickly shucked while good lists are called repeatedly.
• Spend Judiciously- A WordPress based site that is user friendly with all the SEO, blogging, social media and sharing capabilities can be done nicely for $500-1500. Also, a Virtual Assistance doing all that SEO and Social Media work for 2 hours per day can be had for $400(!) a month. Compare that against the cost of a full-time entry level marketing person- $35,000+/year?
• Easy to Use- Older websites were impossible to keep updated and fresh. One reason I recommend WordPress based sites is non-programmers can add fresh, new content. Even video blogs are relatively easy to do. Also since Google’s algorithm assigns a premium to fresh, new local content it is critical that a low cost and hassle free way is found to do this.
• Understand where your leads come from Now!- Forget all these fancy, internet tools. How do clients and referral sources find your business now? How are you found, researched, investigated and finally given a check?

Tony Schwartz, the president and CEO of The Energy Project and the author of “Be Excellent at Anything” shared in Harvard Business Review the magic of doing one thing at a time.

Why is it that between 25% and 50% of people report feeling overwhelmed or burned out at work?

It’s not just the number of hours we’re working, but also the fact that we spend too many continuous hours juggling too many things at the same time.
What we’ve lost, above all, are stopping points, finish lines and boundaries. Technology has blurred them beyond recognition. Wherever we go, our work follows us, on our digital devices, ever insistent and intrusive. It’s like an itch we can’t resist scratching, even though scratching invariably makes it worse.

Tell the truth: Do you answer email during conference calls (and sometimes even during calls with one other person)? Do you bring your laptop to meetings and then pretend you’re taking notes while you surf the net? Do you eat lunch at your desk? Do you make calls while you’re driving, and even send the occasional text, even though you know you shouldn’t?

The biggest cost — assuming you don’t crash — is to your productivity. In part, that’s a simple consequence of splitting your attention, so that you’re partially engaged in multiple activities but rarely fully engaged in any one. In part, it’s because when you switch away from a primary task to do something else, you’re increasing the time it takes to finish that task by an average of 25 per cent.

But most insidiously, it’s because if you’re always doing something, you’re relentlessly burning down your available reservoir of energy over the course of every day, so you have less available with every passing hour.

I know this from my own experience. I get two to three times as much writing accomplished when I focus without interruption for a designated period of time and then take a real break, away from my desk. The best way for an organization to fuel higher productivity and more innovative thinking is to strongly encourage finite periods of absorbed focus, as well as shorter periods of real renewal.

If you’re a manager, here are three policies worth promoting:

1. Maintain meeting discipline. Schedule meetings for 45 minutes, rather than an hour or longer, so participants can stay focused, take time afterward to reflect on what’s been discussed, and recover before the next obligation. Start all meetings at a precise time, end at a precise time, and insist that all digital devices be turned off throughout the meeting.

2. Stop demanding or expecting instant responsiveness at every moment of the day. It forces your people into reactive mode, fractures their attention, and makes it difficult for them to sustain attention on their priorities. Let them turn off their email at certain times. If it’s urgent, you can call them — but that won’t happen very often.

3. Encourage renewal. Create at least one time during the day when you encourage your people to stop working and take a break. Offer a midafternoon class in yoga, or meditation, organize a group walk or workout, or consider creating a renewal room where people can relax, or take a nap.

It’s also up to individuals to set their own boundaries. Consider these three behaviors for yourself:

1. Do the most important thing first in the morning, preferably without interruption, for 60 to 90 minutes, with a clear start and stop time. If possible, work in a private space during this period, or with sound-reducing earphones. Finally, resist every impulse to distraction, knowing that you have a designated stopping point. The more absorbed you can get, the more productive you’ll be. When you’re done, take at least a few minutes to renew.

2. Establish regular, scheduled times to think more long term, creatively, or strategically. If you don’t, you’ll constantly succumb to the tyranny of the urgent. Also, find a different environment in which to do this activity — preferably one that’s relaxed and conducive to open-ended thinking.

3. Take real and regular vacations. Real means that when you’re off, you’re truly disconnecting from work. Regular means several times a year if possible, even if some are only two or three days added to a weekend. The research strongly suggests that you’ll be far healthier if you take all of your vacation time, and more productive overall.

A single principle lies at the heart of all these suggestions. When you’re engaged at work, fully engage, for defined periods of time. When you’re renewing, truly renew. Make waves. Stop living your life in the gray zone.

Planning of acquiring business? There are a couple of things you definitely need to know before you sign that check Here’s some tips that you need to keep in mind.

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It can be a lonely world out there.  During the first days and weeks when you are just starting a new business, it can feel like you are alone in the wilderness.

When consulting with entrepreneurs that are struggling to get a business off the ground, I often end up telling them this:

I read a great book on starting your own business. It’s the most important book on the subject you could ever read—and it only had two words in it.

Those two words were “nobody cares.”

To close the story and make the point, I tell them that as an entrepreneur, your entire job is to make those two tiny, awful words wrong.

That’s it. Make people care about what you are doing.

The fact of the matter is that at first, people won’t care. People are busy. People won’t know who you are when you start out, and they won’t go out of their way to find out. As you create a business, and move beyond your product to the point where you are figuring out how to connect your product with the market, you realize that the whole purpose behind your effort is to get people to care about what you do. If you are in the computer business, it is not just about computers. If you are in the pizza business, it is not just about pizza. The best product in the world is just a starting point, and it won’t make you a dollar unless you can figure out how to make that product relevant to the lives of your customers and get them to under­stand that relevance. Having a great product helps, but that alone is not enough.

This bias toward customer indifference is a reality of the market. But to tell you the truth, I like the fact that getting into markets is tough, because that means that it is tough for my competitors too, and will serve to keep the folks in your market that aren’t smart enough or fast enough from hogging the swing set for too long.

Here are some hard-won lessons from INC Magazine for start-up survival which are worth more than a read—you might actually want to print them out.

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