Wondering exactly who you can best serve in your small business? Here are a few ways to hone in on your target market.

1. Draw a picture of your ideal customer (or client). How old? What gender? How does this person dress? Where does the person shop? What does she (or he) spend discretionary income on? Has she (or he) bought products or services similar to yours before? 
2. Figure out where your target market hangs. If you had 3 tickets that would take you anywhere you could meet potential customers or clients, where would the tickets take you? Where online would your target market be found? Where locally?
3. Once you have some ideas about who your prospects are, flip your questions around. Can you describe who you are not targeting? Who would be your least ideal customer or client? Where would they never hang out?

I was listening to a video interview the other day with Ramit Sethi, who was talking about why business owners fail when their target markets and what they offer are too broad. He used the term “ultimate specificity.” Make sure what you offer has ultimate specificity, and make sure who you are looking to serve is as specific as possible, too. Keep honing it down.

You make it so much easier for yourself as a small business owner AND for the people who truly want and need your services to find you when you have this focus and clarity. Work at answering all the questions above – and if you need help, let me know!

Here’s to genuine, unstoppable growth for you and your business.

The post Tips for Small Business Owners – How to Find Your True Target Market appeared first on Business Consultant, Book Yourself Solid Coach, Confident Marketer.

The other day another small business owner complained to me that her business had picked up, but she was almost too rushed to get her customer’s work done. I’d have laughed at the thought of being too busy to actually service a customer, but I could tell she was really frustrated and totally serious.

As I listened, I realized that her problem was one I’ve been seeing lately, especially among service professionals. She is actually marketing too much! Or, to say it more succinctly, she is wasting some of her precious time marketing in ways that don’t serve her business.

Here are the traits I see in the service professionals who are marketing too much:

1. They are bright and have a strong desire to do well.
2. They listen to the latest trends in marketing and work to apply what they hear to their businesses.
3. Their marketing is done from a crisis platform – they hear about something they should be doing and race to implement the new thing without an overall perspective or plan.
4. They handle most of their marketing efforts themselves, so anything new they adopt is, by default, only half understood and their efforts are not to a level where they will see big results (because of their lack of time, not because they are lazy).
5. They are infamous for never stopping to measure the results of their feverish marketing activities.

There’s one key element of marketing that these worn-out small business owners have failed to use, and that is to put your marketing efforts only into the places that matter most for your business. Don’t try every new trick that comes out of the bag. Think it through, experiment a little if it makes sense, and evaluate success with real numbers. It’s a total waste of your time and money to market where your prospects aren’t.

I’ve just launched a brand new training product for you about this very topic. It’s called How To Create Step By Step Marketing Campaigns for Your Small Business and it teaches you my fail-safe 6-step planning system. You can check it out at this link:  http://confidentmarketer.com/business-products/marketing-campaign/

Don’t be marketing too much – you don’t have the time and won’t see a good result. Do just enough, at the right time, and in the right places. I’ll show you how.

The post Marketing for Service Professionals – Are You Doing Too Much? appeared first on Business Consultant, Book Yourself Solid Coach, Confident Marketer.

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post about the problems small business owners have with finding and keeping great team members. You can find that post at http://confidentmarketer.com/2013/04/29/get-team-building-right/. It created a lot of discussion and several questions from readers. The pool of workers available for hire and the skills they need to be successful in an Internet-based business was still on my mind when I went over to De Soto National Memorial, literally up the beach from our Florida home.

As every schoolchild knows, Hernando de Soto was a Spanish explorer who was the first to land on the Gulf side of Florida and the first European known to have crossed the Mississippi River. What I didn’t know is that De Soto was still a teenager when he landed on what is now Florida’s Tampa Bay. Not only did this 19 year old command the ships that came to the New World in search of gold, he had already been on an expedition to Peru and returned to Spain before setting out once again, this time to find gold and a route to China through North America. De Soto left home at age 14 to seek his fortune, and by 19 was commanding an expedition across the seas.

Contrast that to today’s 14 to 19 year olds. I know teens de Soto’s age who have never made their own bed, done their own laundry, worked for pay, or ever spend a night away from their parents. Our teenagers are not thought of as capable of much responsibility or independence. And yet, we have a generation of teens who are, no doubt, far more educated than de Soto was. And from what I can see, when we challenge our teens and give them responsibility many step up with creative, innovative ideas and show just how much they are capable of.

The keys are expectations and encouragement of independence. I see a lot of teens from whom not much is expected and for whom independence is not encouraged. This hurts us with social issues now, and in the long run gives us a labor force that will not serve our economy. This is one big reason why it’s so hard to find great team members for your business today. We are reaping what we have sown in the past few generations. Want more proof? Ask any human resource manager for any mid to large-sized corporation about worker stability, willingness to learn, willingness to step it up. You’ll get an earful.

I believe that today’s children and teenagers are our future. The more we can encourage and coach our teens to be responsible, flexible, and unstoppable the better off our businesses will be. We need teens whose parents teach and accept risk taking, teach and expect independence and performance, teach and foster a sense of adventure and a fearless attitude. Those children are the ones who will have a life of accomplishment and financial independence. The thirty year olds who are still living at home and borrowing money from mom and dad will have a dependent and fearful mindset – by de Soto’s standard they have already missed the mark.

Just as I was writing this blog, a friend sent a link to a recent Huffington Post article “Have American Parents Got it All  Backwards“ by Christine Gross-Loh. Click on that title to give the article a look and see what you think. I have long noticed that children in other cultures behave differently than children in this country and work either at home or outside the home at a much earlier age. In Bali I discovered that temper tantrums didn’t exist – and when Balinese hear a foreign child throwing one they come running, thinking there is a life threatening situation. 

Small business owners need team members who are creative, flexible, technologically savvy, and have outstanding interpersonal skills. It’s very difficult to find that, as any business owner will tell you. Let’s do a better job of helping our children and teens believe in themselves and what they can do independent of the ever-watchful eyes of their parents and teachers. Let’s teach taking risks and dreaming big. Let’s teach self-responsibility. Let’s hold our children’s hands not to keep them where we are comfortable but to lead them where they are uncomfortable, where they will be challenged to think and act like true adventurers and explorers of their own new world.

The post Children, Risk, and Successful Small Businesses appeared first on Business Consultant, Book Yourself Solid Coach, Confident Marketer.

My grandfather used to say “I’ll take buckshot over a bullet in my butt anytime.” (My grandfather was a working carnie, and had a mouthful of colorful language.) Why did Granddad prefer buckshot? Because buckshot is scattered, not targeted. And it doesn’t go as deep when it hits.

I see small biz owners who don’t have much background in marketing take the buckshot approach all the time. Someone has told them they should “try everything” and by spreading themselves so thin they get not much in return. You can’t market effectively using a buckshot approach – you may hit a few targets but not precisely and not very deep.

A marketing campaign is a series of activities that help promote one of your products or services. An effective campaign has three components:

1. You know what you want to accomplish (set a specific objective)
2. You select ways to market (marketing channels) that make sense for you
3. You set up measures of success for the campaign.

Notice #2. Not all ways to market will make sense for your business – and this is what I often see go wrong. Biz owners pick the wrong way to market, or use too many ways to market, and get a bad result.

Here are some campaign types that might work for you (depending on your situation):

• Welcoming new customers, clients, or members with additional information and a special offer
• Creating opportunities to educate prospects about what you offer
• Special offers and promotions based on the calendar or a special event
• Membership drives
• A special event for prospects or for existing customers
• Information sharing through social media
• Announcements of new products or services
• Goodwill campaigns (holiday cards, birthday cards)

This isn’t a comprehensive list of every campaign type there is, but it’s a good start. Think about what type of campaign makes good sense for you. Put specific, measurable goals to it. Maybe you want to increase your list of prospects by 25%. Write out a plan and implement it, sticking to it all the way to the end, then measure your success. Don’t jump ship in the middle of a campaign and go off to try something else. Bright shiny object syndrome will ruin your marketing efforts!

Just remember that you want to be opposite from my grandfather. He preferred buckshot to bullets, but you want a bullet that hits your target and goes deep. My grandfather would be shaking his head.

Do you need help sorting out the best marketing for your business? I’m hosting a free, open access Q&A call on Tuesday, May 7th, you can call in and ask me any question. No pitches, just questions and answers. You can register for the call at this link: http://confidentmarketer.com/may7opencall/. Hope to see you there!

The post Which Works For Your Small Business – Bullets or Buckshot? appeared first on Business Consultant, Book Yourself Solid Coach, Confident Marketer.

There’s something stirring in the small business world that bothers me, so today I thought I’d talk about it. More and more frequently I hear war stories of small business owners who have big issues with the team members they’ve hired to help them grow their business. It doesn’t matter whether the team members are contract workers or regular employees.

From the small business owner’s perspective, the issues seem to be:

1. Team members not being accountable for the time they work.
2. Team members starting to show disinterest, lack of follow through, or sloppy work.
3. Team members not showing up when expected or performing at a less than needed level.

It’s definitely true that it is far more difficult to find qualified team members now than it was 10 years ago. Despite all the talk about a waning economy some people who need work just do not have the skills needed to be a team member for a constantly-changing small business. Why? Because you need team members with a high level of competence in technical skills as well as great interpersonal skills. So if you have found team members, you want to do all you can to bring them up to speed about your business, your work style, and your expectations.

Here are my top 5 suggestions for you:

• Make pay incentive based when you can. People perform when they have skin in the game. If you are paying on a commission basis increase the commission after certain levels of performance have been reached.
• Spend time getting to know your team members, find out what each one really loves and does super-well. You may find ways a person can help you even more than you thought was possible at first.
• Get the team together (even if it is virtual) on a weekly basis. Talk about where you business is going so that people can share your vision. Don’t just hand them unrelated tasks to do – they can’t see the whole of where you are going.
• Invest in your team members. If someone has completed their probationary period consider paying for training they need to do your work. Start small, but invest.
• Expect super-high performance, and set the standard by making sure your performance is high. For example, don’t expect team members to show up to a virtual or live meeting on time if you are consistently 5 minutes late.

My two main beliefs (based on years of experience in leading teams as large as 52 people doing millions of dollars worth of work each year) are these:

1. Hire slowly and fire quickly. When it starts feeling off nip it right then.
2. Hire for attitude and train for the skills you need (if at least basic skills are present). No matter how tech-savvy someone is, a bad attitude will make your life miserable.

Do you need help in creating or managing your team? You can work with me in a One and Done session by clicking here.

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For some strange reasons that have to do with my health insurance company’s bureaucracy, I’m now a resident of Florida for medical purposes. Which means I’ve had the unpleasant task of finding new doctors for all the stuff I need, ophthalmology being one. Given the aging population that tends to reside in Florida, there are a zillion eye docs and a zillion orthopedic surgeons, so standing out above the crowd is hard to do.

On the advice of a few friends here I made an appointment with Brian Foster, M.D. who is an ophthalmologist here in Bradenton, where I live now and then. Imagine my surprise when I walked into the reception area and spied this sign (see picture) sitting on the counter. When have I ever seen such a sign in a large medical practice? Never! The receptionist was helpful, gave me great eye contact, signed me in and assured me I would not be waiting long. (She was right, I barely got myself into a waiting room chair and I was called by the nurse.)

The eye exam was cheerfully and expertly done, and soon enough I was passed along to the doc himself. After he did his exam, he told me that I really didn’t need to come back in for two years, even though most docs would push for an annual eye exam. I was shocked, for most docs will be happy to sell their services to you as often as they can. He invited me to call him if I had any eye problems, and I was done.

That exam was late Wednesday afternoon. Friday morning, a packet arrived in the mail with the following items:

• A personal note thanking me for choosing Dr. Foster as my eye doc
• A business card with his private voice mail number on the back (see the picture)
• Two extra business cards to pass along to friends who might be looking for an ophthalmologist.
• A small half-sheet flyer that listed their eye treatment services.

I can honestly say I can never ever recall being thanked for becoming someone’s patient, much less receiving a business card with a private line inviting me to call if I had problems. This group has a smart marketer along with well-trained physicians. Dr. Foster will keep my business for three reasons:

1. He and his staff are kind, compassionate, and very expert at what they do
2. The practice runs its appointments on time
3. I’m impressed by their welcoming attitude and follow-up marketing.

What could you do in your own business to follow Dr. Foster’s example? In an hour we could lay out a plan for increasing your word of mouth referrals, making sure your process for welcoming new clients wows them, and laying out how you follow up. You can schedule that with me by clicking here.  Client attraction and retention work when you have a system in place.  Let’s set up yours.

The post 3 Ways My Eye Doc Keeps My Business – Small Business Success Tips appeared first on Business Consultant, Book Yourself Solid Coach, Confident Marketer.

If you’ve been a part of the small business community for very long, you’ve heard the term “bright shiny object syndrome.” People who own their own business tend to have BSOS – which means we flit from new idea to new idea, never really stopping to fully let any one idea mature into a money maker. This happens for a few reasons:

1. We are curious.
2. We are creative.
3. We tend to be impatient, wanting quick success.
4. We doubt ourselves easily, so when a product or service we’ve thought of doesn’t work out right away we start thinking it isn’t a good idea and look for something else to take its place.
5. We get excited easily about new ideas.
6. We often need help to look at our ideas through the lens of how to develop it, let it mature, and monetize it.
7. We tend to lack self-discipline.

On the other hand, successful small business owners know that their willingness to try new things is what will eventually bring them multiple streams of income.  They will let an idea that didn’t work very well the first time around mature into something that is a money maker. So, how do we balance the courage to change things around with the desire to stay away from bright shiny object syndrome?

Steve Martin is a great example of someone who has tried new things but not fallen into BSOS. Orginally the comedian we all have come to know and love, Martin built upon his celebrity success by expanding into new things he wanted to learn. Besides great success as a comedian, he is an actor, an author, and now a bluegrass musician with several albums to his name. Does he suffer from BSOS? Let’s see….

1. He is curious.
2. He is definitely creative!

But here’s where Martin deviates from BSOS. 

1. He studies each new craft before he puts it out into the marketplace – he isn’t impatient with it. 
2. He doesn’t doubt that he can do it – he disciplines himself to work at it until he gets it right, allowing his new ideas to mature.
3. He knows how to use his success and status in one area (comedian, actor, author) to build his multiple streams of income into new areas (musician.) 
4. He also knows the value of getting help (his newest bluegrass album is with Edie Brickell, a singer-songwriter who happens to be Paul Simon’s wife).

And one last thing – all of Martin’s endeavors still fall into the broad category of entertainment. He stays true to what he is, and he pushes himself to learn new things that interest him within that entertainment category. He doesn’t flit from entertainment to medicine to surfing.

If you are a small business owner who always wonders whether your new ideas are worthy or just BSOS, ask yourself a few key questions.

1. Is this new idea something that fits into my existing broad category of business?
2. Am I willing to discipline myself to learn about this thoroughly and stick with it until it matures and can monetize?
3. Am I willing to get the help I need to flesh it out?
4. Can I see a path toward making money with it?
5. Does it detract or add to my core business?

You can get help from me by browsing over to my Money Maturity  program, which helps you get clear about your “broad category” and how to create a business model that supports the life you want. Check it out here: http://bit.ly/myownmoney. Be like Steve Martin – wildly successful, creative, and money savvy.

The post Does Steve Martin Have Bright Shiny Object Syndrome? appeared first on Business Consultant, Book Yourself Solid Coach, Confident Marketer.

Have you noticed that lately I’ve been blogging a lot about money and finances for small business owner? It’s because the number one reason small businesses fail isn’t a lack of passion by the owner, it’s a lack of money in their pocket. I’ve seen small business owners who have a very low net worth get into debt that a millionaire would have trouble getting out of. It’s a waste. It’s a waste of their financial future, and it’s a waste of a valuable product or service that could help others.

There are 3 main reasons small business owners often lack cash flow.

1. They price their product or service too low, trying to catch a “broad” market. Instead they catch no one, or else they catch lots of customers who don’t value their time or product and don’t pay up.
2. They have used credit cards to get started in business (which might be OK up to a point) and now find themselves working to pay creditors instead of working to pay themselves. They can’t grow fast enough to overcome their debt, and their worry about it causes them to lose focus on their business. Bad news.
3. They don’t understand and closely watch their cost of doing business (overhead or operating costs). This will kill a small business owner faster than just about anything else. If someone tells you that you can open a business for $100 total (and those people are out there, for sure) run the other direction fast! To open a LEGITIMATE business you will definitely spend more than $100. Think about licensing, permits, merchant account fees - you’ve spent more than $100 on that alone and you have not even opened your doors or launched your website yet.

Can you open a business without huge dollars backing you up? Yes, you can. But you can’t open a business for free. Not understanding that fact causes people to jump in too fast and sink before they ever even swim.

You can work with me in 4 sessions to settle out these 4 questions:

• What’s your picture for your life right now and as you get older?
• What’s your business model and does it support your picture?
• How can you lower your costs of doing business?
• What is the fastest path to increasing income right now?

If that’s something helpful to you, check out the details here:  http://confidentmarketer.com/get-money-mature/.

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Before I left the corporate world it was my responsibility to trek up to Washington, D.C. and bring home large contracts that would give my staff of 52 people something to do – money that would pay their salaries and mine. If I didn’t bring home the bacon, I had no budget and had to lay staff off. Needless to say, the pressure to do well in selling our services was very high. I can’t tell you the number of times I caught the 5:30 AM flight up to D.C., met with potential clients all day long, had lunch and dinner with existing clients, and flew home on the 11:00 PM flight. Exhausting, but that’s the way it was done.

In the years I spent selling services to government clients, I learned a thing or two. One of the most obvious was that no one would respect you, your team, or the work you did if you tried to give it away for free. Yet I see small business owners offer free samples of their work (free massages, free consultations, free samples of baked goods). Do people take the free samples? Yes, they do! But does that translate into top of mind awareness about your business so that next time they need a baked good they come looking for you? No, it does not!

Free and “too cheap” are not good ways to increase your sales and make more money. I learned the hard way that pricing your services too low creates suspicion in a savvy buyer. Once when I was on one of those D.C. marketing trips I proposed doing a piece of research for a new client and took a little off the price, hoping to hook him. The first words out of his mouth were “You can’t properly do this research for that money, this shows me you are not expert at what you do.” And he went with another research firm at $100,000 more than I had proposed. You can bet I didn’t make that mistake again!

Don’t teach people to wait until you offer special deals, sales, or free tastes – you are teaching a bad habit and you are not respecting your own time and work. If you don’t respect your expertise and your time, no one else will, either. Research has shown that using the word “free” doesn’t engage prospects. Freeloaders are just that – they are after stuff that doesn’t cost them a thing. Freeloaders will never become your ideal client or customer.

Instead of using the word “free” in your marketing, use the word “new.” Prospects will respond to “new.” They will also respond to something that adds value – so try adding something into what you propose to do for them instead of throwing free stuff at them. You will increase your sales and make more money.

If you’d like to know more about creating a mindset and systems that give you ease and less worry over money, join me on April 10th for “The ABC’s of Money Maturity – How to Decrease Your Worries, Feel Less Guilt, and Change Your Feelings About Your Financies.” You can go to this link to get your ticket, and you’ll immediately receive a self-assessment with a worksheet that will help, too.

The post How To Increase Sales and Make More Money In Your Small Business appeared first on Business Consultant, Book Yourself Solid Coach, Confident Marketer.

We form our impressions and beliefs about money at a very early age. Do you remember what your parents and grandparents told you about money? I do – my grandparents had to make ends meet through the American Great Depression, and my parents were young children at that time, too. Consequently, my parents often said to me “you think money grows on trees?” If you heard that expression, too, then you know you were taught a mindset that money has to be hard to make and hard to come by. Not a great mindset for a business owner, is it?

I remember as a little kid really feeling sad that my parents felt so anxious about money – even though my father, who literally was a rocket scientist at NASA, made a good living. Neither of them could ease up about money. One April Fool’s Day, wanting to lighten up their frame of mind, I sneaked out early in the morning with some tape and 50 one dollar bills, and I taped them all to a scrawny little fruit tree my dad had planted in the front yard of our new home. Later that morning I waited until both my parents were in the front yard and watched as their eyes grew wide at the sight of dollar bills hanging from the tree. They never did ease up much on their fear of not having money, but they sure quit telling me and my brother that money doesn’t grow on trees!

When I work with small business owners it’s easy for me to quickly tell whether they have a limiting mindset about money. A limiting money mindset (which I have come to call money immaturity) means that every single time a decision has to be made by that person she will think small, box herself in, and choke off the big possibilities for her business. Money immaturity translates to being risk adverse, anxious, and fear-based – none of which will help you grow a business to the point that you can have the life you want for yourself and your family.

Sometimes I have to focus on building money maturity with my clients – and if they don’t make this critical switch it almost always ends up that they slog along, barely making ends meet, always worrying about cash flow. Here’s the thing – what we put our attention on grows. Money is no exception.

Are you money mature? Here’s a quick self-assessment for you.

• You track your income and expenses weekly for your household and your business.
• You know what percentage of gross income your operating costs are for your household and your business.
• You have hired a bookkeeper for your business.
• You do not take money out of the business when cash comes in to squirrel away in your wallet or give to a kid.
• You have a written budget against which you measure how much you are spending for what.
• You pay bills each month well before the due date, no last minute panic.
• You are comfortable quoting prices for your products or services.
• You have a disciplined savings plan for your business.
• You have a plan to give back to your community from your business profits.
• You don’t squirm away from writing down how much you really want to make in a year, just in case you don’t make it or someone will see it and think you are too grabby.
• You are comfortable in a room with your peers talking about projected sales and profit margins for the remainder of this year.

Both women and men suffer from money immaturity, but I think women are the most hesitant to sit down and talk about the green stuff. As a business owner, you are the shepherd of your income, so I’m telling you that it’s good to have an open mindset and a belief that you can create the income you need through using your skills and talents to help others solve their problems. It really is just that simple.

Because money immaturity for small business owners is so common, I’ve decided to host an interactive webinar on April 10th. I’d love to have you join me, or share this with anyone you know has money mindset issues. I’ll be teaching about The ABC’s of Money Maturity – How To Decrease Your Worries, Feel Less Guilt, and Change Your Feelings About Your Finances.

I’d love to help you change your mindset, start dealing with your income (no matter what the level) with ease, quit feeling lost or panicked, and create more income when you need it. It’s such a relief to switch your mindset and your actions, releasing the worries and putting your energy into your life and your business, watching both change and grow. Money worries disappear because you take the guess work out of what you’re doing. And magically enough, because you are watching and talking about the green stuff, more of it starts showing up for you. Click here to get a ticket to The ABC’s of Money Maturity – you’ll get a worksheet right away, and I’ll see you on the webinar soon!

The post Do You Show Signs of Money Maturity In Your Small Business? appeared first on Business Consultant, Book Yourself Solid Coach, Confident Marketer.