Business growth tips for SMB from author Eric Gilboord

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04/26/2012

10 Things You Can Learn From the Apple Store

04/25/2012

April 09, 2012
By Guy Kawasaki

10 Things You Can Learn From the Apple Store My friend, Carmine Gallo, has written a book called The Apple Experience: Secrets to Building Insanely Great Customer Loyalty. The Apple Store is the most profitable retailer in America, generating an average of $5,600 per square foot and attracting more than 20,000 visitors a week.

In the decade since Steve Jobs and former head of retail, Ron Johnson, decided to reimagine the retail experience, the Apple Store not only reimagined and reinvented retail, it blew up the model entirely and started from scratch. In his research for The Apple Experience, Carmine discovered ten things that the Apple Store can teach any business in any industry to be more successful:

1. Stop selling stuff. When Steve Jobs first started the Apple Store he did not ask the question, “How will we grow our market share from 5 to 10 percent?” Instead he asked, “How do we enrich people’s lives?” Think about your vision. If you were to examine the business model for most brands and retailers and develop a vision around it, the vision would be to “sell more stuff.” A vision based on selling stuff isn’t very inspiring and leads to a very different experience than the Apple Retail Store created.

2. Enrich lives. The vision behind the Apple Store is “enrich lives,” the first two words on a wallet-sized credo card employees are encouraged to carry. When you enrich lives magical things start to happen. For example, enriching lives convinced Apple to have a non-commissioned sales floor where employees feel comfortable spending as much time with a customer as the customer desires. Enriching lives led Apple to build play areas (the “family room”) where kids could see, touch and play on computers. Enriching lives led to the creation of a “Genius Bar” where trained experts are focused on “rebuilding relationships” as much as fixing problems.

2 Minute Video with Eric - 9 Rules for Thinking Outside the Box

04/23/2012

2 Minute Video with Eric - Marketing It's Harder Than It looks

02/28/2012

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Harder but not impossible. Get answers to your marketing questions here.

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12 Things Highly Productive People Do Differently

02/21/2012

12 Things Highly Productive People Do Differently
by MarcandAngel.com

“Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is specifically your own.”
– Bruce Lee

Being highly productive is not an innate talent; it’s simply a matter of organizing your life so that you can efficiently get the right things done.

So, what behaviors define highly productive people? What habits and strategies make them consistently more productive than others? And what can you do to increase your own productivity?

Here are some ideas to get you started…

Create and observe a TO-DON’T list. – A ‘TO-DON’T list’ is a list of things not to do. It might seem amusing, but it’s an incredibly useful tool for keeping track of unproductive habits, like checking Facebook and Twitter, randomly browsing news websites, etc. Create one and post it up in your workspace where you can see it.
Organize your space and data. – Highly productive people have systems in place to help them find what they need when they need it – they can quickly locate the information required to support their activities. When you’re disorganized, that extra time spent looking for a phone number, email address or a certain file forces you to drop your focus. Once it’s gone, it takes a while to get it back – and that’s where the real time is wasted. Keeping both your living and working spaces organized is crucial. Read Getting Things Done.
Ruthlessly eliminate distractions while you work. – Eliminating all distractions for a set time while you work is one of the most effective ways to get things done. So, lock your door, put a sign up, turn off your phone, close your email application, disconnect your internet connection, etc. You can’t remain in hiding forever, but you can be twice as productive while you are. Do whatever it takes to create a quiet, distraction free environment where you can focus on your work.
Set and pursue S.M.A.R.T. goals. – These goals must be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. Read more about this here.
Break down goals into realistic, high impact tasks. – Take your primary goal and divide it into smaller and smaller chunks until you have a list of realistic tasks, each of which can be accomplished in a few hours or less. Then work on the next unfinished, available task that will have the greatest impact at the current time. For example, if you want to change careers, that goal may be driven by several smaller goals like going back to school, improving your networking skills, updating your resume or getting a new certification. And each of these smaller goals is supported by even more granular sub-goals and associated daily tasks. And it is these small daily tasks that, over time, drive larger achievement.
Work when your mind is fresh, and put first things first. – Highly productive people recognize that not all hours are created equal, and they strategically account for this when planning their day. For most of us, our minds operate at peak performance in the morning hours when we’re well rested. So obviously it would be foolish to use this time for a trivial task like reading emails. These peak performance hours should be 100% dedicated to working on the tasks that bring you closer to your goals.
Focus on being productive, not being busy. – Don’t just get things done; get the right things done. Results are always more important than the time it takes to achieve them. Stop and ask yourself if what you’re working on is worth the effort. Is it bringing you in the same direction as your goals? Don’t get caught up in odd jobs, even those that seem urgent, unless they are also important. Read The 4-Hour Workweek.
Commit your undivided attention to one thing at a time. – Stop multi-tasking, and start getting the important things done properly. Single-tasking helps you focus more intently on one task so you can finish it properly, rather than having many tasks started and nothing finished. Quickly switching from task to task makes the mind less efficient. Studies have shown that changing tasks more than 10 times during an 8-hour segment of work drops a person’s IQ by an average of 10-15 points.
Work in 90 minute intervals. – In an interview with The Globe and Mail, Tony Schwartz, author of the NY Times bestseller The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working, makes the case for working in no more than 90 consecutive minutes before a short break. Schwartz says, “There is a rhythm in our bodies that operates in 90-minute intervals. That rhythm is the ultradian rhythm, which moves between high arousal and fatigue. If you’re working over a period of 90 minutes, there are all kinds of indicators in your physiology of fatigue; so what your body is really saying to you is, ‘Give me a break! Refuel me!’”
Reply to emails, voicemails, and texts at a set times. – This directly ties into the ideas of single-tasking and distraction-avoidance. Set specific time slots 2-3 times a day to deal with incoming communication (e.g. once at 8AM, once at 11AM, once at 3PM), and set a reasonable max duration for each time slot. Unless an emergency arises, be militant about sticking to this practice.
Invest a little time to save a lot of time. – How can you spend a little time right now in order to save a lot of time in the future? Think about the tasks you perform over and over throughout a work week. Is there a more efficient way? Is there a shortcut you can learn? Is there a way to automate or delegate it? Perhaps you can complete a particular task in 20 minutes, and it would take two hours to put in place a more efficient method. If that 20 minute task must be completed every day, and a two-hour fix would cut it to 5 minutes or less each time, it’s a fix well worth implementing. A simple way of doing this is to use technology to automate tasks (email filters, automatic bill payments, etc.). Also, teaching someone to help you and delegating work is another option. Bottom line: The more you automate and delegate, the more you can get done with the same level of effort.
Narrow the number of ventures you’re involved in. – In other words, say “no” when you should. The commitment to be productive is not always the biggest challenge, narrowing the number of ventures to be productive in is. Even when you have the knowledge and ability to access highly productive states, you get to a point where being simultaneously productive on too many fronts at once causes all activities to slow down, stand still, and sometimes even slide backwards.

If you're looking for Sales and or Marketing services or education to help you be more productive please visit: www.BiznessCentral.com

Making Passion Your Business

02/20/2012

Article by Eric Gilboord from the Costco Connection Nov/Dec 2011 issue.

Click to enlarge.

The New Retirement
We now have a generation of entrepreneurs who, if they had been told a few years ago they would still be working in their 50’s, 60’s or even 70’s would have responded with ridicule and their visions of a glorious stress-free retirement. For the baby boomers with businesses, thinking about selling when they were ready to retire was too far in the future to worry about.

The past few years has been a rude awakening for many of them. Somehow life hasn't worked out the way they thought it would. The cost of living keeps rising, retirement funds have been decimated, children have gone their own way and businesses are not easy to sell for what the owners know they are really worth.

It’s a new world, and significant change is required to survive. The last thing you want to do is sell the business you have nurtured for decades and get a fraction of its real worth. Good luck in proving its value, though, without sufficient sales.

To boost sales and growth, you may be thinking about the direction of your business and considering a change. Part of that change could involve getting back to your passion.

Here are seven questions to help:

What are you passionate about?
When you wake up what do you wish you could be doing?
How do you want to spend your time?
What REALLY turns you on?
What’s fun for you and not work?
What activities do you like to do?
What gives you a sense of fulfillment?

Fun is great but don’t forget to ask question #7. Everyone desires a sense of accomplishment and success. What makes you feel great deep down inside your soul?

If you have an established business, consider returning to your original passion. Get in touch with what drove you and get back to doing the things that you can’t wait to do each day. Who knows - maybe you won’t want to sell after all.

A2E

Faux Familiarity is Worse Than None at All

01/29/2012

Faux familiarity is worse than none at all.
By Seth Godin

Sure, it's easy to grab a first name from a database or glean some info from a profile.

But when you pretend to know me, you've already started our relationship with a lie. You've cheapened the tools we use to recognize each other and you've tricked me, at least a little.

Direct mail used to take advantage of this technique a lot, and since they measure everything, they knew when it worked. Online, though, we're seeing less disciplined marketers (big and small) continually mess it up. The clues are obvious to even the untrained eye--typefaces that don't match, references that don't make sense, and most of all, the weird disconnect we get when we think we're supposed to know someone and can't remember who they are. That's a lousy mood to get your prospect in, I think.

3 Success Tips from Guy Laliberté (Cirque du Soleil founder)

01/25/2012

The following story is courtesy of Evancarmichael.com

“I bet everything on one night. If we failed, there was no cash for gas to come home.” – Guy Laliberté

Guy Laliberté, (born September 2, 1959) is a Canadian entrepreneur, philanthropist, poker player, space tourist and the founder of Cirque du Soleil. When Laliberté was 18 years old he left Canada for Europe to become a street performer. He played traditional Canadian music on an accordion with a hat for donations and slept on a park bench by night. He also met other street performers who taught him how to breath fire, juggle, perform magic, and walk on stilts before returning home.

Unable to find a 9-5 job back home, he started a business that would create large-scale street shows. After 3 years of successful shows in 13 Canadian cities, Laliberté wanted to get bigger. In 1987 his company was booked as the opening act for the Los Angeles Arts Festival. He spent all the money he had to get to Los Angeles and prepare for the show. If it didn’t work out he’d have to perform on the streets to get gas money to go home. Luckily for him the gamble paid off – his performance received standing ovations and ticket sales came flying in.