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Completion is in the Air, but how do we capture that momentum and keep it going?
Greetings!
My son just graduated
from SDSU and what a season of joy that was after four and a half years of the ups and downs of student and academic life. At the same time what
a shock it was for him to realize he now had to go out into the world
and earn a living, buy food, pay rent, utilities, gas, insurance, etc.
That the protection and security of campus life was no longer
available. All of the joy immediately became surreal for him.
On another note, as many of you are aware, I had the pleasure of serving this past school year as an Advisory Board member and Faculty member for the Joseph Business School. This past Saturday, we celebrated our first graduation of our inaugural class. Wow! Was it exciting. We graduated 14 students who endured 9 months of Saturdays. Their journey is a topic of a whole series of articles in and of itself, but suffice it to say, the question immediately became, what happens now? Each of them graduated with a business plan, each of them developed their business model by the numbers, and each of them have to be careful that they don't stop there, they must continue the journey and put into the place the plans they painstakingly created.
Both of these scenarios play out for real in our businesses as well. Have you become comfortable with whatever lot you have been dealt with in this economy? For many, it is truly scarcity and lack, while for others, they have aggressively moved to capture what others have lost.
In this day and age of economic uncertainty, it is almost always better to do something than to attempt to wait it out, as over 500,000 small businesses have suffered the fate of not being able to wait any longer. CFR Seminars is offering a seminar to help your business make some of these critical strategic decisions, action plans, and adjustments on June 25, 2010. For a limited time only, the Early Bird discount will still save $100 making the registration only $99, but you need to act soon.
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Building a Referral Relationship , The Spirit of Givers Gain
Our readers are always asking how do you create powerful referral relationships? One that continues to give good referrals while not having to continually ask for them. This is a great question and one whose answer is not as logical as you may want it to be. BNI, Business Network International has coined the phrase Givers Gain. This has become the overriding philosophy of giving and receiving referrals. It means you are looking for referrals for your partner as much as they are looking for referrals for you. Zig Ziglar said, "I can have anything I want if I just help enough people get what they want." The Bible says in Matthew 6:38, "Give and it will come back to you, good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over." Wow, what a picture, you mean, the more I give, the more I can expect to get?
That is exactly right, when we take on a giving attitude, we are opening ourselves up to the Law of Attraction, people like people who give and it brings a whole different level of client or customer, try it, one relationship at a time and see how it impacts your business. This is also a great strategy for helping your existing clients and customers, what can you do to help them build their business? There are several great books in our Recommended Reading section for this.
One critical element that many business people miss in this, is this relationship takes time to build. It must be built on trust. You can't just go in and expect to give a referral to someone you just met or even like. Please take the time to determine how good they are at what they do and then cultivate that relationship into a referral relationship. Next week, we will talk about categories of possible partners and the importance of implementing this one at a time.
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Sales, There is more than one way. How do you keep it going? Guest Editorial Even If Your Existing Clients Aren't Buying,
Serve Them
By Tom Hopkins In a perfect world, we'd be so
well organized and good about fulfilling our sales and service duties that we'd
never neglect any of our clients. But, we're human. Things happen. And, we will
find ourselves in positions where we haven't given our best service to a client
or two. It's easy to do in the current economic climate when existing clients
tell you they just aren't buying. You still have to make sales. So, you invest
the majority of your time on finding new business instead of servicing the old.
The result? Neglected clients. Hopefully, this doesn't happen
to you often. However, accountability is the name of the game in sales. You are
compensated based on how satisfied your clients are. If you aren't happy with
your compensation, chances are some of your clients aren't happy with your
service. Even if they tell you things are slow and they're not ordering, you
must keep up the same level of service you provided them when they were making
regular purchases. If you can't possibly do that, you'll soon find yourself in
some awkward situations with them. Again, with accountability comes the
admission that you just haven't done your job to the best of your ability. |
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Selection and Retention of Star Employees (ongoing series), When is it time to hire?
William J. Osgood, Certified Business and Executive Coach  |
This is one of the most difficult questions to ask and answer. It is best answered along with a myriad of other questions in our FREE STAR REPORT. The real answer is when you have the money to pay for a new employee. However, there are times when an employee can immediately free you, the business owner up to make additional revenue because you will be able to focus on building your business and not on working in it. When you are currently working in your business, you are in fact slowing down its growth and ability to serve and increasing number of clients because you can only do so much. So, when that time comes, it is a good time to have a process in place to begin looking for an individual to take away the strain of continually producing products or service. This decision is best made however with wisdom and discernement because it is a difficult decision and not getting the right person as we have talked about over months can destroy your business. Get the right people on the bus at the right time. For some additional help with this, get our FREE STAR REPORT
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