E-Biz Booster Blog - Consulting

Fix Bad Habits Become More Productive

nospam@example.com (John W. Furst) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 18:39:39 -0700

A couple of days ago I have written, “Your Business Needs To Grow Continuously”. Today I want to combine that important fact with a very easy to do management or personal development practice, that helps you to achieve your goal, tune out distraction as you learn to focus on what's really important.

You will see it's not about time management or life management as some call it. You still have to come up with a way to use your time efficiently. Of course you can refer back to my original series of articles about Productivity and Time Management, “Touch It - Do It - Get More Done”. I wrote a total of 4 articles on that subject and they are available combined into a single PDF report in the download area for my newsletter subscribers. Actually the PDF contains some extra content that is not released on my Blog.

Might be the right time to sign up to my newsletter, right now. (To my existing subscribers: I'll send you the download info as soon as I have finished this post.) Sorry for the little detour.

Let's get back to productivity issues. The little, but nonetheless important advice I'll give you fits almost everybody.

Managers,
Team Members,
Entrepreneurial CEOs,
For Money Bloggers,
etc.

And it can be applied to business- , job-, and personal-life equally well.

“The goal of that exercise is to get into the habit of focusing on the important tasks.”

1. Determine what kind of repetitive, atomic tasks drive your output respectively bring you closer to your goal on a daily basis.

With atomic task I mean something that cannot be broken down any further.

E.g. a cold call to a potential prospect could be such a task, or the collection of a single email address from a shopper in your store, … But not something like opening a new store, because that requires many tasks performed by many people to make it happen.

This exercise is about your life, your responsibilities, and dreams.

For example:

The more cold calls, the more appointments.
The more comment on other Blogs, the more traffic, which drives your advertising revenue.
The more submissions to more Blog Carnivals, the more back links, etc.
(no spam as a result of this exercise, please. you need to remain relevant to the carnival)
The more social bookmarking, the more traffic, etc.
The more articles, the more traffic to your web site.
The more you start conversations, the easier it becomes for you to talk to strangers.
etc.

Now commit yourself to a plan and decide how many of those activities you need to perform every single day. Excuses are not allowed. This little list has to become your bible for the next 2 weeks. Or you can make such a bible for your contractors and employees to show them what you expect.

2. Completing the tasks on that list should become your highest priority.

As I said this is not sophisticated time management here. This is a simple exercise that helps you getting into the habit of focusing on the important things.

It also will show you something else. If you are getting tired of writing 25 comments on other Blogs and would rather like to do market research instead and work on a new product. (I just take the Internet business example here). Then it's the perfect time for outsourcing such repetitive an activity.

If you stick to it, you'll be happier and more relaxed very soon, because you are pushing your business drivers forward and you certainly feel satisfaction by sticking to your plan and accomplishing your little, but important mini goals.

You'll also see that you don't miss the activities that used to become excuses in the past.

If you like this post, please, do some social bookmarking for it.
I wish you a very nice weekend.

Yours
John W. Furst

Copyright 2008 by John W. Furst. Some Rights Reserved. Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.5. - If you find this content on a site that is violating our copyright, please, report its URL to us. Thanks for fighting copy scrapers.

10 Reasons Why Your Business Needs To Grow Continuously

nospam@example.com (John W. Furst) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 17:00:15 -0700

While waking up this morning I suddenly found myself having a pen in my hand and scribbling 2 ideas for a new blog post on a piece of paper. Here is the first one.

Probably you can help me out and post as a comment, who had said the following originally.

“If your business doesn't grow it dies.”,

It is certainly true.

As the population grows, as markets grow, someone else will takeover your niche soon. If not, you are in the wrong market and hopefully close to retirement with enough retirement funds saved.

What are the drivers:

Number of sales
Average sales price

So why would you like the product of those variables to grow continuously, strictly monotonically?

This is not supposed to be a scientific article. No. I only want to get you engaged thinking about those issues in your own business. So I really only give you a short list and not much more.

Let's start out with a solo entrepreneur, because it's real easy to start thinking from this point on and the rest applies for big corporations as well.

Here is my Top-10 list, why your business needs to grow:

1. Limited personal capacity: You simply cannot work more than 24/7, which is 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 366 days (Yes, 2008 is a leap year. You probably noticed on Friday.) Believe me, you cannot do even that. I would know.

The heaviest working week I ever had was, I believe 1987 or 1988, when I put in some 105 hours! I was assistant manager to a very successful restaurant and discotheque owner at this time. We opened up 2 new bars in that week. I remember that figure that well, because I had to fight for getting compensated fairly for this heavy duty overtime.

Back to the point: Once you start outsourcing, you increase your cost that has to be compensated for. Right? Means you need to grow.
2. Inflation: Ever wondered why you cannot buy bread for 5 cents anymore?
3. Investments: By it's very nature investments help you to increase profits, but there are 2 types of investments. You can decrease costs or you can increase revenue. Ideally you should do both types. Then your business will grow.
4. Markets Grow As Economies Grow (normally): If a market grows and you stand still, you are actually shrinking.
5. Competition: If you stand still, you cannot gain or defend leadership in your market. There is a huge competitive advantage for market or industry leaders. Don't miss that.
6. Increasing Financial Needs: Isn't it natural that anybody wants to earn more over time and actually deserves it (if the work attitude is right). You as an owner, your employees, your contractors, and the Tax-man. How to do it? Grow.
7. Enjoying Your Seeds: The more freedom you want to have from your business, the more it has to perform without you. How? Grow
8. Stability: A bigger, stronger business is more likely to fight any economic, environmental (or even political) threats successfully. How to get there? Grow.
9. Compelling Offers: The more you can rely on the overall fact that your business is growing, the more compelling offers you can make your prospects and clients.
10. Using Full Potential: If your business is not growing you simply don't utilize its full potential. It means that you don't leverage its own momentum. If you are using all your business assets the right way, it's natural that your business will grow continuously.

Well, as I said this is not a scientific essay, just a couple of thought. Tell me what you think. Leave a comment below.

Yours
John W. Furst

P.S.: I won't forget the 2^nd blog post idea that I mentioned. Don't worry, I wrote it down as I said.

Performance Boost Under Pressure

nospam@example.com (John W. Furst) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 21:43:33 -0700

Face Yourself!

It seems that people respect their boss and they do whatever they demand — more or less — in exchange for their salary. That's how this boss-employee relationship works. What can you learn from this for your own business?

Even if you have changed the sides in the meantime and become your own boss, either as owner of your company or manager of a department, you will remember the days, when you worked late or on weekends to meet the deadlines given to you by your superiors. All of a sudden everything became less important: your plans for Friday night, the date with your new acquaintance, the movie premier, etc.

You absolutely needed to finish your assignment, because your boss would not accept any excuse and even could fire you. Even, if your assignment appears to be ridiculous to you.
Your boss is your boss.

I will cut a long story short (… and save your time).

Many tips on personal-development and self-improvement Blogs tell you how to avoid distractions of all kinds to focus on your tasks and goals. Eliminating distractions is an important goal for any aspiring Internet marketer or home business owners in general. Your Internet business in in danger, if you do not learn to control your environment effectively. I gave you some tips in my series of posts about getting more done.

However, this is only one part of the equation. Even without any distractions it is possible that you don't get anything (important) done.

The cure for this is actually quite easy, even though it sounds a bit strange.

“Simply be your own boss, if you are your own boss.”

Do you respect yourself or do you accept each and every excuse for not hitting the target?
Your daily task(s) should produce measurable results each and every day.
Your day is not over unless the target is hit.
Be mean to yourself and don't accept any excuses from yourself.
Imagine you are watched (by a third party boss) and pretend that he or she will check your results at the end of the day.
If there is a fault in your procedures, you should revise those as your boss (in the world of employment) should recognize such a situation and give his employees better tools.
You will see that your habits will change within a short period of time (less than a month) and that you do not need to be schizoid for the rest of your life. It just helps to shorten the process from being used to receive order to being responsible and accountable.

Does this sound too drastically?
What do you think?
Leave your comments and let us know.

Yours
John W. Furst

P.S.: Thanks to The Next 45 Years for featuring this post in the Personal Development Carnival - Issue 28.

My Answers To Your Questions

nospam@example.com (John W. Furst) — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 15:40:41 -0700

Reflecting on Tenerife

Certainly I was taking some time to write this post after I have asked my readers to submit a question for me to answer. 4 questions qualified. In the meantime I have sent an even more detailed answer to those folks, who dared to ask a question.

Now it's time to share my answers in public. I don't want to carry that as liability into the next year. But since I am lazy at the end of the year, while my assistant enjoys a nice skiing vacation in Switzerland, I only will answer 2 of those questions today. I will deal with the other 2 topics in future posts in January.

1. You have hosted some blog carnivals on your blog. Do you recommend that?

Yes, and no.

It appears to me that hosting a carnival gets you more traffic, while using the same amount of time for writing and submitting your articles to other carnivals will get you more back links, which leads to more residual traffic in long term. What do you prefer?

I found the response from the folks whose articles get used in a carnival is less than it could be. Not many digg, sphinn, stumble, or bookmark your post with the carnival edition. That seems to be the reality.

Unless you see hosting or organizing a carnival as part of your content strategy, and you are willing to put some effort to work, you probably should just stick with submitting.

However, if everybody only submits, there won't be good carnivals left soon. Then it might pay off more to organize or host a carnival, again. I noticed that many recent carnivals are basically just link lists. If you don't have any problems with that, Blogcarnival.com (↑) makes it really easy to publish such a “list”. You only have to press the InstaCarnival button and copy the HTML code as is to your Blog. Finished.

It's up to you, how far you want to go. I will host other editions on my Blog throughout 2008, but I will have an assistant doing the actual work.

2. In “Sad Story About The Million Dollar Secret” you wrote “You cannot leverage consulting, unless …”. What's the unless part of it. You never wrote that following post.

Good observation, I never wrote that post here. I only wrote parts of the answer in my time management series of articles Touch It - Do It - Get More Done! and in some comments on other Blogs, and I believe in one of my newsletter editions. Anyway, the answer is very simple.

You need to teach and train others to do your type of consulting in a similar fashion. Those folks will have to be employed or contracted by you. Then you will have the time to work on your business, expand it, and make it more independent from you.

One example:

If you are often hired as consultant for doing project management, then you need to start building a real business, a company around it. You'll need other people doing the work in the future that you are still doing by yourself right now. It's moving from being a freelancer towards being a business owner.

Yours
John W. Furst

Attention Age Doctrine Part 2 - Important Lesson Learned

nospam@example.com (John W. Furst) — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 17:09:06 -0700

Rich Schefren

You probably already have seen, that I promote Rich Schefren's latest milestone type of report — The Attention Age Doctrine Part 2 — very prominently on this Blog. I even have shot a brief video.

The core message of the report for many businesses is

“You are no longer in control of your branding, positioning and marketing.”

Wouldn't you believe someone, who had made enough money to retire at age 25, but has so much drive that he just moves on and since then helped his coaching clients to make some hundred millions of dollars additional income.

“Don't ask any further questions?
Just download the free report and read it.”
(It won't be available forever!)

So what are the lessons that I have learned from this?

I had 2.7 times more visitors on my Blog than usually on Sundays. I am already curious for todays figures. All because I decided last minute, that I will participate in Rich's 66 seconds promotion video contest. So why did I get more traffic yesterday? Because I took action to participate in an event (the contest) that has a lot of attention. It is that simple.

Do you remember my post about one key factor for success: The Speed of Implementation. If not, go back and read it. It is one of my top posts.

Even though the video contest had a sharp deadline only 36 hours after it had been announced, my situation was worse. I did not “pay attention” until 2 hours before the submission deadline. That's when I decided to do it.

All of a sudden I had hundreds of ideas, but no time to put them on screen. Furthermore I never made a promo video like this. But I wanted to participate, I wanted to see, how it effects my Blog. So I focused on the essentials and kept everything to the bare minimum.

Writing a script, the text.
Filming myself speaking
Trying different setups, quickly.

I just didn't like any of the intermediate results. But I kept going. The clock was ticking. Finally I realized, I have to make the video some kind of funny to cope with all those no-time, no-budget, no-preparation, no-outsourcing type of issues in this Saturday night mini project. Originally I wanted to get into the informational or compelling category, but … no music, no third party material to be edited into the video, …

I kept rolling, registered for those sites, and submitted the video 6 minutes before the contest submission deadline.

What do you think? Is the video funny or just plain stupid?
About Rich Schefren's Doctrine (John's Video)
Please, leave a comment here on the Blog.
Do you have anything else to say about the doctrine, Rich, or myself?
Say it, in the comments.

Do you see what was driving me?

It was not perfectionism. And excuses like there is not enough time or how could I win and compete against everybody else, … could not stop me. Today I have seen videos from my competitors in this contest that blew me away. I am also relieved, because — at least in my opinion — my video is not the worst one.

I was driven by the determination to enter this competition. Nothing stopped me. I used what I had available, which was not much at this time as far as my Internet video skills and tools are concerned, but I am proud that I did it.

I have proven to myself that I am an action taker and that I am capable of getting to speed quickly. That is what counts. It is much more important for me than this particular contest. Of course, if I won, it would boost my business tenfold or more, But I am confident that I'll be able to boost my business anyway.

Yours
John W. Furst

Sad Story About The Million Dollar Secret

nospam@example.com (John W. Furst) — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 01:25:22 -0700

John Furst

If you are in the Internet business you might have heard about the legendary Mike Filsaime (Butterfly Marketing System and more recently The 7-Figure Code). Yesterday Mike wrote a longer blog post telling us his thoughts about people, consumption, and most importantly the betters ways to make money.

The sad part of his story is, as Mike says, “People are just not willing to learn. Give a hungry man a pole, teach him how to catch fish, and he will complain to you.” That's how Mike builds his article in a very interesting way. It is fun to read and it contains a very valuable lesson.

That's the good part (for you) in the story. You can and should take advantage of this knowledge, it will help you to make more money. Well, don't expect a turn-key-solution, you are (hopefully) of the learning breed. At the very least you recognize the truth in the story with a smile and you will apply its consequence in a strategic way in your business.

The core of the story — people don't want to learn, rather spend money — applies to many more scenarios among others, like people don't want to sweat (at work), don't want to wait in line, don't like to go to stores of the average folks …

Mike talks about entrepreneur's point of view on consumers. Take it to your advantage and think about the selection of services and products that you are offering. There is always room for some upgrades and improvements, isn't it.

Mike Filsaime

Now, go ahead and read Mike's full article,

“Fish, Poles, Boxes, and Buttons … WTC? (↑)”.

When I started out consulting on the Internet in 1996, I basically provided a custom made turn-key, push-the-button solution to my first major client. This solution grew over time, had survived various managers, IT personell, operators, and was in place for over 11 years. I agree, don't waste your time with bean counters. Get to clients with the big budget. It's more rewarding in any aspect of the work, not to say money is everything.

The only problem with consulting: You cannot leverage it, unless …
(I keep that for a future post.)

Adios
John W. Furst