I’ve been putting together “The Ultimate Business Celebrity Mastermind” – an elite Mastermind group for some of my top clients, where we’ll travel around the country together and experience some things that usually only entertainment celebrities get to experience while also working with each other to build everyone’s businesses using a wide array of strategies that are working right now across multiple industries. As part of the package, I’m also including some really special Celebrity Events, two of which have been locked down for a white, the Grammys in L.A and the Kentucky Derby. Pretty cool, right?

The problem was that these events were so cool that, when it came to putting together the third and final Celebrity Event for the year, I wanted to make sure it could hold its own and didn’t look like a weak excuse for a celebrity event!

Since I do live in Orlando, and since I actually do have a family I like to see occasionally, I thought it would be nice to set up one of the events here. And there is a bunch of cool stuff to do in Orlando that is a great mix of business and entertainment, so I contacted a venue that I thought might work for this new Mastermind group.

But, again, since the Grammy night has bumped everything up a few levels, I wanted to make sure this place could deliver something special on their end. So I called my usual contact, who transferred my call to a really knowledgeable colleague. I was very upfront and said I needed something with the “Wow” factor to really make this work – and that she was, in effect, competing with Las Vegas, which was my other choice for a Celebrity Event site.

Anyway, she was very, very helpful and indicated she would work with me on making the event happen and at a magnitude that I’d be happy with. She’d email me contact details and we could go from there. Awesome.

Except this is where the problem started. She never sent the email. Instead, a week or so later, she called and left a voicemail with another colleague on the line – again, it sounded like these folks were all over this and ready to make it happen. She ended the message by saying I should call her back at a phone number with a very long extension attached to it, which in corporate America is not very unusual. What I usually do is just call back the number on caller ID and ask for the person I’d like to speak with instead of using the extension, mostly because I’m often driving or traveling when I return calls and I don’t have the best circumstances to stop and take notes! I looked at my iPhone for the caller ID – because, normally, I just hit the button that instantly calls back the person who left a message – and the number pops up on my screen as “Not Disclosed.”

A private number. In the words of many a comic book character, “What th-!”
I thought about the business associate I have in New Zealand. I can even push the callback button to get him on the line! And, at that moment, I didn’t have time to listen to her message again, write down a whole long of string numbers that probably would have taken two or three tries to get right and call the person back.

And so I kept the message, and kept meaning to find a time to call them back when I could write down the number.

In the meantime, I had continued to explore the Vegas option, which looked better and better as time went on. If she called back or sent me the email with her contact info in it, I would certainly still give the Orlando venue a fair shake, but my time was wearing thin! As I was working on the logistics of a vegas trip that would be both educational and entertaining, I hit the motherload! I was able to connect through a friend with Tony Hsieh, the billionaire CEO of Zappo’s, the online shoe selling phenomenon, and he agreed to host our Mastermind group at the Zappo’s facility in Vegas and do an in depth brainstorm and Q & A, revealing some of the secrets that made him the mogul he is today. That’s Grammy-caliber to business people and exactly the kind of event I was looking for. Orlando, sadly, was left on the outside looking in.

Don’t get me wrong – this venue is not about to go under because they didn’t host our Mastermind group. But they did end up missing out on tens of thousands of dollars worth of business – because they didn’t make it easy for me to get back in touch with them.
Which is surprising – on almost all counts, because the staff at this venue excels at customer service, they’ve always been great in the past. But the private phone number mistake is just the kind of little mistake a big company like that might not ever notice and correct.

When it comes to our own businesses, I think the mantra needs to be, as I said at the beginning of this piece, “Let’s Get Small.” We all think our own customer service is top quality, but are all our systems really seamless? Are we really making it as easy as possible for our clients and customers to connect and do business with us? Are sales phone calls being handled correctly by the people answering them? Or, worst of all, are calls from interested prospects just getting lost or unanswered?

Yes, the Orlando venue made a mistake. Let’s not make the same one with our own operations. Otherwise, after we’ve lost a big client, we might end up like they did, wondering why the phone isn’t ringing!

Back in the “old days” most things were bought on cash but if you didn’t have the cash to buy, retailers came up with a system called a lay-a-way plan. The retailer held the goods and you made payment to them. When you were done paying the full price you got your furniture, dishwasher or whatever. Christmas lay-a-way assured gifts for the kids.

Over the years, the plan morphed into giving you the furniture at the point of purchase and making payments. Then someone got the bright idea to charge interest and once that took off credit cards began. Soon, merchants were making more on their financing charges than the sale of goods (GE Capital) and the world of credit was born perhaps to all our chagrin.

History has a way of repeating itself and during this economic downturn the lay-a-way plan has made a comeback in various forms and from unusual sources. Who would have ever thought a Music Festival would be sold that way.

The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California offered a Lay-a-way plan this year for the first time in their ten year history. Customers had the option of buying their tickets over several months by putting 10% down and the balance over two additional months, with the final payment due prior to the event.

The payment plan was adopted because other festivals have had to cancel their events this year due to sluggish sales. The plan has been working. The organizer was quoted as saying, “without the lay-a-way option we wouldn’t have done so well”. Like any good idea it is also already being adopted at other festivals in Tennessee, New Jersey, and Arizona.

The NFL also now uses a similar payment plan for their season tickets. You start paying right after the season and get paid up before the new season begins.

We use a lay-a-way option in our own business. The Ultimate Celebrity Branding Experience™ payments are spread out over 12 months; franchise legal work and business consulting are all extended over at least 12 months instead of charging the full fee or requiring the total to be put on a credit card and the client getting killed by interest. We are convinced it has made a tremendous difference in everything we do and why our business is growing rapidly even in this economy.

We aren’t alone and several of our clients including Orthodontist, Donna Galante and Paul Cater (www.CGBraces.com) have added monthly payment programs to their standard pricing. Clearly others should consider doing the same no matter what your business.

If you adopt a variation of the lay-a-way plan in your practice we encourage you not to add interest. All of us are very serious about our dislike of interest payments right now, and we all would love to avoid paying it when we can. You will make more sales by not charging interest and that alone will increase your bottom line.

Once I have set my goals for the year, I review action ideas that I’ve used in the past and that I know will work. In this month’s issue is a series of quick-action ideas that I think might help your business. I have listed 41. You may be able to use all of them, but you need only one to make a difference in what you’re doing. The action ideas are not in any particular order, so consider each of them the same. It may be the first or the last you find most helpful, but consider them all your business New Year Resolutions!

1. Add a ‘call to action’ in all your advertisements. Give people a specific reason to call you now; give them a toll-free number to do it with, and specifically tell them to “act now.”

2. Review your old customer records. Write a specific letter to each of them offering a special discount if they will do business with you today.

3. Get testimonials from your customers. Use them in all your promotions. Third-party testimonials are considered the most powerful form of advertising.

4. Establish your own referral network. Get a group of business people together that are non-competing and pledge referrals to each other. Meet once per month to thank each other and give ideas of the type of customers and clients you may be looking for. Commitment if the key for each participant.

5. Become the expert in your business. Write a book, report, article, newspaper column, or seminar about your topic and publish it yourself to get it circulating. When you circulate your best ideas, good things happen.

6. Develop at least one add-on or “up-sell” to your main product. Always offer the add-on every time the main product is offered. It should be low cost, and high profit. Start now and it will help you make up any recession fall-off in your business.

7. Make it more convenient for your customer to do business with you. Increase your hours, add a toll-free number, accept credit cards, etc.

8. Raise your prices. Don’t be afraid to raise your rates sometimes. As an alternative, consider raising your rates for new clients, but discounting them for your current customers.

9. Do a cost audit of your business. Consider alternatives to every vendor or supplier you have. For example, competitively price your long-distance carrier. Compare UPS to Federal Express. Eliminate waste. A dollar saved goes right to the bottom line profit.

10. Consider buying “shareware” computer programs. Before you buy name brands, just as in the case of prescription drugs, generic software is much cheaper and will often do an equal job.

11. Trade high interest rate credit cards for low interest rate cards. If you pay off your balance every month, get a no fee card.

12. Before adding a new employee, try a temporary. See if the increased work is short term. Outsourcing jobs is a growing trend for all businesses.

13. Become tax smart. Learn all of the business deductions and be creative in how you can reduce your taxes. Deductions save you the percentage of your tax bracket. Tax credits save you dollar for dollar.

14. Incorporate your business. If you are a sole proprietorship or partnership, liability protection is extremely important in this day of never-ending lawsuits.

15. Set up a monthly automatic investment. Don’t put off your long-range planning. Set aside 10% of everything you make for investing in your future. The investment could be for more marketing.

16. Arrange for a discount with your suppliers if you are able to pay on invoice. If you are having cash flow problems, reverse the procedure and ask for 90 days same as cash.

17. Buy your office supplies from major wholesalers. Use Office Depot, Price and Costco, and don’t let individual employees order their own supplies. Adopt a set list of products a new employee can have and exclude anything else.

18. Get a separate credit card for your business. All interest paid on that card can easily be determined as deductible.

19. Join the National Association for your business. Attend the national convention. This will keep you informed of the latest ideas in your industry. Also take advantage of discounts they arrange with vendors.

20. Buy a book on time management. Incorporate at least one time-saving idea into your daily life.

21. Consider bartering your services. Be liberal. The barter, even if worthless, may lead to a new client. You should also consider offering your services to non profits; it would be a way of meeting a new group of potential clients.

22. Raise your insurance deductible. There is a big premium difference between $250 and $1,000. Weigh the annual difference and consider self-insurance for the higher deductible.

23. Update your business plan with changes for the New Year. If you have never done one, now is a good time to organize your thoughts and plan your direction.

24. As long as you’re updating plans, review your specific marketing ideas and objectives for this year. Don’t just spend money on whatever comes along; plan your expenditures. Use only advertising that allows you to back your reason. If you don’t know your reason, you’re wasting money.

25. In 25 words or less, write out your Unique Selling Proposition. What is it that makes you better than your competitors? Make sure your customers know what it is.

26. Use free advertising by getting publicity. Do press release on newsworthy events. Create a scholarship for high school. Donate time and money to your local charity. In a nutshell, get involved and let people know it.

27. Consider joint ventures with other companies. You can piggy back on their business; be quick and ready to pay for referrals where payment is legally allowed.

28. Survey your customer or hire an outside company to do so. Find out what they really think. What they like and don’t like. Make changes which heed their advice.

29. Send thank-you notes for anything and everything done for you. Do it because it is the right thing to do, not just because it will help your business.

30. Do a profile on your customers. So that you can be a target market your advertising and promotions. Once you know your customers’ demographics, you can go after them more effectively and increase results from your marketing dollar.

31. Hire an outside person to be a test prospect. See how your customers are actually treated. Find out what your sales people are truly promising your customers. The outside company can quickly give you the inside on your company.

32. Focus on making your business profitable over and above what you take out as a salary. Remember, there is more to being in business than simply making payroll. Don’t just create a job for yourself.

33. Consider a home equity loan to expand your business. Refinance as rates fall this year and pay it back with a better business.

34. Step up your collection process. Use credit cards to get money faster.

35. Add shipping and handling charges to any order. Everyone has them, and it has become common place. If you are absolutely against them, make sure you promote the fact that you don’t charge for shipping and handling.

36. Make your life directly related to your business so that everything you do becomes deductible. Vacation on business and dine with business clients.

37. Maximize your retirement contributions. Get control of the investing of those dollars yourself. Don’t miss out on the time value of money and the enormous advantage of tax-free compounding.

38. Consider asset protection with everything you do. Incorporate your business and use estate planning strategies — not just to save taxes, but to minimize the chance of losing everything in a lawsuit.

39. Keep immaculate business records. This will save your neck in government audits and lawsuits. Use internal memos to the file and confirm everything in writing. If it’s not worth writing, it’s not worth doing.

40. Update your life and health insurance cost. For an independent analysis and recommendation of the cheapest insurance use an insurance audit.

41. Develop Additional Profit Centers for YOUR Business.

If you studied the preceding list, I know that you will agree there were some powerful ideas contained in a few pages. I would hope that you would save the list to review again in the months ahead. I find that as I scan through a list of powerful ideas, others will formulate in my mind. Sometimes even better ideas because they are usually directly related to my business; and that process is, of course, what psychologists refer to as imaging, and it is a terrific way for individuals to brainstorm with themselves.

While editing my list for publication to you, it occurred to me (through imaging) that one of the best resolutions of all (#41) would be to add an additional profit center to your business no matter what that business is. After all, you already have overhead clicking away, so anything you do to “add-on” makes your profits grow exponentially. When you consider this strategy, keep an open mind and consider not only new profit centers related to your business, but that it may actually be an entirely new business. For instance, this year we took one of our companies’ core competencies website developments and spun it off into a separate company doing outside work. This new business-in-a-business added a new six-figure income stream with little added overhead.

What he essentially asked me is, “How is Celebrity Branding® different from personality branding, and the long-standing concept of a personality driven business?”

While I can’t summarize everything that Celebrity Branding® includes in one short article, let me tell you one of the main differences. The main difference is in the magnitude of focus and commitment you give to your positioning. You can have personality in any brand. But Celebrity Branding® is taking your personality and making you the focus, not the back-story for your product or service. Once you make that switch, you develop a system of marketing that is centered on you as the celebrity expert, which separates you from your competition. No longer is your product or service a commodity that anyone can supply. To get what you are now offering, the client or customer must utilize you and your business.

Let me give you an example to illustrate the difference.

Let’s assume we’ve got two different financial planners that are in the same market. It doesn’t matter whether their customer base is local or national, what matters is that they compete for the same customers.

Financial Planner 1 has his photo on his business card, has ads featuring his image in several publications that his target audience reads, and his website also has his picture on it. This financial planner understands that “people buy people,” so he has put his picture on his materials so that people can identify who he is. This is personality branding.

Financial Planner 2 has some or all of the things that financial planner 1 has. These things are a great start, but she also realizes that the true value of Celebrity Branding® is to create devoted fans out of her prospects and clients. And she realizes that while having her photo on her marketing materials is a great start, ultimately she must connect with her audience in order to turn them into fans. She has to let her audience know who she is (and include some details about her “real” life outside of work, when appropriate), what her expertise is, why she’s an expert, that she’s constantly at the forefront of her industry, and just how she can help her prospects and clients. You can’t get any of this across with a photo alone! You’ve got to take the time to develop methods to communicate with your audience.

If you want to create true Celebrity Expert status, you’ve got to show your audience why they should listen to you. You’ve got to display your expertise to them and create a personal relationship in order for them to develop an affinity for you and what you do.

The difference is huge between the value of these two financial planners to their audiences. If you want to develop Celebrity Status, you’ve got to create a system for communicating with your clients and prospects. Clients should obviously get more of your time than prospects should, but the key here is to develop some methods of communicating with your entire audience that you can replicate through the use of systems.

Marketing systems for Celebrity Branding® involve multiple facets of “touch points” with your customers. Utilizing an email system that allows you to write one message and send it out in a manner that makes it look personalized to your list, instead of a generic blast, developing an ezine which contains specific content rich information about you and your business, physical newsletters that allow people to hold and feel your business in their hand, or a blog that allows you to keep in constant contact with your audience via multiple forms of social networking and social media are all examples of new ways to reach your client and create the relationship that both bonds and builds. It is this level of commitment and focus that allows you to take your brand to another level beyond even your closest competitor.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter what you include in your marketing system, the key is that you actually have a marketing system for building a relationship with your fan base. Additionally, the system should incorporate a method, or methods, to continually drive the relationship forward, whether you have the time to literally speak with every person or not. This is what we mean by Celebrity Branding®, and you can see that it is much more than people realize — which is why it is so powerful. Take a look at your current system for prospecting and follow up communication with customers and see how you can better optimize your system to create a Celebrity Brand, rather than just a personality driven business. As always, if we can help, you know where to find us.

First, it is a mistake to think about marketing as a cost. It isn’t a cost if you know your numbers and you know how much money in new business you should reap from your marketing. This number is your return on investment (ROI). The money you spend on marketing is, and should be, an investment — not a cost.

Second, not all recessions are the same, so you can’t bet that waiting on the sidelines is a strategy that will even keep you in the game. Right now, you need to be making “real time” changes in your business that will let you take advantage of the opportunities you see — and there will be opportunities. Maybe just the fact that your competition finds the market tough is the opportunity you need to take their spot in the marketplace.

Let’s look at six more major business mistakes that people are making right now in their business and how you can overcome them.

1. FAILING TO TEST YOUR IDEAS

Great ideas are frequently born around the kitchen table. Unfortunately, so are bad ones. The real question is: How do you know the difference?

My experience has been that everyone (including me), thinks their ideas are best. Frequently, however, we are surprised to discover that the idea didn’t work. If people like the Coca-Cola Company can make a major marketing blunder, dropping “old” Coke for “new” Coke — or the entire American auto industry can market the wrong product at the wrong time, then all of us can make mistakes. The problem with business marketing mistakes is that they are expensive, as the tax payers are going to find out in the auto bailout.

Is there anything we can do in our own business? Absolutely! Test your ideas first. Test, you say? Test your ideas first? Yes, that’s what I’m suggesting. It is a little more work. It’s a little more time consuming. But guess what? It saves money, and it absolutely works.

Let’s say you have ten outside salesman. Each salesman calls on 20 people per day, and closes four sales. If you could change the presentation they make, and increase your sales by one sale per salesman, your sales would increase by 25%! The problem you face, however, is that a change could also result in lowering everyone’s production. Potentially this decision could be so big that it could actually put you out of business. The result of this predicament is failure to act.

Instead, test the new presentation. Take two of your best salesmen, and let them try the new presentation. Monitor the results. Does it work? If so, immediately change and adopt the new presentation throughout your organization. Use your best salesmen because if they can’t do it, then it is likely that the others can’t either.

Sales presentations aren’t the only things to test. Test your ads. Do they pull better in your local newspaper, or in other mediums, like local magazines? Which works better? Compare the costs per reader. Does the response rate improve if you add one additional color to the ad? If it helps, use it. If it doesn’t, now you know, and you also know how to save yourself some money.

Test your prices. This is one of the craziest things in business. Sometimes raising your price will actually improve sales. Okay, so you don’t believe me. Try it and see. Some things that wouldn’t sell for $19.00 sell better at $24.95, and sometimes even better at $149. Don’t ask me why exactly, but it has to do with the perception of value. Increasing the price doesn’t work all the time, just like decreasing the price doesn’t. The point is that you must test, and constantly re-test, to see which price works the best. The other point which is important to make on this particular topic is that once you have decided which price is correct, don’t let yourself be lulled into the thought that it should always stay the same price. At least once a year, re-test your prices to determine whether or not increasing or decreasing will have a better success rate than your current price.

It is far cheaper to test many ideas to find one that works

than it is to throw money at “hunches” you think are right.

2. RUNNING INSTITUTIONAL ADVERTISING INSTEAD OF DIRECT RESPONSE ADVERTISING.

Ninety-five percent of all advertising you see is institutional advertising. For those of you who aren’t sure, institutional advertising is the type that tells you how wonderful and terrific the company is that is putting on the advertisement, but fails to tell you much about products. More importantly, while institutional advertising may create a feel good response on the part of the person it is directed to, it does not create a direct response that offers the ability for the customer to act.

The result is wasted advertising dollars, except in loose terms of brand identity. Small advertisers can’t afford to lose money this way. Unfortunately, small advertisers frequently copy the large advertisers. They also frequently copy their bad mistakes, and try to use institutional advertising. Again, the result winds up the same. The small advertiser develops an ad which may bring some feel good response on the part of its viewer, but does not bring the type of response which results in a sale. If you are a small advertiser, you simply cannot afford to make this kind of mistake.

Direct response advertising is different. Its entire purpose is to elicit a direct response from the viewer. This means that the intention of the ad is to get the viewer to act at that particular moment and make a call, send in money, go to a website, order a free report, or use some method of responding directly to the ad. The difference between direct response advertising and institutional advertising is that direct response advertising produces direct results. Direct response advertising doesn’t waste its time with superficial information about the company, and its motivation for success. Instead, it talks about the product, what it will do for its consumer, and why they should specifically purchase the product with all of its benefits now. Direct response advertising answers the questions of who, what, where, when, why, and how. Then, it ends with a call to action on the part of the reader.

For those of you who may be reading this, and remaining skeptical, all I ask you do is utilize direct response with testing (point number one). Take a certain amount of your advertising budget, and leave it with the same type of advertisements you have been running. Take the other half, and utilize direct response advertising. After a three month period (which is a good test marketing run), you tell me which works the best. Clearly, you will discover that direct response advertising far out-pulls the institutional advertising in terms of return on investments (ROI), and you will be well on your way to increased sales.

Use institutional advertising only when you become an institution.

In the meantime, make money with direct response.

3. FAILURE TO CONVEY YOUR UNIQUE SELLING PROPOSITION (USP)

Every person, product and company has a “Unique Selling Proposition.” Maybe you are the fastest in your business. Maybe you provide the best service in your business. It could be that your product is the least expensive available in the market. Whatever the reason, you have a unique selling proposition, or you should create a specific one, to separate yourself from your competitors.

Once you discover what your USP is, you should feature it in every advertisement you place. If you are open 24-hours a day and no one else in the industry is, then make certain you promote that as unique to your store. While your USP may not be attractive to everyone, it will be attractive to a certain segment of people, and those people will be your buyers.

Developing your USP is a must. It is the integral part which separates you from your competition. Without hammering it to the marketplace on a daily basis, you become one of the numbers in the crowd.

Federal Express utilized the USP of getting a letter to an individual guaranteed by the next morning in an industry that had no reliability to it. It created a USP, and with it, went on to become a multi-billion dollar company. Apple computers took a unique method of utilizing icons and pictures to create a new method of using computers, which simplified what had previously been a complex array of letters and numbers. Carving out this niche, the “MAC” became the second leading computer system in the industry, and the iPod and iPhone are blockbuster sellers.

How is your business unique? What is the one feature that you offer that no one else offers to their customers? Why should a customer pick your company over any of the other companies offering a similar product or service? Discover this answer, and use it in all of your advertising and marketing materials. Hammer it home constantly, over and over in public.

Your unique selling proposition (USP) is the reason your

one (USP) they won’t set you apart.

4. FORGETTING THE BACK-END SALE

Most companies spend a great deal of money getting their customer in the front door. Once they do, and the customer purchases a product, the owner feels he has accomplished his goal and objective of making a sale. The sad truth is these companies and owners do not realize that they have only begun the sale, instead of ending the sale. Too often these companies stop selling at this point. Having captured the customer and sale, they neglect the most profitable part of the business: The Back-End Sale.

While making a sale in the front-end is unquestionably important, the key everyone should realize is that what has really taken place is that a long-term customer has just been generated. What happens with this customer now separates the truly successful businesses from those which remain moderately successful.

What should you expect from the follow-up business? A simple rule of thumb is that 20% of the people you get in the first sale will become high-end product customers. That means that these individuals are pleased with your company’s performance and will be willing to purchase more products, and more expensive ones. Let me give you an example: Let’s say that you are selling a $19.95 product. This is sold to 1,000 people through a direct response advertisement, such as the one we discussed in point number two. Of the 1,000 people who purchase the initial $19.95 product, at least 200 (20%) of those individuals will be immediate candidates for a product priced higher (anywhere from $499 to $1,000). You will note from the initial sale, that the total gross of 1,000 people at $19.95 produced $19,950.00 worth of income. If you are then able to take the 200 people representing 20%, and convert them to $1,000 purchasers, you would then produce a gross of $200,000 on the next immediate sale. Obviously, forgetting the Back-End Sale is extremely expensive.

Another point that needs to be made is that this is only from the initial and second sale. Now that you have captured these people as potential long-term customers, they should be placed in your database and constantly contacted to buy additional products. Again, from this experience, clients will continue to purchase additional products, some on the lower end and some on the higher end. The point is, they must be captured in a database and constantly communicated with and offered additional products. This is also true of the other 80% who will buy again but perhaps not as frequently.

The result of the example above is important for another point regarding advertising and sales in general. Frequently, advertising will be written-off if it produces only a volume of sales which break even. In other words, if the advertising campaign costs $2,000, and it produces $2,000 worth of income (even on a net income basis), the campaign will be written off as a failure because it only broke even. However, what you must remember is that some of those customers you just obtained will buy again and again. What most businesses miss is the opportunity to measure this advertising campaign based on anything other than the initial sale. This is another huge mistake. Remember, the post-sale success should be more profitable than the initial sale’s success.

The single most profitable product you have
is your back-end sale.

5. FAILURE TO CAPTURE THE NAMES AND ADDRESSES OF YOUR CUSTOMERS.

The single most important asset that any company has is the database of names and addresses of its customer base. Nevertheless, at least 80% of companies never maintain a database of their customers. Think about it. You spend thousands and thousands of dollars getting people in the door, and once you have separated these key customers from all of the other thousands of people who totally disregard your advertisement, they are neglected for future advertising. Instead, you continue along with your institutional advertising, trying to get more and more new customers. Try something new, concentrate on your customer base as you capture it instead, and gear at least a growing portion of your advertising dollars solely to these individuals. They are proven successful buyers, and as long as you provide the quality and quantity of the products that attracted them in the first place, they will continue to buy from you for years to come.

Once you have become one of those few companies that successfully capture the names and addresses of their customers, go a step further to find out specific information about that customer. What type of product do they like? What services are they most interested in? Once you classify these customers, you can now target advertising based on sales of products which will be most attractive to those customers.

Let’s take a clothing store and use it as an example. If a clothing store kept a database on me, they would find that I frequent the casual area of the store, and prefer Tommy Bahama shirts. If the store uses this information in a database, they can now do pinpoint marketing. Every time they have a sale on Tommy Bahama shirts, who should they send a post card to? Which advertising do you think would be more successful — an institutional ad in the newspaper about the store, or a direct contact with 1,000 people who you know like to buy Tommy Bahama shirts? I think you get my point.

The lifetime value of a repeat customer is
a company’s biggest asset.

6. STICK WITH MARKETING CAMPAIGNS THAT WORK

Want to know one of the biggest marketing mistakes made by most every company? They stop doing what works. I know it sounds crazy, but it happens over and over again. The company may have had an ad which has run for years. It worked every time. A new employee comes in who wants to show some new pizzazz, and says, “What we need to do is change our image. We need to drop the old ad for this clearer, fresher look.” Do I have to tell you what happens? Friends, if something works, let it ride. Better still, let it roll. Your goal is to find the best ad by testing until you know it works. Once you know for sure, you do a “roll-out.” This means you take as much money as you can, and leverage this winner until it stops producing. As long as it keeps hitting your numbers, keep pounding it out.

If upon occasion you want to test a new ad, keep the old one running as a control, and test the new one. If the new one works better than the old one you can either use the new one and roll it out with all your marketing dollars, or use both as long as they keep working.

Never forget what works and always expand on success.

THE FINAL MISTAKE

NOT PUTTING INTO PRACTICE – THESE IDEAS

Now you have them. Use these Golden Nuggets and they will make you money. Remember, while I can tell you what I know, I can’t do it for you.

Once you learn a rule that works, don’t forget to apply it.

But, as always, when you see a lot of business ideas, and work with many types of people, the most obvious errors and mistakes that people can make also become glaringly obvious. The one I’m going to tell you about today is one that has been around forever, but you probably didn’t make the connection to how it applied to you.

Let me start with an example. We’ve all heard the sob story of a famous actor, musician, athlete, artist, etc., who has had blockbuster success, sold millions of something, and then ended up flat broke and can’t understand why. They often even go so far as to start suing those around them in hopes of uncovering some scandal and recouping some of their lost funds. Well, if it is scandal, then the victim is only partially to blame, but they still usually deserve some of the blame. If there is no scandal, then the victim is really only a victim of their own folly. They are most likely guilty of ThoughtSourcing.

What is ThoughtSourcing? It’s the function of outsourcing everything that crosses your path that requires some good old-fashioned thought; and possibly even some management of time and effort to execute on the decisions that you make based on that thought.

For example, what usually happens when the aforementioned artist/athlete/actor begins the ascent to stardom? As soon as they start making any money, they start changing everything they were doing. They stop practicing as hard, they stop handling their own business, and they start hiring people to handle every function that they don’t want to deal with. They start pushing off all business, financial and other important decisions, so that they can “just focus on the ______________” (insert the word music, game or art in the blank and you can complete the sentence for yourself).

Every rock star wants to just show up and play to thousands of screaming fans, get paid millions to do it, and then go back to crafting great songs.

Every artist wants to spend all of their time in the studio painting as inspiration hits them; and then for someone to run into the studio and offer them lots of money to take the artwork off their hands before someone else does.

Every athlete wants to focus on what it will feel like to win the big game.

The list goes on and on … and on. Then, at some point, the aforementioned “tortured soul” loses one or more sources of their income, along with those who were posing as their friends because they could latch on and party for free, and winds up in a catastrophic financial position, seemingly overnight. The problem? They were ThoughtSourcing.

What these people often fail to realize is that at some point things are going to change, and if the person who is most affected by the decisions made doesn’t stay actively involved in working to build a better, stronger, faster business on the back of their talent, then at some point the odds are that the well will run dry. It does take some thought and some strategy to stay at the top of your business, no matter if it’s an artistic or athletic endeavor, or a financial one.

I know, I know. But you’re not a ______________ (insert artist, athlete or rock star here). But most small business owners make the same mistakes. They build a successful business, “bootstrapping” their way to profitability and doing everything themselves. Then, when things start going great, they start hiring people or outsourcing most of their work. They start changing the formula that got them to profitability. Eventually, they start letting a little bit of customer service slide, they don’t keep their costs under control, and they realize how much “better” life would be if they had someone else running the operational portion of their business (because after all, operations are no fun anyway, right?), etc., etc., etc. And POOF! The tortured soul once again ends up stranded by themselves, and so broke that they can’t even afford their $10 mocha-choca-latte-grande-milkshake anymore.

I’m certainly not advocating that you do everything yourself and not to surround yourself with others who can help take some of the burden off of your back so you can be more productive at doing what you do best. No, I’m not saying that at all. All I’m saying is that you shouldn’t let it get to the point where you aren’t the one in control and making well thought out decisions anymore, because you’ve gotten a bit lazy. Don’t be a victim of outsourcing your thought. Don’t be the next victim of ThoughtSourcing.

Take a few minutes to think about what you can do to take control of the important areas in your business that affect your bottom line; make sure you’re the one taking the time to think about how you want them to be handled, and then execute accordingly. Take the time to do this, and I’m confident that 2009 will be a breakout year for you.

It seemed like the sink was about two inches deep at its deepest point. No matter what we did, it was useless for everything you would want to use a sink for. And of course, as we looked at the sink problem, we decided that there was also a counter top problem. The counter top was the wrong color and was keeping us from having the “warm” kitchen that we really wanted. So we decided we were going to fix the sink problem and the counter top problem at the same time. And it just so happened, that the very moment when neither of us could take this problem anymore, was the Sunday before the party, and the small army of 80 people were set to arrive in T-6 days. Panic set in.

I can do a lot of things, but plumbing and granite installation would certainly not be within my skill set, so I had to find a solution — QUICKLY. I can tell you that the only thing that calmed my boiling blood pressure was a few simple words from my good friend Brian. He said, “Don’t worry. I’ve got a friend in the business.”

So I called his friend first thing Monday morning and explained my dilemma. He laughed at my “compact” timeline, but with a little cajoling, I had him out at my house within an hour. He left with his head in his hands, but he agreed that he would do his best to help us solve our dilemma by Friday of that same week.

I use the story to illustrate the fact that when consumers have a point of pain, they go looking for a solution. And there is no greater solution than having or being referred to “a friend in the business.” These five simple words break down barriers that are normally in play when selecting a vendor, and ultimately lead the vendor to a point of less price resistance and less time closing the sale.

The ultimate goal should be to get your clients and prospects to feel like you are their friend in the business. The only way to do this is by constantly delivering quality solutions, on time, at the right price (notice I didn’t say the cheapest price) and by building a relationship. Without the second step, building the relationship, you’re not a “friend” in the business, you’re just another vendor and that isn’t nearly as valuable or profitable.

So how do you develop a relationship and become a friend in the business? You have to consistently keep in touch with your clients and prospects. Now, I know what you’re thinking — “I can hardly keep up with my own friends and family, how do you expect me to keep up with hundreds or even thousands of clients and prospects?” The solution is through a systematic approach to keeping in touch. While there are many ways to do this, here are a few of my favorites that you can start using immediately:

1. Develop a “snail mail” newsletter: Most businesses think that this is too expensive, or takes too much time and effort. But I can tell you from first-hand experience that the direct business and the referral business we get from delivering our message to the mail boxes of our clients and prospects each and every month, far outweighs the time, the effort or the expense. Think about it this way: would you rather have to pick up the phone and call every client and prospect on your list and repeat yourself over and over again or would you rather write your message one time, as concisely as possible, and be able to illustrate it in pictures or diagrams, without interruptions? Exactly. The newsletter allows you to carry on a one-way conversation with your clients that will take far less time and yield greater results, as long as you deliver it on a consistent basis, and craft your message in a way that feels like you are letting your clients into your world; allowing them to get to know you as a “friend.” A newsletter doesn’t have to be complicated or overly long, it could even be as simple as a letter that you write, but the point is that it consistently allows you to build the relationship.

2. Send out an Ezine: While ezines (also known as e-mail newsletters) aren’t quite as effective as snail mail newsletters because they are often seen as an interruption and get deleted, or end up in the spam folder, they are still a great way to communicate with your audience. They are another point of contact with your clients that will allow you to tell your story and keep in touch. We send out an ezine that is very nice looking and it has pictures and graphics in it, and these are nice. But I will definitely say that my preference is for another type of ezine that we use. This second type is written like a personal email, with just text, that tells a short story about what’s happening in my life or business, and then allows me to relate it back to a business lesson that is valuable for my readers, along with an offer to contact me if I can be of any help. It’s modeled after a personal email and gets read as such, rather than lumped in the pile of emails that don’t need to be responded to, and therefore are first to get deleted. I find that the response from this type of ezine is much higher. There are many programs that will allow you to insert the name of your prospects into your emails so it looks personalized when it arrives in your prospects’ inboxes. My favorite, and the one we use is www.CelebrityBrandingCart.com

3. Develop Greeting Card Campaigns: We are always on the lookout for strategies that will allow us to stand out from the crowd, and not get us lumped in with every other business that is vying for our prospects’ attention. One of the ways we do this is by sending out greeting cards. As you might imagine, writing out thousands of greeting cards would be very time-consuming, if not impossible, to do in a timely fashion, so we use a very cool service that allows us to send greeting cards with any image we want on them, with a message that is personalized and written in our handwriting; but we only have to type the message once and it gets personalized and sent. They have digitized my handwriting and they insert the names we give them and then they print the cards one by one, stuff them in envelopes and then also use my handwriting font to print the address on the front of the envelope. They have thousands of designs and messages to choose from, or you can create your own. You can check out this service at www.CelebrityBrandingCards.com

There you have it: three simple ways that you can continue to establish rapport with your clients and prospects that will only take you a few hours each month. The key is to create a system that allows you to spend just a couple of hours creating one message that can be leveraged and personalized to keep in touch with your clients and prospects on a regular basis; so that you can spend your time delivering great quality products and services, on time, and continue to be a good “friend in the business.”

…Oh, yeah, and yes we did get our new sink and granite installed before the party. Everyone had a wonderful time, and as you can imagine, we now need a bigger house due to all of the presents Bowen got!

Business Vision came up today when I read a newspaper report about Michael Eisner buying Topps Co., the 60-year-old trading card company. Clearly, for years, this long-term successful company had continued to operate the way it had always operated and there is certainly nothing wrong with that. Now, Eisner walks in and looks at the company differently than the millions of other people who have seen it. Yes, he sees a trading card company, but what he also sees is a media company. In his view, the trading and sports card company had a different kind of business just waiting to be released from its confines. Using the new view, instead of just “Bazooka Joe” trading cards, how about a “Bazooka Joe” movie, followed by a “Bazooka Joe” web site, book, t-shirts and likely an entire amusement park or at least part of one (ala the Harry Potter Attraction going in at Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida). [Note: These are my expansions of ideas based on his comments.] Note also that “Bazooka Joe” is only one of the hundreds of real and imaginary characters in the Topps Co. stable that give them a virtual library of talent and personalities from which to draw.

As always, let me now suggest that you bring this concept home and take a moment to step back and look at your own business, or even the business of someone else you like, and see what they aren’t doing that your vision of another profit center could add.

One more quick point from the Eisner announcement: his method of moving Topps into the position of a media company is web-based from the beginning. He envisions web movies, as well as many types of mobile entertainment. He sees new platforms to be generated, and is preparing to stake a beachhead now for the future in the long-term. To me this is more than Web 2.0, this is the next transformation from being tethered anywhere for sports, news or entertainment; and keeping this in mind in your own business will certainly have profitable overtones for your future.

The answer of course is that it depends. The good news is that you can, with reasonable care, keep your area exclusive operations away from the classification of a franchise if that is what you want to do. We say “if you want to,” because there will be times when a franchise may be the very thing that you do want to structure. If you decide to incorporate franchise elements into your business then naturally you will then want to make sure you comply with the franchise laws. The reason you may want to look at structuring your program as a franchise is because you will open the door for larger revenue streams.

To gain insight into the proper legal structure for your growing business we want to start at the beginning.

What is a franchise?

There are three elements that make up a franchise. If you have the three elements present you have a franchise whether you call it that or not. To be clear, calling your business system an area exclusive, coaching group, license, or distributor won’t help you a bit if you have all three of the required elements that qualify you as a franchise. You will be a franchise. If you haven’t prepared for that, then such classification could be a disaster.

The law is clear and the courts will rule you have a franchise if you have these three elements:

1. You grant or license the use of a trademark or trade name

2. There is a payment of a fee

3. There is the existence of a community of interest between the parties such as a marketing plan, control, assistance or area exclusivity.

If you can eliminate one of the three “legs” of the franchise “stool”, you do not have a franchise. But make sure you do a good job of kicking the leg out.

In most cases you will want a payment of a fee so this leg stays in. Sometimes people try to hide it in the form of some “other type of payment,” like training fees, but the courts have been pretty adapt at finding that payments are payments no matter what you try and label them. Name classification does not change the reality. A continuity fee, royalty, or residual income would all be considered a fee payment.

In many of the coaching businesses or area exclusives there is an element of community of interest for sure. The “Done 4 You Services” that are often accredited to build value of the sale fall into this class. If you promise to help build your clients’ business using your marketing system you have crossed the line and have community of interest.

The exclusion of granting the use of trademark or trade name is usually where you can avoid the franchise tag if you so desire. But what if you have loosely tied an Association to your group or operations system that your group uses to market with. Does that put you back into the franchise mix? To us, the answer would be yes and the “rule of common sense law” governs. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck no matter what you call it. It won’t matter that you haven’t formally filed a trademark application, you may very well be deemed to have a common law trademark. It is ironic that what you might have wished to be able to prove, that someone was trying to steal your material, actually comes back to bite you with a regulator or opposing attorney making the same argument.

So do you want to be classified as a Franchise?

An important question you may want to ask yourself is whether you really want to avoid the franchise tag, even if you can. One reason is that a franchise can bring legitimacy to your operation that other methodologies, such as area exclusive licenses, simply can’t. Franchises are now recognized as a respected form of operation and a buyer may feel more comfortable with the franchise label and even feel he is getting more value from your system if it is a franchise.

Some people want to avoid the franchise tag because the cost of documenting the franchise structure is more expensive. This is true in the beginning of the business but remember what you are doing is creating a disclosure document which tells the prospective buyer of all the potential risks of your business. Having the disclosure document in place is precisely one of the things that will protect you if something goes wrong. Not having a disclosure document will bring a law suit down to a “he said she said” issue on what you did or did not tell the buyer and in almost all consumer cases, the seller loses without the correct documented disclosures.
Creating your own “franchise network” may also give you more value if you ever decide to exit your business. Trying to sell a coaching group is a lot harder than try to sell a franchise network. In fact, franchise networks also go public and sell for “multiples” of the income stream. What are commonly referred to as “earnings multiple” sales prices are not yet commonplace, in the more recently devised National coaching or “Area Exclusive” business structures.

The Business Opportunity Dilemma

Sometime in the next 12 months, we expect the FTC will pass a totally new Business Opportunity Rule that will address business systems like we have been discussing that are not franchises. When they do, we also expect that they will come to require some sort of disclosure document for business opportunities like those of franchises. If this occurs, and it seems certain that it will, your business system will be one or the other: franchise or business opportunity and you will have to comply with the rule of that business label. From a marketing position alone you may prefer to be a franchise because business opportunities have always had a sort of tainted reputation and it will take some years to change the image.

Two more states have adopted laws requiring database owners (and in some cases, businesses that just store and maintain database lists) to notify everyone on their list of a breach to the database. Additionally, you must notify the attorney general of your state or appropriate consumer agency.

In most cases the Database Breach Notification laws apply to personal information containing name and one of the following: Social Security Number, Drivers License Number, State ID Card, Passport or Financial Account Information with password or security code information. A breach is an unauthorized acquisition or use of the data.
The following states have laws now on the books: AZ, ARK, CA, CO, CT, DE, FL, GA, HI, ID, IL, IN, IA, KS, LA, MA, ME, MI, MN, MT, NB, NV, NH, NJ, NC, ND, OH, OK, OR, PA, RI, TN, TX, UT, VT, WA, WS.

More states are expected to add laws if they don’t have them and federal regulation is likely. Penalties for non compliance are calculated per name so they can be expensive.

Steps to take:
1. Maintain a control data security policy
2. If you have a breach, immediately determine if your state has a law
3. Contact your attorney for specific step by step procedure in your state for compliance.