It’s a simple yet common question, “How can I make my business more successful?”

Success can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people but when it comes down to it, the success of your business should only be measured by one thing - profit.

At the end of the day, it’s not how many people came in to your store or phoned in. It’s not even how many widgets you sold. At the end of the day, what truly matters is how much of a profit you made.

It would make sense then that your efforts focus on profit as the end result. With that in mind, there are only three strategies to increase profits for your business.

1) Increase the dollar size of each order
2) Increase the number of times people buy from you
3) Increase the number of people who buy from you

Most likely, your business is already primed to attack each of these three angles and implementing that attack should be fairly easy.

Let’s say that you are the owner of Happy Wicks Candle Store. Let your customers know that for every $50 they spend they will receive a free 4-inch candle. When they are eligible for the free candle, offer them the option of upgrading the 4-inch candle to a 6-inch candle for only four dollars.

Implement a customer loyalty program. Whenever a customer spends $200 with your store they receive a 20% discount on their next order. Show loyalty to your customers, too. Create customer-only events and sales, even workshops on how to make candles at home.

Candles are also popular gifts. Be sure to place your contact info on each and every candle. This makes it easy for the gift recipient to purchase from you. Be sure to also use this tactic when co-promoting with similar businesses such as a flower and bath and body shop.

Looking at the example Happy Wicks Candle Store, the tasks of increasing profits was not a difficult one. Truly, it’s a matter of putting systems in place that generate increasing profits.

Take a look at your business and examine the systems you have in place. Chances are there’s undiscovered profits lying about. Put systems in place to gather those profits and you’ll find your business reaching new heights of success.

Have you sat down and reviewed the importance of goal setting? Have you looked back at the planning and goal setting programs that you used and all the results are nicely stored somewhere in your computer?  Do you think it is too soon to sit back and review where you stand in terms of your goal setting objectives? Well you can wait for the end of December later this year and hopefully have hit your mark or you can stop now and make sure you are on course to meet and or exceed your goals and objectives.

If you decide to do the wise thing and reflect on where you are now and each month going forward, here is a plan to walk your self through as you plan to live up to your goal setting activities.

• Define your Purpose - What is your current state? Document your numbers and goal setting activities as outlined in your plans. Where do you stand now in relation to those goals? Oh you don’t know your numbers well that is not good. You need to remember the past makes the future.
• Reflect on the Past - Next reflect on past business activities and decide what you will keep doing and what you will not do more of. You should review and find what goals you met, goals you exceeded and do more of those things that make success a lock.
• Decide what is not working - What about those activities that did not go well? A reflective way to look back is to evaluate what you did because you got caught up in the latest fad versus what you really like to do. We all believe we want to make money, but sometimes we have found we make the money and then are unhappy.
• Start working with profit in mind - make sure you are working towards profit. You would be so surprised to find how many people, are working because working gives you a purpose and makes you feel good. But is it a pofitable activity?
• Change your approach to training - One key activity that should change for all of us is to change your approach to training. We need a different approach to learning new activities that help you meet your business goals not just make money for the sales person. start workig yourself into win-win.

If you walk your self through this beginning phases of this goal setting process and really take this new approach, there will be many profitable benefits because you will be working on your passions and reaffirming the fact that your business goals will be reached.

While working through your business activities, you come across many internet, office, voice and client focused strategies and technologies, IOVC that can provide many productive benefits for your business. However if technology is not your thing, you hate it, just don’t have time for it but you know you need it, just what do you do?

The small business owner is usually busy and focused on the mission at hand and does not have time or the inclination to define benefits or payback from an internet technology solution. But once you understand the revenue producing benefits of applying the office automation elements of IOVC Strategy and Technology solutions, you will want to consider how to get your business into service with some or all of the key IOVC Strategy and Technology components. Here are some of the benefits to help you understand what an IOVC office automation solution for your back office can do for you.

1. Decrease the time spent on manual efforts<
2. Reduce the money spent on manual work
3. Increase the overall productivity of your office operation
4. Raise the quality of your business
5. Increase user and client confidence in your business<
6. Improve your ability to handle a larger volume of customer requests
7. Produce shorter turnaround time
8. Reduced limits on customer requests
9. Gain time to develop new services for customers
10. Reduce the cost of producing work now and in the future.

As you can see, some times the benefits of an IOVC Office Automation Solution are not immediately apparent when you look from the outside in. Sometimes it seems easier to keep doing what you have been doing but rest assured the old saying is true. If you keep doing what you have been doing, you will get what you always have been getting. Do you want more of the same? I think not. To get started review your business process by selecting which of the benefits above are important to you and that you feel will make a more immediate difference.

 To help stimulate your thinking, some of the questions to ask yourself are, do you need a product or a product and a service? A lot of people buy the product without the service and never implement the product. Other folks do the reverse. You saved money but never reaped the benefits of the money you spent and to get the improvements you needed, hence you lost money while the solution sits. In this increasingly competitive global economy, it is not enough to just keep pace with what is occurring around you, one must also understand and use internet based IOVC strategies and technologies to help your business expand, prosper, beat out the competition and exceed your customer expectations.

Resource Feeling overwhelmed, kind of technophobic about internet technology based solutions, well then you owe it to yourself to take advantage of a free pdf that describes how to build a profitable business using IOVC Strategy and Technology.

So, you are one month done with 2007 and now you are in the second month of 2008. Have you dropped your New Year’s resolutions already? I get the feeling and most of us do this every year, we have already stopped working on our planned goals? If you didn’t have a planning goal setting session, then you need to get your vision planning going and crank up that look into the future. But I know you did.

Since I know you did set goals, sit and ponder if you are on the right track to make 2008 profitable, fun and exciting. Think through that vision planning January goal setting session. What went wrong already? Because there is nothing wrong with goal setting activities, the problem revolves around the theory of goal setting because the importance of goal setting is really about having the correct mental approach.

Examine your goal setting approach because it is the situation we need to resolve. You like a lot of us, our vision is being driven by the dynamics of the web. Last year, it was coaching and speaking for profit. Then it moved to information products and membership sites became key. This year it is article writing and squeeze pages. And don’t get me wrong, these are valuable tools, we need all of them but should you be doing it? If these activities are not your passion, why spend more time and money doing it rather then having it done for you? 

Since history is a barometer of the future, you should see the futility, in continuing down the 2007 path for 2008. Instead, look at the past and let’s capture the good and dump the bad.  Here is my first action tip - use the secret I use to motivate me not to redo the bad of 2007 again. Go and review the web pages of the programs you took last year and I guarantee you will not be any near as excited as you were last year. That internal feeling of oh yeah and then hmmm it did not happen is a very telling feeling.

So what’s the solution - remember it is all about the proper real world approach to setting goals, whether it is career goal setting, setting a weight goal or you are setting your business goals for the year. So here is my recommendation for taking steps to refocus your vision and goal setting before taking another course. To make 2008 successful, I do not recommend taking any new standard classes or training because if you did the exercise recommended above, you should have convinced yourself that you already  spent enough time and money just training. What I propose is that you now take a situational learning approach to your training.

Before we get to the Plan - let’s examine situational learning to make sure the approach and benefits are truly understood. Let’s review the process.

Said another way - as found on the web at Being a Situational Leader - To direct, coach, support or delegate based on the commitment and competence of the team member in that situation ….. consciously practicing situational leadership  ….. ultimate objective is to be able to delegate a slice of work and get quality output. it works because ……Once there, the team member moves to higher challenges and we go through few of the other phases again. ……… success could be owed to the situational leadership model.

Bottom-line is you work on a piece of the pie with a focus and a committment to take theory and execute it in the teal world and make results happen now not after the training is over.

The Plan as proposed to move forward in 2008

1. Focus, Focus, Focus - Define what is your key focus and skill. What are you absolutely fanatical about? If not fanatical, then what one activity can you do and be happy, doing it now and every day? Still lost? Then look back over the last year and define what activity you did repeatedly regardless of income.  Here is another tip, look at what you naturally gravitated to when you wake up and get started. Besides being hooked on email, notice what you tended to do, address, solve or do first. That is your passion. Bottom-line is find what you can do effortlessly and continually on auto-pilot. That is a quick and sure way to get a niche without any time spent trying to learn your niche.
2. Target market - Who do you work with now versus who should you be targeting? This is painful for us because who we are getting our money from now may not be who we should be getting our money from in the future. Most of us started small and we want to grow. Like the need to focus on what we love, we need to focus on our end state target customer. This customer in most times is not our current customer. Reality bites, if the current set of customers can not pay for your projected high end product, then why are you staying and focusing on them? It is a never ending cycle of trying to stay afloat for now but never growing because you are just staying afloat. You have to break the cycle. Grow your customer to where you are going or if they can’t see being a high end customer, help them find someone who can service them.
3. Develop a Profit Project - Next I recommend you find someone, whether you pay them or not, doesn’t matter. What you want is someone whom you can work on a project that is a real profit potential project. Some project that leads to making real money and this will further incent you to stay the course. This is very specific plan and much deeper then being a coach.
4. Build a Focused Plan - Then I advise you stay within the activity you love and develop a year long plan around that set of activities. In this plan, you need to decide on a really bodacious, outrageous, bold goal.  This will additionally incent you to achieve, it should be a scary number, but attainable number. And outsourced all the rest.
5. Technology - the mechanics of how should not even be in your realm but you tend to get into it like all most of us because completing something gives us a sense of accomplishment. However this technology area can and does hold many people back. I highly recommend gets onto autopilot. Start an autoresponder and start building a customer relationship with customers. Start turning those customers into clients and keep in touch with those who are your true niche market.  Serving them is your passion.

In summary- refocus your goal setting and approach to 2008. Then follow the steps recommended.

• This step by step plan can help you stay focus because you will work at your passion and niche customers on a daily basis.
• Two, you will stay the course because the situational learning environment is extremely encouraging because you see measureable results almost daily.
• This tells your mind to not lose interest because you are working on a project that has profit potential at the end.
• Then having an outrageous, bold goal stops you from wandering and moves you towards success because it is easier to stay on your journey towards your bold goal when you have removed the painful activities
• Hence your naturalexcitement will build and encourage you to continue non stop towards success.

To conclude, pay close attention to this. You have heard this before, time is money.

You can change your mind and then change your life, if you look back, see what works and take that forward.

Now start working on your passion, start making your money, passion and time work towards profitability and excite your self by seeing success actually being attained and realized.

The internet is proving to be a substantial venue for promoting products. If you have a retail outlet having a web site can be an extension of your store. With our busy lifestyles and dual income families, it can be easier for many people to simply go on line and make their purchases. This saves time and gas. If you have a store it would be prudent of you to have a web presence.

When customers come into your store capture their email address. You could have a form they fill out with a check box that they check off permitting you to send them a newsletter or sale notification. A large database of clients can be built by doing just this one thing. By having a web site and regularly sending out newsletters you keep your name in front of the client at all times. When they need a product you sell, they will most likely think of your store, as you are always reminding them of your presence.

Offer your database a special discount now and then for email subscribers only. Write an article of interest you think your clientele would be interested in, ie; if you sell golf clubs research and write an article on how to improve their golf swing, or if you have a dress shop write an article on what the next seasons colours will be. This will keep your site sticky (people will want to come back often as they get good information when visiting your site).

If you feel you don’t have writing skills you can go to www.elance.com and very reasonably hire a writer who can write small articles for you. Your return on investment would be worth it. Always update your site with new articles, new products and sales on a regular basis. Fresh content added often will keep your site high up on the search engines.

You can easily find software today that makes it easy for you to create a web site. Just visit your local software retailer and you will find many ideas for web site creation software. It is quite inexpensive as well. HTML knowledge is not a prerequisite for creating a web site. You can find software now that lets you simply follow a template in a WYSIWYG editor. This stands for “what you see is what you get”. If this is intimidating you can hire a web site designer. They are relatively inexpensive, depending on what type and how extensive your site is.

Make sure when you choose a domain name you give this a lot of thought. It is better to have the keyword that describes your product in your domain name, than something totally unrelated. The search engines will find you easier.

Once you have your site, it needs to be registered with the search engines or directories. This can be done manually or you can pay someone to do it. Common search engines are Google, Yahoo, Msn, Lycos, etc. Web shoppers use search engines when they are looking for specific information or products.

It is better to get a web site hosted by a company that you pay a monthly fee for rather than use a free one, as they can have a lot of advertising on your site, which doesn’t look professional. Just Google hosting companies and you will find a large number available.

There are a many excellent books in book stores that teach you all about marketing on the web. It is worth the read as it is very competitive out there. Knowledge is a definite plus! Good Luck!

Many people think that the Internet offers a tremendous marketplace, while others will question the extra effort and money to purchase and design a website. Some of the money-making values of having a website are summarized in the following paragraphs for your consideration.

1. If you have a local group of customers and want to expand to the neighboring areas, states or even, countries, without spending massive amounts of costly advertising money or even leasing more company space, then the Internet can work very well for you. Niche markets (small groups of customers scattered about that are interested in a very specific item or service) also work very well on the Internet.

2. As a business owner, you need to provide a map and directions to your store for your customers and enable them to look up specials, discounts, limited merchandise, or varieties and prices of each item you market. For instance, let’s say you sell cheesecakes and you would like to spend less time on the phone explaining the different varieties, how many people the different varieties will serve, prices, and availability. Here’s how this could work online for you. You would provide a secure, encrypted order form thereby collecting the person’s credit information as well as their address, phone, and email information. They would list their preferences as to varieties and sizes of cheesecakes. This form would be sent directly to your email or to your fax so that you would have the items ready for the customer to pick up that day or the day they designate. You would have the cheesecakes shipped for those that cannot make it to your store. When a customer returns to order another product from your website, they would not have to fill out most of the form as it would already be in your database.

3. You build their confidence when you show customers that you have their best interest and shopping convenience in mind when you open a website and properly maintain that website with new and updated information. Customers will appreciate being able to read about the owners, the store’s policies, the service after the sale, and any other items you think would develop a rapport to allow them to do more business with you. Having a website allows your company to develop its style and branding and develops a sense of security for the customers in doing business with your firm.

4. A small operation can look just as important as a large corporation. A website builds confidence and value into your products and services and allows you to receive orders you may have missed without being on the Internet.

5. If you do advertising on the radio or TV, newspapers or direct mail, having a website gives the customer a place to review what you tell them in the ads in much more detail. Every ad should reference your website so customers can view the details at a time and place that is convenient 24 hours a day seven days a week. You can quickly change and update information on a website without the expense of printed materials.

6. You can do any promotion online that you can do offline and much cheaper. Coupons, money-off sales, discounts, employee recognition, limited merchandise you want to move, all these can be marketed on your website. Keeping the website up-to-date can be provided by your webmaster at a very nominal fee.

I hope that you can see from some of the above points that having your own website is necessary in today’s marketplace for any small or medium-sized business as well as any at-home business. Customers are out there looking for you and you need to take advantage of where they are looking and, right now, that is the INTERNET! Since your competitors have a website, they are perceived as being more up-to-date. The ease, convenience, special online savings, information about your company’s mission, your services, your ability to communicate with customers are all important reasons for having a dynamic online website. Online marketing will only continue to grow…WILL YOUR CUSTOMERS FIND YOU ONLINE?

It’s a simple yet common question, “How can I make my business more successful?”

Success can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people but when it comes down to it, the success of your business should only be measured by one thing - profit.

At the end of the day, it’s not how many people came in to your store or phoned in. It’s not even how many widgets you sold. At the end of the day, what truly matters is how much of a profit you made.

It would make sense then that your efforts focus on profit as the end result. With that in mind, there are only three strategies to increase profits for your business.

1) Increase the dollar size of each order
2) Increase the number of times people buy from you
3) Increase the number of people who buy from you

Most likely, your business is already primed to attack each of these three angles and implementing that attack should be fairly easy.

Let’s say that you are the owner of Happy Wicks Candle Store. Let your customers know that for every $50 they spend they will receive a free 4-inch candle. When they are eligible for the free candle, offer them the option of upgrading the 4-inch candle to a 6-inch candle for only four dollars.

Implement a customer loyalty program. Whenever a customer spends $200 with your store they receive a 20% discount on their next order. Show loyalty to your customers, too. Create customer-only events and sales, even workshops on how to make candles at home.

Candles are also popular gifts. Be sure to place your contact info on each and every candle. This makes it easy for the gift recipient to purchase from you. Be sure to also use this tactic when co-promoting with similar businesses such as a flower and bath and body shop.

Looking at the example Happy Wicks Candle Store, the tasks of increasing profits was not a difficult one. Truly, it’s a matter of putting systems in place that generate increasing profits.

Take a look at your business and examine the systems you have in place. Chances are there’s undiscovered profits lying about. Put systems in place to gather those profits and you’ll find your business reaching new heights of success.

It’s a simple yet common question, “How can I make my business more successful?”

Success can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people but when it comes down to it, the success of your business should only be measured by one thing - profit.

At the end of the day, it’s not how many people came in to your store or phoned in. It’s not even how many widgets you sold. At the end of the day, what truly matters is how much of a profit you made.

It would make sense then that your efforts focus on profit as the end result. With that in mind, there are only three strategies to increase profits for your business.

1) Increase the dollar size of each order
2) Increase the number of times people buy from you
3) Increase the number of people who buy from you

Most likely, your business is already primed to attack each of these three angles and implementing that attack should be fairly easy.

Let’s say that you are the owner of Happy Wicks Candle Store. Let your customers know that for every $50 they spend they will receive a free 4-inch candle. When they are eligible for the free candle, offer them the option of upgrading the 4-inch candle to a 6-inch candle for only four dollars.

Implement a customer loyalty program. Whenever a customer spends $200 with your store they receive a 20% discount on their next order. Show loyalty to your customers, too. Create customer-only events and sales, even workshops on how to make candles at home.

Candles are also popular gifts. Be sure to place your contact info on each and every candle. This makes it easy for the gift recipient to purchase from you. Be sure to also use this tactic when co-promoting with similar businesses such as a flower and bath and body shop.

Looking at the example Happy Wicks Candle Store, the tasks of increasing profits was not a difficult one. Truly, it’s a matter of putting systems in place that generate increasing profits.

Take a look at your business and examine the systems you have in place. Chances are there’s undiscovered profits lying about. Put systems in place to gather those profits and you’ll find your business reaching new heights of success.

Qassia Rocks and Really Works

Qassia is Awesome!

Qassia.com is Awesome! Another IOVC Strategy and Technology Tip

Qassia.com really rocks, The uniqueness of this website is because you can make a change and it gets updated ASAP. It is getting better by the moment. This is a very active site for getting real intel, getting backlinks and learning while making Qassia dollars.

If you haven’t signed up, I highly recommend it. You can signup by going to http://gregb.qassia.com  

Currently it is not open to generally everybody and the fun is going in early with someone so go to http://gregb.qassia.com and get in on the fun now. Its one opportunity to get in early before it gets huge and you will reap the benefits now and as Qassia.com/ grows.

How does it work you ask?

Join for Free,

Create as many backlinks as you want by adding short snippets of intel on their site.

You write as many articles or snippets as you want.

So you essentially create your backlinks as you go .

People will review and vote you up higher based on your snippet

You can get a horde of traffic to your sites from these articles.

I strongly suggest you signup today. Visit http://gregb.qassia.com  and signup.

Oh did I mention -   It’s free.

Fits perfectly with the IOVC Strategy of getting free backlinks from a Quality Website.

If you haven’t signed up, I highly recommend it. You can signup by going to http://gregb.qassia.com