Contracting is high risk, high reward. I have a client who has generated net worth in excess of $10 million, no debt, in less than a decade. He started with very little except his experience and a lot of debt. That same road is littered with the carcasses of those who didn’t make it. But you will not be among them if you follow a few guidelines.

Never run out of money Cash makes a difference in so many parts of our lives, but money really makes a difference in the construction business. Make sure you have adequate net worth and a bank that understands the business. Expect that 10% of your billings will be held back (“retained”) until the job is finished meaning that you, the subcontractor, may be done with your work in June but the rest of the job doesn’t complete until September and the owner doesn’t pay the General Contractor until December. Your retainage comes to you six months after completion. Make sure you determine whether you will qualify for bonding BEFORE you buy the business if this company works in a bonded environment.

Practice good management The employees are the heart of the contractor’s business. You can buy the best bathroom lavatory in the world, but if you are unable to install, you have no business. Personnel practices in the industry are, in my experience, poor. “Management-by-yelling” is the most common method of managing employees, so if you can employ policies and procedures that treat employees as valuable partners in the business, you have an advantage over your competitors.

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Downsized organizations, tough economic times, demands to reduce costs and improve quality and a myriad of other reasons can stimulate the need for an employee incentive program. Done properly, the investment can be minimal but it can produce very positive results.

If you want to improve results and morale throughout the organization, here are some tips on ensuring your employee incentive program meets your goals:

1. Realistic Pay for Realistic Performance…Rewards for Extraordinary Efforts
Rewards are no substitute for a decent paycheck. For example company stockholders/management shouldn’t expect employees to give back benefits and go the extra mile. Especially in light of the side deals senior executives received just for showing up at the office. Given the tough economic environment the industry is operating in today management should expect decent performance for decent pay. At the same time, management – in any industry – should be creative in developing programs that will help encourage off-the-chart performance, even if the rewards are deferred.

2. Don’t Let Them Strike Out Early
If they are half way through the incentive program and half the team has no opportunity to be rewarded you have lost half your team. They have no incentive to push harder and be more efficient/more effective if they are out of contention. Putting forth the extra effort and winning should be a team effort, not an individual effort. Keep the team interested and involved throughout the campaign.

3. Prepare the Team, Administer the Program
Don’t launch your employee incentive program and then go about explaining it to members of the team as the program progresses. Plan a promotional campaign for the internal program just as you would for a product launch.

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This is not “brand new” news, but it is news small businesses should be taking note of and considering ways to utilize it for their marketing efforts.

Your target market watches television, listens to the radio, observes roadside billboards and building banners, reads newspapers and magazines, reads ads in their email and on the internet… seems it doesn’t matter what they are doing, if they are awake, they are exposed to marketing at some time, if not most of the time. And then, just when you thought marketers had run out of ideas how to expose their ideas to you, along came the smartphone.

Mobile phone users are increasingly switching to phones with added features like larger touch screens, internet connectivity, ease of using social media applications such as Twitter and Facebook, email, etc. The days of just using your phone for calls is over. The days of just expecting to receive calls on your phone is also over. These days you don’t need to concern yourself only with getting your website up on the internet, you have to have your website accessible through a smartphone or lose customers who will find your competition instead. Busy people with smartphones don’t have to wait until they get back to the office or their home computer to browse the internet to buy goods and services.

In 2010 and onwards, our attention will turn to maximizing our use of smartphones to access our customers. More and more businesses will be developing mobile websites, taking advantage of the increase in mobile broadband services. Today and tomorrow’s mobile phones are yesterday’s laptops and notebooks. Furthermore, more people use mobile phones than laptops – think of teenagers and the elderly. This means more people can access the internet at any time now. Google and Yahoo are already strong browsing presences.

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Behind Door No. 1 are one dozen warm leads. Behind Door No. 2 are three times as many cold suspects. Which door would you want to open? I’m sure you said Door No. 1. But what if in order to gain access to the leads behind Door No. 1, you have to ask someone to refer you to them first? Which door would you open now? Regrettably, for too many salespeople and business owners, the answer to the second, qualified question is not an automatic “Door No. 1.” When it comes to asking people for referrals, they suddenly shrink away from the opportunity.

This seems to fly in the face of logic. The benefits of asking for referrals are obvious. Because you are being introduced by a trusted intermediary, you have immediate credibility. You avoid having to spend time (a) identifying the appropriate person in an organization and (b) placing multiple calls trying to reach that person, to whom you are an unknown quantity.

So why, then, are many of us reluctant to ask for referrals? Curious to know, I’ve asked several people. Here is a sampling of the responses I got:

• “The client paid us and I got my commission. I don’t feel I have the right to ask for anything else.”
• “I feel like I’m imposing on people.”
• “I’d like to, but I don’t know how to do so tactfully.”

As you can see, these are emotional reasons. They are all reasonable, but the fact remains that these people are missing out on the tremendous benefits provided by referrals. So how do they — and you — get past these concerns? To begin, you may need to get out of your own way. Here’s a three-step process for doing so.

Question your beliefs. Ask yourself, “Why do I feel this way when so many other people clearly don’t?

Play out a referral-asking scenario in your mind. What’s the worst that could happen? Will the new client cancel his order?

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We all know how frustrating it is when a sales opportunity we’ve been working on suddenly stalls out. Our instinctive response is to begin thinking of ways to accelerate the prospect’s decision about the sale, usually by offering some financial incentive (a discount). Paradoxically, this often has the opposite effect. The prospect senses your eagerness, which may be perceived as desperation, making you less attractive, and causing a further delay in purchasing your product or service. Is there a better way?

ANTICIPATE DELAYED DECISION MAKING
In order to find a better way, it helps to understand the three primary reasons why prospects who clearly want or need what you have to offer, delay making a decision: analysis paralysis, the inability of a committee to come to a consensus, and the fear of making the “wrong” decision. Furthermore, in tight economic times, the perceived risks of making the “wrong” decision are exacerbated, making people even more skittish and reluctant to make financial commitments.

An effective way to minimize the frequency with which you encounter delays is to try to head them off before they have a chance to manifest. There is little you can do if a prospect delays a close by not getting back to you; however, you can avoid delays in closing by taking the following steps early in the sales cycle.

1. DETERMINE THE DATE BY WHICH THE PROSPECT WANTS TO MAKE THE PURCHASE, AND WHY.
Establishing a target purchase date provides a basis for determining whether you’re on track or you are headed towards a delay. Asking “why” sets the table for the follow-up question about the cost of delaying. This will be an important lever to pull if things do indeed get off track.

2.

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Salespeople won’t always get the call back, get the appointment, get to meet the decision maker, or get the order. Now it is, of course, unreasonable to expect to always get what we want. But, it is reasonable to believe that we might get what we want more often if we changed the way we asked for it. The sad fact is that one of the reasons we struggle to get sales results is because we simply don’t ask for what we want – or we don’t ask for it directly. Here are five types of questions that few salespeople ask that can move the sales cycle along and help you achieve your goals.

1) Qualifying Questions
Most salespeople are taught to probe for “pain” – to find out what’s wrong, and what the prospect is not happy about, what they don’t like about their current situation. But there’s another question that should be asked before that kind of question: “What do you like about what and whom you’re using now?” At first blush, it may seem self-defeating to ask a question that provides the prospect an opportunity to say something favorable about his current situation.

But there are two reasons why it makes sense: (1) it tells you what you need to – at a minimum – provide as part of the solution you will propose and (2) it builds rapport by giving your prospect an opportunity to discuss aspects of his current product or service that validate his decision to have selected them.

2) Money Questions
Many salespeople have been taught not to mention money early in the conversation. Nonsense. You should not be talking with any prospect who cannot or will not pay you what your product or service costs. Period. You need to find out whether the two of you are in the same ballpark; the sooner you do, the sooner you can stop wasting your limited time with those prospects that aren’t, and move on to those that are.

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In tough economic times, there’s a constant concern that customers will pull in the reins and make fewer purchases. If you’re Wal-Mart or some other commodity seller, you can simply drop your price to drive more volume, thereby maintaining your current revenue levels. But if you sell a premium product or service — one where the premium value of what you offer is conveyed in part by a premium price — “discounting” is inconsistent with the brand promise you’ve made to your customers. For example, Nicole Miller was selling her ties for $65 when the rest of the world was selling ties of comparable quality for $25-$45. She never discounted — not even during slow periods. To do so would have removed the cachet that was the hallmark of her ties and moved them toward the realm of the ordinary tie. This would have deprived her of her unique selling proposition, and made it difficult, if not impossible, to return to the premium price she’d established once things got better.

How then can we induce skittish customers in an uncertain economy to continue buying without discounting? One way is to offer to stretch payment over a period of time. You accept a down payment, and allow customers to pay the balance in installments (say, monthly for the next six months). This eases the payment burden on customers by lowering the current cash outlay (but not the price), which will motivate some customers to buy who otherwise would not have. Of course, you are implicitly discounting (forgoing the time value of money), but it’s not perceived as such by customers. One note of caution: By using this tactic, you are effectively financing the deal, and in doing so taking on the risk of non-payment.

A second option is to offer a deal, such as buy two, get the third for half-price. Constructed properly, this incentive will help you maintain (perhaps even increase) unit sales and revenue, with only a slight hit to your margins.

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When I first started Exceptional Thinking, just about everybody told me that I should do some advertising and to be honest, that’s what I thought I should do too. After all, that’s what businesses do to promote their products and services don’t they? So, dutifully I advertised. First in a business magazine that resulted in nothing, then in a local community magazine – again nothing and then finally (I was learning my lesson at this point) in the local paper. Nothing there either. By this point, I was getting a little frustrated with marketing. Wasn’t advertising supposed to bring in results? All I’d done so far is to spend out money and got nothing back. After reading tons of marketing books and about 6 months later, I finally realised that advertising was simply not going to work for my business. But, the funny thing was that when I spoke to other businesses too, exactly the same thing had happened to them! Why was this? Well, here’s my theory on advertising. Advertising is extremely good for making people AWARE of your business, but not too good at actually getting you customers. Think about it this way. You advertise in your local paper. Your potential customers might see your advert, be interested and mean to do something, but the paper gets thrown away and they forget all about it. Next week, you advertise again. The same person sees your advert for a second time and thinks they really must do something, but forgets all about it as soon as they close the paper. And so it goes on. Someone might do something the third or fourth time they see your advert, but by this point, you’ve spent a fortune and although for this person, it’s the third or fourth time they’ve seen it, for someone else, it might be the first time they’ve seen your advert. And then, consider this scenario…people flick through the local paper, but bypass the adverts section because they think there won’t be anything in there that might interest them.

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American Vending Systems is offering new business opportunities for those looking to run their own business and earn an amazing living. Their distributorships are available in all states with the exception of Indiana and Iowa and come complete with ongoing training and support.

About American Vending Systems
American Vending Systems is a partner of Pro Energy Beverages in this venture and the two have formed a very successful partnership to promote and sell Mad Dog Energy Chews. The partnership was formed in 2007 when the chews were introduced to the snack market and proved to be an instant and massive success, but the business itself has been in operation since 1985. It has an excellent reputation of bringing snacks to the masses and is rightfully proud of its perfect record.

American Vending Systems offers Mad Dog products, including the energy chews and shots (a beverage designed to give the individual energy). With high quality ingredients and proven results, the products are flying out of the machines in all locations so it is a very profitable business. It is also easy to find great locations because the products American Vending Systems offer have been featured on numerous TV shows and publications, including The Whoopi Goldberg Show, CNBC, and The Wall Street Journal. Of course, it helps that they fit right in with the lifestyle niche that has been booming of late. With weight loss and energy products being high on the desirable list for consumers, this could be the opportunity that you are looking for.

The American Vending Systems Benefits
The relevance of the product is only part of the reason why this is a great opportunity for people looking to purchase a branded opportunity and effectively run their own businesses. Here are just some of the benefits:

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CareMinders Home Care is looking for motivated, kind and driven people to take advantage of a current franchise opportunity. With full training and support included, you can become a franchisee if you have the drive and qualifications.

About CareMinders Home Care
CareMinders Home Care is one of the market leaders in the senior care industry. It is also one of the leaders in the in-home non-medical care industry. In fact, what sets it apart from the competition is that not only seniors benefit from the company’s services. CareMinders Home Care provides in-home non-medical care for any individual who needs it, regardless of age. They also provide in-home medical care in certain situations as well.

CareMinders offers a range of services for those who have problems with illness, injury or other similar issues. Both short term and long term assistance are available. In many cases, the CareMinders Home Care workers are invaluable because they give family members the freedom they need while providing an essential service to those suffering from immobility, illness or other problems. Given the significant benefits this service offers, franchisees can expect to begin earning profits right away.

CareMinders Home Care Rewards
CareMinders Home Care has a successful program that has been tried and tested over the years. The program almost always yields success for those with determination and drive. This is a solid franchise to be a part of and franchisees can expect:

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Blue Moon Mexican Café is currently looking for willing, hard working, and determined entrepreneurs to take advantage of a major business opportunity. The company is expanding and need franchisees that are committed to achieving their goals. Blue Moon Mexican Café provides full training and ongoing support in addition to financing assistance and is looking for franchisees nationwide. If the following information intrigues you, then please request further information today.

About Blue Moon Mexican Café
Blue Moon Mexican Café is a full service restaurant chain that offers friendly and warm service, a relaxing atmosphere, and food that is true to traditional Mexican cuisine. Designed to be a neighborhood restaurant, Blue Moon offers incredibly fresh food that is made on the premises every day. With over 20 years of experience in the New York market, they know how to treat customers and offer exactly what customers are looking for. This makes dining at Blue Moon a first class experience.

Every Blue Moon Mexican Café strives to be an important part of the community, as demonstrated by the strategy they practice to give something back. This policy encourages favorable attitudes towards the restaurant, which is exactly what the company wants, and what franchisees benefit from.

Personal and Community Blue Moon Rewards
Running your own restaurant under the Blue Moon Mexican Café brand is a smart and profitable investment.

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Americlean Dry Cleaning is currently offering a business opportunity for interested parties to join this highly profitable company. With third party financial assistance available and ongoing training and support, this is a major opportunity for all potential entrepreneurs within the United States and Puerto Rico. Please read the benefits below before requesting further details and applying because there are several opportunities available and one of them may just be the opportunity you are looking for!

About Americlean Dry Cleaning
Americlean Dry Cleaning is one of the few market leaders in the dry cleaning industry today. This fragmented industry is a haven for small businesses but few of them offer a major brand that is well known by individuals all over the United States. In operation for over 50 years, Americlean Dry Cleaning has established around 6,000 outlets that provide excellent service to all customers. As a result of that, millions of people visit the chain every single week!

As an already successful dry cleaning business, there is little risk in the opportunity for new owners. In fact, the list of benefits is seemingly endless!

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Virtuoso Music is currently looking for highly driven and determined people to take advantage of an exciting franchise opportunity. The company is searching for individuals to join the franchise and capitalize on the full training and support given in order to benefit from profitability, personal rewards, and immense business success.

About Virtuoso Music
Virtuoso Music is an investment in the future of music and can be highly profitable for the right candidate. Virtuoso Music promotes music education within the local community by providing people with access to music lessons with a variety of instruments in a wide range of locations. The company provides lessons in homes and schools and offers a variety of other music-related services, also giving the community access to music events.

Although there are other companies that offer music related services, Virtuoso Music stands alone in the fact that there is a huge gap for services that operate at the convenience of the community. People can schedule appointments for musical instruction at their convenience rather than attending at a set time and place. As the company actively travels to meet requirements, it is a home-based business, which means little overhead for franchisees.

Virtuoso Music Franchise Benefits
Virtuoso Music is offering a solid opportunity for entrepreneurs to invest in a growing industry that has virtually no competition in the set niche that has been established. The system has been proven to work time and again by entrepreneurs that love running their own business and the flexibility such an approach offers.

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The Drug Test Consultant is currently offering a business opportunity that allows individuals to invest in a highly profitable opening in a high demand industry niche. With full training and support available, and a growing industry to tap into, this may be the opportunity that you have been waiting for to fulfill your entrepreneurial goals. The information below should give you a quick idea as to how profitable the opportunity can be. Applications are being accepted now.

About The Drug Test Consultant
The Drug Test Consultant is an innovative business that is extensively relevant to modern society – it is aimed at drug abuse victims. Drug abuse continues to be a problem in all walks of society today. It affects families, home, the workplace, and situations in day-to-day life. Unfortunately, community and legal initiatives do not always work as they should so The Drug Test Consultant gives people another option by offering:

•    Drug detection assessment
•    Drug testing in the workplace
•    Hair follicle drug testing
•    Steroid testing
•    Home drug testing
•    Instant supply distribution
•    Background checks

As you can see, the service list is extensive and covers every possible aspect of drug testing. This is, unfortunately, needed in society today, but The Drug Test Consultant can help to make the world a much better place to live in if used correctly. It can also give entrepreneurs personal rewards as well as the obvious financial ones.

Why Choose The Drug Test Consultant?
The Drug Test Consultant has a wide range of benefits available for individuals seeking to invest in such a major opportunity. Check out the benefits below for an idea of what you can expect:

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A lot of businesses have seen a steep drop in their 2009 sales. 2009 was one of the worst recessions in the last 50 years. It has become evident that the economy is on the verge of coming back, now businesses are asking what their next move should be? The reality is that businesses need to be more aggressive with marketing and smarter with how they spend their marketing budgets. Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist at IHS Global Insight, told 2000 attendees of the Grainger MRO conference that many businesses experienced a 65% drop in sales in 2009. This is a staggering amount to try and absorb regardless of the size of business, and as a result has severely weakened many businesses.

It is clear that almost all businesses and individuals have reduced spending, meaning there are less people that have money to buy your products or services. In 2009 many people had decreased disposable income for a large chunk of the middle class.

Businesses that have a good economic strategy are doing more marketing during a recession not less. Companies that reduce marketing efforts tend to see a decrease in revenues and therefore the collapse of many companies. It does cost you more to get the same amount of sales but you must maintain sales even if the cost is higher. This is unfortunate but this is the result of the recession and something all businesses are experiencing. The result of decreasing revenues means future problems with cash flow. The most critical aspect is making sure you do what is needed to keep your revenues up. It means expanding where you can get more sales, being creative and looking at additional opportunities. Good business economics means that you need to look at ways to market your company so you are in front of more potential customers.

Keep doing what works and look for ways to get in front of a greater number of potential customers.

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What is an expert? Are you an expert? Do you call yourself an expert? Do your customers/clients refer to you as an expert? Undoubtedly, it provides value to be viewed as an expert in a certain field or line of work. Is aspiring to attain such status a worthy goal, or is attaining such status really just a byproduct of ones efforts towards larger, bigger picture goals?My current business is helping people and business in the process of buying and selling businesses. My perspective or “area of difference” is from the perspective of a small business owner that has personally bought many businesses over a 20 year period to add to my existing business . The interesting component of what I do in helping people buy and sell businesses is that most people only buy or sell a business once in their life once, most never do at all. So when someone is looking to buy a business or sell a business and only do it once, it can be accurately stated that that person cannot be an expert in that process. Maybe when buying a business or selling a business one should seek advise or help from an expert- but that is not what this article is about.

My opinion is that the term expert is a widely used term and its use has only been growing as the internet is reaching further through social networks and into our daily lives. Maybe the term is getting over-used and “watered down.” We all get on Google, search, and run into experts everyday suggesting, telling, guiding so many of our everyday actions and even views, or way of thinking.

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Social media and blogging can immediately establish a company’s presence and deliver its message online.  Business owners and entrepreneurs can now find specific communities that they can target and deliver their message addressing specific interests and concerns.  But for most companies, the Internet’s capabilities and outreach are limited.  There are countless businesses with websites, blogs and social media campaigns that are not effectively reaching the public, much less their specific target market.  The Internet is an amazingly powerful communication tool; it offers everyone with a computer and online accesses a voice and an outlet, but that is also the net’s downside.  There are millions upon millions out there trying to deliver their messages and competing for eyeballs and visitors.   Nearly every competitor is trying to get his or her message out to the public using the same basic approach, which creates a daunting marketing dilemma.  The Internet is a marketing must, but how does a company effectively market online?

The smarter companies use a targeted approach, utilizing SEO and SEM techniques; they create and market their blogs and develop targeted campaigns on the various social media sites.  But, even for the savviest online marketers, the competition is still fierce.

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Up until last year, when things really got tough (fiscally and image wise), it was commonly felt that companies went through two types of management–one that could carry them through the tough start-up period and another that could run a successful enterprise. The same group of people seldom managed the company through both phases of growth.

This past year, the line between the two management styles has become muddied. Especially with the added scourge of senior management dipping too deeply into the corporate well for their own good. The survival mode of operation is forcing management to conserve their most precious resource: talented people. By cutting back to a core group of talented, motivated people; management not only finds they can run “leaner, meaner and better,” but it is also a better organization overall, as a result of the changes.

Re-Assessing Positions, Priorities
Management has to assess what they are doing internally versus what they should be doing internally. Then they can determine what they should outsource.

Today, few manufacturers in the industry do much – or any – of their own production in-house. In fact, many of them are essentially technology developers and marketers. They buy cases from specialists; have boards and packages produced and stuffed by specialists; and purchase a complete range of components from specialists. Many like Dell, HP and Cisco never even take possession of the product. Instead it is shipped direct to the channel partner or consumer. This permits management to adapt more rapidly to sudden industry/marketplace changes. Technology and manufacturing can be changed almost overnight.

Management realizes that it takes almost no time at all to reverse-engineer even the most advanced technology, thus nullifying their perceived advantage.

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This truly is a new age in the public relations and media world.  The Internet has turned the communication world on its head.  Many say it heralds the end of traditional media, but I believe what is actually happening is not the death throws of one form of media, but a morphing of different forms of communications.  This new media world is still young, but, when the dust settles, it will result in the advent of a new, more exciting and more robust media and communications world.

One of the upsides of the net, social media and blogs, is that you can now learn so much about writers, editors and producers that you are pitching.   You can learn their interests and study their writings   Now, when you pitch a story, you can have a much better take on whether your pitch is appropriate or off-base.  You can still call or email to make sure you’re making an appropriate pitch, but the information that the Internet now puts at your fingertips makes it much easier to be prepared and go in with the right pitch.

This type of homework does take some time, but that is one of the many changes in the world of PR and media relations. Instead of sending out hundreds of emails and packages hoping that a few hit the right target, which, sadly, is how things happen much of the time, the savvy approach is to pick a small number of media contacts, do your research and make more focused targeted pitches.

With That In Mind The New Rules For Pitching The Media Are:

1. Develop a strong pitch for your product or service.

2. Don’t just make it a sales pitch, come up with a story

3. Study various media outlets that would be appropriate to pitch your story to

4. Find specific writers and producers that work at those media outlets

5. Go online, find articles, blogs or segments they’ve done and study their work.

6.

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For me, PR always has been (and probably still is) the hardest part of marketing Exceptional Thinking. Why? Because it involves picking up the phone and talking to journalists. 

Now, I’m sure they’re lovely people, but in my head, they’ve got three heads, sharp fangs and would happily eat me for breakfast. And that’s why I personally don’t like calling them.  

Thankfully, there have been two things that have saved me from having to pick up the phone. One was employing a lady last year whose background is in PR – she is quite happy picking up the phone and having a chat with the ‘aliens’. 

And then of course, there’s also online PR too, which doesn’t involve (I’m very happy to say) talking to anyone and allows you to get your message out there and put whatever you like. 

I can write articles (like this one) and put it out onto as many websites as I want to; I can join forums and answer people’s questions; and I can send out all the newsletters that I have time to do. 

Now, to be honest with you, I know that journalists and newspapers traditionally haven’t been happy with the fact that small businesses can do online PR and marketing now because not as many people are advertising with them. 

Because no-one is advertising, the space they have available for editorial is less and it’s even HARDER to get your press release in the paper. 

But, one area that the journalists seem to have embraced is social networking. The media absolutely love it! And I don’t seem to be able to listen to a radio programme now or read something in a magazine without Facebook or Twitter coming up again and again. 

So, because of that, I started doing some research and unearthed a massive resource of all the UK journalists that are currently using Twitter – tons of them as it turned out. 

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