bizthreads.net: Business Information for Entrepreneurs by an Entrepreneur

Everyone's writing a “leadership secrets” book these days. I've thought about it but then I realized that I don't have enough leadership secrets for a book… and they're not that secret anyway.

In business, I try to lead with four simple rules. None of these should come as a surprise to anyone. They are tried and true rules that have served me well for years:

1. Dream big. Part of the fun of starting a business is envisioning its massive success years down the road and working to build toward that success. I don't want to build businesses with the hope of being a small corner store; I want a business that will put vast conglomerates like GE or Microsoft to shame. Will I ever achieve it? Who knows, but I'll have a lot of fun trying.
2. Plan to succeed. Planning is so essential to a business. Businesses often fail when they fail to plan. I have dedicated myself to helping other businesses succeed through proper, careful planning.
3. Gather a strong team. We can't do it on our own. We need to surround ourselves with a group of people who can work well together. Each person's weaknesses should be accommodated by another's strengths.
4. Execute tirelessly. Entrepreneuring is about lighting a fire in your soul for something and fanning it into flame. There will be times when you're exhausted but often the only way to be successful as a business owner is to execute your plan and keep pushing yourself to execute it further. That doesn't mean you don't take vacations, but it does mean that make sure you enjoy the journey as a journey.

For those business owners who do a lot of traveling, http://www.cosmopod.com/ is a great option. I've seen business owners use a laptop or a Palm Pilot device without as much success: perhaps they had the computer but not the file they needed because it was still at their office on their desktop. I've seen business owners who kept all of their work files on their laptop, only to have the laptop take a nasty spill during travel… losing access to the files when they were needed most.

That's why I like CosmoPOD. You can download their software for free and you end up with an online office that accepts emails, has office applications that let you work with Word and Excel documents, and can store up to 1 gigabyte of information; often enough for most business travelers to carry most of their advertising material. Although your web office is ad supported, you still end up with a vast amount of virtual real estate so you can log on at any computer and access the documents you need the most… when you need them the most.

I am an avid computer user. I like how convenient it is to keep all of my documents in one place, easy to find… and it doesn't take up a lot of space (unlike my filing cabinet in the corner). Although I'm not currently using one, I have used a Palm Pilot to help me store and retrieve information and share it with my computer.

Although I try to stay technologically current, there is one thing that I have so far not been able to replace in a computer.

My annual calendar. All you have to do is typically look around the Internet for programs — whether freeware, shareware, or commercial — and you'll usually find something that suits your needs. But I have yet to find annual calendar software I enjoy.

Until that day comes, I keep a big annual calendar on my office wall. It's the kind you can get at an office supply store for $20 and you write on it with smelly markers. Perhaps it's the size that I find useful; computer screens are getting bigger but aren't quite big enough yet to give you the at-a-glance that you get from the annual calendar.

My recommendation: get and use an annual calendar to give yourself an at-a-glance view of the year. It makes planning so much easier.

The Definitive Book of Body Language by Allan and Barabara Pease.

I've always had an interest in psychology and the inner workings of the mind. In college I was fascinated by a number of books on our internal and external motivations. To be honest, I think understanding those things has helped me in business.

Recently, I was discussing the successes and failures of corporate meetings with a few small business owners and one of them recommended this book to me. The last book on body language I had read was in college so I picked up this one — published in 2004 — for a refresher.

Allan Pease is the world's foremost expert on body language and that becomes very clear in the book. The Peases cover everything from the basics to advanced concepts, including cultural differences and gender differences. The book has a general focus, ranging across applications that include personal settings (like at a party or when you're interested in someone romantically) as well as corporate settings that include meetings, office politics, and interviews.

Admittedly, I would have liked a book that went even more in depth on the business side of the body language equation, but this very comprehensive book does a great job of talking about many aspects of body language that an be applied to business: this includes building rapport, as well as diffusing difficult situations, and making the customer feel important.

If you interact with people — socially or professionally — this is a good read. If you want to connect with your customers and make them feel great about doing business with you, this is a must-read.

Links of Interest: Business Loan Your Financial Experts.

http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/Tec6s9KwGjzKCq/Google-Adds-Dayparting-Feature-to-AdWords.xhtml

Nearly every day I talk to businesses that use some form of text-based online advertising. Google AdWords are the most common — usually the first stop in a litany of choices… followed by Yahoo, Microsoft's new AdCenter, and Miva.

As early as last October, while many were shouting that Google's AdWords are the biggest and brightest star in the online galaxy, I had heard rumblings from a discontented few that felt Google's sun was setting.

Then, since January, we've seen Google moving away from their core competency into web-office applications. Recently, they seem to be returning to the ad business that has brought them untold wealth. I've blogged a fair amount about Google because of their premiere position in the online marketing world. I was wondering if that would falter soon because they'd lost focus, but I think they are regaining position.

Google has recently introduced a new aspect of AdWords called “dayparting” which means that advertisers no longer have to have their ads posted for the entire day. AdWords already allow marketers to target country, language, and city, but now dayparting lets them target by time of day.

Months after I was seeing people moving away from AdWords because bid prices were getting out of control, now I think Google may have climbed back on top of the pile for a moment longer, helping marketers target even more accurately.

Everyone has their “hobbyhorse” and mine is business planning. I have seen businesses succeed and I have seen them fail and while there are many factors that contribute to the success or failure of a business, I continually see businesses with business plans manage those factors… and improve their chances of success.

Like the Constitution, a business plan should be a living document. That means, it should always be changing and growing with your business. Your business plan shouldn't lock you into a way of doing things. Instead, your business plan should enable you to take on more opportunities.

A business plan helps you anticipate problems before they arise and build solutions before you even need them. A business plan helps you know your market, better than they know themselves, so you can advertise effectively and sell more products. A business plan helps you understand your industry well — such as the ups and downs that might come with a rising and falling economy — and help you to maintain an even keel.

Business plans are not something that ONLY a new business needs to do. I firmly believe that they should be done by every business and reviewed on a quarterly basis and updated on (at least) an annual basis.

If you're in business and haven't created a business plan yet, let me encourage you to spend the time to make one. You won't regret it and the bottom line is that you'll improve your bottom line!

You can find business plan templates at http://www.morebusiness.com/businessplan/ to help you get started.

The other day I was on the phone with a fellow small business owner and we were brainstorming some ideas which he listed as we spoke. At the end of the phone call, I asked him to send me the ideas we had talked about and then I logged onto my email to wait for it to come through. A few moments later, my fax machine beeped and out came a fax of a lined piece of paper with handwriting on it.

Unexpected, but not the end of the world. When I bought my printer, I made sure it had multiple capabilities (including fax, scanner, copier, etc.). Once the fax came out, I put it right back in the machine and scanned it using OCR recognition. When I bought the fax machine I didn't know what OCR was or why I'd need it but now I am glad I bought it.

OCR stands for “Optical Character Recognition” and it allows you to scan a handwritten document (like I did) and turn it into a text document. After scanning, in moments, I had turned my friend's handwritten page into typed text in a Word document. There was the odd error here or there (probably attributed more to his handwriting than to the OCR capabilities) but nothing I couldn't fix in about 30 seconds.

Incidentally, for movie buffs out there, it's the same technology Harrison Ford used in the recent movie Firewall when the villains wanted him to scan bank account numbers.

Convenience and Hollywood entertainment… does your scanner have OCR?

I apologize that I'm blogging about Google twice in one week. I wouldn't do it if they'd just stop trying to be so darn helpful.

I know that many people go to Google's main page, www.google.com  to browse. My home page when I first turn on my browser is actually Google's “other products” page: http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/  because it gives me instant access to whatever I'm looking up: regular searches, news, blogger.com, images, video, etc. It's quick to see when they add new things so the other day I noticed a link I hadn't noticed before: http://webaccelerator.google.com/ . This is a Google Labs product, which means they're still testing it, but will let you download a version to try it out. If you use a DSL connection (that is, high speed not dial-up) then this is for you. It places a toolbar on your browser that helps you to browse more quickly.

They give details on their site on how they can help you browse more quickly. Some of the ways include pre-fetching pages or saving pages and only loading updates. One neat (but essentially pointless) feature of the toolbar is a counter that adds up how many minutes or hours you save by using the accelerator. A clever idea but it's really just there for interest sake.

Use it to browse more quickly. As I mentioned in a previous blog, it's another way for Google to become King of the Online World.

Recently I was in an audience at a presentation. It was all I could do to stay awake! The speaker had great content but a terrible delivery. He seemed to talk into the podium and after concluding he said, “Uhhh… okay, that's what I have to say.” The applause was polite.

Not everyone was born to speak in public but if you want to share your passion for you business, you should be prepared for it and be ready to present. After hearing that presentation, I wanted to make sure that I was prepared to give a dynamic presentation when called upon so I picked up a book from Amazon to “brush up” on my public speaking skills.

10 Days to More Confident Public Speaking by Lenny Laskowski and The Princeton Language Institute is an excellent book that can help you succeed in public speaking.

What makes the book so good is that it is very practical and easy to read. Laskowski's approach is to divide the topic of public speaking into 10 sections and have the reader tackle one section per day. Each day, one short chapter covers topics such as “Relating to your Audience” or “Remembering what you have to say” or “Ending your speech with a bang.” He uses interesting real life examples and covers several types of presentations that most small business owners would typically have to give.

The book is deceptively robust! By that I mean, it's small — my paperback version is 203 pages but it is so easy to read that I usually read 2 or 3 chapters a day. When I first got the book I thought “How could the author cover such a huge topic in such a small book?” but by page 203 I knew that he had done so quite adequately.

Google's recently announced spreadsheet has the online community talking.

Certainly, many people see this as one of the many ways that Google is trying to become the King of the Online World. Remember recently when we reported Google purchasing a web-based word processing program? They already have calendar and email functions. Add the spreadsheet and now you've got a decent online office system.

Some people think that Google is trying to unsettle Microsoft's hold on office software… which is possible.

Other people worry about privacy: will spreadsheet numbers about your business suddenly become interesting reading to Google executives? That's possible, too.

I'm not an expert on either of these issues, although I think that competitiveness will make both companies’ spreadsheets better and I think if privacy is a real concern you will use offline spreadsheets.

What I am interested in is how Google will monetize the spreadsheets. Google may hold the title of King of the Online World but I think they should be given the title of Supreme Ruler of Contextualized Advertising. Google AdWords were a stroke of genius. AdSense are great. Google Local ads within maps are brilliant. Will they be able to effectively advertise applicable ads in the spreadsheets that are meaningful to the users? Some people may not want to see ads when they use spreadsheets. I, on the other hand, as an entrepreneur, am very interested in seeing this develop.