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How to Build Wonderful Relationships With Your Clients Through Live Events

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For the past few weeks my heads down working on one of my businesses , TheBDevent. The entire concept is focused around bringing executives together in a particular industry, segment of the Technology Industry for education and peer networking without the distractions that a typical trade event brings of multiple different areas to cover and too many places to be. The event is regionalized and held in different parts of the country a few time a year. Well, we’re just about done with our 3 day event in Boston and I’ve learned a few thing and have been reminded of a few thing this week.

1. Personal Connection makes a difference: There is very great value in meeting somebody face to face, shaking their hand, and grabbing a chair for discussion .  Getting to know them better from both a business and personal perspective has a huge impact on the ability to do better business when you’re in different geographic areas and spend a majority of the time communicating via email and telephone. You can build a stronger relationship when you personally connect with them.

2. A little enjoyment goes a long way: While we may have fun with it, most of us spend a lot of time running from place to place, stressed out and plain old tired as we grow our businesses. It continue to amaze me what happens when bringing people together, in one place, to get a little work done and then allowing time to socialize and relax. Brilliant ideas are born and synergies are created. Sometimes in the formal meeting, sometimes at dinner or at the bar afterward. I realize how substantial in business relationship to hang out with your client though we don’t get to do it enough because both of us spread across the country.

3. The value of the live event is huge: When you get dozens/hundreds of the smartest people in an industry together then bring in other smart people to provide education through discussions, forums and presentations – the collective “smartness” increases. The learning that is done leads to new concept , new products, new partnerships, new relationships , etc. As event promoters, we may not know it during the event or right away – but at some point something that was said at X event has a positive effect on someone and they make action. New companies and new products are born.

4. We are all human: Our events include many of the “who’s who gurus” of the industry. I’m talking about the people with oodles of respect, money and influence. It is wonderful to take time out of their busy days to join us and share with us. And yes, sometimes I am surprised they take the time – but they do. They weren’t always gurus or part of the who’s who. They started someplace, worked hard and moved up and didn’t forget their roots or their friends. It is amazing to watch. Having put on these events for a while now, it continues to remind me that deep down we’re all just people looking to grow our businesses and live a good life and that connecting and helping others learn is all a part of that.

I want to propose an idea to you to take a look around your industry and see if there is an association or group of people that puts on live events during the year and if you haven’t been to one I want you to look into it . Whether you’re a lawyer, florist, realtor, artist, mechanic, network marketer, or basket weaver – there are others like you , your peers, that want to get to know you. And there are events for you. Go, enjoy yourself, learn and you’ll benefit from the information and friendship gained. Trust me on this one . I experienced it myself and seen it happen.

Have a great day!

P.S. I appreciate your feedback and look forward to your comments. For more information about my services or to find out how we can partner together call me at 503-780-3203 or email me at vanessa@vanessaduplessie.com.

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Tags: Business, Coaching, entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, Internet Marketing, mlm, Network Marketing, Public Relations, relationships, small businesses

Secrets of Having More Time for Small Business Owners Revealed

The scarcity of time is one of the strongest challenges of small businesses but do you want to know the answer ?

The solution isn’t as hard to resolve as you might think. You might call it simple, but not easy. If it was easy everyone would achieve it.

The secret to having an abundance of time in business is to do something different every day or week to change that circumstance .

Inch by inch anything is a cinch.

Having more time is not going to be achieved in one day . It’s something that will take time to achieve, but here’s a true story about this .

A client of mine who owned a company with 5 staff was working from 6am to 6.30pm 6 days of the week, or over 80 hours every week. But 10 months later he was working ZERO hours a week with a business that worked 100% without him. His business now worked hard so he didn’t have to himself. In fact he hasn’t worked at all in his business for over 4 years since, it keeps paying him a passive income and he has all the time in the world to do what he wants with his life.

Without going into the full story of how that was accomplished here (see our Business Training Services for more on the “7 Steps to Business Freedom” and how it was achieved), we’ll summarize here.

The meaning of insanity is to keep doing what you’re doing every week and hoping for a new outcome .

If you want more free time, in fact 50% or even 100% more, you need to start to walk the talk. You have to prove by action you will commit to doing whatever is possible to do to achieve it. This is the most important first step. A half hearted commitment is no commitment.

Heard this phrase … “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve”?

Without conceiving (imagining you can enjoy 50%-100% of your time back you won’t believe it, so therefore you definitely won’t achieve it. If you believe you will have a business that can work with 50% of your time only (or even zero percent of your time) you’re right, you can. If you believe that’s impossible, you’re right again! Whatever the mind can conceive…

Let’s assume it is achievable and you’re committed what next?

You need to start leveraging.

Leverage is simply doing work once only that you benefit from for years. Until you are doing leveraged work you aren’t making true progress in business, you are swimming with lead shoes on with no shore in sight. Sooner or later you get tired and stop swimming forever .

There are many ways to leverage in business depending on and } how you invest your time.

The majority of business owners waste their time; they aren’t investing it. They continually say, “I don’t have time, I’m too busy”, yet do nothing to have more time in the future.

Here are some suggestions . We’ll begin with low level leverage activities you can do, then add on higher leverage things.

Low level leverage

1. Allocate 1-2 hours a week to train your team proactively.
2. Think about permanent solutions to your challenges, not band-aids. If you can’t get customers, learn how to write better promotions, don’t keep writing your own if you haven’t learned how to, delegate it.
3. Delegate, train and delegate some more. The more you delegate the more time you will have .
4. Learn! Learning is not common with business owners. This means not technical learning but sales, marketing, leadership, personality profiling, financial intelligence, gross and net profit margins, systems, etc. Attend programs and pay to learn these subjects as you only pay for learning once to benefit forever.

Higher level leverage

1. Put your prices up by 10%. This works 95% of the time with no detriment in profit. Sure you might lose a small number of customers but the profit increase will offset the loss of revenue from a few clients not buying.
2. Use the surplus profit to hire more staff to free up your time.
3. Document systems so you are doing work once and benefiting forever. Training an employee , who then leaves one day means you need to train someone else again.
4. Empower your team more to do what you think they can’t do now. If you pay them to carry out a job , it’s their challenge to figure out how to carry it out , not yours.

You can also leverage time by letting someone help you through this process of leveraging.

One that’s ideal is pay someone who will hold you accountable to stick to actions and complete them. Paying a professional externally creates accountability and the strong reason for change.

Look for a business training services company to create that accountability, but also one you can leverage through by using their proven and documented systems. One of the few such companies is my own – Business Building Mentors (plug).

If you want help with having a lifestyle with 50-100% more time in 12 months or so as many of our other clients now enjoy, check out the small business management program called – The 7 Steps to Business Freedom. It’s a fully systematized business training program for any SME owner who wants to enjoy leverage or passive income.

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The Skills And Mindset Of Typical Entrepreneurs

Whether you dream of owning your own small business or of creating the next big global enterprise brand, there’s a lot of skill and work that goes into becoming a successful entrepreneur. If you’re thinking of making the move to working for yourself, read on. One of the first things you need to have in place is a good idea as, without this, you’ll be nowhere. You also need the skill to turn that idea into reality, so an element of practicality is essential.

This takes commitment and dedication on your part as it can often take a long time before even the best of ideas come to fruition. You may want to give consideration to the following things: do you care enough about your idea to work on it for free until it starts to come good? Are you willing to sacrifice your social life if you have to put in long hours to make things work? Are there any areas where you could make cutbacks to focus on your dream?

There’s a lot of hard work involved in becoming an entrepreneur, so once you’ve got the commitment sorted, prepare for hard graft as it takes time and effort to create a successful enterprise. You need to spend some time marketing yourself and making sure people hear of your idea to maximize your chances of success and also work to put in place any structures you need to ensure the sustainability of your business as well as focusing on how innovative your idea is.

Linked to innovation is the need to be flexible about every area of your business. This will help you be sustainable in the long run as it’s vital to be able to update and adapt your business to the ever-changing business environment to ensure your continued relevance. Also, if your idea doesn’t work first time, you need to be flexible enough to understand why and change things if necessary or you may find yourself stuck in a rut you can never get out of with a business that doesn’t work.

On top of this, it’s vital for entrepreneurs to be ‘people’ people, as without vital skills of networking and meeting people, you will have a hard time finding support and investors. Getting investors on board is often crucial so make sure you know how to market yourself, your business and your skills. Also give some thought to timing as, no matter how great your idea is, enter the marketplace at the wrong time and it might flop, which also makes a positive outlook crucial in hard times.

If you liked this, try : Company Formation UK

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Reading Between the Lines When Buying a Business

In our entrepreneurial world you need to be able to get on with people really well if you want to get anywhere. There is so much competition and so much pressure on you if you are in charge of a business, that you need to be able to interact with people from all denominations, countries, origins and creeds if you want to be really successful. While there may be a definite trend toward service provision in the business world as a whole and many new businesses may well exist online, as opposed to in “bricks and mortar” form, the fact is that you have to be able to interact with people in one way or another, successfully, in order to make it work.

If you break down the process of buying and selling, you will quickly find out that every person involved in the process has an agenda. In short, they want to achieve something. The buyer has something in mind, is looking for a great price and wants to come out on top. However, they may realize that what they’re looking for is rather difficult to find, or is particularly valuable and then their objective may be just to get that item at whatever cost. Let’s consider what the seller is looking for. Now the seller is obviously interested in the transaction, but they’re also careful to see that the buyer is satisfied as well if they want to retain that client and their associated, potential lifetime value. We all know how difficult it is to get new clients, so it’s better to look after the ones that you have got.

Realizing that there is an agenda, whenever you are looking at buying a business, you need to be able to read between those lines. Recognizing the motivators, the hidden agenda in many cases, may well be crucial as you navigate your way through this often complicated process. You need to be able to reveal the “real meaning” at every phase of that journey and once again understand that every person who you come across will have his or her own agenda.

The vast majority of people involved with a business for sale are above board and you will be very unlucky if you come across any fraudulent activity, but do expect to find something beneath the covers, or hidden away in a closet. Those hidden items on the agenda may or may not be deal killers and may have little bearing on potential success after you buy business assets, but you need to be able to reveal them, nevertheless.

The seller may be a very successful business person and have a matching personality. You need to be on your guard against whitewashing and take everything that is said with a certain pinch of salt. The process of due diligence will help you to read between the lines, but be sharp during the preliminary processes and you will be amazed at what you will pick up.

When you’re getting ready to buy a business a lot of behind the scenes investigation will take place. The seller is not going to reveal all the cards until he or she knows that you are really serious. You need to gather as much intelligence on your own as possible, before you start.

Richard Parker is the author of the How to Buy a Good Business at a Great Price series. As President and founder of Diomo Corporation – The Business Buyer Resource Center, his materials, seminars and consulting have helped thousands of business buyers realize their dream to buy a business.

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How To Venture Toward Success

One of the significant qualities associated with web entrepreneurs is they have not really been afraid about having to take some of those risky moves forward.  Consider Mark Ling as an example.  This individual has made a substantial amount of financial success with regard to himself and continues to do so.  Mark Ling has become unselfishly ready to be able to pass on these pointers for success to various other web marketers.  Take a glance at this AffiloJetPack review to acquire an inkling of just what Mark has created to aid others attain terrific financial success.  Develop your own internet marketing strategies by looking into the few suggestions here that may help you to move towards success.

1.  Explore a number of distinct niches for you to specialize in.  Web marketing experts just like Mark Ling have frequently experimented with a variety of markets well before they have arrived at their extraordinary amounts of financial freedom.  It is always important to bear in mind that this financial success was not attained over night and that it required a number of great trials and tribulations for most of these incredibly successful internet marketers to get where they are at currently.  Be sure that you happen to be choosing niche categories that happen to be intriguing to you nevertheless it really is acceptable to try out several diverse ideas before you discover where you fit in.

2.  Obtain some very nice SEO software that will help direct you along the route.  As stated above, Mark Ling is an excellent net professional to obtain some ideas from and he delivers some wonderful software that will help virtually any online professional at just about any level of their monetary quest.  Mark is simply one of the many with some wonderful SEO software programs so go out and then determine which one will work for your specific circumstance.

3.  Be sure you practice anything you preach.  If you are delivering products and services online it can be so crucial for you to follow through with what you are promising for your buyers.  That really is one of the very techniques that other prosperous net entrepreneurs have produced their own results.  They have been faithful to their particular specialized niche and offer material which really allows others to develop their own results regardless of what market that they may have been tinkering with at the time.

You as well may take certain words of knowledge to venture toward your own achievement being a net professional.  Pursuing these fantastic ideas will surely get you started out on the road to economic independence.  Relax and enjoy the ride considering that you will be there before you know it!

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Chatting with Just For You Owner – Arienne Landry

Recently, I had the chance to sit down with NAWBO-SF’s new policy chair Arienne Landry. Arienne is a small business owner in San Francisco who owns Just For You Café.

How did you get into business?

I purchased Just For You Cafe nineteen years ago with a business partner, Julie Campbell. I eventually bought out her portion of the business. The restaurant was then located on eighteenth street on Potrero Hill. We kept the original menu but expanded on it. It was a tiny place, what people in New Orleans call a “shotgun” (because of the length and width ratio). During the dot com era we were basically pushed out because of high rent. In 2002 I was able to move the location to where it is now, on 22nd St. We serve breakfast, lunch and dinner with an emphasis on Southern and American style cooking. Some of our specialties include; New Orleans style doughnuts called Beignets, New Mexico (Hatch) green chili huevos rancheros, grits, creole crab cakes and awesome Reuben sandwiches. We have an extensive menu with daily pasta and fresh fish specials. We try to use as much organic produce and locally made meat products as cost allows and our eggs are produced locally in Petaluma. All of our food is prepared in house from scratch, with the exception of chili con carne, Acme rye bread and Royal bakery French rolls.

Why did you want to get into business for yourself?

I went into business for myself because I think that I am an entrepreneur to the core. I like risk taking, I get bored easily, and in this type of business there is never a dull moment. The responsibility is intense, but I like calling the shots.

What is your biggest challenge?

I think the biggest challenge of all business owners is managing people. Since I am not a natural leader this has been my most difficult challenge.

What is the greatest reward?

All of the amazing people that I have met over the years and continue to meet everyday in the restaurant. And providing employment to many people who might have had to settle for menial jobs with lesser pay.

Do you belong to business organizations?

I have participated in the Renaissance Center and belong the National Restaurant Assoc., Potrero Hill Merchants Assoc., National Association of Women Business Owners of which I am the Public Policy Chair, Small Business California and Public Policy Institute of California.

Do your employees have a nickname for you?

To my face, they call me Mommie!

What challenges do you face doing business in SF?

The challenges of doing business in S.F. are almost insurmountable and too numerous to list. I think most small businesses in San Francisco are really struggling with the frequency and costs of laws and regulations.  San Francisco is one the most expensive cities, in the country in which to do business. I often wonder how long I can continue here. Many other business owners that I speak to say the same thing. San Francisco doesn’t want franchises, yet it does nothing to promote or help small businesses to thrive.

Do you have a role model?

My most important role model was my father. I learned my values, ethics and perseverance from him.

What piece of advice would you offer a newby restaurateur?

Find a mentor and learn everything you can about food and how a professional kitchen works. Focus on the Food. This is your product and it’s one the basic necessities of life. People bring a lot of emotion in with them when they eat, actually expectation, and your number one goal is to try to match or exceed those expectations.

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Tags: Arienne Landry, ational Restaurant Assoc., Business, challenges of doing business in SF, entrepreneur, Just For You, National Association of Women Business Owners, NAWBO, Potrero Hill Merchants Assoc., Public Policy Institute of California., San Francisco, Small Business California, small business owner, What challenges do you face doing business in SF?