Crafty??

Lately I'm obsessed with reading these blogs filled with crafts, home reno projects, and cupcakes.  I find all of it so appealing... but alas... these types of things are not my strong points.  I wish they were.  I wish I had the patience to sew, or scrapbook, or edit amazing photos.  I usually shy away from Relief Society craft projects... mostly because mine NEVER looks like the sample.  NEVER!

But, I have come to the realization over the years that I have my own sense of "craftiness" or creativity.  Having spent many years as a small business owner, I grew to LOVE small business. I love the science of it.  I'm fascinated by it.  I'm also fascinated with teaching... and helping others learn new strategies and concepts.  I guess its okay if I don't know how to hang wallpaper... I know how to create an effective small business.  I can walk into a business and within seconds tell you if it's working...or not. 

I love that I can help people apply new concepts to their businesses (often at very little expense), and that those concepts can have far-reaching personal and finacial rewards.  I love that I can help a small business owner who feels "stuck", get excited again about their business.  I love that.

I believe we all have natural gifts and abilities.  We are destined to create things.  Even though I'm not so crafty-  I love what I create!!

A great quote by Elder Uchtdorf...

"The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul. No matter our talents, education, backgrounds, or abilities, we each have an inherent wish to create something that did not exist before.



Everyone can create. You don’t need money, position, or influence in order to create something of substance or beauty.


Creation brings deep satisfaction and fulfillment. We develop ourselves and others when we take unorganized matter into our hands and mold it into something of beauty—and I am not talking about the process of cleaning the rooms of your teenage children.


You might say, “I’m not the creative type. When I sing, I’m always half a tone above or below the note. I cannot draw a line without a ruler. And the only practical use for my homemade bread is as a paperweight or as a doorstop.”


If that is how you feel, think again, and remember that you are spirit daughters of the most creative Being in the universe. Isn’t it remarkable to think that your very spirits are fashioned by an endlessly creative and eternally compassionate God?"

Let's take the talents we've been given and use them to create great things!



Shauna
http://www.mysmallbusinesscoach.com/

Make it easy on your customers!

Click here to read the article: Share!

This is a great article from Orange Soda.  I can't stand shopping online when the website isn't easy to use.  If you want a customer to buy from you... make it easy for them to find what they need!

Recommended Reading!

I know I've said this before... but I love this book, so I must mention it again!!  This book will help you evaluate the way you do business and live your life!!

What can you learn from Mark Zuckerberg??

http://www.allfacebook.com/what-every-entrepreneur-should-learn-from-mark-zuckerberg-2010-06

This is a great article I found online.  I think we can all learn something from this guy in the way he dared to dream big when creating Facebook!

The 7 Deadly Sins of Social Media

With everyone trying to figure out the best ways to use social media for their business, I thought this was an interesting read...


CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE

Small Business Marketing Strategies

This is a great article I found here:  http://www.originalquill.com/blog/

Here’s a simple tip to increase your small business revenue:

Don’t think outside the box… make your own box.


Here’s where most people go wrong and make costly mistakes in their marketing: they find their most successful competition, copy their marketing strategies, and sit back and wait for success.
While there’s nothing wrong with copying successful strategies from your competition (in fact, it’s a topic I’ve blogged about in the past), by limiting yourself to that strategy, you’re limiting your potential for success.
Pioneers in any industry are the ones who make it big. Copycats can find success, but the ceiling is often lower than that of the people they have copied.

So what’s the solution? Create your own marketing paradigm within your industry.
What’s the easiest way to become a pioneer in your industry and set the gold standard for success? Look to the successes in other industries and apply them to your industry.
By looking to other industries to see what’s working and applying their successful marketing strategies to your small business, you’ll stand out from the crowd and uniquely position yourself in your market.
Example: About a year and a half ago I decided to put my house on the market. The housing market had already started it’s down-swing, but I felt that if I could market my home differently, I’d have a great chance to sell my house at a price I was happy with.
What did I do? I looked to the web for examples.
Most successful internet marketers use a lead generating product that’s free to collect leads, then a follow-up system to close a sale or make an upsell. I followed that example in real estate.
I set up a website offering a free e-book on selling homes in a down economy and collected leads. My follow-up system sent out a series of auto-responders that talked about selling strategies and promoted my house. To get even more local leads into the system, we called local real estate agents to tell them about the free e-book and our house.
Within a couple of weeks we had shown the house on a daily basis and had offers coming in.
By thinking outside the real estate paradigm, I was able to set a new precedent that generated more interest in my house than anyone else in the region was getting. It was easy to do (didn’t require unique, earth-shattering ideas) and it worked.
So how can you come up with an outside-the-box marketing strategy that will work for your small business? Here’s an action plan:

1. For the next five days, keep a sharp eye out for good marketing strategies that you encounter in your every-day life. Pay special attention to local commercials, sporting events (minor league baseball is a gold mine for unique marketing ideas), the internet, and local excursions to places like the coffee shop, breakfast cafe, and home improvement store.
2. Jot down the 10 best ideas you encounter (even if you don’t think you can use them for your business).
3. At the end of the 5 days, go through the best ideas and narrow the list to the top 3.
4. Talk to your mastermind group (or a group of trusted associates) and share your top 3 marketing ideas. Ask them to help you brainstorm how you can apply them to your business.
5. Take action! Once you have your ideas and a strategy for implementing them in your business, take action and put them to the test. Brainstorming is great, but what separates the cream of the crop from the rest is action… so make sure you implement those ideas!

FREE Teleseminar Training

Join me for a FREE 60 Minute Teleseminar Training

5 Ways to Recession-Proof Your Business

Wednesday, February 23rd

7:00 PM MST

Register today and you'll receive an email containing the call in number and access code a few days before the event.

REGISTER HERE:
http://mysmallbusinesscoach.eventbrite.com/

NEW Business Spotlight!!

Be sure to check out our latest business spotlight:  KD Portraits

Kris Doman has created numerous portraits for my family... and each of them is a work of art!  Be sure to visit my Business Spotlight page to learn more about her, and see a sampling of her amazing work.

http://mysmallbusinesscoach.blogspot.com/p/business-spotlight.html

Why have a coach?

In the sports world an athlete doesn't get to the top of their profession without the guidance and support of a coach. Without a coach they would not be at the peak of their performance and achieve success.
Coaching can come in many forms - but a coach is someone who will enable you to improve, motivate you and hold you accountable to your goals and enable you to grow.
Some of the positive benefits to working with a coach are:

• Time to focus on YOU and what you want to achieve.
• Someone to challenge, motivate and support you.
• Enable you to come up with a fresh approach to an old problem.
• A safe supportive environment to discuss your issues and test out your ideas.
• Give you accountability and commitment.
• Create an action plan and support you in achieving it.
• Someone to provide unconditional support and praise.

A coach also offers a totally objective point of view.  They can be a sounding board for your ideas.  You will have an environment in which you get a chance to spend time on ‘you’.  Your issues, ideas and goals.  You will challenge yourself more because you have support, motivation and can afford to stretch yourself further than doing it on your own.  Your coach will keep you accountable and on track.

If you commit your goals to writing you are 40% more likely to achieve them.

If you tell someone else you are 60% more likely to achieve them.

If you have a coach you are 95% more likely to achieve your goals.

I often hear people say that their family is their support and they don't need anyone else.
"Although family members mean well, they often have a preconceived notion about your limitations, strengths and your future. It is difficult for family members to project beyond what they themselves achieved and or experienced. When you hire a coach who has worked with executives across numerous industries, you gain access to a wealth of information, insight, techniques and strategies used by other successful achievers."

Coaching is becoming a must for success!

IBM has more than sixty certified coaches among its ranks. Scores of other major companies have made coaching a core part of executive development. The belief is that, under the right circumstances, one-on-one interaction with an objective third party can provide a focus that other forms of organizational support simply cannot.

And whereas coaching was once viewed by many as a tool to help correct underperformance, today it is becoming much more widely used in supporting top producers.

In fact, in a 2004 survey by Right Management Consultants (Philadelphia), 86 percent of companies said they used coaching to sharpen the skills of individuals who have been identified as future organizational leaders.

"Coaching has evolved into the mainstream fast," says Michael Goldberg, president of Building Blocks Consulting (Manalapan, New Jersey), whose clients include New York Life and MetLife. "This is because there is a great demand in the workplace for immediate results, and coaching can help provide that."
How? By providing feedback and guidance in real time, says Brian Underhill, a senior consultant at the Alliance for Strategic Leadership (Morgan Hill, California). "Coaching develops leaders in the context of their current jobs, without removing them from their day-to-day responsibilities."

At an even more basic level, many executives simply benefit from receiving any feedback at all. "As individuals advance to the executive level, development feedback becomes increasingly important, more infrequent, and more unreliable," notes Anna Maravelas, a St. Paul, Minnesota-based executive coach and founder of TheraRising. As a result, she says, "Many executives plateau in critical interpersonal and leadership skills."

So, should you have a coach?
If you want to be the best you - YES!
And my small business coaching program is affordable and easy...
Plus... you have a dentist to help with caring for your teeth.
You have a doctor to help caring for your body.
You need a coach to help with your thinking and your business...  after all how you think is the single biggest factor in whether you are happy with your life or not.

Recent studies have shown that 20 % of your success is from how you work and 80% of your success is from how you think - What's going on in your head is driving 80% of your results!

-Clarity Point Caoching

To thine own self be true

Guest article written by Natalie Bradley- I think this applies to all small business owners.  Do what you love!!




When I’m not connected to what my heart pulls me to do, I literally feel like I’m suffocating. I’m not one of those people who’s great at faking it ‘til you make it. When you talk to me or see me, you pretty much know I’m feelin’ it (and I’m happy) or I’m not. There’s not really a gray area here. And what’s very interesting to me right now is that I see a lot of people out there feeling the exact same way.

It’s so important for entrepreneurs like us to check-in and do what we love. If you aren’t enjoying what you’re doing right now, it’s usually time to move on. Part of the reason I stopped planning weddings as my primary business is that my heart was no longer in it and I could not bear to put a smiley face on a restless, unhappy part of me.

So, if your business or parts of your life just aren’t working for you any more, make a drastic change. The last few months, I’ve felt many times like I’m suffocating again, and couldn’t figure out what the problem was. On the surface, everything was perfect in business and at home. But beneath the surface it was like a violent storm, and I knew it was a matter of time before it came to the surface.

When this happens, I suggest journaling a lot, being quiet, meditating, going for walks, and embracing your creative side. It helps you reconnect with what’s really going on. A lot of times when you can’t even figure out what it is that you actually want it’s because we’re lying to ourselves so much that we don’t even know what our truth is any more. So you must break through whatever those barriers are that are holding you back.

Be weird. Take a risk. I’ve never been what you’d call “normal”. Honestly, what does that even mean? Maybe none of us are “normal,” but so many of us have bought into the “American dream” or whatever the dream is where you live right now that we think it’s what we want, and then wonder why we don’t appreciate anything we have right now. But if you feel like you’re suffocating and feel handcuffed to a life that you don’t even want, change it.

And when you change this, the interesting part is that you’re ALWAYS “rewarded” for being authentic to yourself. Once Edward and I realized (and every time in the past when we evaluated) what was off, we knew the decision would be hard to make. Not because it’s not what we wanted or that it would require a lot of work on our part, but simply because the people around us wouldn’t get it because it’s not what they want for us. But it’s worth it even it it’s hard because you must understand that true success ONLY comes when you are truthful with yourself and what you really desire.

 So I actually challenge you to go for what you want even if it seems like the dumbest thing you’ve ever heard. What we desire doesn’t always make sense. But that’s okay. Follow your heart - and like Shakespeare says - “This above all, to thine own self be true.”

Quote of the day...

 ‎"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."-Eleanor Roosevelt