Focus
Being able to stay focused is the first key to small business success. There will always be new options, new opportunities, new markets you ‘could’ take your products and services to. The quickest and easiest way to build success is by having a clear focus and checking to make sure all your efforts are aligned.

There is always more that could be added to your To Do list, but are those tasks adding value? Double check daily that the actions you’re giving your time to will build the business results you’re aiming for.

Leverage
One of the ongoing challenges for every small business is getting it all done. If your vision is to grow your business, you need to practice ‘not doing’ – not doing it all your self, not doing what doesn’t actually need doing. Leverage means setting up systems for how things are best done, so that they can be handed off to other people.

Another form of leverage is hiring others, whether part-time or full-time, to take over those systems and activities. Using both of those forms of leverage will free you up to be doing exactly what you need to accomplish on behalf of your business.

Leadership
How do you envision your role in your business? Is it as a team member or a team leader? If it’s the former you’re playing small. Every team needs great members, but team success depends on a leader who make sure the resources the teams needs are available, and the obstacles get cleared out of the way. Be the leader.

Management
No matter the size of your business, you need to carve out time for working ‘on’ your business rather than ‘in’ it. That means putting together the plans that will be road maps for everyone’s efforts. Once you have those plans, it’s your turn to make sure you’ve got the resources your business needs to get the work done. And as work is taking place, you need to monitor how things are going so you know what to adjust.

Passion
Let’s not forget, as you become absorbed in the doing, you need reminders of why you’re in business in the first place. Keep your life vision and your business vision in your line of sight on a regular basis so that you can draw on the inspiration to sustain your balance!

And one way to grow your business to the next level is to join the Business Accelerator TeleSeminar Club at http://www.TheBusinessAcceleratorClub.com – come on board and join for $200 savings the first month.

Come join me and like-minded business builders and learn all about how to run your current business ever easier, AND how to take your experience & expertise and turn it into – Programs, Products & Services Your Clients Are Hungry For – with all the how to’s set out for you.

Technorati Tags: Leadership, Management

Businesses are not build on fear – they’re build on optimism.

Moreover – the companies that succeed, that thrive, and that last over time are those run by people who can separate out the noise from the naysayers chatter and locate the opportunities that surface.

As Amy C. Crosper, Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur magazine puts it, “It’s bad enough that Detroit is wheezing and Rome is burining and all hell has broken loose, but what’s worse is that the situation is making normally rational people act like loonies.”

You and I have been here before – fear makes us irrational. I’ve listened to business leaders declare that cutting is the strategy to follow, instead of growing. They are not equal choices in business. Never have been. Never will be.

And people who pour their time into rationalizing cutting are often missing their golden opportunity to Be The Game Changer.

When I talk about changing the game with my consulting and coaching clients, I come at it from several directions.

For business owners, professionals, entrepreneurs who have a roster of employees they want to take care of, ‘game changing’ can include a fresh look at the company’s core competencies in order to become laser focused at marketing them – creating a sharply defined identity in the existing marketplace.

One of my clients is a re-finisher of manufacturing parts. In this economy they are deliberately going after every certification that is relevant in their industry. They’re putting in the time and effort so that they can secure the long-term highly profitable contracts that ARE going to be signed by their customers. While this means taking on added systems and tracking and documentation demands of their entire workforce – the new stability they are creating is well worth it.

How can you do this in your own business? Birth new entrepreneurs.

What do I mean by that?

It’s time to reward everyone in your business for thinking like an entrepreneur.

Assign everyone in the business the task of looking for opportunities – new ways of getting things done more efficiently inside, and scanning for how to leap ahead of the competition that’s focused on shrinking instead of growing.

Come up with messages and actions that reward each person who steps up with a new idea – for leveraging themselves, for leveraging systems, for leveraging the company’s expertise to go after new customers and to offer new services to your faithful clients.

I want you to think about this on both the ‘business’ level, and the ‘individual’ level. It’s just as relevant, and just as important in each of thoses arenas separately AND when taken together.

Let me explain what I mean.

My long-time client and coaching Club member Anne is a perfect example.

Anne has spent the last two years focused on accelerating the growth of a technology start-up in Santa Monica. And she and the company President have concluded that the initiative just won’t work. Not enough barriers to entry, and too broad a range of prospective customers. No way to tighten the the niche without burning through too much cash, while the business opportunity gets fractured among all the small players dashing into the frey.

So, what does that mean for Anne?

Well, as she and my other Business Accelerator Club members know – from my perspective it just means time to hit ‘reset.’

That’s all.

And that’s everything.

It doesn’t mean doom, gloom and despair. It does mean it’s time to brush off the distracting messages about lay-offs and economic collapse to look at how to take all her know how, all her expertise, and her entire proven track record and CREATE a whole new category: Anne Schmidt.

The last time we did this, web 2.0 was in it’s infancy. ALL the techniques we used were off-line positioning. Now it’s an integral component of how we’ll be repositioning her so that:

1. Her voice and expertise become known to a wider audience
2. Her credentials are demonstrated to her ideal, targeted pool of prospective clients
3. Her expertise can be leveraged to create new streams of income for her

We’ll be laying the specific strategies for leveraging her long-term business connections, her specific success as a business growth and turnaround expert, and incorporating the new avenues created by technology to give HER the choices about who to work with next.

And everyone in the Club will be learning from her as she takes each step.

Fearless. Forward.

Focused on opportunities.

Oh, by the way – the same techniques are available to you, too!

So often our focus is on what’s ‘not yet’ done, what is sitting on our To Do list, and what we ‘ought to’ be getting to but haven’t yet completed.

Children have a great deal to teach us about what motivates our hearts and gives us the impetus to put our energy into growing our businesses. They remind us that our strength in life comes not from what’s missing and undone, but rather from what we’ve accomplished.

My 6-year old nephew reminded me of this as we were celebrating the holidays. His joy as he calculated 600 times 600 in his mind and got it right is his motivation to keep learning how to work with numbers. His glee at that power is a great pointer for all of us to deliberately take stock of what challenges we’ve taken on, what we’ve learned this past year, and now can use it.

Here are some of my favorite accomplishment prompts that I use with coaching clients and participants in my programs:

1.  List 10 things you accomplished this past year that you are proud of.

2.  What were the most important things that you learned this past year, both in business, and personally?

3.  What changes did you make based on that learning, and as a result of these changes, how will your life be different this coming year?

4.  How have you changed over the year, and as a result of those changes, what new possibilities exist for you?

5.  What if it all had to stop now?   (take your time with this one)   If you had six months to live and six million dollars, what would you do?

6.  What changes would you make in the way you work to give yourself the best possible chance of success?

7.  How will you have to change in order to give yourself the best possible chance of success?

And here’s a powerful BONUS Question. What steps have you taken in the past that helped you succeed?

The reason that final question is a gem is that it’s your opportunity to reveal what you DO know how to do, the steps you’ve used in the past to create your success.

You may have used them unconsciously or deliberately.

Either way, jsut as my nephew is consciously calculating two 3-figure numbers and coming up with a great answer, you too know techniques that have let you cut through confusion and challenges to create the accomplishments you’ve listed.

Now is a great time to remind yourself of what you DO know, the tools you already have at hand, and use them as the road map for the challenges you want to take on next.

That makes it all so perfect – perfect for refelcting exactly what HAS been accomplished the past year.

My niece Emily and nephew Evan are getting The Game Of Life this year – and I know they’re going to have a blast with it.

So I thought I’d share with you a set of questions that will help you awken to a new sense of appreciation for what you HAVE achieved, and apreciate it.

It’ll make a wonderful foundation for your deciding what game you’d like to play and what success you plan to build this coming year.

When is ‘too much to do’ finally enough? I mean enough to have you reach out and slap your personal and business ‘reset’ button?

I was working with my client, Brenda, last month when she looked me dead in the eye and said “There’s no way to get out from under this list of what I need to get done.”

We could have gone on and on about prioritizing her lists, rank ordering them by fit with her strategy or sorting by the highest payoff at the bottom line. She could have found relief by delegating to her staff the 80 percent that really doesn’t need her involvement to get things accomplished. We could have spent a lovely hour talking about techniques to get over procrastination. And that would have missed the point entirely.

All the business management practices in the world won’t solve matters if the real issue is feeling stretched to the breaking point. She was feeling overwhelmed, worried and incompetent to run her own business.

Why? Well…

• Doubling her staff in mere months meant she needed more time to train and manage those folks.

• Adding more programs to her clients in past weeks meant more time designing, testing and adjusting the ones she was putting in place.

• Increasing her financial demands on the business meant she needed to check all her operating expenses and receivables numbers on a daily basis.

And more. So many new ‘management muscles’ all being used at the same time, all of them aching at the intense activity.

Instead of looking at the tactical issues, rather than checking the action plans she had in front of her, I wanted her to gain distance and start over with the big picture. So, instead of staying in our seats, we got up and walked out of her office and into the fresh air of a sunny California afternoon, cars moving past us, our bodies in motion.

We shifted location physically and we shifted our perspective and changed the discussion from what wasn’t getting done, to refocus on her Vision – building a business serving service professionals who want to outsource part of their administrative needs.

At times, running a business is a lot like working out at the gym. Just as our muscles get fatigued when we work them out beyond their current capacity, so too, the rest of us gets exhausted when we’re stretched too far on too many fronts for too long.

We need to build in ‘recovery’ time for our muscles AND for our psyche, too!

Taking that walk gave Brenda a chance to walk ‘away’ and shift her point of view back to the big picture. From that ‘reset’ we were able to talk about the heart of the matter. Brenda has a clear vision both for her business AND for herself. Once her viewpoint was reset, she could see exactly what was stretching her.

Brenda saw that the tension she put herself under hadn’t left any area where she could just be Brenda – a competent professional, skilled at the services she’s provided for years, adept at directing the team she’s had on board, and comfortable with the money side of her company. She was being stretched beyond that in many directions all at once.

And just like working out our muscles in the gym need ‘recovery’ time, Brenda needs recovery time of her own. She now sees she’s got several choices for ‘recovery’ and these are some you’ll want to look at when you find yourself stretched, too.

Release the ‘muscle’
Sometimes you just need to put the barbell down for a while. That means Brenda is pausing the growth she’s piling on the company until the newest clients have been welcomed into the system and everyone feels they’re succeeding.

Reduce the effort
There are times when projects need to be put on the back burner for a while. Times when you, or your staff, need to just have lazy summer days handling ‘normal’ work instead of challenges. Brenda’s taking items off everyone’s To Do lists, some of them permanently.

Reward the’ body’
My favorite one of all. After weeks of 60 and 80 hour schedules, Brenda had her team turn off their computers, grab their wallet and purses. She then sent them off on a scavenger hunt ending at a great restaurant.

Appreciation and a break from the relentless effort. Fun and acknowledgement. Brenda’s monitoring her stress and building in relief and recovery on an ongoing basis.

Your turn to hit ‘reset’!

What do you do with your passion?

Ralph passed his on through his art and through the skills he taught his students.

Ralph Bacerra passed away at age 70 this past month.

His death has had me thinking about passion and dedication.

As an artist, Ralph was passionate about clay, glaze, form and design. He was renowned for several philosophies in ceramics: simplifying the complex by

• making something difficult to accomplish done easily,
• taking out what is extra rather than adding, and
• recognizing that at times something cannot be ‘repaired’, and one should just start over fresh.

His work demonstrated his mastery of ‘layering the elements.’ He combined as many as 7, 8, 9 firings to create his desired effects.

Those elements may sound simple, but each of us so often become immersed in what we are trying to accomplish that we make it more and more complex, and push relentlessly to make situations conform to our vision. And many times, that’s exactly when we need to step back and simplify or take a completely fresh start to a situation.

As a teacher Ralph was passionate about teaching his students mastery all of the elements for their own passion – be it in ceramics, other arts, or life itself.

I bring all of this up because it relates to other areas of life, not only ceramics. Many of his students continued on in ceramics for their profession. But not all of them. For instance one of his students, Elsa Lucan, has become a respected landscape designer in Los Angeles. She uses her artistic training in everything she does with the elements of wood and landscape. She begins with pruning, distilling out the shape of the plants already in the space, taking out what is ‘extra’ rather than adding.

Unique in the industry, rather than just ‘digging a hole,’ Elsa and her crew till the soil to create the ideal living element with just the right amount of air and water to create perfect environments for transplanted plants to thrive. And in landscape, she too applies knowing that at times something cannot be ‘repaired’ and it’s time to just start over. The results of Elsa’s passion become landscapes that her clients thrive in.

Passion is behind many of the ‘new’ businesses blooming on the internet. Andrea Albright became passionate about weight loss. But not the fad dieting version we’re familiar with in the popular press. Instead she’s used her own experience creating a healthy mind and body then loosing all her excess weight (and keeping it off ever since) to create an internet-based business. In it she focuses on educating her readers on the simple elements of modern foods that contribute to illness and obesity.

Andrea’s videos educate and entertain, and stir the passions of viewers to join her. She draws others like a magnet with her enthusiasm, passion and encouragement.

Too many of the business owners I work with have buried their passion under the idea that business is driven by practicality and force. Not only do they bury their passion from their own view. They’ve also hidden it from those around them who can be inspired by it.

This past month I’ve been working with a senior executive of an international business. Don’s bosses encouraged him to get coaching to deal with his stress. As we explored the sources of that tension he’s been carrying, we uncovered the fact that he’s passionate about his people’s success and frustrated when they’re stuck solving things in complicated ways. And he often goes silent when in meetings with his peers that are bogged down in contention.

We’re working on giving Don skills to simplify discussions, whether in meetings he is leading or even those called by others. He’s also learning new problem solving systems, and giving them to his team to simplify how they work with each other across very different disciplines.

Built into all of his upcoming one-on-one meetings is exploring his staff’s particular passions. He’s layering specific new leadership techniques that will have his people start over and work together collaboratively rather than competitively.

As a result, Don is living his passion for accomplishing complex business more easily and helping others do the same.

What layers do you use? How do you simplify the complex? And what are you working on that might be even better with a fresh start?

When you think back to the elements that have shaped your business and your life, where is their source? I invite you to live your passion today.

I spent this week coaching two executives on how to take control of their personal power in meetings in order to get greater participation from others. One element of our discussions was a technique that quiets the Left Hemisphere of the brain and all it’s chatter, and shifts thinking over to the Right Hemisphere.

And there in my email was a link to a wonderful, profound, moving presentation by neuro-scientist Jill Bolte Taylor. Jill’s presented her personal experience and discoveries when she experienced a stroke – a stroke that forced her out of her left brain and into her right, involuntarily.

She’s recovered from it and used her acute skills as an observer to create a presentation about her experience at the TED Conference.

I’ve followed the TED (Technology, Entertainment & Design Conference) since the early 1990′s. And now that technology has enabled them to post the contents of this invitation-only $6,000 event on-line where you can view it for ***free***. Well… honestly I think everyone should watch one of their recordings every single week – but I’m biased… I believe in stirring up new perspectives and new possibilities on a regular basis!

Jill delivered her experience in a fashion that every viewer – that’s you and me – can apply to our lives. So watch it and let me know what it says to you about what you can create – in your business and your life – using the opportunities presented by both halves of your brain.

This video will transform how you thing about the possibilities and start you on the path of actually accessing the ‘rest; of what your mind is just waiting to offer you.

Tell me what you think of it.

Did you watch it? You can watch it here.

This time, as you watch it, think about the reaction you had when Johnny identified one action he could do.

When you have, come back here and ask yourself:

“What is an action I say I cannot take with MY customers?”

List all the ideas that come to mind. Now think about reasons that you’ve used to bolster those ideas.

When you’ve run dry listing all your “can’t”s take one those ideas and list 3 simple steps you could take to just do it.

It’s the second step to designing High Payoff customer contacts you can use in the coming year.

When was the last time you looked in the mirror, really looked, and saw how you show up for your customers?

I ask because it’s been a subject that has come up repeatedly for my coaching clients, my MasterMind buddies, and myself the past couple of months. We’ve faced how we were showing up, and changed our results as we made an important shift.

My client Susan serves the legal community… as a marketing consultant. Her personality is very different than that of her clients. And her expertise at increasing their presence in the marketplace is what they need, what they want, but what they are uncomfortable spending time or money on.

One of my MasterMind buddies, Bonnie, is a career coach. For years she’s helped people forced into career transitions to take a fresh look at their capabilities. And then she teaches them to use specific interviewing techniques that have their next employer clamoring to bring them on board.

And as for me? Well, I came out of the world of mega corporations and work with a diverse group of professionals and business owners who want to grow their business, while doing it easier and faster. My expertise is in getting people crystal clear about their goals, getting all their distractions handled and out of their way, and sharpening their attention on their High Payoff Activities.

Each of us faced the same challenge: How to differentiate ourselves from others saying they produce great results for our clients.

The single spark that changed our own results is stepping into our authentic selves and connecting with our clients from that place.

For Susan, that means showing up as a bright, successful professional woman, and modeling the very marketing activities she’s asking her clients to invest in. The marketing activities at professional conferences, the artful and eye-catching way she distributes articles and tip sheets, the way she gets herself quoted in the media are all models of the High Payoff results she’ll create for her clients.

Susan models how to inject a personal flavor in professional marketing so her clients can trust how they’ll show up as well. Susan shows them how to preserve their own personality while building their professional presence.

For Bonnie, her relaxed personality blended with all her expertise are a perfect style for working with the younger generation, just as they enter the work force. She invites them to grow a powerful sense of themselves, and teaches them how to navigate finding their first jobs and any employment changes they make next.

Bonnie coaches her clients into new skills in connecting with their own personality so they practice them, use them adopt them in their interactions the rest of their lives.

And for me, my ideal clients all share a common characteristic – they are ‘doers’ challenged with stepping out of the ‘doing’ and into the leadership and management activities that feel constraining to them. Each of them is afraid of disappearing as person and becoming a robot if they focus on ‘management.’

I show them how to preserve their drive and individual style while connecting with and leading the people who now need to be the team that achieves their vision.

You don’t have to wait until your clients signal you to take step into your own authentic self. The fact is for Susan, Bonnie, and me, the moment we allowed ourselves to just show up, as we are, our clients relaxed and stepped up too!

So here are 3 High Payoff Steps that bring your authentic self into your business:

Greet everyone with a SMILE

People cannot connect with you or listen to you if you’re just a ‘suit’ sitting across from them. Your clients are stressed and feel vulnerable. They want you to solve that stress AND reassure them it will happen with ease. If you’re not smiling, you’re in your head rather than in your heart. And the person sitting across from you knows your attention isn’t on them and their challenges. Your smile instantly lets them know your attention is on them, and they’ll relax and breathe.

Focus first on THEIR issue, not your solution

You’re already an expert. You already know one, or six, or even twenty ways to solve their challenges. The more you focus on probing how they understand what needs solving, the more natural your conversation with them will be. And immediately your true personality can come into the conversation so they see you, in your own unique brilliance. And your individual personality, added to your proven ‘Know How’ is what will cement the relationship.

Champion the result THEY want

Our greatest gift is in helping people succeed on their journey. Yet our greatest challenge in life is to help others along the road they want to travel, rather than the path we’d take “if we were in their shoes.”

So take a look in the mirror and see how you’re showing up. When you use these three steps your clients will be begging for more of you. Now that’s further, faster and easier, isn’t it?

This time, as you watch it, think about the first reaction you had when Johnny thought there was no action he could do. Then think about how it felt to hear his idea. And lastly think about how it would have felt to be one of his customers.

When you have, come back here and ask yourself:

“What simple action could I take to connect with MY customers?”

List all the ideas that come to mind. Now think about actions that you’ve heard or seen others use. Which of those ideas would you like to consider as well?

Carry that list with you and start putting notes next to each idea to flush them out. It’s the first step to designing High Payoff customer contacts you can use in the coming year.

© 2008 Linda Feinholz