I would also like to add a small disclaimer though: The advice or suggestions I give in these podcasts are my opinions. They should not be taken as (nor constitute) legal or professional advice because I am not a lawyer and in most cases I don’t have enough information regarding the question or situation to give a professional opinion from the position of a consultant, therefore I am giving my general opinions based on broad and unspecific situations or questions.

The first question I answered was from Robin in South Carolina that asked:

“Thanks for talking with me the other day, Heather. I just had a follow-up question about productivity: As a coach, I’m interested in expanding my business by hiring more people. But I want to retain the delivery of the primary coaching services myself. How can I expand my business if I’m the one doing the main revenue-generation?”

Then Marcus from Ohio asked:

“I own a marketing company and I work with owners of independent car repair shops. They are always asking me about social media, especially Twitter. I like Twitter and I recommend it often but I’m at a loss of things that they can tweet about. Any thoughts?

Following Marcus, was Russell from Germany who asked:

“Heather, businesses are becoming more social. Blogs were a little social. Then came social networking sites like Facebook. Then Twitter. What’s next and how do you suggestion businesses adopt it?”

And to wrap up the call we had Kristine from Georgia who asked:

“There are so many ways to get in touch with me and my phone rings off the hook… except that I’m also trying to run my business. Every call is an interruption which distracts me, and yet I don’t want to be completely unavailable to customers or they’ll just go to my competition.”

Check out the podcast to hear my answers! And to those of you that left feedback on the hotline, and I did not answer. I have saved the questions and will answer them shortly, I promise.

Related posts:

1. Heather Podcasts: Initial Consultations: Do you give away too much information? (Episode 4)
2. Heather Podcasts: Managing a Virtual Team, Advice by Deb Walker – Virtual Team Manager (Episode 5)
3. Heather Podcasts – Episode 1 (uncut)

Time is one of those elusive factors that we’re all desperately trying to get more of. We understand we only have 24 hours in a day and can’t actually add more time to it (except for the one day a year when we “fall back” an hour, but that single added hour doesn’t have much of an impact in the big picture).

So we focus on productivity, we talk about efficiency, we desperately search for more time. Blogs like the one by Meryl K Evans called “12 Ways to Find More Time” are widely read and tweeted enthusiastically. And that’s okay. It’s a good list with some great common sense time-finding tips that you can use: Things like “control your phone time”, “review your meetings”, and “save time in your calendar”. There aren’t any surprises on this list. That’s not an indictment against the post’s author. Rather, it’s an indictment against most of us!

There’s a reason why these “time-finding tips” blog posts are so popular. People want to find more time and they actively search for ideas to help them. But all of these ideas (not just Meryl’s great list but also the many productivity tools and resources available) are completely wasted if we don’t act. Action is the key to business success. It’s what separates the winners from the losers.

Many people search for more time but the reality is, they frequently squander the time the have. Rather than taking action to sell their products or services, promote their company, or serve a client, they end up on Facebook, or returning emails, or browsing the web. It feels productive, but at the end of their new-found time they have nothing to show for it. And so they go off in search of more “find more time” tips to help them.

Stop looking for new ways to find more time. Just for a moment. First, master the time that you have already.

• Eliminate wasted time by only watching specific TV shows (and turning off the TV after) rather than lazing in front of the television and watching whatever is on.

• Make better use of time at your desk by restricting your own access to sites that aren’t specifically geared to productivity. (For example, pull back a bit on Facebook if it is part of your social life but not part of your business plan).

• Closely review the work you do on other sites to make sure that it is not work that feels productive but really isn’t. (I’ve got a blog post about this which I’ll be posting in a week or two – stay tuned).

• Set hourly goals for yourself that stretch your productivity and help you to stay focused against the distractions.

• Before you invest in another time management system or project management system to replace the one you’ve got, consider what it is that you need to do to be more efficient and to use those current investments better.

Once you’ve done all these things, fine tune your time to do the following work:

1.    Position your company to generate more prospective customers
2.    Sell your services to those customers
3.    Serve all of your customers with great service

That’s it! Spend your time doing that critical work and you’ll have a super-strong, amazingly profitable business.

Then, after you’ve started to efficiently use the time you have, start looking for tips and ideas to help you find more time.

Good luck!

No related posts.

Why Pushing Through Is Not Always The Way To Get Ahead – Sometimes, knowing when to quit something is the smart move to make. On occasion we do need to walk away from something and revisit it with a fresh pair of eyes at a later date.

Top 10 Funny Dog Videos on YouTube – Funny videos of dogs – what else can I say? The sleep walking dog is my fav!! Dogs and video cameras; you can never go wrong with that combo!

Google Isn’t God – Have you ever been told that when you blog you should only focus on those in the same forum, type, or genre as our own blog? That by doing so it would create more chances for people to share your information, creating exposure for you and your site? While those things are true, only focusing on blogs of your own niche can get old fast. Barbara shares how reading posts outside you niche is fun and a great way to meet other bloggers.

“No” Your Way to Increased Productivity – Do you find yourself saying yes to things out of guilt? Are you buying things you really can’t afford? Do you take on tasks that interfere with your ability to spend time with your family? These are all things that bring us down, and can be avoided by saying “NO” to. Kudos to Marelisa for talking about this subject and reinforcing that it is ok to say NO.

How To Use The Turning Of The Seasons To Support Your Development – Great idea! It’s kind of like spring cleaning of the mind and soul. Christine talks about what she plans to do this weekend that is influenced by spring. Described in her article as “self-coaching”, Christine shares the process of writing down some thinking questions. This is a quick read with a very helpful and easy self improvement task takeaway.

Check out more of my favorites on HeatherVilla StumbleUpon.

Have a great Easter weekend!

Related posts:

1. Weekend Reading: My fav’s from this week: 2/19/10
2. Weekend Reading: My fav’s from this week: 3/5/10
3. Weekend Reading: My fav’s from this week: 4/30/10

We all face professional disasters of one kind or another. It’s inevitable, whether you work in your own business or for someone else. And sometimes those disasters are brought on by us (whether we want to admit it or not) and sometimes those disasters are externally occurring but impact us anyway.

I was going to list a few disasters but then I realized that I could fill the next 100 blogs with disaster story after disaster story; and you’d be likely to match me with your own disaster stories.

So what happens when disaster strikes?
There is an excellent article at the Management Excellence blog that I thought you’d enjoy called “Surviving as a Leader When Things Go Horribly Wrong.” It’s by Art Petty, a management consultant and college professor at DePaul University.

He lists seven tips that leaders must follow when disaster strikes. Of course, you should read the full article for yourself, but I’ll briefly list the steps here:

• Early recognition. Petty says that you need to learn to spot disaster as early as possible in order to mitigate it. How to do that effectively is not easy but it’s critical. Invite your staff – who might have their finger on the pulse of the situation better than you – to raise the warning flags if they sense it coming.

• Get rid of panic and confusion. Oh this is so important! Clear, decisive leadership is always needed, never more than a disaster situation. Keep a level head and a calm demeanor and your team will follow you… and likely survive!

• Your team mirrors your approach. Related to the above tip, Petty says that however you respond to the situation will be how your team responds. (Hey, that’s what makes you their leader). So watch what you do and be very intentional.

• Trust your team. This is an important one and, if I were making the list, this item may not have made it onto the list. As a leader, you may want to solve the problem yourself. However, that’s not why you have a team. Put them to work and trust them to do it. That can be a hard thing to do as a leader!

• Break down the impossible into the possible. Every seemingly insurmountable crisis is actually a big series of very manageable parts. It seems unwieldy but when you break it down, it’s quite solvable. And, in my experience, you rarely need to solve all of the parts in order to reduce the crisis to a minor annoyance.

• Manage the environment. In this tip, Petty says to stay involved and empower your team. Most importantly (in my opinion) stay aware of the situation and all of the moving parts.

These are great tips for handling a crisis. However, the real test comes when a crisis hits. Will you remember? Why not create a file called “When ‘it’ hits the fan” and keep a few crisis management tools, including this blog, bookmarked for later.

See you floating to the top!

Related posts:

1. The End is Near (But it’s No Big Deal)
2. Horror story from the front lines of project management
3. The Advantage of Virtual

In a couple of days, my calendar is going to ping me with a reminder. It’s going to say “One month in – how’s it going, Heather?” This reminder is for me to review the new business strategies I intended to integrate into my business this year.

Each year, I list out a bunch of strategies I want to integrate into my business. Some are marketing strategies, some are productivity strategies, some are customer service strategies; that kind of thing. I always have a really bold and vibrant vision of the year ahead and it’s easy for me to actually create so many strategies that I simply can’t implement them all effectively.

What I find is that over time, some strategies simply can’t be done in the day (because I don’t have time, for example) while other strategies become quickly integrated into my daily routine.

I was speaking with a colleague of mine who does something similar. She had developed several strategies she wanted to integrate into her year. For example, she wanted to increase her article marketing and she wanted to do more blog commenting. We usually chat about our strategies from time to time so I asked her how hers were going nearly one month into the year. The blogs were easily integrated in and are now a habit for her. The articles, however, are not. We talked about the reasons that could be and what she and I discussed might be helpful for you, too:

• Integrating new strategies into your daily schedule is important to do from time to time, but not always easy. I’ve found that if you want to be more successful at making them habits, you need to do everything possible to make it super-easy to do. The easier they are, the more likely you’ll do them and the more likely they will become habits.

Take exercise as an example: Lots of people make a New Year’s Resolution to start exercising… and then they fail. One of the reasons is that exercise might be an hour or two commitment a few times a week: Driving to the gym, working out, showering, driving home. It adds up so it’s not compelling to do. The secret to integrating it into your life is to make it really easy at the very beginning. Start with a 5 minute workout at home; have a friend call to remind you. Then, increase your workout to ten minutes. Then to fifteen. Then twenty. Eventually you will find yourself at the gym doing a full workout, but by then it will be a habit. To get there, though, it had to start easy.

It’s the same with my friend and her articles: Instead of writing an article a day – her original goal – she should start with an article a week. Or, split the work between herself and a freelancer. Eventually, she can increase her own effort. And she should decide ahead of time what the article will be about, rather than staring at a blank page.

And it’s the same for your 2010 goals. The goals that easily integrated into your business – celebrate them. And the ones that you’re struggling with one month in – take baby steps and make them easy. You may not start out as boldly as you had originally dreamed but making them easy will help to make them habits.

Have a great time!

Related posts:

1. It’s March. Do You Know Where Your Resolutions Are?
2. First Things First
3. When Business Growth is Bad – Part 2

Some disclaimers:

• I will change the name of anyone I am discussing (or just not use names at all).
• I will not speak regarding clients with whom I am working and bound by confidentiality.
• Almost all blog posts that I write go through my editor prior to being posted. Some of these will not, as some of my best written blogs are written on the fly and without editing. So excuse any typos etc.
• There are exceptions to every rule (or, in this case, “legend”), so when I speak, I am not saying something is impossible or can’t be done. I am speaking about the majority of the time or about my own experiences.

So,  in a nutshell, you will not be a millionaire eating bon-bons (or doing nothing). This is an all too common misconception. I hear people saying this or telling me all the time:”I just need a product or two that can create a passive income stream and then I will have time to travel or time to spend with the kids.”

Uh… FALSE!

I don’t mean to be rude, but there are so many problems with that statement it is not even funny.

1. Products do not ‘create’ a passive income stream: YOU create the passive income stream, whether creating the product, doing the marketing, or both.

2. 1 or 2 products is not (normally) going to create enough of an income stream to pay for lots of travel or all of your expenses so you don’t have to do anything. (Again there are exceptions: You could be the inventor of the light bulb!!!)

3. There are other things that exist besides “having” the products. How are you going to sell these products? How are you going to provide service, support, or help on the products? Who is going to do your bookkeeping, marketing, copywriting, patenting? There are overhead costs or work associated with anything you do or sell. Keep that in mind.

I know people that make millions. They do not have 1 or 2 products and spend all their time lounging on the beach. If you are rich or independently wealthy, maybe you can pay enough people to do everything for you so that you don’t actually have to do anything. But from the get go there will probably be a loss, so the statement still won’t hold true.

I know people who make millions… and they all work. Whether it be by writing their web pages, or thinking up copy/content, or networking, or speaking, or just thinking up and researching ideas. They ALL work.

I told this to someone today and they responded: “I know this one person, [name removed to protect her privacy] and she sells a package of ebooks for $19.95 and she makes millions!”

Well, I happen to know this person, and I happen to know she does not make “millions”. She makes about a million in a year, but not “millions”, and her primary source of income is not from that package. Her primary source of income is in her consulting and she charges thousands of dollars an hour for her consulting service. That $19.95 ebook package is just a marketing ploy to get you “in the door” – to get you to purchase something not too costly, so that she shows off her stuff enough to you so that you will maybe hire her later at $3k per hour (and she consistently markets to you her other products and packages through her email marketing campaigns).

In addition to this, she speaks at about 50 events a year (that’s about 1 a week) so that she can be known as the “expert” in her niche market. (If speaking at an event a week is not work, I don’t know what is).

On TOP of all that – she HAS a niche market. What she is teaching and consulting on is very very specific and she knows her stuff. Being an “Internet Marketer” is not a niche market. Being a [changing her expertise here to again protect privacy] specialist in squeeze pages would be the “niche” market.

Last, but not least, she is just not “telling you” she has done it, she has helped hundreds of people do it who are also experts in their niche markets. This proves she is good at what she does if she has helped them and they are successful.

I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but unless you are the CEO of a large corporation and have enough employees to handle every aspect of your business (and even then this is far-fetched) the chances that you will never have to work again is slim to none.

There are exceptions, of course: Inventors, people who have such a grand idea that it is a big success and they are able to hire the staff needed to man it, etc. But the average entrepreneur who wants to get started or grow their business is not going to be making big bucks off an ebook or two when that is their whole product offering and they don’t want to work.

My advice:

Passive income IS important, but until you build up a reputation or client base to market these products to, it will generate peanuts. To build up a reputation or client base takes work – lots of work – or lots of money to pay the right people to do it for you.

Try to work passive streams of income into your billable activities (or whatever it is that you do) so that one day you will reach a level where your passive income is large enough to tone down the actual work you do have to do so that all of your work can be related to creating and brainstorming up new passive income ideas.

Related posts:

1. You will not make a fortune overnight, especially selling advertising space (BUL Series)
2. The conundrum of committedness – part 1
3. Joint Ventures – Be Picky! Like Me!

So far, I’ve talked about out-of-control business growth that costs so much up-front, the business cannot keep up. And, I’ve talked about business growth that spikes (increasing then decreasing) so that the business is stuck with a high bill from the brief burst of business.

And in this blog, I want to talk about yet another problem of business growth that I’ve seen:

Problem 3: The lack of control over the business. When a business grows – whether it’s a sustained increase or a spike, the business owner/director/manager tends to lose control over that business. In some cases, customers “take over” in the sense that they might demand additional efforts which might not normally be granted but which are added because the money is there. In other cases, business partners “take over” because they see the money coming in from a certain market and they want to follow those dollars. In other cases, resellers “take over” because they feel that they are bringing in enough money for the business to make demands on the business. One example I’ve seen is a consultant who was asked by a client to design his website. Business was busy and the consultant should have said no, but the client was generating so much revenue that the consultant couldn’t say no. It didn’t go well and the consultant lost a client and the revenue. And another example I’ve seen is a reseller who earned so much money for a manufacturer that the reseller started demanding price cuts and excessive promotional considerations.

Solution 3: The best thing to do is stick to the business plan. (Uhhh…you have a business plan, right? MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A BUSINESS PLAN…then stick to it). If you’ve done your research and you start the business with the confidence that the plan is going to work then you should be okay (assuming that your research led you in the right direction). Yes, you may need to shift with the market, but that needs to happen carefully and thoughtfully and not “on the fly” based on whoever is sending the most money right now. Your business plan should be your North Star that guides your business. And when you need to change your business plan, you take time to do it carefully.

There are certainly other problems that result from too-fast, unmanaged business growth, but these are three common ones that I see from time to time.

Related posts:

1. When Business Growth is Bad – Part 2
2. When Business Growth is Bad – Part 1
3. The Three Stages of Small Business

Here are some ways to manage that situation for your business:

• Know your numbers! How many prospects do you need to have, on average, to get one client? While the number is not a fixed number, there is probably a good average to work from.
• Know how long it takes for the average prospect to become a client… and then for that client to pay.
• Don’t stop doing what you’re doing! Continue working with current clients, continue marketing your services.
• Do what it takes to go the extra mile. It might mean late nights or running the assembly line through the weekend from time to time, but those steps are necessary to keep clients happy, especially when there are unpredictable changes.
• Automate. If possible, automate some of your processes so you are no longer working on the mundane details that might distract you from your focus. Over at IAC-EZ, that’s what kind of help we give to businesses.
• Hire out. You might or might not want to outsource your core competencies, but you should probably consider hiring out your non-core efforts so you can spend more time on the work that earns your income. Over at IAC Professionals, we helps all kinds of businesses do that all the time.
• Plan for it. As a consultant, I see these challenges in businesses all the time, particularly as we work at increasing a business or bringing a new product to market and then facing the demand it generates.

Best,

Heather Villa

Related posts:

1. The conundrum of committedness – part 1
2. The conundrum of committedness – part 2
3. What should be delegated?