A brand is like a garden. You plant your brand the way you want it, adding a picture here or a logo there or a bio somewhere else. It looks neatly trimmed and ordered. Over time, though, it starts to grow. It can become unwieldy without very careful management. As a business owner trying to build an online presence, it can become all too easy to create a brand and push it out onto the web only to lose control of it.

In this article of Tips In Ten, I want to give you a way to easily manage your brand in just ten minutes.

A lot of entrepreneurs don’t take the time to pull their branded elements together. Instead, their branded elements are scattered around in folders on their computer: Photos are in photo album folders, logos of various sizes are in website folders and folders from logo designers, and bios and blurbs and summaries and “About Me” text files are here or there.

This is the cause of “weed-strewn” brands that grow out of control and take hours to get back under control. So the two ten-minute steps you’ll do are:

• First, set up a consolidated system where all of your branded elements are in one place and easy to find. Do this once, in just ten minutes, to pull everything together and create a centralized brand hub.

• Second, revisit this brand hub and compare it to your current branding around the web to make sure it is up to date. Do this once a month, spending just ten minutes a month, to make sure that it’s all together.

Ten minutes to set it all up
The first thing you’ll want to do is take 10 minutes and pull together all of your branded elements into one file.

Start by creating a folder called “Brand Management” or “Brand Hub” or “Master Brand” or something like that.

• Add the photos you’ve used in various places (i.e., photos of you or your company mascot or whatever branded pictures you use).
• Add the image files of any images you use (i.e., logos, ebook covers etc.)
• Add any text-based content that you use as a brand (i.e., tag-lines, article blurbs, bios, etc.

Once you’ve pulled them together, you’ll need to sort, consolidate, and rename them. Consolidating is easy: Just open the files and delete the ones that are exactly the same but have different file names. Then to sort and rename, here’s what I would recommend:

Create naming conventions that you’ll adhere to. For example, if there are several pictures of my logo in various configurations, I might call them:

• HV_logo_-_color_-_hi-res
• HV_logo_-_color_-_lo-res
• HV_logo_-_bw_-_hi-res
• HV_logo_-_bw_-_lo-res

These logo files are named for what they are (logo), their color (or bw for black and white), and their resolution.

And if I have photos, I might name them like this:

• HV_photo_-_color_-_hi-res_large
• HV_photo_-_color_-_hi-res_med
• HV_photo_-_color_-_hi-res_small
• HV_photo_-_bw_-_hi-res_large
• HV_photo_-_bw_-_hi-res_med
• HV_photo_-_bw_-_hi-res_small

These photo files are named for what they are (photo), their color (or black and white), their resolution (in this case they are all high resolution but if I have low resolution files I can easily include them here), and the size of the picture.

You might also consider adding the name of where you use it if it is a unique size or shape to comply with something. For example, I might have a file called:

• HV_logo_-_color_-_lo-res_Twitter-background

Once you’ve named everything, if you have your source files, write the name of the file and add the word “_SOURCE” at the end of the filename. So I might have a file name for a source file that looks like this:

• HV_logo_-_color_-_hi-res_SOURCE

By doing this, you’ll easily eliminate the many duplicates that can build up over time. And, after you’ve renamed your image files, you can easily keep them sorted and viewable in one folder. If you have a lot of files, you might consider collecting all the sources into their own separate folder within your brand management folder, but that is up to you.

Okay, that’s what I do with images and photos. With text, it’s a little easier. I tend to keep all my bios in text (.txt) files because it might be used to cut and paste into an online text box (which doesn’t always nicely paste from a Word document). I usually have one long bio that is shortened into a medium-sized bio, a short bio, and a one-line bio and I keep “clean” and html-ready versions of each bio.

The one line might be copied and pasted into Twitter, the short bio is useful for article resource boxes, the medium bio might be appropriate for an introductory email or to put at the end of a proposal, and the long bio can be found on my website. Although there might be some slight variations, it can generally be the same bio.

Next, create an excel spreadsheet or Word doc chart with just two columns: In the first column, write down the URL where you have branded yourself and in the second column write down the brand element file name. Then, every time you make a change to one of those branded resources, you simply check your spreadsheet to see where it was used and you update those sites.

So let’s say that your spreadsheet looks like this:

Now, whenever you make a change to any of your brand element files, you simply open up this spreadsheet and see which sites it impacts. So if I were to get a new headshot, I can see that it impacts Twitter and Squidoo I would delegate that I need to have these sites updated.

Managing your brand
As mentioned above, every time you update one of your brand elements, you need to open your brand management chart and see what is impacted by the change and update the file at that site. But it’s also helpful to do some proactive management at regular intervals as well.

Schedule ten minutes every month to open up your brand management folder and review the files inside. Are the logos and photos still relevant? Have you used anything else in the past month? Are the bios still up-to-date? Have you written anything else in the past month?

Then, open up the chart and check the URLs. Have you been to that site recently? Do the brand elements listed still reflect what you want to communicate at that website? Are there brand improvements you can make to the site? Are there additional branding opportunities you haven’t used yet? Are there seasonal changes you can make to your brand at that location? (An example of this might be adding a festive hat during the Christmas season).

While you’re reviewing the URLs, think about what hasn’t been listed. Perhaps there is a new site you’ve just started using that you haven’t included here. Add it to the list and make sure that the right file names are recorded. It only takes a moment and it can help you keep your brand neat and tidy online.

This part won’t take long, especially if you do it every month. In fact, it’s likely that it will take only one or two minutes each month instead of ten, but set aside ten just in case.

Your brand helps to position you and lock your name in the minds of your prospects and customers. Effective brand management using the method I’ve described above will help to ensure that you maintain control over that brand.

Related posts:

1. Self-Directed Project Management in Ten Minutes a Day
2. Business Growth in Ten Minutes a Day
3. Make Bookkeeping Faster & Easier in Less Than 10 Minutes a Day!

In this article of Tips In Ten, I’m going to give you some basic steps to train others without spending more than ten minutes a day. Even if you don’t have staff yet, you might some day. Or, you’ll soon have an assistant or virtual assistant to train. Or perhaps you’ll outsource to someone and you want to give them a rough idea of your business. And, this might even work when putting together some instructional content for clients, too. So this issue is about “training” but it could relate to training anyone.

There are just four simple steps that you can do and most of the time it will take just ten minutes to put this together. In some circumstances where it will take longer, you can break it up over a few days. However, if you regularly train people and you get into a pattern with developing this kind of training, you probably won’t take more than ten minutes anyway.

Before I start, I want to give you a couple of ways to deploy your training. There’s no need to get fancy but you should use something that works for you. Depending on what you’re comfortable with, you might want to do:

• Written training (i.e. in Microsoft Word or some other word processing program).

• Audio training (where you record your voice talking to the trainee). If this is your preferred method, your computer probably has a standard “sound recorder” program in the Start > Programs > Accessories menu. Or, a free audio program I really like is Audacity which allows you a lot of freedom to record and edit sound.

• Video training (where you record your voice, your face, and perhaps a screen-cap video for the trainee). If you want to record your voice and face (and a whiteboard or other visual aid), you can just use your computer’s built-in camera or an inexpensive computer camera. If you want to record videos of what’s on your screen, Camtasia is really good.

Feel free to use a mixture of these three different types of training media, depending on what you are trying to teach. If you are trying to teach a program that has a lot of detailed things to do, Camtasia is great. If you want to give audio instructions about how to answer a telephone, audio is good. If you have some basic concepts or a training about a simple website, a written document (with images) is fine. Once you’ve made all this training, be sure to store them in one convenient place with obvious names so your trainees can access them later.

Here are the four steps I recommend for your training:

Step 1: Give them the bigger picture. (Duration: 1 minute)
This is so important and often ignored! Most trainees will do a much better job at whatever you are showing them if you just tell them why they are doing it and how it fits into the bigger picture. If you are teaching them to use Twitter on your company’s behalf, for example, don’t just show them the technical aspects of tweeting; instead, start them off by briefly explaining why Twitter is important and how Twitter fits into your company’s social media marketing strategy. You don’t have to spend long on this, just a moment to tell them why it’s important.

So you might say, “We believe that social media is a powerful way for businesses to interact with customers and we’ve chosen Twitter as one of our social media tools. You will be tweeting on behalf of our company to share our brand with our followers.”

See how easy that was? It only took a moment and it gave a nice, clear picture about Twitter’s role in the company.

Step 2: Give them the highlights. (Duration: 2 minutes)
Next, you are going to just hit some of the important things they need to know. It doesn’t have to be very detailed (you’ll get to that), but it should give them an overview of what they are doing and how they are doing it. I like to think of it like this: In a moment, you are about to give them the detailed instructions but first you are going to give them some key things to remember so that when you touch on those things in the detailed instructions, they will jump out.

Just keep it really simple and quick with bullet points. Keep it to ten or fewer highlights.

To use the Twitter example again, I might say: “You are going to spend ten minutes a day interacting with followers on Twitter using a combination of tweets, retweets, replies, and direct messages. You’ll also be actively following other people. What we are looking for is an engaged audience who thinks of us as the experts. And we always want to make sure we are engaging our audience and not just promoting ourselves.”

I wrote that as if I was doing an audio or video but you could easily arrange those into about half a dozen bullet points for a Word document. Now, when the trainee reads this and reviews the detailed part (in the next step) they will recognize the important parts that you want them to cover.

Some other valuable items to cover in this section:

• If you are measuring them on something, tell them what the measurable is.
• If there are several ways of doing something, tell them that and point out which way you are showing them.
• Tell them whether you are giving them a general overview as a guideline or a strict “must-follow” step-by-step system.

Step 3: Give them the details. (Duration: 5-8 minutes)
If you’ve done the other parts, this is going to go quickly and easily. Just show them how to do what you want them to do. Keep it simple. Make it step-by-step. Go through the material quickly but be mindful that you don’t blaze through so quickly that they will miss important parts.

If you are going to use a Word document, use screen capture (Press “Control” and “PrtScn” at the same time and that will copy a picture of your screen to your clipboard, then you can click “paste” in your Word document and the image of your screen will be pasted there).

If you are using audio or video, speak naturally and clearly into the microphone and jot down an outline before you start so that you don’t ramble on beyond your time limit.

There’s no reason why you can’t spend more than ten minutes but here’s what I find: You are already busy and don’t have a lot of time, but the only way to train your staff is bite the bullet and take the time to train them. So if you take ten minutes now to get them started, and you take ten minutes later for some intermediate training, and another ten minutes down the road for advanced training, that’s probably going to be easier to carve out of your busy days than half an hour all at once.

On the odd occasion, you might need to create something that takes longer than ten minutes. If that happens, break it up over a couple of days so that it doesn’t become a time stealer for you. In general, though, you should adequately cover a lot of material even if you restrict your time to ten minutes.

Step 4: Help them troubleshoot. (Duration: 1-2 minutes)
In some cases, I’ve found that a troubleshooting training session is worth ten minutes all on its own. But there are times when you only need to spend a moment or two helping your trainees avoid disaster. Give them a couple of the top things to watch out for and ways to deal with it. Then point them to a resource to get more information if they need it. If I was going to add some troubleshooting tips onto the end of my Twitter training, I might say something like, “Make sure you don’t explicitly sell our services while using Twitter because that’s not what it’s for. And be careful when you click on any shortened URLs; don’t click on them if they aren’t from a source you recognize.”

There! You’re done and it only took ten minutes. Now you don’t have an excuse not to train your staff to do the work that will be truly helpful to you! Just take ten minutes a day to create some training and your staff will be able to take on so many more projects, freeing you up to focus your attention on other aspects of your business.

Related posts:

1. Business Growth in Ten Minutes a Day… IS Possible
2. Run a More Efficient, Profitable Business in 10 Minutes a Day
3. Growing Your Business with YouTube in Just Ten Minutes! – Part1

As I mentioned, expense review – which is just one part of bookkeeping – is among the unsexiest of the business functions you need to do. And it’s nice to outsource it to a bookkeeper or accountant. But some of you can’t outsource it, or choose not to, and more importantly, as a business owner you should still have a handle on your expenses even if you do outsource the majority of your expense management to someone else.

I also recommend that you do this in ten minutes a day. Once in a while you’ll have expenses that will require more than ten minutes but what I’m proposing will only take ten minutes or less. So, although you might not like to manage your expenses, a ten minute “quick hit” of expense management is something you can get through. And as long as you set aside ten minutes a day, it will rarely take more than five minutes. Depending on your business, if you start now with ten minutes a day, you might get to a point where it only takes ten minutes a week… but you have to start somewhere.

Preparation
The first thing you’ll want to do before you sit down for your ten minute expense blitz is to keep your expenses in one convenient location. Don’t keep them in your inbox with everything else. When it’s time for your scheduled ten minutes of expenses, you’ll spend more time searching through papers for your bills than you’ll spend managing them! Instead, try a stackable organizer and set one shelf aside just for invoices, bills, and receipts; anything that represents money that has gone out or is about to go out.

Step 1: Enter your expenses. (Duration 1-2 minutes)
This is the easiest and the fastest step: Open up your favorite bookkeeping system and enter your bills. (What’s that? You don’t have a bookkeeping system? You need to get one ASAP). This step won’t take long. The more familiar you are with the system and the more you do this expenses-in-ten-minutes work, the faster it will go. Some days you’ll input one or two expenses or nothing at all. If you’re just catching up on your bookkeeping, make this your priority before you do the next steps. But once you’re at a point where you are all caught up, and entering your expenses only takes a moment or two, then you can move on to do the rest of the expense management, which I’m sure you’ll find more interesting (and profitable).

Step 2: Analyze your expenses (Duration 6-7 minutes)
After you’ve entered the expense, you’ll still be left with pile of papers. Now it’s time to do some analysis. This might take you the full ten minutes at the very beginning (and could spill into ten minutes the next day, too, if you have a lot of expenses). Over time, you’ll end up with just a couple of expenses to manage each day and it will go very quickly.

With your pile of expenses, you’re going to analyze each one to make sure that it is helping you to run your business. So, create a chart (you can just use a piece of paper unless you want to save your work to review it in the future) and write the following columns across the top:

• Expense
• Amount
• Time
• Impact on Sales
• Impact on Profit
• Is there a better way?

Expense & Amount Columns: The Expense column and the Amount column are easy. You can simply list whatever the expense is. Make sure you also list expenses that don’t have a corresponding piece of paper to go with them, and list the expenses on your credit card bill as separate expenses (not as a single lump sum).

Time column: In the Time column, list the amount of time that it takes you to deal with that expense. So a lunch with a client might be an hour at the table plus another half hour of travel time. So you’d list 1.5 hours. Some expenses won’t take any time at all. Others will take a lot of your time. If you have employees and you have entered their wages as an expense that day, the amount of time that goes in this column is still whatever YOU spend. So you might spend time training them, managing them, reviewing their work, and dealing with administrative paperwork (like health forms, etc.). If you have 4 employees that you pay biweekly and you spend 4 hours each with your employees in that period, then you would write down 16 hours in the column.

Impact on Sales & Impact on Profit column: The Impact on Sales and Impact on Profit column is really simple. On a scale of 1-5 simply write down a down a number that represents what impact you feel this particular expense has on your business’ overall sales and overall profits. 1 = Not at all, 2 = Very little, 3 = Some, 4 = Noticeable impact, 5 = Great impact. Yes, this isn’t an exact science and you won’t find an accountant or bookkeeper who uses this 1-5 scale. That’s not the point. You’re not trying to replace a bookkeeper or accountant with this effort. You, as a business owner, are just trying to figure out how a particular expense impacts your business overall. Your telephones might be used as the primary way to make sales so they’d get a 5. Your lunch with a client might have an impact on a single sale but not a big impact on your business’ overall sales, so it might be a 1 (or, if they’re a big client, it might be a s high as 2-3).

“Is there a better way?” column: In this column, you are just pausing for a moment to consider if there is something you can do to manage that particular expense more effectively. In many cases, the answer will be no. In some cases it might be yes. Your sales staff might not be an expense you want to do anything about. Or maybe you want to float the possibility of switching them from a wage to a commission. Your $100 lunch with a client, though, might have been equally as effective if it was just a $60 lunch. Use the other columns – like the time it takes you or the impact on sales and profit – to be your guide. If something takes you a long time but has little or no impact on your business’ sales or profit then it might be worth outsourcing, eliminating, or reconfiguring for a more cost-effective way of doing things.

Step 3: List your to-dos (Duration 1 minute)
From your list of expense analysis, you might end up with a few to-dos a couple of times a week. Some of the to-dos will be specific things you need to act on, like “find someone to outsource my staff administrative work to” or “find out if the phone bill needs to be as high as it is” or “shop around for a new service provider”. Other things will be items you just need to keep in mind for later like “Don’t spend so much on lunches with clients.” These latter reminder-type to-dos are worth noting and I like to put reminders of them in places where they are applicable. For example, if I wanted to spend less on lunch, I might add a little “$!” to my schedule for my next client lunch as a way to remind myself to watch my spending.

Final thoughts
At first, you’ll push the 10 minute window every time; but soon, you will only have a couple of expenses to deal with everyday and this will become a fun exercise to focus you in on running your business in a more efficient and profitable way.

This isn’t a perfect science and as you read through my instructions I’m sure you thought of a couple of expenses that don’t fit the system. That’s okay. I’m not saying it’s going to be bulletproof. However, in my experience, most of my readers will find that most of their expenses will fit nicely into this analysis and the other expenses can just be dealt with on their own. This isn’t deep analysis that will replace your accountant. The purpose here is to get you processing your expenses quickly but also to compel you to pause for a moment and consider whether or not the expense has an impact on your business.

Related posts:

1. Generating Repeat Business in 10 Minutes a Day
2. Better Business Lunches in 10 Minutes a Day
3. Business Growth in Ten Minutes a Day… IS Possible

In the last article of Tips In Ten I started talking about how to make faster decisions and I gave you 2 tools to help: I introduced you to a mindset that will empower you to make faster decisions and I showed you how you can restate decisions (or problems) in order to crystallize your thinking and explore the decision more fully before you move forward.

In this article of Tips In Ten, I’m giving you one more tool that is really useful to take the things that you thought about in the last tool and to help you sort them down into what is likely going to be the best decision.

Again, I offer up the same disclaimer that I gave you in the last issue: Make sure that the time you spend on decisions is relative to the importance of the decision. These tools can make decision-making faster (and it often can be sped up) but that doesn’t mean that every decision should take ten minutes. Some will take ten seconds, some will take ten minutes, and some need to take ten days… or more. Ideally, these tools will help you speed up the time it takes to reach a good decision, but they will never accelerate all decision-making to ten minutes.
Here is the third tool to help you make better decisions:

Tool #3: Table of Elements

When you are faced with a decision and you’re trying to weigh between 2 or more choices (especially after you’ve restated them and come up with even more choices!) this tool will help.

Start by creating several columns. The number of columns you create will depend on the type of decision you have to make and I’ve used as many as 10 or 12 columns and you might end up needing more.

In the left-most column, write down each of your choices (which you created in tool #2). I’ll work through an example to demonstrate. Let’s say that I’m trying to decide between 3 products that I’d like to develop to sell. So I write down my 3 product ideas in the left column.

Then, in the columns to the right, write down different elements that make up or influence the action if you were to act on that choice. You’re just trying to come up with factors that might sway your decision one way or the other. Sometimes it will include the amount of effort involved or the convenience it offers or the potential return.

For example, if you were exploring the creation of a few different products to sell, you might have columns for:

• Up-front development cost
• Time to completion
• Size of market

… just to name a few. (I’ll just use these 3 factors as an example, but you’ll probably want to think of more. Price of product, profitability of product, and relevance to current clientele come to mind as additional factors to include).

To give you another example, if you were thinking about buying a house but couldn’t decide between 10 different houses, you’d write down each house in the left column and then write down elements that would influence the decision in the right columns. For example, you might include:

• Proximity to schools for the kids
• •Ease of access to route to work
• Amount of work required to fix house
• Price of house

… and so on.

Makes sense so far? You’ve got a chart with your choices in one column and influencing factors along the top row.

Now, here’s where the tool becomes really useful: For each influencing factor, reverse rank all of your choices in that column. If you have 10 choices, rank them 10 (the best) to 1 (the worst). If you have 19 choices, rank them 19 (the best) to 1 (the worst).

Back to our example: We reverse rank each product idea based on the up-front development time. Since there are 3 products, our ranking is 3-1, with 3 being the best and 1 being worst. We decide that product one will be really affordable to development, product three will be average, and product two will be expensive to develop. So we reverse rank our choices like this:

Now do the same for each column.

In our example, we reverse rank the time to completion. Product two will be really slow. Product one and three are going to be fairly quick but we decide that product three would be the quickest. So we rank them like this:

See how easy this is? Last, we rank the size of the market. It turns out, product two has the biggest market, product one has a medium-sized market, and product three has a tiny market. So we reverse rank them like this…

Now that we’ve done all the ranking, we simply add up the columns. The highest numbered choice will be the most likely choice while the lowest-numbered column will be the least likely choice.

In our chart, we add up the three columns in the product one row to get 7, we add up the three columns in the product two row to get 5, and we add up the three columns in the product three row to get six.

So, we’ll likely go ahead with product one since it has the highest score.

“But Heather…”

Now, there are a few “buts” that some of you might have, so let me address them below:

“But Heather, one influencing factor might be far more important than another influencing factor.”

That is true but my purpose here isn’t to give you a tool that gives you THE answer. That’s your job. The purpose of these tools is to help you think through your decisions quickly and easily so that you’ll feel fully informed (or, as informed as possible) so you can act. You’re still the one making the decision and maybe (using the example above) you might decide that product two’s market size is the most compelling and important factor and therefore you choose product two based on that decision. The tool didn’t fail; it still worked to help you sort through what you feel are the most important and least important factors and it forced you to consider at the very end what was the most critical factor in your mind.

“But Heather, I have a hundred different choices and I’ll be at this all day.”

That does happen. I’ve found it easier to handle up to about 20 to 25 choices maximum. To solve an over-abundance of choice, you might want to consider grouping a few of them. Or, you might consider performing this chart tool in a two stage format with some really simple influencing factors to quickly sort down from 100 to 25 and then once you have a more manageable number, you can apply a more complex version with a full set of influencing factors.

“But Heather, I have several choices and when I added up the rows, a few of them were tied.”

This happens sometimes. I don’t mind it when it does because it means that I’m not making a decision for nothing: I have to really think through something if several choices seem equal to me. When that happens, I introduce more influencing factors and/or, I put it aside for the day and come back to it tomorrow. Both of those help me to think a little deeper about the decisions.

What comes next?

I’ve shown you how to adopt a decisive mindset that realizes you can’t be perfect but you still need to take action. And, I’ve shown you how to crystallize your thinking when it comes to stating your decisions and understanding what they are really about. And then, I gave you a tool so you can rank your choices based on important factors.

These are going to be useless if they don’t compel you to action. Using the things you’ve learned here, adopt a “get it done” policy where you make a decision in as short a time as possible, trust yourself to have made a good decision, and then move forward in confidence.

At this point, you can use any number of great project management and time management tools to act on the decision you’ve made.

Decisions can be easier, faster, and more enjoyable to make when we trust ourselves and have the right tools at our disposal.

Related posts:

1. Ten Minutes to Faster Decisions – Part 1
2. Make Bookkeeping Faster & Easier in Less Than 10 Minutes a Day!
3. Become A Fortune Teller in Just 10 Minutes – Part 2

In the previous article, I showed you a six step process about hiring freelancers and contractors in just ten minutes. Step three of the six step process reads:

Take ten minutes to post your project. You could Google the kind of person you’re looking for (“bookkeeper” or “copywriting” or “web designer”) but, frequently, the sites that appear high on those lists are informational or very high end or too broad for your needs. Instead, I recommend visiting a site like Elance.com or Guru.com. On these sites, you can post your project within a specific category (there is a significant variety of categories so most of your business needs will be met) and you’ll have many freelancers and contractors submit proposals. Creating a project on these sites is free and fast, allowing you to take just ten minutes to do this part of the process… Once your project is submitted, sit back and wait. The proposals will start coming in from freelancers.

So that’s my starting point for this article: Use Guru or Elance to put your project out there and receive proposals back from a number of freelancers that you can then sift through to find the right one. (By the way, in this article I refer to “proposals” and “bids” interchangeably to mean the same thing: Responses from professionals about your project).

Tips on creating the right proposal

In steps 1 and 2 of the previous issue, you spent ten minutes thinking about what you want and then another ten minutes thinking about the details. Now it’s time to put those things into a proposal that professionals can understand and respond appropriately to.

Both Guru and Elance give you some options to select prices and dates, and select whatever you think is appropriate for you. For price, though, I’d recommend selecting “I don’t know” or “Private” as the price because I strongly recommend against setting a price if you’ve never worked with freelancers before. Even if you want to mention a price, I’d suggest mentioning it in your proposal instead of mentioning it in the earlier “details” section of the process. The reason is: Some professionals look at that initial price (or even use sort-by-price functions) and if they don’t like the number, they’ll move on without looking at your project. You want lots of qualified professionals looking at your project and bidding so you can choose the right one. So don’t push away many freelancers by filling in a price.

During the request-for-proposal process, you’ll have a chance to enter some text about your project and this is where the work you did from the last issue will come in handy.

First, write a brief introduction. You may not be allowed to give a lot of personal details (for example, your website will sometimes be removed) but I’d suggest that you say something like: “Hi, my name is Heather and I’m looking for a graphic designer for a series of logos I need created.”

This first sentence does three things:

1.    It makes you seem nice and approachable (and professionals who are really busy – and are the kind of people you want to work on your project – want to see that you’re approachable).

2.    It clearly and succinctly outlines the project. That way, someone who is a graphic designer specializing in website headers will see right away that they are not the right professional for you while a graphic designer who specializes in logos can see that they are the right fit.

3.    By giving your name you can also help to weed out people who submit standardized bids on projects without reading them. (This happens a lot). Good professionals should provide a customized proposal and many will say something like “Thank you for the opportunity to bid on your project, Heather”, which is an easy way for you to see if someone actually read your proposal. (Clarification: Not all professionals will use your name when submitting a proposal and if they don’t it doesn’t mean they didn’t read your proposal. But it is a good way to quickly scan and see who has read your proposal).
Next, talk about the big picture details (which you should have done in your step one work from the last Tips In Ten issue where you gave some thought to your overall project). So, to continue with my own example, I might write something like: “I’m looking to create logos for 3 ebooks. I’d like the logos to graphically depict the benefits that the reader gets when they read my ebooks and I’d like the logos to incorporate a specific set of colors.”

By writing this “big picture” paragraph, you’re telling the professionals what your intended outcomes will be. This is important and is missed by many businesses who look for professionals. When you tell them what you hope to achieve from the project, you’ll help to get a lot of proposals that bid on similar things (thus helping you with an “apples-to-apples” comparison) but you’ll also make sure that whomever you finally choose has a good understanding of what you want… Not just what their deliverables should be. (In other words, they aren’t to just deliver 3 logos to you; rather these logos need to accomplish specific things as indicated by you).

Next, give some details, which you’ve already outlined in the step two work from the previous Tips In Ten issue. A simple bullet point list is good. Your bullets should include details like preferred timeline, price (if you’ve decided to include a price), and subject matter. Subject matter is important and is frequently missed by many businesses with the mistaken impression that professionals can work within a variety of industries. That is not always the case. Sometimes, the best professionals specialize.

So, in my example I might write something like:

• The ebooks are B2B ebooks about social media networking and marketing
• I’d like rough drafts of the 3 logos within 2 weeks of project acceptance
• I’d like to have 2 review cycles
• I’d like final delivery of the logos a week after the second review
• I’d like the logos provided in .png format

Here, you can see how I’ve included enough details for someone to be able to submit a proposal and it is clearly written in an easy-to-follow bullet point format.

You might invite them to show you samples but here’s my opinion on the matter: If they’re good professionals, they will show you their samples anyway, whether you ask or not.

Then submit! It’s that easy and can take less than ten minutes (if you’ve done the work from the previous issue ahead of time).

Now all you need to do is sit back and watch for freelancers to reply. (Note, you might be contacted with questions by freelancers and be sure to pay attention to those because they might indicate that you forgot to leave out an important detail which you can edit in later).

In the next article, I’ll talk about how you can pick the right freelancer in just ten minutes.

Bonus Tips:

Just a couple more points:

• If they ask a question, be quick to respond

• Create requests-for-proposals for each separate portion of the project rather than lumping a complex project into one proposal.

• You don’t have to wait the entire period of time you set for the bidding process, but you should wait long enough so that you get a variety of freelancers that you can pick and choose from.

• If no one bids on your project, take a look at it more closely. If you put in a price and timeline, perhaps they were too restrictive. Try taking it out and resubmitting. Or, have someone else proofread your proposal for clarity.

Related posts:

1. Choosing the Right Freelancer or Contractor
2. Successful Business Proposals in Just Ten Minutes a Day
3. How to Hire Freelancers and Contractors in 10 Minutes a Day

Part of what makes this process difficult is that we don’t know what is actually important to do and what isn’t important to do. (Many people realize this issue when they start to think about delegating, which is a topic we covered in a previous Tips In Ten). In fact, I’ve coached people who show me their to-do list and say to me, “Heather, I try to prioritize the work in my life as 1, 2, 3, etc… but it ALL seems to be priority 1!!!”.

On top of that is the ongoing challenge of all entrepreneurs to find balance between work and the rest of life (which might include parenting, volunteering, and so on).

So in this issue of Tips In Ten, we’ll cover “part 1″ of how to set and achieve your daily goals: Figuring out what’s important to do.

The truth is, there are a lot of things to do but only some things that are important to do. But it all SEEMS important.

One way that you can help to separate what is important to do and what only seems important to do is to use a system I have augmented from Stephen R. Covey (the 7 Habits guy). One of his “habits” is called “First Things First” and it’s a system to help you figure out what’s REALLY important in life.

I’ll give him credit, of course, for the idea. I really like starting with roles first then moving to the goals that are based on each role. It really helps to make sure that there is balance in your life. However, if you are a big Covey fan, you should know that I’ve dramatically augmented his plan in order to accommodate the business owner’s lifestyle which (in my opinion) should include more space devoted for clients.

Here’s how my augmented First Things First plan works:

First, before you even bother thinking about your to-do’s, think first about who you are. What are your roles in life? Chances are that you’ll make a list which includes:

• Business owner – you own a business.
• Parent – you have children
• Spouse – you have a spouse
• Child – you are a child (in fact, you probably keep meaning to call your mother, right?)
• Friend – they keep you sane

There might be more. Covey also suggests that you include a “role” for yourself in order to make sure you take time out for yourself. (I tend to list myself twice – once as “student” and once as “me” for non-educational activities).

Now here is where I depart from Covey even more: As a business owner, I list my business but I also list some of the critical business relationships that I have with key customers and as the publisher of a newsletter and as a partner for JV projects I work on.

Okay, so you have this list of roles. What now?

Every Thursday or Friday, in preparation for the week to come, list your goals and then write down the things you want to do that would enrich those relationships. Be specific! For your spouse, it might be “Go on a date”. For your kids it might “Take them to the park”. For client XYZ it might be “deliver their project”. For your business it might be “implement new Twitter marketing plan”.

You might have a lot of stuff in your to-do’s; in fact, you might have even more now that you’re including your spouse and your parents and other aspects in your life… but at least you’re dividing it up based on the roles in your life. So, rather than one big list, you’ll end up with a dozen small lists.

Now that you have listed all these goals, look at each one and break them down into individual parts. So implementing your Twitter marketing plan from the example earlier might actually be 4 smaller goals like “Open Twitter account”, “Download TweetDeck”, “set up columns”, “Tweet 5 times on day 1″. (Note: Breaking down your goals into more granular goals might take longer than 10 minutes when you do this the first time, but once you’ve done it once and if you do it regularly, it really does just take 10 minutes).

So now you have an even bigger list of goals! This might seem stressful to you but I promise you that it’s better. That’s because a big cause of procrastination is not knowing where to start. So, by breaking your goals down into smaller goals, you’re helping to eliminate that.

Okay, you have a dozen lists of tiny goals. That’s great! You’re now ready to make it work for you: With this list, determine how long each goal will take and then determine if any of them have a deadline.

So, let’s say that you want your Twitter marketing plan deadline for the 23rd. Obviously, all the related goals need to take place before the 23rd. Your list might look like this:

• Open Twitter account. Duration: 5 minutes. Due on the 20th.
• Set up TweetDeck columns. Duration: 5 minutes. Due on the 22nd.
• Tweet 5 times on day 1. Duration: 10 minutes. Due on 23rd.

Now you have a dozen lists of tiny goals and they all have durations (and, if appropriate, deadlines… although it doesn’t hurt to put deadlines on all of them).

Now it’s time to start scheduling!

First, place your deadlines into your calendar (obviously along with other things like meetings or picking up the kids from school or whatever).

Second, add in a mix of other goals from each of your roles wherever you have free space. (You might put a check mark beside each goal once it’s scheduled or you might color code your goals and look later to make sure that there is a good balance of color variation in your schedule).

Third, find those tiny spaces that aren’t filled and include items that fit the available duration. For example, perhaps you have fifteen minutes between two telephone conferences. In the past, you’d just waste the time on Facebook but now you know that you have 15 minutes and you can look at your schedule. Perhaps you can spend the time ordering flowers your spouse (Role: Spouse, Goal: Order flowers. Duration 5 minutes. No due date) and then following through on two of the Twitter marketing tasks (Role: Business owner. Goal: Open Twitter account. Duration: 5 minutes. Due on the 20th. Download TweetDeck. Duration: 5 minutes. Due on the 21st.)
By now, you should have a calendar that includes the important elements of your life all addressed in some kind of balance.

In the next issue we’ll talk about how to make your goals even easier to achieve and I’ll provide you with a few extra tips to make your scheduling and goal execution even more stress-free.

Related posts:

1. Setting (and Achieving) Daily Goals Like a Genius – Part 2
2. First Things First
3. Business Growth in Ten Minutes a Day… IS Possible

There could be any number of reasons why we have to extend some form of credit to our clients: Perhaps all of your competition is doing it and if you didn’t, you’d be out of business; perhaps you are a freelancer who requires payment when the project is complete and not before; perhaps the customer cuts a check on a certain day of the month; perhaps you offer a service in which you collect a fee at the end of the month for usage; perhaps you’re a consultant who collects payment based on the ROI you deliver (and thus need to wait for it to be measured first); perhaps you delivered your product or service and the customer realized that they simply couldn’t pay it all right now… I could go on and on.

Whatever the reason, in most cases, giving customers the option to buy now and pay later comes with the territory. As soon as you extend credit and your customer owes you money, you step into the world of receivables. For many business owners (especially the new ones) this is an uncomfortable place to be. You don’t want to have to send reminders. You don’t want to have to make collection calls. You NEVER want it to get to the point where a customer simply doesn’t pay and walks away with your product or service. As a business owner, it’s easy to take that personally because you pay all of your bills and you treat people fairly and put your heart and soul into the business, so when someone who takes your product or service without paying, it FEELS no different than if someone stole from you.

And yet, you can’t escape it: You need to offer credit. So, what can you do to manage the situation, to avoid people from becoming “deadbeat” clients, and to collect the money that is rightfully owed to you?

The good news is, the work doesn’t have to be as unpleasant as it seems. And it doesn’t have to take as long as it seems, either. In just ten minutes a day you can manage your receivables, and because you are managing them you’ll be more likely to collect more money owed to you.

Get Started

Before you can manage your receivables effectively in 10 minutes a day, you’ll need to have a couple of systems in place first. Set these up and the 10 minutes a day will be time well spent. Setting up these processes might take a week of 10 minutes a day just to work through on their own. That’s okay. These are extremely valuable systems to have in place and they will put you in a good position over the long run to minimize bad debt and maximize the credit you collect.

First, you need to have a list of money owed. Some like a paper list, printed off regularly; others like an Excel spreadsheet; others have a bookkeeping system or invoicing service that will generate a list for them. Pick whatever works for you but at the very least you’ll need a list of people who owe you money, no matter how old that money is, and it would be nice to have it sorted by date. If it’s electronic, it will be refreshed constantly. If it’s in paper format, print off a new list each week. This is your receivables list and you’ll use it when you read the next Tips In Ten issue. So, take ten minutes and get the list and put it in order.

Second, you need to know what your average operating expenses are and how your income is split between immediate payment and receivables. Figure out the maximum amount of credit you are comfortable giving out in a month. This is your monthly risk threshold number. Divide this number by the average amount of credit you give to each customer and that will tell you how many customers you can give credit to. For example, if you determine that you don’t want to give out more than $5,000 worth of credit in a month, and customers are granted an average of $500 credit, then you can’t have more than 10 customers at a time on credit. If you want to give credit to more customers than that number, you’ll need to start collecting a security deposit from each one. By figuring these numbers out, you will avoid over-extending the credit you provide and that will help you to avoid scrambling to cover your operations with loans and credit cards while you get customers to pay. Many businesses fail in their first two years, not always because of a lack of customers, but many times because they over-extend the amount of credit they give and then don’t have enough money to cover operating expenses. Take 10 minutes one day (or over a couple days if you need to) and make sure you know these numbers. As long as there is cash flow, from old receivables being paid and from customers who pay cash, you can extend some credit but you need to find the balance for your business.

Third, put good processes in place including a consistent invoicing process, some payment terms, and a credit approval process. Obviously you don’t want to make it impossible for people to buy from you, but here’s what I would suggest:

• You should have your terms already set out. Know what they are and don’t shoot from the hip. And, if you have to extend a lot of credit, offer incentives to people who pay early or who pay on time or who pay within a certain period. This is much easier and way more positive than charging interest on late payments (although you might have to do that, too, and that’s okay).

• The more someone buys from you, the more information you should expect from them. Verify their phone numbers and email addresses.

• Do some research about them online, if appropriate. Do they have a web presence? Even something simple like seeing how many followers they have on Twitter, how many connections they have on LinkedIn and how many blog posts they have in their blog won’t mitigate every receivable issue but it will help you to know how long they’ve been around and how easy it is to get in touch with them.

• Create thresholds of amounts owing and connect those with payments you expect from them. For example, if you’re going to give someone $1000 credit, require a minimum payment of $250. A security deposit, for example, might be the right choice for your business. And the more credit they need, the more security deposit you require.

• I don’t need to tell you that you shouldn’t extend credit to everyone every time they ask. For example, if someone doesn’t pay one bill for a long time, then pays it and expects credit again – they shouldn’t get credit. Or another example: A brand spanking new client from a business you’ve never heard of before, who approaches you with a huge order and demands full credit. – that’s a no-go in my books.

This might seem like it will take more than 10 minutes but you probably already have some of this in place, it just needs to be formalized.

Lastly, managing your receivables actually starts long before you deliver your product or service, and even before the customer contracts your services. It starts with a relationship. Build one. You don’t have to be best friends with your clients but you should try to connect with them, empathize with them, and be friendly with them. It’s good for all aspects of your business. It helps them to be more loyal, it helps you to understand them better when you need to sell them something, and it helps to diminish the likelihood that they will not pay. On the occasions in which I’ve had non-paying clients, of the ones with whom I never had a relationship, I know that income is gone; but of the ones with whom I’ve had a relationship, I’ve actually had “troublesome” clients call me back a year and a half later and pay me based solely on the foundation of my earlier relationship with them.

When you have these things in place, you’re ready to manage your receivables in ten minutes a day. That’s what I’ll cover in the next Tips In Ten article.

Related posts:

1. Manage Your Receivables like a Rock Star – Part 2: Execution
2. Solve Your Business Problems in Just 10 Minutes
3. Mastering Sales and Selling More -Part 1

The World’s Best Frozen Margarita Recipe – Movies are a great source of inspiration. You can learn valuable lessons from watching how others deal with failure and overcome obstacles, as well as taking note of the perspective they take toward life. Listed are some great inspirational moments in film.

Know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em: How business is like poker – Poker and business are very similar: They’re studies in money-making through opponent evaluation and risk acceptance. Aaron has a great comparison here between poker and business. By becoming a better poker player you will intern become a better business owner.

I’m Granting Wishes Today – Who has seen an authentic voodoo doll? I sure haven’t nor would I know what to do with one, until I read this. With a little bit of humor this personal story explains what to do with a voodoo doll if you ever come across one.

This is Why You Don’t Bury Your Blog’s Gold- Don’t bury your blog’s best content; find ways to share it with your readers. That can only help grow your readership and bring more exposure to your blogging efforts. Mack talks about quality not quantity when writing you blogs also, linking out to 2-3 of your most popular posts every week on Twitter.

Getting Ahead By Not Being A Cliché – Differentiation is like a bridge which creates the proper context for your work to reach the right target. When instead of being a cliche, you are different; this allows you to stand out. And when you stand out, three essential things happen: You get noticed; You get remembered; People get curious about you. This is the key to getting ahead by not being a cliche.

If you’re looking for more, see the rest of my favorites on HeatherVilla StumbleUpon.

Related posts:

1. Weekend Reading: My fav’s from this week: 4/16/10
2. Weekend Reading: My fav’s from this week: 6/25/10
3. Weekend Reading: My fav’s from this week: 7/2/10

• High maintenance clients who are focused on your rate. If you have clients who require a lot of hand-holding, who constantly ask for free services, and who call you back to go over invoices in detail, you’ve got a business-destroying problem on your hands. They may be the nicest people in the world but they can take away from other customers who cost less to manage and are therefore more profitable. If a clients gets too demanding (even if their demands are disguised as requests), revisit how much you do for them for free.

• Vendors with whom you are too closely tied for critical situations. As a business owner, you probably have vendors who provide you with any number of services. And it’s often nice to work with just a few people who know what they are doing rather than spread yourself too thin by trying to manage a whole bunch of people. But you need to watch your vendors carefully: If you are extremely reliant on them to come through (because they provide you with several critical services) make sure their own business is in good shape. You don’t want them dropping the ball for too long simply because they can’t keep their own house in order).

• Employees who just warm desks. The world somehow has balance: There are entrepreneurs who dream of living a life of unfettered freedom and there are employees who like the consistency of employment. We need each other in order to coexist in perfect harmony. But sometimes you get an employee who likes the consistency of employment without the hassle and sweat of actually doing work. They are a drain on your revenue without contributing to your business. Unfortunately, if you run a small office, it can be extremely difficult to do anything about them.

• Decision makers who have a different view than you. Decision makers could include majority shareholders, partners, COOs or CFOs (if you’re the CEO), or other key people on your management team. You need everyone moving in the same direction but if they feel that the business should go somewhere else, you’ve got a potentially bad situation if they start making decisions that run counter to how you feel the business needs to go.

Businesses frequently fail from these people because these business-destroyers are cloaked in good relationships. They get close to entrepreneurs and usually have the best intentions and positive feelings toward the business owner and the business. But, as you can see by reading descriptions of them; their views are just not aligned.

One of the most difficult things you’ll have to do as an entrepreneur is identify and remove these people from a position of influence in your business.

Good luck!

Related posts:

1. How to Take Your Business to the Next Level
2. What Compels People to Hire You (Instead of Your Competitor)?
3. The Three Stages of Small Business

There is an invisible set of stairs that entrepreneurs perceive in the life of their business and every business owner has the desire to move their business up these stairs toward some (possibly unknown or unstated) level of success. They know that each level requires new efforts and techniques and ideas and comes with its own challenges and rewards.

But the problem is, what the heck are the levels? There’s no manual anywhere suggesting what the levels are. Yet, every entrepreneur knows that they are at one level and they want to get to a higher level. I have people asking me all the time to help them move to a higher level.

In case you’re reading this and wondering if I have somehow divined what the levels are, I haven’t. But I have discovered something else: Moving from one level to another is often preceded by dissatisfaction at the current level as well as an increasing amount of chaos and sometimes an unsettled feeling. I compare it to a child’s top that is spinning smoothly for a while and then starts to wobble. The business starts to wobble, unbalanced, just like that top. That “wobble” is often the time when a business owner wants to move to the next level. But here’s what I recommend first:

Instead of focusing on the next level (which is difficult to do anyway because it’s hard to know exactly what it is for each business), focus on making your current level perfect. Address that unsettled feeling and that chaos. Get it under control.

You can do this by:

• Creating or revising your business’ systems.
• Revisiting your business plan.
• Hiring someone to take care of your details (or extending the responsibilities of someone you’ve already hired).
• Taking a vacation to clear your head.
• Perfecting your current operation.
• Looking at your expenses and reducing them.
• Revisiting your business model to see if there are additional revenue opportunities.
• Strengthening your customer service.
• Increasing the consistency and quality of your marketing.
• Increasing the quality of your deliverables.

“But Heather,” you say, “I want to get to the next level. What you are telling me is how to make my current level better.”

Indeed that is exactly what I am doing. And the reason is: Your current business, which is probably running well enough (after all, you are looking at moving forward) needs to be tightened up a bit in order to more effectively move forward anyway. And, as you move forward, you want to maintain as much control as you can (and as much profit as you can) and cleaning house will help with that. You will also gain a fair amount of insight into how your business is running (and that could reveal for you exactly how you can move forward).

If your business is starting to feel like it’s becoming unbalanced and you’re wondering if you’re ready to move to the next level, make your first step a house-cleaning effort to strengthen your current business and that will help you get to the next level faster and more profitably.

On to the next level!

Related posts:

1. When Business Growth is Bad – Part 1
2. One Small Step for Business
3. How Entrepreneurs Can Get the Benefits of a Team (Without Selling Part of Their Business)