Have you had a talk with your business lately? It’s easy to think of your business as something you thought up and that you control. Turns out, that’s not the whole story. Read more

Self-introduction. Elevator speech. Ten-second introduction. Thirty-second commercial. Whatever you call it, you need one to be an effective marketer, salesperson, or even jobseeker. Here are six tips to creating one that produces the results you are seeking. Read more

Rewarding yourself for a job well done — do you do it? If you’re like most of my clients, the answer is no. You may think that rewarding yourself is silly, as do a lot of people, and for that reason most everybody seems to skip it. It’s not silly, however; in fact, it’s extremely important! Read more

It’s only natural to emulate successful people. You’d like to copy their success, so it seems it would make sense to copy their approach to sales and marketing. But modeling your marketing after the gurus in your field may not get you where they are. Read more

It seems like I sat down just yesterday to write an article — I had a great idea and everything — then I looked up and more than a month had gone by. What the heck happened, I asked myself? Short answer: LIFE. Read more

A desperate entrepreneur contacted me recently. “I need to get clients immediately,” she said. “I’ve been trying for months with no success, and I’m almost out of money.” When I asked her how she had been marketing herself all this time, she gave me the following list of what she had been doing: Read more

Recently I taught a class at the Small Business Administration, where we discussed many characteristics of successful business owners. When discussing communication, and differing communication styles, it became apparent that most of us assumed that others communicated the way we did — or at the very least, could hear and understand what we were communicating. Turns out that’s an assumption that isn’t always correct. Read more

One day, the phone just stopped ringing. At first, you may not have noticed it. You were busy serving your clients, keeping up in your field, and getting the bills paid, like all good professionals do. But then a project ended or a client quit, and you didn’t have a replacement waiting in the pipeline. Suddenly you realized that it had been quite some time since any new prospects were referred to you. Yikes, what’s going on? Read more

I’ve been thinking a lot about comfort zones lately, mostly because I can’t seem to see mine very clearly anymore. Or more accurately stated, I can see it, I just haven’t spent that much time there recently. Read more