I read the other day: ‘If people behaved like most businesses, they’d be called psychopaths’. I think that’s true. Many businesses behave like this: That’s why so few small businesses break though and become long-term successful. If they behave in the same way as the existing larger businesses, they’ll never get noticed and they’ll never […]

As some of you may know, I’m a huge fan of ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’. I try to live it every day. And I teach and coach it to others. A few years after ‘The 7 Habits’ was published (and became the best selling self-development book of all time), Dr Covey published

It’s a scandal. Over 60% of small businesses fail within 3 years. And that rises to 80% in 10 years. I can’t begin to imagine the pain and loss to all these people, their employees and their families. Indeed, it’s happened to me. And the real tragedy is that most of this is avoidable. There

In our blog last month, we talked about ‘Success’ measures (outcomes) vs ‘Activity’ measures (Causes of outcomes). And we agreed that, in order to be consistently successful, small business owners needed to make sure they had some good ‘Activity’ measures in place that they used rigorously. This month, all I am going to do is

Most business owners ask the wrong questions We all want success – in our business and in our other lives. And success is easy to measure: how many customers, how many sales, what level of profits etc But, interesting and helpful though these figures are, they don’t help us do the right things to create

The ‘holy grail’ of business is happy, loyal customers who continually recommend you to people they meet. So: what do customers REALLY want in order to persuade them to do this? In a nutshell, ‘customers’ just want three things: Customers ALWAYS act emotionally, in order to get a mixture of the above outcomes … there

As we know, our beliefs dictate our actions, through our emotions. One of the key problems with ‘speedy selling’ is that ‘It’s tough out there’ and ‘You have to fight to win’. This kind of adversity belief will produce panic, and you’ll end up back into the old, ineffective ‘speedy selling’ actions of the past.

Both you and your customer want the same thing: but it’s super hard to make this happen. The key question is: How can we not only blow the customers’ socks off with our consistent and continually improving customer focus, but also make good profits and grow our business? After all, it’s relatively easy to wow

Specific, graceful words to keep you focused on what matters

How to stay calm and allow solutions to find you in good time.