In order to control your time, you have to know what you are doing with it now. The best way to determine this is to do an exercise that takes a maximum of a half an hour a day for 10 days. You will not have to go on a crash diet or run three […]

“To succeed, your business must not focus on selling, but on providing solutions to your customers. When you focus on providing solutions, something awesome happens: your business product offerings will never become obsolete. Instead, they’ll thrive toward meeting customer needs–no matter the era.”
Inspired by Theodore Levitt
The challenge is knowing what they need, on knowing that […]

Fear stops many of us from truly expressing who we are and achieving our dreams. Some of us are risk takers, all of us make mistakes and I would say all of us have experienced fear at some stage or another. In this article I am talking about the type of fear that stops us from moving […]

Time is crucial to your business success, or any success for that matter. Imagine not getting to work on time and finding five customers waiting… What would you do about it? Or if your business is service related and you are constantly late for appointments, what now… Too many businesses people are getting caught up […]

I have come across two similar ad campaigns which have angered me no end. The first, a TV ad, features a beaming bride who keeps smiling as she takes a work call during her ceremony. The second, on the radio, has a dad reading a bedtime story, before taking a call then cutting it short, […]

In the busy, noisy world of solo business it can be a challenge to be heard and get noticed. One thing is for sure - it’s far better to be heard well by one person than ignored by thousands.Our solo ventures stand the best chance of growing by word of mouth when those around us […]

1. Vision
All successful people have vision. They have the ability the “see” clearly what they want before it exits.
I’d have to agree with Mr Gates on that one. All of the successful people I have known and […]

A number of the world’s all-time great geniuses were at first thought to be anything but gifted.
Einstein, we know, left school in Germany because of poor grades in history and the language arts. The problem wasn’t Einstein, of course, but the type of learning he was forced to do, which required a lot of rote […]

Hi everyone,
If you are here to check out the web site GREAT! If you are a business professional and write articles, blogs etc, or want to, then this is where your opportunity rocks!
We want to build this web resource to be world class, with great depth and a multitude of solutions for all people in […]

Have them, carry them, never run out. Business cards are a physical reminder to others that you have had contact with them. Business cards should also contain all your contact details. This may sound extremely obvious, but it never ceases to amaze me when I run into clients or people wanting advice, who essentially have […]

Has the world changed so drastically that manners are no longer considered necessary? Is a thank you or a quick acknolwedgement of an email too hard to do in our busy and stressed out working lives?
How can we change this poor culture and start treating each other with some common courtesy and respect again?   
Here are […]

Goals have a special place in the solo psyche. They have helped plenty of soloists to focus energies, challenge themselves and nurture a sense of achievement. But used unwisely they can, quite unintendedly, be counterproductive. That’s because goals are typically treated in a linear fashion: the theory goes you start at a point and progress […]

Have you ever accidentally lost an important file on your computer? Perhaps your computer crashed (again) or your cat sauntered over a dooming sequence of keys. Remember that little pang in your stomach you felt when you realized that file was gone for good?
OK, now imagine losing your entire e-zine subscriber list or customer list. […]

I love working with businesses as they are made up of people as the main part of the mechanism to make the organisation work, but all too often companies run into negative people issues and that can mean things may not go quite as planned some times. I developed this list in response to a […]

Could non religious spirituality have an intrinsic and or extrinsic value to your organisation? And what would it take to foster this in your organisation? Would the team “buy in” easily or would things have to be disguised in some way to make it seem like a secondary thing…
Consider this, Non religious spirituality essentially could […]

My client was dumbfounded. The answer wasn’t complicated, costly or hard to do. The question was, “How do I effectively engage people at the tradeshow?”
“All you gotta do,” I said, “is invite people to take a sheet of your letterhead, make a paper airplane and see if they can fly it into the open window […]

Don’t we just have it all at our fingertips these days? Mobile telephony, satellite monitoring, wireless go anywhere internet connection, SMS and ‘always on’ email straight to our palm devices.As soloists, there’s no excuse for failing to stay in touch with our work (and our clients) regardless of where we are or when. The marketers […]

What’s so hard about branding?
I think it’s the little things that are hard sometimes. Well, at least it seems to me the little things can be the easiest to get wrong.

I hate to admit this, but I’ve ordered more than one gadget or doohickey from TV infomercials. It’s usually been when I’m back East visiting my parents around the holidays, snowed in and bored to tears, and watching TV I’d never dream of watching in my “real life”.
For example, last year I bought the “Hair […]

Have you ever had that sinking feeling, when the day simply slides in to a black hole, and sometimes it happens within moments! I have, but in particular I had it a few years back on walking into a business I was invited to evaluate and advise.
The sinking feeling came pretty quickly as I looked […]

This one really got me. I must admit I have seen it so many times with clients, and it still intrigues me to no end. But I liked the way this recent article in Mybusiness magazine (Oct 06) put it. “It’s not enough to know how” By Brad Sugars. His analogy of overweight people and […]

For so many of us, Google has become an integral part of our online experience, reliably guiding us through the vastness of the web. Now Google brings its mighty search power to your computer.
About Google Desktop
Google Desktop is a simple yet powerful tool that enables you to search your computer for files in the same […]

Allan and Barbara Pease are the internationally renowned experts on human relations and body language. 20 million book sales worldwide have turned them into household name internationally.
Did you know that according to Allan Pease…

Being ‘perceptive’ means being able to spot the contradictions between someone’s words and their body language.
And that overall women are […]

Occasionally we hear stories of people who struggle against great odds, prove the naysayers wrong, and achieve the nearly impossible. They turn around a defunct company; they stop a highway from going through virgin land; they beat the odds on terminal cancer.
In order to do extraordinary things, these people - and you! - don’t need […]

Standing on top of a mountain or a very big hill on a clear day it seems as if you can see forever… If the journey there was a hard slog then the view hopefully is well worth it.
In a similar vein I was checking out web resources for business and came across an article […]

Motivate to Activate Your Staff
Love your job or hate it? If you asked your employees the above question how many would say “love it”? For those that answer “hate it” is it because they really are in the wrong job or is it due to environmental factors?
There are strategies that employers can create to foster […]

In our book Flying Solo - How to go it alone in business, Sam and I talk a great deal about the role and importance of holding a vision.

Exploration on the topic of visions is often done in the context of a start-up business, but to dismiss visions as something solely useful to newbies is to […]

It was the fall of 1998 when I had just started my first business as a marketing communications writer. Most of my clients hired me for newsletters, brochures, and sales materials, but I would get the occasional request for something different. At the time I was too naive to consider saying “no” to any project […]

Back in the early 70’s, recently accredited with my MBA and happily engaged in my first college teaching position, a friend asked me what my long-term career goal was. When I answered that I would like to eventually become the president of a large university, my friend chuckled and replied, “Tony, there’s no way!” I […]

***ATTENTION /NOTICE*** Please read the entire article before drawing any conclusions or posting any reply. This article uses extremes to make a point in a thought-provoking manner. Absolutely no malice is intended.
Hitler was a great leader. Through his guidance, dedication and sense of what was right, he changed and influenced the lives of […]

There are so many average businesses, so why are the excellent ones few and far between?
If you start out to do something, do you start with excellence in mind or mediocrity? I guess the answer is excellence, after all why would you want to create an average thing, where is the logic in that?
So go […]

I walked in the door, no sales person. I called out, no answer. I stood and checked out the display before calling out again, No answer. Finally a person came out and stretched with a wide yawn, “Ehr g’day, I didn’t know you were there… I was taking a snooze out the back. Must have […]

I should have known better to say what I said, seeing how the caller was from an accounting firm. I merely suggested she put the firm’s logo on the back of a baseball cap. Her silence caused the sort of anticipation you experience when someone keeps blowing up a balloon until it pops. The words […]

So there we were ready to eat, looking at what’s on offer in a semi fast food joint… The good lady wife asks about the “Indonesian pork dish” the girl says, “She likes it” and smiles, good enough for my wife who after looking at a bunch of food joints is now salivating and wants […]

Can I share a secret with you?
I love working out. So much that several years ago I considered a career in fitness. I modeled for Reebok and Ironman magazine, made it to the final round for hosting a fitness TV show, and I moonlit as an aerobics instructor and personal trainer for several years while […]