Top 10 Ways to Make 2009 the Best Year Yet

Here is a checklist to turbo charge your business in the New Year.



10. Evaluate your service lines. Use your QuickBooks® reports to view your revenues by item. Where are you making the most money? The least? Rank your service lines from highest to lowest revenues. Decide how you will strengthen your top revenue categories for 2009. For your lowest revenue categories, ask yourself whether they are draining your business and should be discontinued.


There are many reasons to discontinue a service line:
You are losing money on it
You hate doing it.
The liability of doing it is giving you an unreasonable amount of stress.
It is not your firms core competency.


Is there a service line you know you need to get rid of? If your clients are asking for this service and you would like to get rid of it anyway, try to find another firm that will do it in exchange for a commission. Know what your strengths and weaknesses are.


9. Start a new service line. Is there a new service that you are ready to start? Is there something your clients have been asking for that you don't do and you are tired of giving away that business?



8. Evaluate your profitability by client. Use your QuickBooks reports again to sort your revenues by client and see which client generates your highest and lowest revenues. Take a look at your top clients: do you need to take better care of anyone? Reward your top clients and weed out your bottom clients.


7. Evaluate your profitability by industry. Sort your clients by industry, and generate a report that shows your strong and weak industries. Are your clients mostly in construction? Health care? Nonprofit? Do you want to be considered an expert in a particular industry? Or do you prefer to spread your client base across multiple industries? Decide on the strategy that will work best for you in 2009.


6. Evaluate your vendors. Generate yet another report to show what vendors you've given the most business to. Do you plan to continue that business? Use your leverage to work out an arrangement with your top vendors. Can you negotiate a discount? How can you work together to get the best deal for both of you?


5. Look for and create new partnerships. Take a look at both your top clients and top vendors. Is there a possible partnership that would make sense? For example, you have a great printing company as one of your top vendors. If all of your clients began to use that printing company, could you gain a substantial discount off of printing services?


On the client side, perhaps you have a florist that your other clients and vendors could begin to use. More business to go around for all will make you look like a hero in everyone's eyes.


4. Evaluate your employees. You won't need a QuickBooks report to rank your employees. Take a hard look at who is performing well and should be rewarded and who is holding you back. Complete the tough steps that you know you need to carry out to turn the situation around.


3. Start a new initiative. Is there something you've been wanting to work into your business for a while, but haven't yet? Perhaps 2009 is the time to start your new initiative. Write some guidelines, communicate your mission, follow your gut, and get started.


2. Set your strategy. You might have an excellent idea of where you want to go with your business, but have you formalized it? All businesses need a written business plan, complete with a mission and purpose. I'm sure you've heard this one before; the question is whether you've tackled it or continue to ignore this advice. Make your mind up to spend time working on your business in 2009, not in it. Work on the big picture and stay out of the day-to-day details as much as you can.


1. Resolve to have an outstanding New Year. Set the intention to have an amazing year. Communicate your plans, goals, initiatives, and strategies to all of your stakeholders - employees, clients, vendors, partners. Let them know where you and your business are headed so that all energies are pointed in the right direction for an outstanding 2009.


Happy New Year.

Beware of Marketing Scams

You might not know it, but you are a perfect target for a marketing scam. A small business entrepreneur just like you is tasty meat for the highly aggressive marketers and scammers that are so plentiful these days. And while not all marketing efforts are scams, even legitimate marketing efforts can be overly aggressive.

That’s why I’m providing you with a checklist. My goal is to help you become aware of overly aggressive, if not illegal, marketing tactics. To keep from getting “conned,” education helps, along with skeptical, rational thinking.



Among potential scams, the most pernicious tactic may well remain the seminar or free lunch. Once you are in an environment that the marketers control, you could be subjected to all sorts of high-pressure tactics. (Of course, some informational sessions are legitimate. You will need to be reasonably skeptical to decide between the two.) If you know and can recognize the high-pressure tactics as they occur, you will be well-prepared to avoid the scam.

Red Flags

Here are some red flags that the marketing effort directed at you could become overly aggressive.

__ Higher Priced Industries. Scams are most common in the real estate, stock market, investment, money management, health care, estate planning, personal growth, and business development industries.

__ Free Anything. Is the item part of a lure to make you more vulnerable to high sales tactics, such as going to an event or signing a document?

__ Getting You in Their Environment. While some free educational sessions may be worthwhile to attend, often such sessions simply make you more vulnerable.

__ Becoming Your Friend. We tend to do business with people we like.

__ Getting You to Sign. Once you sign a legal document, it may be all over for you. Therefore never sign anything without reading it thoroughly and understanding it clearly. In scams the document commits you to buy a product or service, or to prevent you from buying the product or service from anyone else.

__ Emotional Appeals. All marketers use some form of emotional appeal, but scammers go for the jugular. Unfair appeals include those to patriotism, wish fulfillment, awe of others who are successful, creating a sense of “us” against “them”; playing on a sense of high mindfulness with inspirational quotes, or working on your self-doubt about being afraid to take risks.

__ Urgency. If you only have ten minutes to save hundreds but spend thousands, slow down and think.

__ Exclusivity. Scammers want you to think they’re the only ones on the planet who can solve your problem, make you rich, or cure your ills.

__ Bargain Pricing. To make you think their $3,000 product is such a bargain, aggressive marketers will force the comparison by comaring the item to something irrelevant like a car or a MBA degree that costs $35,000.

__ Enthusiasm of Others. Once one person (often a plant) rushes to the sign-up table, we can feel like we’re going to miss out. It’s important not follow blindly.

Remember, often the best protection against a scam is to become educated about them and to approach marketing offers with skeptical, rational thinking.

Saving is Earning

So we have all heard the phrase "A penny saved is a penny earned", well in these times, it is true. Many people look at spending versus saving and always say, "I need the tax deduction, so I will purchase these items". If you are in the 25% tax bracket, then that dollar spent will only help you by 25%. Yes, we all need income tax deductions, but you don't need to spend money to just get an income tax deduction. Instead of purchasing the item just for the income tax deduction, you may want to save your money.
Saving money is normally a thing of the past. Most people and companies for that matter of fact, do not have emergency funds in place in case something drastic happens. Individuals need at least 3 months of expenses in the bank as their emergency fund. I advise most businesses to try to put a percentage of sales back into savings if possible. Use these funds in dire emergency, for example, like an accident where you had to go to the hospital or your engine failed on you automobile.
Saving is earning. Start saving today because you don't know what your future holds. Just think of all of the grief and heartache that you can save by knowing that you have an emergency fund just in case. Start working on it today. Put some back every week, and be diligent.