Category: New Business Development

I receive emails every day
from readers who say
my romance novels have made them
smile or laugh
or feel more hopeful.
I make their world
a slightly better place.

If we all tried to make
the world a slightly better place,
the world would be
a MUCH better place.

As Walter Isaacson,
CEO of the Aspen Institute
shares

“it ain’t about your passion;
it’s about being a part
of something larger than yourself …
Because at the end of your days
when you look back
—it’s not just about saying
how successful you were,
how many toys or trinkets or
how much power you accumulated,
it’s about what you created,
about what you did to make the world
a slightly better place
because you were here.”

Make the world a slightly better place.

Many companies hire
freshly designated accountants.

A major beverage company
I worked for
aggressively hires accountants
one final step away
from achieving their accounting designations.

All of the time and money investment
has already been paid
and
they have first choice of candidates.

I suspect one of the reasons
my New York publisher signed me
was because I’m a book or two away
from breaking out sales-wise.

I have almost 60 stories published
and my readership has been building steadily.
It is fairly easy to predict
that I will break out soon.

Yet other publishers didn’t bother
to make that prediction.
One of my current publishers eliminated
the entire line I was writing for.
Ironically, if my sales continue,
this dead line will become one of their bestsellers.

When you have a choice of candidates
for employees, business partners, suppliers,
look at the progression in their career/business.
Bet on the candidate positioned
on the edge of success.

I no longer have time
to help one of my publishers
to load free reads.

This publisher found another person
to complete the task.
I agreed to train my replacement.

Ironically, this training cost me three hours.
I could have posted
three month’s worth of free reads
in the same amount of time.

This upfront time cost
is one of the issues
with delegating.

If we thought short-term,
no one would ever delegate.

But we aren’t thinking short-term.
We are building lasting businesses.
We pay this cost now,
knowing it will pay off for years.
It is an investment.

Delegate what you can
and allocate the time to training.

I was talking with some authors
about branding
and one author declared
“I want to be the Walmart of writing.
I want to write anything
a reader wants to read.”

That’s an impossible branding
to achieve immediately
because even Walmart
didn’t start out
as the Walmart of today.

Walmart started with one store
serving one town.
Yep, Walmart was a niche store.
They focused on that store
and on that town
until the store was profitable.
THEN they expanded.

All large companies start
as niche companies.

Focus on your niche.

I thought I was hard working
until I read this article
about Rob Honeycutt.

For 13 years,
Rob Honeycutt,
founder of Timbuk2,
worked
more than 100 hours per week,
sewed through several fingers,
almost starved a few times
and lived out of his factory.

“I worked from home
for three years,
making every bag by hand.
By myself,
I could make
10 to 15 bags per day.
This was the late ’80s,
early ’90s
and the Internet wasn’t around yet,
so I would hand-draw pictures
of bags on fliers
and send them to bike shops
along the West Coast.
By 1993, I had about 50 bike shops
selling my bags.
I moved into a live/work space
just outside San Francisco
and hired one person.
I grew slowly from there,
but the biggest growth happened
when I hired good salespeople.”

Are you willing to do
whatever it takes
to make your dreams a reality?

Today, I told a publisher
I’d no longer be submitting stories
on a set schedule.
Basically, I quit
but left the door open
to return.

Although this publisher expected me
to make this move,
actually making this move,
quitting,
made me sick to my stomach.
I worried about
whether or not it was the right move
for everyone.

Even after quitting,
I still worry about it.

And I strongly believe
that’s the way quitting should be.
Quitting should be difficult.
It should be the last resort.
It should be thought about.

If quitting was easy,
we wouldn’t finish anything.
We wouldn’t succeed.

Don’t worry
if quitting is difficult
for you.
Worry
if quitting is easy.

A common way
for a small company
to get bigger
is to merge with another small company.

This is common
but not easy.
According to a recent
Harvard Business Review study,
between 70 and 90 percent
of mergers fail.

Glen LeBlanc
has twice helped companies merge.
In May/June’s CMA Magazine,
he shares

“One of the biggest challenges
was merging business cultures.
Financially, it’s easy finding reasons
to bring companies together.
But can you bring
customers and employees with you
to the end of the journey.

You have to develop a common culture
that everyone signs up for,
and get people to see
that the future can be brighter
by showing progress
in your new strategy.”

Consider cultures
when deciding
whether or not to merge.

As we move into the summer months,
some of us are considering
hiring high school students to help
with projects.

The key to hiring students is…
assume they know absolutely nothing.
This is great
because many of them
don’t have bad work habits
(they are often also
full of exciting new ideas, insights and energy)
but it can also be challenging
because we need to guide them
in every aspect of the job.

As recruiter
Pamela Kleibrink Thompson
shares in
May/June’s
The Costco Connection

“Define all aspects of the job,
including punctuality, scheduling
and how to work with customers.

Make sure the employees also know
what you don’t want them
to do on the job,
such as texting,
talking on the phone and
chatting with friends who stop by.

Make expectations, requirements
and milestones clear –
and be consistent with
rewards or consequences.”

Factor in extra management time
when hiring high school students.

One of my past managers
was so moody,
we had a signal
to tell other people
what type of mood
he was in.

If the blue flag was up,
he was in a bad mood.
If the blue flag was down,
he was in a good mood.

Working for him was extremely stressful.
As soon as I located another job,
I left.

As Karen Wright,
author of
The Complete Executive,
shares in
the May/June Costco Connection

“You’re up one day
and down the next.
No problem –
the people who work for you
can just go with the flow, right?
Wrong.”

“Your people need to know
the difference between a mood swing
and a major business issue.
Help them out
by staying on an even keel
at least 90 per cent
of the time.”

Manage your own mood swings
so others won’t have to.

When asked,
in the Spring 2013
UofT Magazine,
what advice she’d give
to students wanting to make films,
Sarah Polley replied

“The most important thing is
to keep working.
It’s so easy
to make short films now
with very little budget.
There is no reason
not to start making films
instead of just thinking about them.”

Of course,
Sarah Polley’s not talking about
making special effects heavy Hollywood blockbusters.
She’s talking about making small starter films,
films made with phones and handheld devices,
films that might never be seen.

The point isn’t to make a great film.
The point is to move
from thinking to doing,
to START.