Tips on business, marketing, productivity and self-improvement

Just a quick note to share with you all over this Easter break:

I just read this great how-to article on packing everything you need into one carry on luggage.

Great tips

I subscribe to a lot of newsletters (both by email and rss feeds). One particular newsletter I was receiving publish 6-days a week so it was a bit much for me (the content is fine though ) and I decided to unsubscribe.

When clicked on the unsubscribe link, I was brought to a page that was absolutely brilliant (click on the image for a larger image):

Instead of just letting their hard-earned subscriber go into the wind - they managed to salvage me as a subscriber by offering me a choice to receive a weekly summary rather than daily emails. That was just what I needed, I thought the content was useful but just couldn’t keep up with the daily emails.

They read my mind.

If you publish/post a lot during the week, do you make such an offer to salvage potential lost subscribers?

Think of all the possible reasons your subscribers would want to unsubscribe and offer a suitable alternative to salvage these subscribers.

It’s already hard enough to gain subscribers and their attention in this attention-deficit world - so try this technique to recapture your audience.

Whether you’re a one-person-band, a group of 5 or a company with hundreds of employees and staff, you will always want to cut on costs wherever you can.

Expensive software is something that always bugged me. It’s not that the creators of this software shouldn’t’ be denied payment for their work, but it would be great if it was just more affordable. That’s why I love using free software (legally of course) .

Here’s a list of desktop software (software that needs to be downloaded and installed) that I have used or presently use for business and best of all, it’s free! Continue reading →

My wife and I decided to change laundry cleaners today.

The one we used to go to was great, it was run by this nice couple who always remembered are names and had a smile for us everytime we showed up. It made us happy to go there and give them our business. It’s not that the laundry was any cleaner or cleaned any faster.

We just had a nice feeling going there. But all that changed when the couple sold the business to a new owner.

We gave the new proprietors a chance but it just wasn’t the same.

What did they do wrong?

• They always had a hard time finding our laundry
• They always looked like they hated seeing a customer show up
• They never asked us for our names nor remembered who we were
• Worst of all, they never seem to smile

So, the next time you have a chance to interact with your customer, give them a smile and make them feel nice.

And they’ll reward you with their business and not go to your competitor.

I was watching a British made series about entrepreneurship on the weekend. The focus of this episode was a pair of couples who started a hotel.

They invested a lot of money into the hotel (furniture, renovations, etc). When they opened for business they seemed to have one problem: no guests!

Only after they were bleeding so much cash that they almost had nothing left did they realise that they had to get moving on marketing and getting guests into their hotel.

Lesson learned?

The first thing you need to do before starting any business or venture is to ask yourself:

“How do we sell this?”

Only once you’ve figured out how to do this, should you even consider moving onto the next phase of your business.

I recently read the latest shareholder letter from Warren Buffet to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway. In it he writes something to note:

“…if a business requires a superstar to produce great results, the business itself cannot be deemed great. A medical partnership led by your area’s premier brain surgeon may enjoy outsized and growing earnings, but that tells little about its future. The partnership’s moat will go when the surgeon goes. You can count, though, on the moat of the Mayo Clinic to endure, even though you can’t name its CEO.”

Here’s a good question to ask yourself to determine if your business is a great one: “Will your business endure if you or your star employee/figurehead is not there?”