I’m writing this entry on Mother’s Day between the breakfast in bed for my wife, the text messages to my daughters and friends who are mothers and the dinner we’ll all be at this evening. When you look at branding you have to admit that Mother’s Day is at the top of the mountain.

For the small business owner there are lessons that can be learned from Mother’s Day.

First it’s a targeted event aimed at the person we hold in highest esteem, our mothers. For the business owner the person you should hold in the highest esteem is your customer. Because just like mothers without customers you wouldn’t be.

This leads to developing creative ways to make your customers feel special and create an event that your customers look forward to.

Just like Mother’s Day you can offer your customers special gifts by strategically aligning your product/services with another company’s product/service. An example is for every customer that purchase ____ between (choose a beginning and end date) the customer receives an item from the strategic partner. You can make your special event a social win win by donating a percentage of the sale to a non profit like battered women, breast cancer research etc. Imagine the new customers you can get by giving something special back to not only your existing customers but the community at large.

One thought that comes to mind is that of the wedding videographer. In the wedding video business there are a lot of competition from other businesses as well as family members to videotape that special day. A wedding videographer can stand out by creating a special day for the mothers of the brides and grooms. Imagine a special day just before the height of the wedding season where the mothers can be pampered and have free special video messages recorded for their soon to be married children. Videographers can get the local florist and caterers involved by providing a special lunch and corsets. The event can be publicly announced through the local media and who knows, videographers around the country could make the day a hot event nationwide.

In 1990 a local Chicago couple launched Real Men Cook on Father’s Day. The event was about bringing out fathers to cook their specialty dishes for friends and families and to show the unity and strength of the African American family. This event has expanded to 10 cities with over 1,000 volunteer chefs that prepare meals for more than 30,000 people who attend the events in host cities.

When designing your signature day consider this:

• Make it not about yourself or your company.
• Give something back to the community as well as your customers.
• Have your signature day assist your customers in giving back to the community.
• Get other companies and non profits involved.

Looking forward to your next BIG Customer Appreciation DAY.

Now’s the time to evaluate 2008 and plan for a GREAT 2009.  To help you along here’s a list of 9 web based tools that will assist your small and growing business in collaboration, managing finances and growing your company.

Social Media:  By now you should be using some form of Social Media like your own Blog, profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter etc. If you’re not here’s a copy of my last Social Media presentation on Slideshare.  Slideshare is a website where you can upload PowerPoint presentations and view other presentations as well. Joining is easy and you can share your presentations with the public or a select group.

Cash flow is the life blood of your business.  Keeping track of invoices, payments, bills and time tracking can be a pain in the neck.  If you’re not computer savvy enough for Quickbooks and can’t/don’t want to hire someone else to manage your business finances, here are two online tools that can help you manage your cash flow.

1st is Invotrak.  Invotrak is an easy online invoice and time tracking application.  Setting up an account is easy and getting started takes less than 5 minutes.  Use invotrak to…

• Create and track invoices you issue to clients.
• Determine what you’re owed, by whom, and when it’s due.
• Keep track of timesheets for yourself and your employees.
• Notify your clients of new invoices.
• Create interesting reports and analyze payment history
• Save time & collect your money.

Keep track of your bills with Rudder.  Rudder is a secure online bill management system that connects with your bank and credit card accounts.  You enter your recurring bills and Rudder will remind you when your bills are due.  Rudder also tracks your spending and savings and make suggestions on how to improve either.

Honorable mention here is PuLse.  PuLse is a cash flow management tool for your business. The online application provides an intuitive interface with the power to quickly manage and evaluate your income and expenses. Pulse makes tracking the health of your business simple, accurate and efficient.

Creating great presentations is definitely one way to  increase your sales and 280 Slides is an online website that helps you turn your documents into online powerful presentations that you can share online or deliver anyway you desire.   You create presentations by: Importing existing documents, using their media search and themes When you’re done creating your presentation you can download the presentation to PowerPoint, publish it to the web or run your presentation in your web browser.

Managing all of your Social Media contacts can be difficult if you want people to connect with you on all of the platforms you’re on.  Hypelet “Your Online Signature” makes it simple for people to follow you regardless of the Social Media platform you’re on.  Look over to the left of this Blog and you’ll see the Contact me at and the different ways to reach me.  Hypelet can add your Social Media contacts to your  Blogs, e-mail program and other web based applications.  They have a lot of customization options and its the cool way for people to follow and contact you.

You just finished daydreaming and you have this great idea to make more sales and grow your business.  What’s next? wridea is the solution.  Organize ideas by creating new idea entries in seconds, update details, discuss in depth with your friends and categorize under pages with different categories. The service is free, easy to set up an account and easy to start formulating great ideas into action plans.

Your business is growing but you may not want to hire more employees just yet. Interns can be the answer and InternshipIn is a one stop source for finding quality interns.  List your requirements for an intern choose whether the position is unpaid or paid and the search engine will match your position with qualified candidates.

In the beginning Microsoft Project was this behemoth for managing projects, people milestones and resources.  Now using web applications like Onstage and Sosius you can manage your projects from anywhere in the world online and anytime.  Onstage claims to be a simple and free solution for managing projects over the web.  Its secure, private, able to communicate in different languages and you can use it on your PDAs and smartphones. The group share files, calendars, discussions and the project overview.

Sosius is another online project management and collaboration tool.  You can set your project to be public or private invite your group to participate and set To-Do lists, milestones, tasks and members can add/create discussions, chats, Blogs.  I’m using Sosius for a fund raising committee scheduled for late spring 2009.

Running a successful business is hard work and the better physical shape you’re in the better you can deal with the stress and hard work of running your company.  Gyminee is an online fitness club that can help you get in shape through exercise, monitoring your food intake, setting fitness goals, choosing different fitness plans, groups and workout buddies.  There’s a free account that has a lot to offer and a paid account that allows a little more customization and fitness options I’m on Gyminee as RoaDDoggZ sign up and see how I’m doing with my fitness goals.

There you have 9 web based tools to assist you in making 2009 a GREAT year.  Remember “knowledge not applied is knowledge wasted.”

I’m taking a different approach to my Blog posts for the next 16 weeks.  Instead of me telling you what you should be doing to grow your company, expand your business, find new customers, blah blah blah.  I’m going to tell you what I’m doing to grow our parent company RoaDDoggZ productions.

Like many of you who read this Blog RoaDDoggZ productions is a certified minority owned  small business that produces corporate videos and corporate events.  We have two lines of income from producing events and video production.  However, we face many of the same challenges that other small businesses face especially with corporate budget cutbacks.  So as we face and plan for the future it occurred to us that we’ve been down this path before

I started my first business an employee leasing company back in the recession of 1992 and in three years I grew that business to more than $4.5 million in sales received a bunch of awards, press yada yada yada.  Well now RoaDDoggZ productions is at a similar point.  Uncertain economic conditions is the best time to separate us from the pack and become the leader in our industry.

I know what strategies will work in this climate because I have the experience of doing it before so instead of me just talking about what should be done or what you could do to increase your sales in these roller coaster times, I’m going to report what I plan on doing every week and the outcome of those plans. Yes this change was inspired by my close friend Andrew Morrison host of the 16 Week Challenge TV Show.

My first strategy is to increase our marketing output.  We have been successful on word of mouth and networking within specific organizations but there is more that we will do.   Many business publications report that you should maintain or increase your marketing budgets in recessionary times.

To increase our marketing output I don’t plan on spending money on postcard mailers, e-mail lists or advertising on TV.  My plan is to identify several media outlets in print and radio that have websites and partner with them.  I will provide a service that they can use to increase their revenues and in exchange I will get advertising space and a write up in their publications and websites.  The writeup is more valuable than the ads because PR is about other people blowing your horn for you.

My next strategy is to partner with companies that offer complementary products/services.  I have identified two companies that together we can provide a full suite of services.  This strategy when used properly can increase your sales without increasing your overhead.  The tricky part is to find companies that have a great reputation, customer service and is financially stable.

My third strategy is to start conducting workshops again.  Workshops was the number one way we grew our employee leasing business. We had to educate prospects on what employee leasing was before we could sell them on the concept. We created a series of workshops on employee leasing topics and gave away valuable information. In the end companies realized that we were better to handle their employee needs.

Now you may notice that these strategies are about giving something away for free.  That is the underlying strategy to success during these times. Giving something valuable away will allow you to receive something valuable in return.  “You can get everything you want in life by helping others get what they want.” Dale Carnegie.

You have my strategy, my specific goals for this week is to partner with one print and radio outlet, create two workshops to take place before the end of the year and partner with a complimentary service provider.

I’ll report my progress next week and if you have any ideas that we can implement please add them in the comments section.

Talk to you next week and remember:  “Successful People Do What Unsuccessful People Won’t Do.”

I’m not concentrating on the economic climate that surrounds us these days because I’ve learned that economies are like roller coaster rides up and down and up and down.

However, I have implemented strategies to ensure a steady growth of income for our video production business in these uncertain times.  The strategies I implemented are called Re-Focus Strategies because in order for them to be successful you have to re-focus your thinking.

I learned last year that what you focus on becomes your reality and in order to change your reality you have change your focus.  An example is many people focus on losing weight. What happens when you lose something,  you want it back, and in many cases 75% of weight loss is gained back in 6 months.  How about a re-focus on getting rid of weight.  When we say I got rid of something we don’t usually want it back so the weight loss stays off.  In other words change the focus from losing weight to getting rid of weight.

Here are my 5 Re-Focus Tips for Increasing Your Income:

• 1. Provide Solutions Instead of Solving Problems - Focusing on problems brings more problems. Approach your customers and prospects with providing solutions.  Learn what pains them and present how your product/service provides a solution. 
  
• 2. Move Up Your Zip Code - If your current market is having difficulties affording your product/service then its time to repackage your offering for a more affluent market.
• 3. Help People Purchase - I just received an e-mail from a company that produces high end computer workstations for the film/video industry.  Their e-mail was to inform me that they have credit plans to assist me with purchasing their equipment.  Help your clients buy your product/service by making it easier to pay.  We had a 50%  deposit and 50% due at the delivery of a video but we just signed two new clients by extending our payments across several months.
• 4. Market More Not Less - Too often small business owners are looking to reduce their marketing efforts to conserve cash.  Wrong strategy! Lets re-focus on how we can market more with the same cash.  There are opportunities to acquire more marketing and advertising inventory without spending more money.  Talk with reps and see where the deals are.
• 5. Increase Your Lines of Income Offering - We’re constantly talking with and listening to our clients and these conversations have led us to offer additional services that brings in income.  Adding additional lines of incomes from our clients provides us with additional income streams and solidify our client relationships.

There you have it my 5 tips to Re-focus because what you focus on becomes your reality so to change your reality change you focus.

Today’s quote: “To achieve what you never had, you must be willing to do what you have never done. “

There’s a popular Hip-Hop song rising up the charts called ” Swagga Like Us“ a song by rappers Jay-Z and T.I. featuring Kayne West and Lil Wayne. The chorus “No one on the corner have swagger like us” reminded me of the need to display my own Swagga in business.

Artists/entrepreneurs like Jay-Z, Puffy (Sean Combs) and Kanye West have shown a bravado or swagger in their lyrics and business successes.  Farnsworth Bentley former assistant to Puffy, TV Host and author of “Advance Your Swagger” attributes his accomplishment to one key equation: Manners + Confidence + Style = Swagger. That swagger is not limited to the Hip-Hop culture, any small business owner looking to raise their company to the next level should adopt a Swagger.

Adopting a swagger is exuding a confidence in your company and business skills. People who meet you know you’re the expert in your field.  When you speak you’re passionate, authoritative, you use power words and nothing is impossible to you.

Don’t feel like you’re there yet don’t worry we have some tips to help you get your Swagger.

• Be the expert - Study your field, study your competitors, study your clients. Don’t ever assume you know enough. Subscribe to Google Alerts to stay on top of what’s happening in your industry and your client’s industries.  In order to speak with authority you have to know your stuff.
• Go after the champ - Who’s the champ or leader in your industry?  You should be targeting that company. Remember Avis “We’re Number 2″ That was their challenge to Hertz. Avis placed a bulls’eye on Hertz and said we’re coming for you.  Business is all about competition so there’s nothing wrong with desiring to unseat the top company. Position yourself to become number one by learning everything about the number one company in your field, Learn their strengths, weaknesses and develop your differentiate advantages to unseat them as number one.
• Stay Hungry - When a boxer is coming up and knocking out opponents in early rounds they say he’s hungry, he wants a shot at the champ. Winning the championship is only the beginning keeping that crown from all other hungry boxers is the challenge.  Don’t let achieving goals and success spoil you, want more, accomplish more.  Stay hungry and look for new challenges to keep your Swagger.
• Play your theme song - In the movie “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka” Kennan Ivory Wayans‘ character Jack Spade has this exchange: Jack Spade: [looks at musicians] Who are these guys? John Spade: They’re my theme music. Every hero’s got to have some.  You’re the hero of your business so what’s your theme song?  What song motivates you, inspires you and you feel that you can conqueror the world when you hear it.  That’s your theme song so start everyday motivating yourself with your theme song. Make your ringtone your theme song so you’re constantly reminded of your  Swagger.
• Infect your employees with Swaggaism - yes its a made up word but it fits.  The perception of your company is built by every contact your employees have.  Develop ways to motivate your staff so they’re excited about their work.  Let them play their theme songs before work so they feel their Swagga.  Share your goals with them and let them contribute to achieving the goals. An energized focused and committed staff will take your business to the number one spot.

Spend a month implementing these tactics and soon no one in business will have a  Swagger like you.

I want to thank my family, Mike Jones and Discover Leadership Training, my corporate mentor Theresa Harrison and my good friend Andrew Morrison for helping me get my Swagga back.