Category: Education

Productivity is About Progress, not Perfection

Posted on by Leah Zander

In my last post, we talked about the Profit Minds Growth System: an innovative approach to increasing profit and productivity while building business process for scale. In this post, I’m going to focus on how the Profit Minds Growth System accelerates your productivity, enabling you to make huge strides towards your business goals.

Most entrepreneurs have a pretty good idea of what they need to do, but they just aren’t getting it done. I call this the knowing/doing gap.

In my 25 years as a certified facilitator of Dr. Stephen Covey’s “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” I’ve seen entrepreneurs fall into the knowing/doing gap time and time again. I’ve combined Covey’s method with time-tested methods from other authors and thinkers to create the productivity portion of the Profit Minds Growth System.

There are five steps to accelerate your productivity.

1) The first step is to create inspiring goals. These goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. With the Profit Minds Growth System, you’ll use the SMART model to make real progress toward the business of your dreams.

2) The second step is to work out of your priorities. So many entrepreneurs start their day by checking their email and then get lost in reacting to what others have sent to them. The Profit Minds Growth System will teach you how to create a day-by-day and week-by-week plan based on what you need to accomplish.

3) The third step is about best practices. Through the Profit Minds Growth System, you’ll learn to manage your to-do lists, email, and calendar. Over time, you’ll get better and better at using these practices until they’re second nature. It’s about progress, not perfection!

4) The fourth step is managing distractions and procrastination. Science tells us that we can’t truly multitask—so stop trying! You must turn off your distractions in order to achieve a state of true focus. With the Profit Minds Growth System, I have identified six  procrastination triggers and can teach you how to overcome them.

5) The fifth step is building new and better habits for the future. Our brain wants to make everything a habit because this reduces the energy we expend when thinking about new things. But the brain can’t tell the difference between a good habit and a bad one. The Profit Minds Growth System provides simple steps to follow in order to make new, good habits that will help you meet your business goals.

I’ll dig deeper into each of these steps in future blogs.

Are you ready to escape the knowing/doing gap? If so, take the short quiz at productivitycheckup.com. If it’s time for you to join the growing number of entrepreneurs finding huge success with the Profit Minds Growth System, set up a Readiness Review call by using the link below. In just 45 minutes, I can find $30 to $50,000 or more in untapped revenue for any small business.

I look forward to talking with you very soon!

Educate Your Customers

Posted on by Dr. Steven Kirch

Educate them about what, you may be thinking. Well, consider this, many businesses focus solely on attracting new customers, but you NEED to spend a good chunk of your time retaining current and former customers. These are people you already know to be a good sales potential…they’ve already bought from you!

Take the time to market and sell new products to your old customers and less time trying to sell old products to new customers and you will see a drastic change in your sales, customer quality and branding position.

Here are a couple of key elements to use to retain your current customers:

  1. Stay in contact: This means by phone, email, e-newsletter, in person-by pigeon if you have too!
  2. Post-Purchase Assurance: This means you need to follow up with customers. Your customers need to feel like they are being supported for their purchase and with the item they purchased. How many times have you purchased a product, then felt completely abandoned? Something as simple as a Thank You note with your contact or customer service information can go along way in retaining a great customer.
  3. Deals & Guarantees: Always offer your current customers the best deals and guarantees you have. Show them you appreciate their business or even come up with a club specifically to reward loyal customers. You can also do this with a preferred pricing option.
  4. Integrity: Using good business practices and simply upholding integrity, dignity and honesty go along way with customers. Let’s face it, there’s a lot of swindling and crap out there and the safer and more confident you make your customers feel, the more they will trust you and that makes for an amazingly supportive and loyal customer.

There are three cornerstone ideas to a successful business:

  • Quality product/service
  • Offering useful products/services that solve a problem for or enhance the life of a customer
  • Offer subjects your customers find interesting

Use this approach of educating your customers and offering them real information and insight and you will be rewarded with loyalty and success.

Stop wasting all your time on new prospects while your current customers fall by the wayside!

As Jay Abraham says, “Your best prospects are your existing customers. If you’ve been putting all your marketing efforts into acquiring new customers, stop and diverts some of your resources into reselling, upselling, cross-selling to those same customers. In every ways possible – through package inserts, regular mailings, special offers – stay in touch with those customers and get them used to buying from you.”

So, there it is! Remember, we can help you put together the resources and tools to do exactly that. We can help you educate your customers and you can watch the benefits pay offer many-fold.