Over-delivery As I said the other day, restaurants so often show the best and worst examples of how to do business, all in an hour or so. On our recent trip away, my wife and I visited another bar-restaurant for lunch, looking for a snack to leave plenty of room for dinner later. My…
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Connections Having been at the networking game both on-line and off-line for nearly a decade, I know a lot of people, some of them really quite well. Because it is how this networking thing works, I connect my friends and acquaintances to people they need to speak to, depending on their needs. I expect you…
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We have worked hard to be where we are. We have tried to learn all the demands of the business we are in. We keep ourselves up to date with every bit of news in our industry, every change in the law which may affect us or our customers and every social media tip to…
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Old chestnut I have been involved in an on-line debate covering the old chestnut of price versus value. This is a very important issue in most service businesses and particularly for smaller businesses., because we all need to think what market we are in and what our business model is. I come from an…
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A lot of people who don’t have a business think that there isn’t a difference between a large one and a small one except in scale. But managing and running a small business is nothing like big business. I have had difficulties dealing with large businesses such as the telecoms giants. If I didn’t know…
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We all know how important it is to have a contract with our customers and clients so that they and we understand what service we are going to provide. Having established what we are doing, part of that contract is specifying how we are going to be paid. Sometimes we will specify that we will…
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We all love to have new customers, clients or whatever we like to call them. It is good to sign up someone new and begin what we hope will be a great relationship. Of course we do have to “sign up” our new business in a certain way. Our client (as we will call her)…
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I think we all know that social skills are important in our lives but not everyone has them. That is a problem for small business owners lacking in this area unless they are geeks with a must-have app. Most of us get business from talking to people, whether it is in our store or shop and…
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These days I mainly work from home though obviously I go out to visit clients and those who are providing me with support services to help me run my business. One of the hazards of being home-based is being “doorstepped” by people selling products and religion. I am not sure how well either tactic will…
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I always like to think I am a fairly tolerant kind of guy, but I guess we all have our Achilles Heels. Even on-line I am irritated by people who constantly sell rather than engage. Of course we all have the ability to un-follow or block or simply ignore, depending through which medium we encounter…
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