My business was brand new and very small, one room in an office building. I had to handle everything, whether I was “trained” to handle it or not. I had to discover what I did well, what I enjoyed the most, what I hated to do, when I could afford to hire help, and what help I needed to hire first. I had to stretch and grow quickly. Fortunately, because I had solid experience in growing a business, the Touch Therapy Center (a massage clinic I own to this day) built itself quickly. Within the year, I could hire help for cleaning and laundry service. Next came a bookkeeper. Now, 13 years later, I manage the business while other staff do most of the therapeutic massage, I’m in a medical office building with multiple treatment rooms, and I have a practice manager to handle the front desk, errands, and most adminstrative tasks.

What I want to point out is the rocky path of personal growth it takes to get from year one to year thirteen, turning a profit the whole way. Here are some of the things I had to learn or consider:

1. Watch my operating costs and bottom line – I had to remain profitable even if I was spending more money on getting help with cleaning, laundry service, and so forth. Watching my weekly financial statements was critical, or I could have worked myself crazy and not made a dime.
2. Know myself well enough to figure out what I liked to do and was good at versus what I am not so good at and am not fond of doing. One of these in the massage business is laundry. I didn’t enjoy dragging home loads of sheets and spending my evenings sorting, washing, drying, and folding them. And I wasn’t particularly great at it, either. On the other hand, I’m very practiced and skillful at attracting clients. I didn’t need or want to pay anyone to handle marketing for me, other than getting help with a design for my business card. It was easy for me and saved me money to develop my own brochures and press releases.
3. I had to find out about my willingness to take risk and how to handle the good and bad that came from that risk. Should I move into larger office space and increase my rent? If so, how much more business would I need to generate to remain at my same level of profit? Could I get larger space, spend more money, and at the same time make even more money? Could I negotiate new lease terms that were favorable to me?

Before long, I had a very busy practice and was ready to hire other staff.  Now, I could draw on my past experience as an Executive Director and use my past hiring skills. This time, if I made a bad decision, it was mind and mine alone to deal with, for better or for worse.

And, after about 8 years, I had to make a decision about opening my second business, The Confident Marketer. Other entrepreneurs had been asking me for serveral years how I’d built my business, how I knew what to do when, how I got profitable. I found that I absolutely loved helping other self-employed people be successful. So, about 5 years ago, The Confident Marketer was born. And with it, a whole new level of personal growth and challenge was necessary. It’s one reason I keep myself always working with top coaches who can help me face up to the personal growth and new business skills I need to keep my business successful and innovative.

The point to my story is that it takes courage to be an entrepreneur. You have to be willing to find out what you don’t know, get help with those things you don’t do well, and become expert at a few things that are yours and yours alone. You have to be willing to step up to intimately knowing and watching your financials (something I find many new entrepreneurs don’t want to do). You have to make decisions using both the facts and figures AND your gut feelings — your intuitive skills.  And when there is a problem, you have to be willing to meet it and work it through, taking time to consider whether and how much it affects your customer service and your bottom line.

All this takes a great deal of courage and a willingness to grow both personally and professionally. A great business takes three things – a solid biz plan, a creative and well-thought-out marketing plan, and a willingness to do engage in personal growth. And behind those three vital things is courage.  Step right up, and see how quickly your business becomes unstoppable!

(c) Sue Painter

An entrepreneur needs three things to make money. Here they are:

1. A workable, solid business plan.

2. An effective, targeted marketing strategy.

3. A willingness to do the personal growth required of successful entrepreneurs.

A few days ago, I was on a group Mastermind call, listening as we started with a quick update from everyone. I was shocked! Over half the people on the call admitted that their e-newsletter was late, they had not posted to their blog in quite a while, or they had never gotten around to setting up basic social media accounts. This particular group of people are serious entrepreneurs. They have invested a substantial amount of money to participate in coaching and Mastermind groups over the past year or so. Most of them have created products and services that sell nicely. All of them are smart and full of new ideas.

So what is going on that these entrepreneurs are not paying attention to the very basics that keep their businesses up and running? I honestly believe that they’ve fallen into two traps.

1. They have poor time management skills, and they allow ‘everything else’ to get in the way of taking care of the basics.

2. They’ve come to feel that doing the basics is boring, not cutting edge or new, and therefore not really necessary for their businesses.

They are WRONG! It takes consistent action and focus to build a profitable business, and that means consistently attending to the basic building blocks. If you are someone who needs to built a list of potential clients (and who isn’t?) you need to make sure that your basic structure is in place and gets acted upon just like clockwork. None of these excuses are valid!

1. I was on vacation. (Do it before you leave)

2. It’s boring to do. (Hand it off to an assistant if you can’t tolerate doing the basic, routine things.

3. I don’t have anything to say. (Really? Then why would any potential new customer be interested in talking with you?)

4. I just can’t get around to it. (Yes, you can…schedule it and make sure nothing else steps on the time you need to keep your basics going.)

Paying attention to the basic building blocks of your business is just the same as paying attention to the basic maintenance of your car or your home. You can’t expect your car to run if you fail to rotate the tires, do oil changes, and replace the brakes now and then. If you ignore these things, one day when you least expect it, your car will come to a screeching halt right in the middle of the highway. It’s the very same for your business….ignoring the basics silently and slowly erodes your client base. One fine day it will hit you that your client subscriber list is smaller, your programs and services are not selling at the rate you are used to, and you haven’t talked to a potential new client in over two weeks. At that point, it’s too late. You will have put yourself back to the “I’m building my business up” stage. And it will be harder and take longer the second time around.

Think about it this way – building blocks are the basic clothing for your business. You wouldn’t walk out the door without clothing, you wouldn’t send your kids to school without their basic tools, and you wouldn’t try to bake a cake without the basic ingredients. So don’t try to build your business by ignoring the basics. Commit yourself to the building blocks, and you will become successful and stay that way for as long as you want. You will, in fact, make it as an entrepreneur.

In the space of two hours we were visited by quite a number of beach vendors. Here’s a list of the items we were offered:

Cooked skewered shrimp, topped off by one of the limes hooked onto a separate skewer.

Heavy blankets in various colors that could be used on the beach or as a rug at home.

Brightly colored large pitchers that looked like ceramic but were actually wood.

Toys and gum from a basket.

Tuba-tuba, which is a chilled coconut drink served into a cup from a huge hollowed out double gourd.

Lace shawls.

All sorts of jewelry – silver, shells, beaded.

Elaborately carved cold fresh fruit, your choice, from a head-balanced platter.

Music from a 3-group band, complete with voice and instruments (including a bass fiddle)

Music from a two-person steel band percussion group, a 4-foot long instrument that unfolded and sat on a table, complete with sound system (battery operated).

Sunglasses

Bracelets hand-woven with your name on it

Straw hats

Large silver and mother of pearl fish which are jointed throughout the body so that the fish “swim” when wiggled.

I’m not quite sure this is everything, but the list covers most of the vendors we saw drifting by.

OK, let’s say that your job is to be a beach vendor on a warm Mexican beach. Some of your potential customers will be sitting in chairs under palapas, some will be already sitting in restaurants along the beach. Your job is to sell as much as you can from what you are offering. Can you name the top two things to sell? Can you name the bottom two things to sell? Remember that your target market is beach goers, some of whom are foreign, some of whom are locals, all of whom are on the beach, and some of whom are eating or drinking in restaurants. What are your picks for the two best things to sell to this market, and the two worst things?

Keep in mind, too, that you have to carry what you sell, walking in the sand, up and down the beach for miles and hours a day.

My two picks for the worst? The brightly colored large pitchers, which look like ceramic but are made of wood. They are awkward to carry, the vendor can’t actually carry more than about 4 at a time, and who on the beach wants one of these pitchers right then? Even if a potential customer was not on the beach, the pitchers are too large to easily carry home if you are a foreigner, and more than likely the locals don’t even use them as they don’t hold liquid. I think the guy who chose to sell the pitchers needs a few marketing lessons!

My second choice for the worst to sell, although a close race, is the steel band percussion. The instrument was huge to carry (requiring both persons) up and down the sand, hard to set up, and had to be hauled along with a fold-out table and the battery-operated sound system. That’s a lot to set up and take down for just one song, even if you had good luck selling the music to a lot of people. Plus, many people besides the one person who paid for the music can hear it, so you aren’t exactly going to sell music to the next person, are you? And frankly, most beach goers are busy sleeping, reading, riding the waves, or walking up and down the beach…..they don’t really have hearing live music on their minds.

My two choices for the best things to sell? Straw hats, because lots of beachgoers get to the beach thinking they won’t need a hat. But when they get there, they realize they do! The hats are relatively light to carry (I saw one vendor with a stack of about 50 straw hats on his head). As I watched him sell to someone on the sand, I realized he also had an upsell! He took leather braided bands out of his pocket and offered to add one to the hat for just a few more pesos. Smart guy – beach goers need hats, and they didn’t wear him out to carry.

My second choice for the best thing to sell is the cold, fresh fruit. It both gives a beach person something to eat and quenches thirst. It’s colorful and appetizing, and very noticable since most of the fresh fruit vendors carry the trays on their heads. It’s not expensive, it’s healthy, and even the kids seemed to like it. It’s probably one of the easiest things to carry on the beach, and the tray actually gives the vendor a little shade as he walks.

The point to this is that there are many things to consider when you are deciding what and how to sell to your target market. You do have to consider the pound of flesh it takes out of you, the costs you have in obtaining the product, and, of course, what you believe your market will want.

This doesn’t apply to the beach vendors as much as it does to you, but one way to quit guessing what your market wants is to ask them! Use a brief survey, talk to a subset of your prospects now and then, keep your ear to the ground. You’ll be more apt to design something that is wanted and needed than if you just put something on your back and start walking.

(c) Sue Painter

1. Her business is not thriving, meaning she needs more customers and she is not financially successful.
2. When asked who she works with, she replies “Oh, I work with just about anyone.”
3. If asked to thoroughly and completely describe her target market, she is flustered and can’t give more than a sentence.

The “Oh, I work with just about anyone” response is one I’ve heard from both new and not-so-new entrepreneurs many times.  So many times, in fact, that it now drives me a little nuts.  When someone says that, they are setting no boundaries for who they work with, which is a deadly thing.  Let me ask the “just about anyone” entrepreneurs these questions:

1.  Does it matter to you if a customer stiffs you?

2.  Are you open 24/7?

3.  If you were, for instance, a seller of curtains and blinds, would you drive 400 miles to sell a set of blinds to someone?

Of course, the answer to each of these is almost always NO!   And that’s a good, thing, because that entrepreneur has just started on a path of better describing her target market.  Her target market are people who have the money to pay for her products or services, she works with those who contact her during specific days and hours of business, and she has a limited geographical area in which to sell her blinds.  This isn’t a complete description of her target market, but it is a start.

You can picture the creation of your target market as setting fences and gates around a specific group of people with whom you really want to work. You might not be as blatantly obvious about it as the gatekeepers are at hot night clubs, where one must stand outside on the sidewalk and get personally picked to go inside, but that is one very good example of a business who is very picky about who they want to serve.

I’ve learned about finding your niche and describing your target market from 3 or 4 of my coaches and mentors, but the one who made me work the hardest to describe my market, hands down, was Suzanne Falter-Barnes.  She has a very long list of questions that one must answer to get through one of her platform building classes.  The first time I saw that fat list of questions I just about fainted.  In fact, the document she proposed I fill out to describe my market was 17 pages long!  Still, Suzanne knows her stuff and I was there to learn, so I plowed into the questions.  At the end, I felt like I’d invented something akin to a kid’s secret playmate.  I started getting actual pictures of how my target market person looked, how she dressed, what she spent her money on, and more.  I got so familiar with her in that 17 pages of ruthless questioning that I decided I knew her well enough to name her, for Pete’s sake!  And that is what I strongly suggest you do, too.

My suggestion is to sit down with your computer or a piece of paper and describe a “sample” person from your target market as if she (or he) is a character in a book you are writing, and it’s up to you to fill your reader’s head with a detailed, specific, colorful image of the character you are writing about.  Describe age, education, the kind of work she does, where she lives, her likes and dislikes – anything you can think of that will add to the picture in your head.  This may lead you to dig around on the web for demographic or other information.

Spend quality time here, for it pays off in the end. Ask yourself (with pen and paper or keyboard nearby) “who is the most perfect customer for me?”  If you have a hard time doing that, prime the pump by listing the characteristics of your most favorite or best customer so far.  From there, dream on.  Who would be delightful to work with?  Who would you dread working with?  What characteristics drive you crazy?  Who have you worked with who bugs you so much you hope she never calls you again?  You get the picture – and that’s whole point.  For here is a secret about financially successful entrepreneurs:  

Those who describe and visualize their target market well have started the process of manifesting exactly that type of customer for themselves.  You now have a vision of who you want to attract, in detail.  Put that right on your business vision board and keep it in your mind’s eye, for who you focus on tends to come your way.

Having this vision and description on hand also makes it easier to walk away from business that isn’t right for you, doesn’t truly interest you, and has a downside to it.  (The downside being that while you are spending time with uninteresting client A, you cannot very well be also working with or running into very interesting and exciting client B.  This is called “opportunity cost.”)  Realize that it actually COSTS YOU to work with the wrong customer, for you are giving up the opportunity to work with who is just right for you.

Taking the time to dream up your ideal target market person makes finding that type of person much easier.  You now know where to focus your efforts.  If you are spending a lot of time and money networking in a group of direct marketers, and these are not your target market, it’s time to make a change.  Pull your time and money from the wrong group, and go find the right group.  You’ll find more and better business in the new group and waste less of your precious time.  

When you are creating marketing plans, writing sales copy, or pulling together a presentation you’ll be able to keep your secret target market person right with you, writing to them.  There will be less agony over creating these things.  

And finally, when you have the opportunity to build a relationship with a potential customer, you will be much more at ease because, after all, you will pretty much feel as if you know that person in a way.  You’ll be confident that you’ve spent time with someone who has a much higher chance of needing what you offer.  This will shorten your sales cycle and make you more money faster.  I don’t know of any entrepreneur who doesn’t want that!

So, get that blank paper or computer screen and get going.  Breath some life into your target market, and you’ll breath new life into your business, as well.  It’s a win-win for every entrepreneur.

(c) Sue Painter

1. Running your own business is a solitary endeavor.  Decisions are up to you and you alone.  You need the perspective of other business owners to round out your own thoughts.  The perspective of your employees (if you have any) isn’t the same thing.
2. Your own energy waxes and wanes.  I’m not talking about the moon or hormones, either.  The best business owners know that their own energy has to attract others to them – good staff, great customers, good deals for rents or whatever else.  And it is very hard to keep your own energy up where it needs to be without sometimes drawing from the good energy of others.
3. Time inevitably puts you in the box.  What do I mean by this?  When you created your business you did it to put forward a new, not previously done type of business.  You felt what you had to offer was unique and special.  In other words, you were out of the box.  But as time rocks on, your own thinking gets boxed in by the very dailiness of what you do, by your own fatigue, and by the fact that others will emulate you.  To keep on re-creating a business that continually pleases and serves your customers, you need to keep yourself out of the box.
4. Your ideas, although they are great, can be sharpened and improved by your entrepreneurial community.  Simply put, multiple heads are better than one.  Here’s a quick example of this.  In one of my own communities, a woman had a deal with a book publisher for her very first book.  But she was balking about what the publisher wanted to title the book, taking issue with both the main title and the tagline.  She brought it up in our next get together, only to find that her adamant opinion was not shared by a single one of us!  We all though the title was good and that, furthermore, the publisher knew what would sell much more than the author did.  As I pointed out, the author is the subject matter expert but her publisher is the marketing and sales expert for her book.  All but one of the entire community basically told her to suck it up.  And after she listened to us, she did!  She ended up coming all the way back around to what the publisher had suggested, with only a very minor one-word change.  Which leads me to my next point about the benefit of being in an entrepreneurial community….
5. It helps you get your own ego out of the way, and think about what you offer from your customer’s point of view.  Believe you me, you will ONLY be successful if you offer what your customers want and need, not what you in all your wisdom think they need.

I could probably come up with a few more good reasons, but I think you, smart as you are, get the point.  It may take a village to raise a child, but it takes a community to foster a solo business.  I cannot even begin to list for you all that I have learned from constantly participating in my own communities.  I’ve gotten both wonderful, gentle, loving support and a sharp kick in the pants….and both have been beneficial to me.  It will be the same for you.

I’m excited to tell you that I’m forming a new community for solo business owners that will offer these benefits ( and more) in just about a month.  I’m calling it Private Matters because I’m creating a group to which you can bring your most private thoughts and worries.  These deeply affect your business, they matter.  So….in a nutshell….Private Matters.  It will be small, full of sharp thinkers and dedicated solo business owners, and  it will change you and your business in ways that you can only dream of.  If you feel you are a good match for Private Matters, you can e-mail me and I’ll make sure you get the application and information.

Meanwhile, keep your business focused on who you serve, what those people need, and how you can best offer products and services that meet those needs.  And remember to reach out for community regularly.  Both you and your customers will benefit.

(c) Sue Painter

When you decide to set a new goal for yourself, how do you do it?  Do you sit down and make a list?  Do you write out an affirmation?  Do you simply think to yourself one day while you’re in the car “I need to do thus-and-such” and set out to do it?  Whatever your method, you can have a higher degree of sticking to your new goal if you include as many of your senses as you can to help you along.

There are several ways of doing this, and most of the methods I know work pretty well.  One that is popular right now is called Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT).  EFT is often used to change our emotional reaction to a certain situation.  For instance, if you get nervous speaking in front of people, you can learn to use EFT to say affirmations and tap yourself on specific points of the body.  EFT is nicknamed “tapping” because you actually do tap yourself repeatedly at specific spots as you are saying the sentences you construct about your goal — the change you desire.  I’ve used EFT more than once and if it is used consistently, it has worked for me.  To learn more about EFT, you can contact my friend Annie Wills, at Full Circle Coaching.

I’m going to give you another way to involve your senses and make your new goal stick, though.  It is often called VAK, which stands for Visual/Auditory/Kinesthetic.  I like VAK because it is another way to become an embodied entrepreneur.  Simply put, that means that you are engaged in your work with your heart, soul, mind AND body – and you are sure to be quite successful if you can achieve that!

So, to set a goal and put the power of VAK behind it, here’s what you do:

1. Write your goal down.
2. Close your eyes, and ask yourself “what will you see that will let you know you’ve attained your goal?”  Even better, you can give this question and the following ones to a friend and ask them to walk you through this and answer to her, out loud.  Take a breath or two, and see what pictures you get, what you’ll see when your goal is met.  You will probably get more than one vision.  Open your eyes, and write each of them down.
3. Again, close your eyes and ask yourself “what will people say to you once you’ve reached the goal?”  After you’ve recorded your answer (or had your friend record it for you), try asking yourself “what will people say about you once you’ve reached your goal?”  And finally, ask what you would say to yourself when your goal is reached.  Record your answers, or have your friend do it for you.
4. (This is my favorite part!)  Now, close your eyes again.  Ask yourself how you will feel when you’ve reached this new goal.  Really take some time to let this sink in, and see what feelings arise in you.  Once you have a good strong feeling going, ask yourself about the color, shape, texture, and even the temperature of that feeling.  Finally, ask yourself where the feeling is located in your body.  Record all your answers.  Don’t rush yourself, give yourself time to really get into the feeling of reaching this goal.
5. Finally, ask yourself what belief you could state about yourself that will help you get this goal.  For instance, if you want to lose weight but always snack at night, could you create a belief about yourself that you are able to easily turn your attention from eating after 8:00 PM?  Work on this replacing your current belief that it is “impossible not to eat” or “I must eat because I get too fatigued, too bored, or too scared  not to eat at night.”  In other words, replace your negative self-talk with a positive belief in yourself as someone who is capable of doing what you want to do.
6. Be sure to ask yourself if you foresee any reason NOT to reach this goal.  If you secretly think that being thinner will be bad in some way you will not reach your goal until you have put that belief to bed.  We almost always have a secret reason that we don’t want to do what we say we want to do.  I say I want to improve my auditory Spanish skills, but secretly I don’t want to put in the extra half hour a day to do that.  So, of course, I don’t!  Bring your secret reasons up into your consciousness, and you’ll go a long way to helping yourself get that goal.

The point here is to create a framework around you that helps support you in all your senses.  If you have a goal to grow a rose garden, you can close your eyes and envision the layout, the sunshine, the colors, and the smells for sure.  The more you can embody your goals, the more you’ll be able to make it stick.  Let me know how it works for you.

This thing about perfectionism is controversial to talk about. We are taught to find the “perfect solution” to our customers’ problems. But here’s the thing, and it’s important to remember. Life changes for that customer almost daily. The customer herself can’t really articulate a “perfect” solution. She may think she can, but once her “perfect solution” is in place, things will change and she’ll find that she needs to tweak it a little bit over time.

The big truth is that there IS no ongoing, perfect solution for your own business or for your customer’s business, either. You plan a resolution to an issue and execute it, and after that you see what worked and what didn’t work. You change it around the edges a little bit and go again. Finding what works for yourself or for a customer is not a straight line. It’s a curving line, sometimes curling back on itself, sometimes meandering where you never dreamed it will go. To hold that as true and faithfully watch when changes are needed is the best practice for a solo professional. It’s the best practice for larger businesses, too, but they often become too inflexible and stodgy to execute in that way.

Here are two big problems I see with solo professionals who are trying to establish a business that makes enough money to be viable.
1. Fear of making mistakes, which manifests as failure to take timely action.
2. Trying to decide everything by logic rather than feeling into what might be best for their business or their customer’s business.

I’d much rather see a solo professional try something and fail, and then learn from what went wrong, than to be paralyzed from the fear of failure. Almost all successful business owners have made mistakes, and there’s no sin it in. The sin is in burying the mistake and failing to look at it closely so that one learns. I literally have to re-train a good portion of the clients I work with to actually tell me when something goes wrong! We get into this practice of trying to hide our mistakes, which doesn’t help us in the end.

Additionally, there is a great benefit to using your feeling sense to help make decisions for yourself and your customers. You might also think of this as using your intuitive sense of things rather than depending solely on logic. You can ask yourself a question, close your eyes, and get a gut feel or sense of the best answer. The more you practice this, the better you will get. It is a great addition (and sometimes a replacement) for deciding only by logic alone. In fact, most of the millionaire entrepreneurs I’ve interviewed over the past years tell me that when the chips are down and it’s decision-making time, they trust their gut. Not the figures, but the gut. That’s a great confirmation of using your feeling sense to help you made decisions. Sometimes things will not seem logical at all, but you have a strong sense it is the right path to take.

The truth is that there IS no perfection in this life, so trying to run our businesses from that place will never work. That is the wisdom that successful solo professionals have come to know. the next time you feel yourself fearful over making a business decision, take a breath, check your gut, and move forward. You’ll find that you will do better in the end than waiting for perfection to come.

• It’s no fun to pay attention to weekly income and expenses.
• It’s no fun to carve out the time needed to work on my business, not in it.

The truth is, your business will flourish the more you weave fun into it.  When we look forward to learning something new rather than thinking it will be overwhelmingly difficult, we create energy toward our own success.  When we hold our work lightly, it feels much less burdensome and hard.  We end up with a more positive energy toward the things we have to do.  We all know this, but when it comes to our work we sometimes tend to forget it.  We think we have to labor at our work, or keep it separate from our fun.

Dread has no place in your life as an entrepreneur.  You didn’t set yourself up to be the boss of you just to feel dread toward your work, did you?    One way to handle feeling too burdened or overwhelmed is to make sure you inject some fun and things you truly enjoy into your business.  Tiny pleasures or large ones, they all help you succeed in your work.

Here’s just a small example.  I’ve always loved the color turquoise, so to inject a little bit of fun into the work of updating one of my websites, I used it and asked Facebook friends what color to pair it with.  I ended up with a dynamic combo of my fav turquoise paired with peach.  I love it, and I had fun I had pulling it together.  (You can check out the result at suepainter.com.)  How fun it was to read the other day that turquoise has been named “color of the year.”

Often I encourage my clients to plan personal retreats to work out their stuck places and to work on their business planning.  These are fun despite being productive.  Go where you’ve been wanting to go, or return to a place you enjoy.  Not only does the prospect of a trip create a welcoming energy, you are so easily able to work on your business rather than in it, getting away from the day-to-day routine.  Go by yourself, or pair up with another entrepreneur who also wants to hammer out some work.  You can weave breaks into your day, walk on the beach, get a nice dinner, shop.  But for the most part, you are giving yourself uninterrupted time to invest in your business.  Don’t sabotage yourself by making this a family vacation, either.  It’s not – it’s for YOU.

You can also form a small Mastermind group with people you truly enjoy, and meet by phone or in person to help each other with business issues.  Make it fun – meet over a good bottle of wine, take a walk, whatever you enjoy.  For a while last year, I did this with another entrepreneur by meeting her to water walk and swim together.  We’d do that, then get into the warm therapy pool and stretch both our bodies and our views of our businesses.

Do you have staff or employees in your business?  In nice weather, try meeting outdoors with a picnic lunch.  Just think about ways to bring joy and pleasure into your endeavor.  You’ll benefit both in your spirit and your bottom line.  Think easy-peasy, not hard.  Think mastery, not failure.  Think simple steps, not big overwhelming project.  You didn’t put yourself in business to feel fearful, down or out.  You put yourself in business to serve others and create a world of work that meets your income and lifestyle wishes.  Fun will help you get there, even in small doses!

(c)  Sue Painter

Not long ago, an article by Michael Silverstein for the Wall Street Journal posited that most consumer goods and services are developed by men.  These men consult with other men to develop products and the marketing for those products.  Whether you are male or female, take into consideration a few things about how women buy and watch your sales to women improve.

• Women buy based on the emotional appeal of a product or service.  While men do this, too, men are more apt to get into a certain purchasing habit and stay there, not looking around so much for what is new and appealing in the market.  Women like to feel good about what they purchase, and will buy on emotional appeal more than on habit.
• Women aren’t so impressed with a company’s decision to cut price when sales drop.  We worry about whether the quality of the product has dropped, thinking that something we have previously bought might now be second rate.  We notice a drop in product quality (thinner material or less give in the fit).
• Women shop more than men (big surprise, I know).  What this does is make us far more aware of what’s selling well, what’s bombing, and where prices have changed.  We have a better sense of the market because we are in it more, especially online.
• Women like to know what’s new.  If a company makes tiny little changes to their product rather than truly producing something more innovative and easier to use, women are not impressed.  We have a great ability to review a product and immediately see what will work or not work before even laying hands on the item.  (Again, we shop and compare online.)
• We like to give something that says “I love you.”  We look for that more than something practical.  Research shows that women say love is important in their lives, second only to time.
• We like color and look for products to give us flair.  Men will more often use black and white.  While we like the flair and excitement of color and style, men buy based on function, durability, and price.
• Women talk about what they buy.  This is a critical factor to remember when marketing to women.  We share information personally and online about our likes and dislikes.  We connect with other women over our purchases.  Research shows that a pleased woman customer will impact at least nine other women to buy from you.  This is amazing reach!  Word of mouth marketing works with women.
• We like products and services that save time.  Cumbersome packaging and hard to use products don’t get the nod.

While these points hold true for any industry, women complain in particular about financial services that are aimed toward the male of the house (even when the woman is the major bread winner), health care services (we don’t like the endless waits) and durable goods (we don’t like that a good portion don’t do what they say they will do).  Keeping these facts in mind can help you create and sale to women more successfully than many companies do.

(c) Sue Painter