Self Employed Success

Many people quake in fear at the idea of writing a business plan. They imagine in their mind a 100-page document full of charts and financial figures. While it’s possible to create a business plan of that magnitude when trying to get capital for your business, a typical business plan for self-employed people should be less than 10 pages.

The purpose of a business plan, for a self-employed person who is financing his own business, is to have a central repository for all strategic thinking about the business for the coming year or two. Here’s what should be included:

• Your business idea in three sentences.
• Your target audience.
• The challenges that your target audience faces.
• The benefits of using your products and services to meet those challenges.
• Your company brand and image.
• Your projected revenue and expenses for a year.
• If you project more expenses than revenue for the first year, a statement about where the money will come from to pay for those expenses.
• A list of your major competitors, and how you are different from them.
• At least six markting techniques you’re planning to use over the coming year, when you plan to implement them, and what results do you expect from them.
• A list of people who you will need to hire to implement your business plan or marketing plan (unless you have the business skills and time, yourself, to do all the work).

You should review your business plan, and update it, annually. I recommend reviewing the marketing section of your business plan quarterly, so that you can gauge the success of your marketing campaigns.

In this great article by Christopher Knight, “Is EarthLink Dropping Your Permission-Based List Members?” you can learn more about the recently problems you may have been having with Earthlink email addresses suddenly bouncing from your mailing list.

When you see a lot of bounces from a certain ISP (like Earthlink, Comcast, or others), it’s a good idea to do a little manual research to find out what error message is really coming back from those ISPs. In Christopher’s case, the automated message he was receiving back was a request that HE fill out a request for the recipient to receive his email. What looked like “hard bounces” (email addresses that were no longer valid) were actually being captured by Earthlink’s challenge/response system.

This article is well worth reading if you send out email newsletters or other email marketing.

Good news to report!

I’ve been selected by Practice Pay Solutions to act as their National Education Director beginning July 1, 2006. I’m taking this position over from C.J. Hayden (author of “Get Clients Now”), who had been acting as Education Director for the past six months. I’ve been using Practice Pay Solutions as my merchant account and shopping cart for years, as have many coaches, and I can attest to both the quality of their services and the excellent customer service they provide.

My role will be to create and give free classes and teleclasses to PPS members, member associations, and the general public, on e-commerce, creating passive income, and automating your business by accepting credit cards for your services, workshops and information products. I’ll also be writing a lot of how-to articles for the PPS newsletter as well as some member association websites.

You’ll be seeing quite a lot of me all over the place! I hope you’ll be able to make the classes. They’re free!

I’ll be doing this new role a few hours a week, and still devoting the majority of my time to Passion For Business in my small business coaching role.

Recently, Susan Klein gave a teleclass to Passion For Business subscribers entitled, “Stress Makes Us Stupid.” Wow! What a great class!

Not only did she tell us why stress makes us stupid (biologically-speaking), but she tells us what to do about it. Great advice, good tips and wonderful stories…listen for free here:

http://www.passionforbusiness.com/teleclass/susan-klein.htm

As I sit here writing my “to do” list for the upcoming months, I can feel that weird little tingle in the pit of my stomach: Overwhelm. There’s so much to do! How will I get it all done?

Then I remember all the tricks and tips I’ve learned over the years of how to manage entrepreneurial overwhelm:

1. Breathe. Stop whatever you’re doing, and take several deep breaths. Close your eyes and take a visual and emotional break from the craziness.

2. Get Organized. Write down your “to do” list all in one place (instead of having all those little Post-It notes all over your desk). Next, write a priority next to each item on your list. Is it urgent (“U”)? Is it Important But Not Urgent (“I”)? Is it something that has to be done this month, or can it wait until next month?

3. Get Help. Look at your list and determine if everything on it must be done by you. Don’t fall into the trap of “Oh, it will take me longer to explain it to someone than to just do it myself.” Instead, think of the “explaining time” as an investment: once you explain it one time, the other person can document the procedure and repeat it over and over again.

4. Action Alleviates Anxiety. Pick one high-priority task on your “to do” list and do it. Nothing relieves stress better than getting off your butt and taking action. Don’t fall in the trap of picking a low-priority task just because it’s easy. Do the things that matter.

5. Just Say No. Look at your “to do” list and ask yourself if you can simply say No to any of these tasks? Remember, you are in control of your task list and your calendar. Only you can overbook yourself, so only you can say No to requests for your time.

6. Focus. Avoid the temptation to multi-task and choose instead to focus solely on the task in front of you. If you have to, set a kitchen timer and tell yourself you’ll work on the task for 15 or 30 minutes without taking a break or doing other work.

I think I’ll start by taking a nice long breath…

Technorati tags: entrepreneurship,overwhelm