twanless

Getting Ink: How To Publicize Your Business Today

While there’s been much noise about the demise of the press recently, the truth is that there’s more media around than  ever. The big dif­fer­ence is that the “press” has changed con­sid­er­ably over the last five years – it’s now gone elec­tronic,    has wider dis­tri­b­u­tion than ever, and includes other media out­lets like blogs, online news oper­a­tions, Face­book and  ...

twanless

Confessions Of An (Reformed) Idea Slut

This is a mes­sage — and future pro­gram — for cre­atives, dream­ers, and dis­si­dents every­where.  Its  mes­sage? It’s okay to have lots — and lots — of ideas. But they need to be developed. I like to  tell every­one I meet that I’ve Never Met An Idea I Didn’t Like. It’s my mantra, my self– iden­tity, my rai­son d’etre. It’s also often been my downfall.   Yes, at...

twanless

How To Innovate Your Service Business

When you rein­vented your­self or your busi­ness, you were an inno­va­tor. You may have stopped there. So get back into it by explor­ing new ideas. Any­one who has rein­vented them­selves — or is in the process — is famil­iar with some aspects of inno­va­tion. Rein­ven­tion is a sub­set of inno­va­tion in that you look at some­thing and decide to do it in a dif­fer­ent way,...

twanless

Streamline Operations With Your Own Business Books

All pro­fes­sional ser­vice or advi­sory busi­nesses have a ten­dency to repeat the same processes reg­u­larly. Coaches, con­sul­tants, agents, and other ser­vice providers may be oper­at­ing in a some­what more cre­ative world than man­u­fac­tur­ers, but they still have routines. After all, that’s what ser­vice busi­ness oper­a­tion is. Except for the odd — and some­times...

twanless

Layer If You Want The Whole Cake

Lay­er­ing is a mar­ket­ing tech­nique that moves new clients through an extended sales process and allows them to pick what they need from you. A ver­sion of this post was pre­vi­ously pub­lished in the Finan­cial Post Entre­pre­neurs who make the tran­si­tion from cor­po­rate worker to inde­pen­dent busi­ness oper­a­tor invari­ably face one major hur­dle that hob­bles their...