September 23, 2009.  Women Unlimited are holding a fantastic event to share with you all the ins and outs of one of the most effective ways to grow your business. Business growth is challenging and there are many ways that you can choose to grow quickly. One of the most popular, and effective ways to do this is to follow the franchising model.

This unique one day event will look at what’s required to make a success of this business model and how you might be able to apply that to your business. Whatever stage you are at in your business lifecycle, you should come along to this event to discover whether it can work for you now or in the future.

You’ll hear from two of the UK’s most successful female franchisors, Stephanie Manuel founder of Stagecoach Theatre Arts School and Lara Goodbody co-founder of Yoga Bugs. We also have three leading franchise consultants sharing their expertise and advice with you and finally HSBC is going to be talking money and how to finance your growth.

Agenda for the day:

We have some great experts on hand to discuss the things that are are important to you…

1.  Is your business suitable for  franchising with Ursula Barzey and Bruce Johnston of Matchpoint Franchise Consulting Network

2. Planning and financing your franchising growth with HSBC

3.  Case Study: Yoga Bugs.  Lara Goodbody and Fenella Linden created their successful franchise Yoga Bugs (see video below).  Lara will share their experience in how they grew Yoga Bugs and where they are today.

LUNCH and NETWORKING

4.  The 7 key steps to creating a successful franchise with Kirsten Gibb, co-founder of Replico

5.  Stephanie Manuel is the founder of Stagecoach Academy of Arts. She and her partner grew their business from 14 franchises in 1993 to over 650 franchises worldwide today.  You will have the opportunity to hear from Stephanie about how she grew her business and how they achieved their phenomenal success.

Fantastic networking

This is going to a fantastic day that is worth attending for anyone who would like to explore franchising as a way forward and find out what it takes.  You’ll have an opportunity to network and mingle with two of the UK’s most successful franchisors.  And finally you’ll have the chance to engage with other like minded business people who are serious about their business growth.

You’ll find this day both inspiring and educational and if franchising is even remotely on your agenda, you need to attend this day.

We are offering a fantastic early bird discount of 20% discount up until August 31st, so make sure you book early!  Please note that this is a mixed event for both men and women.
Logistics:

Where: British Library

When: September 23 from 10:00 – 3:30 – lunch included

How to create a sustainable business.

Julie Meyer is passionate about entrepreneurship – follow the entrepreneur is one of her favourite sayings.  Julie believes (and we agree!) that it is the entrepreneur that will pull the UK out of the current recession as they are the only group who are currently focused on growth and development. Julie has helped some very successful organisations grow and develop in their early years including Skype and LastMinute.com. But she is not only focused on large businesses. Ariadne Capital, her current business, supports small and new start ups by advising them and helping them get funding, by bringing them together with entrepreneurial investors. She is also the founder of First Tuesday, one of  the largest networks in the world and an innovation in networking when it first launched.

Julie’s session will discuss what it is that creates a successful business today in this current climate.

• How can you negotiate the twists and turns that are ahead.
• What is going to keep your business going?
• What is the DNA of a successful entrepreneur?

Balancing your business with your life.

Avril Carson is an exceptional speaker and has a gift for encouraging people to show up as their best selves and she has a talent for unlocking potential in communication, confidence, influence and true leadership. Her journey is startling in it’s normality. She began freelancing when her children were very young and managed to create a successful consultancy as they grew and developed. When she began, she knew nothing about how to create a business but as she floundered through those early days, she discovered that her model was very effective and she now advises others on how to start their own business.

Avril’s session will take an intelligent look at what is success and how you translate that into creating the right balance between your business and your personal life.

• How do you create more balance in your life
• What is success for you?
• Where do you fit in?
• How do you get out of the busyness cycle?

Make your personal and professional relationships work for you

Pauline Crawford is one of the most inspirational women I know. In the 1980’s, Pauline transformed herself from a shy housewife and mother in her late 30’s  to a confident entrepreneur with a national reputation in the field of personal and professional development. Pauline is focused on the new blueprint for business, which involves a new way forward for men and women to create more success together.

Pauline’s session is focussed on how you can discover the natural way to attracts the best relationships into your business. You will learn;

• Learn how your gender dynamic influences your actions and reactions
• Take a new view of relationships and partnerships to ensure your business thrives
• Create trust and collaborative working to ride the recession together

Pauline and her partner Alana Mitchell have created Gender Dynamics, a new model on how you can work comfortably with your personal gender profile and be more successful in all your interactions.

Creating a multi-million pound business; secrets, learning & tips

Janette Faherty is a businesswoman and mother. She created her first business TNG in 1983, coming from a role as a senior training manager, which merged with InBiz to create Avanta, a £50m organisation with 750 employees.  Janette has a ‘can do’ approach to life and is passionate about supporting people, particularly women, starting out in business.

Janette will bring her huge knowledge about business and  her entrepreneurial experience to Women Unlimited conference. She will speak about how she would have done things differently if she had the knowledge that she now has, how she made it happen for herself, what obstacles she encountered and how she overcame these. She will also share her secrets, learning & tips on how you too can succeed in your business.

When you run a business from home, you realise the importance of extending a professional welcome to existing clients and potential customers. Presenting to prospects a reception that says ‘we are in business, here to serve and quality is our aim.’ There are a number of ways to extend such a welcome.

By post
You might want to hide your address; maybe it sounds too domestic or you just don’t want people turning up on your doorstep! You can do this with a P.O. Box number that’s easily set up with Royal Mail. Or, rent a mailbox at Mail Boxes Etc., which gives a more tailored and personal service than a P.O. Box. You get a nice sounding address – and a place to meet other home business owners.

For a London address, have a look at http://www.hubworking.net and http://www.londonpresence.com/ for inexpensive mailing addresses and virtual offices.

By phone
It’s cheap and sometimes free to get an 0845 local rate number or an 0870 national rate number for your home business. It will hide where you’re based and divert calls to wherever you specify. Bear in mind, though, that having such a number – especially with national rates – might put customers off ringing you.

If you use a landline number it’s best to have a separate line for home and for business. It will stop your business calls from being answered by the kids and give you a chance to escape work calls when you want to. You don’t need to invest in an actual second line as VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) is an option. This uses a broadband internet connection to make and receive calls. The VoIP service I use and recommend is Skype 

Skype also offer a landline number facility starting from £1.95.  Click here to find out how to get your own SkypeIn phone number

To have someone take calls when you can’t, consider a call-handling service like Moneypenny. They answer calls with your company name, text on urgent messages and email the others, giving you a big business feel and giving customers a professional welcome that inspires confidence.

On the web
This could be the topic of a full feature in itself! Your website is sometimes the first thing potential customers see – and they’ll make a judgement in seconds! Create a well-designed site by hiring a professional designer or build your own and include the basic pages:

About us/ News/ Products or services/ FAQs/ Contact us

If you’re not ready to invest in a bells and whistles website, set up a blog to show off your products and services. This can be done for free via blogger.com or wordpress.org (this website has been built in Wordpress)

Face-to-face
Meeting clients outside the home office offers another opportunity to show how professional you are. Find a venue that chimes with your brand and that will create the right impression. Anyone who visits my site will know I’m a member and huge fan of private member’s club, One Alfred Place. It provides me with a professional base in the city and a space in which clients feel comfortable about doing business.

Investing in these services will make you look professional and well and truly open for business.

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About the Author:

Emma Jones is Founder of Enterprise Nation and author of Spare Room Start Up: How to Start a Business from Home

Are you a trail-blazer? Are you creating you own unique path in life? Or do you prefer to follow in the footsteps of people who have gone ahead of you?

A trail-blazer views the world as a sea of change. Always poised for transformation. In recent decades change has gained momentum, creating continually increasing cycles of opportunity. When we view the world in this way – we recognise possibilities for the world to adapt to our vision. We’re less compelled to adapt ourselves in order to fit into what’s already there.

Not long ago, women entrepreneurs were rare. They were doing something few women had done before. They were trail-blazers. They faced unique challenges and revealed new opportunities. By now, this particular trail has been well and truly established. Women have been successfully going into business for decades. And the trend is growing.

Trailblazing isn’t always about the ‘what’. It’s very often in the ‘how’. Anita Roddick famously blazed a trail in ethical marketing with her enterprise The Body Shop. When she opened her first store in 1976, ethical marketing did exist. However, it was confined to fringe markets and cottage industries. It was certainly not a significant concern in the cosmetic industry. Today the second largest cosmetic franchise in the world is strongly focused on environmental and trading ethics. This, as a direct result of how she did what she did. Not only that, but ethical marketing is king across most consumer markets. Now that’s trail blazing!

Quick Guide to Trail blazing

Trail-blazers rarely set out to blaze a trail per se. So what brings out a trail-blazer? One word. Vision. Seeing an untapped opportunity. Desiring a specific change in the world. Or a burning question needing answered.

Whatever the vision – it needs to connect to the trail-blazer’s inner compass. Their core values. Once these light up, the trail-blazer is compelled to follow through. This is the trail-blazer’s fuel line. It helps them immeasurably as they pursue their vision. With it they have the optimism to deal with challenges and criticism, the enthusiasm to attract good partners and the determination to find new solutions when they fail.

We all have a trail-blazer in us. We’re all unique. Living and responding according to our own core values. A trail-blazer starts with who they are. What makes them tick. What gets them excited.

“You have got to discover you, what you do, and trust it.”
Barbra Streisand, Director, Actress, Singer

Decide what it is you’d most love to create in your life / in this world. Explore your ideas in terms of the values you’d like to enhance. If you’re in business, this is your opportunity to be truly inspired as you grow with your enterprise. You may discover a new how possibility. What connects so deeply with your core values, you can feel yourself buzz with excitement at the very thought of it? There’s where you’ll find your
trail to blaze. Now, trust it!

All trail-blazers take some ‘wrong’ turns. They collaborate with inappropriate partners, they make poor investments or they’re diverted from their path. The trailblazer holds the vision paramount through all of this. They use their vision to navigate through challenges and learn from their mistakes. They apply what they learn to the vision and to their actions in achieving it. No outcome or feedback is discarded as a waste of time and energy. It all gets harvested for its resources.

“These resources are constantly growing to help maximise the possibility of success. I have learnt more from my failures than my successes” Richard Branson, Entrepreneur

When you make a ‘wrong’ turn (and you will!) learn from it and use it to move forwards. Trail blazing can involve a lot of wrong turns. Learn from your feedback – positive and negative – and act on that learning.

However you blaze it, it’s your trail. Blaze it for your own delight and pleasure. The still depths of your authentic self will provide you with your most inspiring and invigorating route, as you journey on your unique life.

Have a great ride, fellow trail-blazer!

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About the Author:  Lorna Hutcheon is a professional life coach with a background in the arts. She combines her creativity with a deep intuitive connection to inspired learning through life. She embraces challenges and persists with her own learning and development. She’s a Master Practitioner in nlp and uses some of these applications to effectively assist her clients in creating the life they desire.

www.wooha.co.uk
0141 332 2107

All too often we focus our marketing energies on attracting new customers, sometimes forgetting those closer to home – our existing clients or customers. So how do you keep your business fresh in their minds? How do you ensure they keep coming back to you for more – and even buy new products and services from you?

In sickness and in health

A good starting point in marketing to existing clients or customers is to keep your understanding of them up to date. Situations change and so will their needs and requirements. What they’ve purchased from you up to this point may not be what they’ll buy from now on. The more you can track their changing requirements, the more you’ll be able to offer the right product and service for the right moment. How do you do this? Keep in touch. If you can’t give them a call or meet them from time to time to find out how things are going, then monitor those changes being reported on their website, in the press or through any of your contacts who also deal with them.

Because you’re worth it

With this knowledge of your clients or customers’ current requirements, consider your product and service range. Could you regroup or repackage certain services or products so they answer specific challenges your customers are facing? Do you need to strip out certain components to make your offer more competitively priced in the current market? The more flexibility you can adopt (without damaging your profit margins), the more chance you can stimulate repeat and new purchases from existing clients or customers.

I only have eyes for you

Armed with these solutions, don’t forget to tell your customers or clients about them. Demonstrate that yours is the business who not only understands what they are facing, you have solutions to match. In doing so try and appear as tailored as possible in your message. If customers or clients receive any information which doesn’t appear relevant, they will assume you don’t understand them (and don’t love them). They may even take their business elsewhere.

Tailoring your approach needn’t be a huge expense. If you have lots of clients or customers then consider grouping those with similar needs or requirements and creating communications which touch on these. The choice of communications tools for this vital market needn’t be expensive either. Consider some of the ideas below:

Case studies that demonstrate you’ve solved this issue/challenge before

Product/service samples that give a taster (perhaps with a ‘trial’ offer) to help them make the first step

Client intranets that deliver regular nuggets of value – ideas, tips, hints on how to overcome current issues. These can also be linked with track-record examples or case studies to demonstrate how others have benefited

Events which discuss and explore a key issue they are facing. To make a great impression and stimulate customers or clients to talk further with you, these events need to be well run, held in a venue that adds to rather than ruins the experience, feature excellent speakers and mix interesting clients/customers and contacts together. Don’t forget to follow up your events – otherwise you are unlikely to convert client interest into purchases

Newsletters – electronic or paper-based that again focus on ideas and ways to solve your clients’ or customers’ current challenges and opportunities. The more valuable they find the content, the more your newsletter will become a ‘must read’. So pick interesting articles and case studies and avoid a blatant ‘sell’ of your products and services

High quality flyers, postcards or ‘grab the attention’ mailers that highlight a particular issue, solution and offer

Meeting the client or customer – nothing is better than face-to-face contact and meetings. They help you learn more about your client’s or customer’s situation and then position your solutions in a way that will make them interested to know more.

Offers – but not discounts. Discounts are very short-term in their focus and are difficult to regain ground from later. To avoid eating into your profitability, consider offers instead – these could comprise combining different products/services together in a package, incentives for ‘early bird’ orders, gifts for ‘recommend a friend’, free research reports, guides or intelligence when they purchase etc

Love me. Love me not

Now’s the time to make sure our customers or clients really understand the full breadth of our products, services, help and support. Before we can expect them to know us, we need to understand them. We need to plot and track the changes they are currently facing (and in today’s economic climate change is happening really fast). The faster we can offer solutions, the greater our chance our protecting our current revenue streams, motivating clients to try out new products and services and building greater customer loyalty. So be flexible, be creative and be as quick as you can.

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About the Author: Michelle Daniels is the Managing Director of Extended Thinking.
An experienced and effective business development and marketing strategist, Michelle has built a successful career increasing top line growth for service businesses and organisations. She helps her clients turn their marketing, business development and thought leadership plans into reality with her ‘hands on’ support and practical advice. A prolific writer, Michelle also combines creative flair with business nous to produce highly effective results. She has written (and ghostwritten) for many professional and business publications and is a member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and professional services marketing group.

About Extended Thinking
Extended Thinking is a hands-on marketing and business development consultancy. Bringing together great minds and great ‘doers’, we help our clients devise and implement plans that achieve real business growth. Our clients come from a wide variety of backgrounds and sectors, but invariably are those who are too busy or lack the resources to action their marketing and business development plans. We roll our sleeves up and muck in to free them up to do what they really want to do and are good at doing.

Our ‘Personal Brand’ is the emotional fingerprint we leave on others. How do people describe you? Successful, leader and trustworthy or are you someone who is described as creative, disorganised and unassuming. Body language, posture, clothes, facial expression, accessories are all part of the package.

Your clients already sum you up in a few words when they talk about you to others, i.e. prospective clients. Your emotional fingerprint is also your ‘reputation’. Are you aware of how others describe you? Or are you sabotaging your personal brand through ignorance or naivety. If you were a supermarket – what kind of supermarket would you be? Lidl or Waitrose?

Our experience of running Personal Brand Workshops falls into two camps. The already converted arrive to pick up hints and tips on separating themselves from the herd. Then there are the sceptics – their dominant argument is; “why do I have to behave differently or dress a certain way? I am an expert at what I do and what is on the inside that counts. Others should see my natural brilliance.” At some stage during the workshop the sceptics will moan about how networking never works for them.

So how do you distinguish yourself from the competition and really get noticed? The key to developing a successful personal brand is authenticity and self-awareness. How we are judged by other is based on a whole host of subconscious decisions. Most of us are highly attuned to picking up fake behaviour. So faking it is a massive brand saboteur. You have to be true to your real self and then apply skills to make a better impression.

So what are you brand values?

Everyone has values. Whether we are aware or not most of us are guided by two sets of co-existing value systems;

Private motivational values which help us make decisions about how we prefer to live our life. Deep down reasons for why we choose a certain career path or live in a particular area.

OR

Public personal values, the ones we show the world. People who are successful have several things in common.

They have a well developed sense of what their private and public values are. Where possible their public and private value systems are aligned giving them clarity, positivity and purposeful confidence in all aspects of life choices. For example someone whose private values are altruistic may choose to work in a caring profession as a nurse or social worker. If their private values are altruistic and commercially ambitious then they may decide to set up a company which develops and assesses people working in corporate organisations.

Here are five questions to ask yourself as you set about understanding your true values, private and public:

What is the motivation behind your public Personal Brand Values? Is there a pressure for you to be like everyone else? Is there an internal disconnection between the real you and how others perceive you?

Are you “emotionally” committed to change? The classic pitfall: Your motivational values are based as much on gut feelings as they are on logic, if not more so. If it doesn’t feel right things will not work out well and you are bound to fail. Your personal brand is most likely to succeed if you are emotionally committed to change.

Who else does this impact? Adoption or re-alignment of new values will impact those around you. Colleagues and friends may notice changes and the temptation to slip back to old ways will be high – old habits die hard. Those impacted will react in different ways to the changes in you – be prepared for feedback.

Be flexible in how you make the changes? Do not jump in at the deep end. Have a strategy of how you want to change your personal brand and adapt accordingly to reflect different experiences. Personal brand values are a force for change, not a straitjacket.

Putting your Personal Brand Values into practice? If only it was as easy to put values into practice as it is to define them! Unfortunately (or fortunately), this is one fire that needs to tended. Client meetings, networking, and especially face to face conversations, they’re all opportunities to feed the flames. So if your brand values are ‘Creative, Intelligent, Leader and Positive’. Are you someone who looks creative, sounds intelligent and behaves like a leader?

If not what do you need to change to be true to your values. Would a leader turn up late at a networking event dressed scruffily and apologises or hides in the corner?

It’s this simple: You are a brand. You are in charge of your brand. There is no single path to success. And there is no one right way to create the brand called You. It starts with authenticity and desire to change.

Tips and Hints for a Successful Brand Image

A key aspect of personal branding is to portray your key messages clearly and consistently in your appearance. Visual dominated in humans so reflecting your personal brand values consistently in your presentation creates a powerful and winning package.

Dress, grooming, body language or facial expression. These shout volumes about you without you speaking a word, so make sure they say the right thing.

Achieve a good balance in your image between ‘standing out’ and ‘fitting in’. You aim to ‘stand out’ because you consistently project your strengths and not because you look awkwardly out of place. You ‘fit in’ because your dress and grooming always create an appropriate professional appearance in context with the situation. Add your individual style choices that signal your qualities and brand values.

Personal image is comprised of many details that together create a holistic picture. Ask yourself if all the details in your picture are working towards creating a true and positive impression? Does your image help you to stand out for all the right reasons by clearly reflecting your unique personal brand?  If not, it’s time to focus on this important aspect for yourself.

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About the author:

Salma Shah is the Founder and Director of Beyond, whose corporate clients include; Oracle, Microsoft, Cap Gemini, New Star Asset Management and Infor. Salma’s focus is to combine business skills with business psychology to help course participants to perform at their best and have a measurable increase in their performance. Beyond also partners with companies and assists them to take development and assessment to the next level. Beyond offer some great training courses to help develop people in business. Find out more at www.beyondonline.org

How to protect your prized possessions – your customers

I was talking with a colleague the other day and they described the current business landscape as ‘unchartered territory’. The events that have unfolded over the last few months have indeed been dramatic. Sizeable, high profile businesses have announced difficulties, governments have been forced to intervene and all this has painted a picture of the unthinkable fast becoming a reality. History is certainly unfolding in front of our eyes and who knows what the next few months might bring?

As humans, we hate uncertainty. We like to know what’s around the corner and when things look unsure or risky we desperately crave security. That often means protecting what we have. For many businesses this involves cost-cutting, detailed planning, exploring new revenue streams and desperately trying to win new business.

In contrast, fewer businesses plan to protect their prized possessions – their existing customers – and yet this band of loyal followers are a fantastic asset. They can really help you weather an economic storm. So how do you protect them? How do you create such a great offer that your customers repeatedly resist your competitors and keep coming back to you for more? Here are 5 theme tunes to help:

1. Don’t know why

If you are going to protect your customers and stimulate new and repeat buys from them, you need to understand why they chose or continue to choose your products or services. What needs do they have that your business satisfies? How do you meet their expectations? You probably know this, but if you don’t, it’s certainly worth asking. The information you uncover reveals the vital components of your offer. These components are the ones that you must continue to deliver on and deliver well. Get these right and the customers will remain happy and satisfied. Start changing or altering them for the worse and your customers may start to get itchy feet.

2. Tell me what you want – what you really, really want

Knowing why customers choose you is one thing, keeping up with their changing needs and expectations can give you real competitive advantage. As the current economy evolves, so will your customers’ requirements. By keeping in regular dialogue with them, you can spot changes as they occur. You can then repackage or add in new services or products that respond to these new needs. For some customers, they may want you to strip out the ‘frillies’ and provide them with a more fundamental or basic offer. For others, they may need extra ‘bells and whistles’ to help them meet the challenges of this new economy. By being more flexible in your approach and adapting to changing demands, you will soon become an invaluable supplier to your customers. And you can do this profitably. Rethink your business model, consider outsourcing or utilising different means of production to help you create a more competitive offer in the current climate.

3. The long and winding road

And while you are in dialogue with your customers exploring their current issues, cast your eye on the future. What are their plans? What obstacles will they face? What opportunities will they want to capitalise on? Your service or product offering may be able to help, but also, you may have contacts who could be useful for them. By supporting them in their ambitions you will become more than a supplier – you will transform into a ‘valued’ supplier, perhaps even a trusted adviser and one whose relationship with them will be difficult for a competitor to penetrate. The idea here is not to explore their future in order to launch into a sales pitch of your products and services. Instead, try to find out how you can genuinely help. You need to demonstrate that you are interested in what they are trying to achieve and want to support them. That support can take different forms – it may be advice, it could be your products and services, it may be access to your contact base. Your knowledge of that customer will guide you on how best to add value.

4. Knowing me. Knowing you

Your competitors’ actions are probably on your radar and you may be tempted, if they start discounting, to offer similar reductions. But have confidence. If you launch into a discounting strategy without changing the components of your products/services, it will be difficult to regain ground when times improve. If you are tempted to reduce your price then change the nature of your offer to reflect it. Also, consider calculating the added benefits or value that your:

• products
• services
• after sales support
• way of doing things

brings in comparison to the competition. You may find that your ‘added value‘ features can command a stronger price and you can explore creating different packages to suit different pockets. Whatever value you bring you, do communicate it. Keep a log of the additional benefits you generate and make sure your customers realise all the good stuff you do – even if it’s in the background. If you give something away for free, make sure the customer knows its typical value.

5. Can’t get you out of my head

Some businesses treat talking to customers as a one-off activity – something that takes place in the selling process. Those that continually revisit how their customers are doing, what changes they are experiencing and how their requirements and needs are evolving often build greater customer loyalty. They can spot change when it occurs and create a different solution that responds to the new set of circumstances. So diarise regular points when you check out how your customers are doing. The economy is changing so fast at the moment that an annual assessment is likely to leave things too late. Talk with your customers and agree how frequently they’d like you to keep in touch. If they value your interactions with them, they’ll be happy for regular communication. In doing so, you’ll also keep your business at the front of their minds – a good place to be when greedy competitors start coming to call.

Extended Thinking
Extended Thinking is a hands-on marketing and business development consultancy. Bringing together great minds and great ‘doers’, we help our clients devise and implement plans that achieve real business growth. Our clients come from a wide variety of backgrounds and sectors, but invariably are those who are too busy or lack the resources to action their marketing and business development plans. We roll our sleeves up and muck in to free them up to do what they really want to do and are good at doing.

What would you do if you’ve been operating in a market without a competitor, and then one appears? Do you ignore it, suggest tie-ups, share expertise, or wage all out war?

Competition is healthy

First off, take the view that ‘competition is healthy’…two companies can make more noise than one and having a competitor may even expand the size of your market, bringing in more business for you.

A fine start: But how do you respond to the new kid on the block?

Make love, not war

Think if there’s a way you can embrace each other. Is there stuff you can do together? This doesn’t have to be a full scale marriage between your two businesses – maybe just a case of swapping content, sharing contacts, or cross-promotion.

Define yourself

There is nothing more real to focus the mind than competition. Having someone else appear in your market will cause you to clearly define what you offer. Once you’ve identified the thing that makes you ‘unique’, then communicate this well.

Be smart

Keep your wits about you. Put yourself in the shoes of your competitor. If you were them, what would you do? Think about it and then out-smart them. Do something better. Not necessarily bigger, just better.

Enjoy it …but keep your eye on the customer

If you’ve been operating without competition, then a healthy dose of it could be a welcome wake-up call! It will have you springing out of bed in the morning, excited by the thought of how you can improve on yesterday.

Enjoy the experience of planning your strategy and sharing this with close and trusted friends and co-workers; but don’t get so caught up in the competition that you forget about the customer. Remember, they now have somewhere else they can go!

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Photo credit: Ren Norman

Working from home can be a nightmare and does not necessarily live up to the fantasy of being able to work as and when you want in the freedom of your own space. If you are especially used to being constricted by the whims and wills of others around you in a structured working environment – it becomes a challenge to discipline yourself to think for yourself. Listening to others – and doing as they ask – is a habit and if you are to be successful at working from home – it is a habit you need to break.
If you are getting stressed out by a constant flow of visitors, household chores and partners wanting you to do things about the house – your ‘WHY’ is not big enough. Thinking that working from home is a sexy thing to do is not a good enough reason to suffer the inconveniences of nagging partners, weeds threatening to suffocate you and your roses and constant interruptions from friends thinking that you are home just to provide them with free tea and biscuits.

If I were you and this is the case – I would drastically re-evaluate your situation! Define some boundaries and then tell everyone else about them – including the weeds.

But to do that you need to sort out why you are doing this.

I am personally on a mission. I cannot achieve what I want to achieve in a 9-5 job. And apart from the fact that I have a teenage daughter, dog and cats that invariably make it difficult for me to commit to a ‘normal’ job, I know that if I give in to my insecurities about what I am doing – I will never get to do the things that I want to do. My ‘WHY’ is BIG! It may not be big to anyone else – but it is to me and it includes things like:-

• I want to set up several passive income streams for myself which allow me to maintain my independence.
• As I become more independent I can allow myself to indulge in the creative things that I enjoy doing – just for the sake of doing them – like writing a book or ten, getting more involved in film, etc – which if I get right – will also generate income.
• I want to gather enough capital to be able to design and build my own house – and that means drawing up the plans myself, and project managing it from start to finish. – and for that I need time too to be able to take my time when I am doing something particularly creative, different, intricate, etc.
• I want to be able to set my daughter up with several passive income streams and build a solid foundation stone for her to launch herself into her own future knowing that she has financial security for the rest of her life.
• I want to have the time to travel to see the many millions of fascinating places in the world.
  I want to spend time with those precious, intelligent and inspiring people who have done and are doing extraordinary things with their lives.
• I want to enjoy doing more photography, take up painting again, and be able to stare endlessly at a beautiful view without worrying about the bills piling up to terrorise me and my bank manager.
• I want to experience all that there is to experience without money, people, fears, stress, and narrow minded attitudes hindering the fullness of those experiences.
• In short I want to live – not as a sheep – ie woolly brained and mindlessly following the crowd – but an inspired life which allows me to follow my instinct and go to places that I would have never thought of going to before.

Your friends need to understand that you have tea breaks – but only at certain times – or not during the hours of…..

Your partner needs to appreciate that being at home does not constitute a license to nag at will according to the mood of the moment. If any nagging needs to be done – it has to be out of working hours.

Get creative with the weeds. I use gardening as thinking time. If I find myself getting stale while I am working – I can breathe a sigh of relief and just go outside and weed a patch of the garden. It is therapeutic, doesn’t take a great deal of thinking and invariably allows me to step back from something with which I was struggling and that in turn allows me to see the problem from a different perspective. And it invariably only takes a few minutes and it is amazing how much you can weed in that time.

If you have a problem about getting this message across – then you need to explain the ‘WHYS’ to your family and friends. Explain that you are on a mission. You have set yourself a target to achieve x, y and z by a certain time and that means you spending time doing a, b and c. Define it clearly and re-affirm it regularly. Keep them updated with your progress so that they too become a part of the mission. They can all help you achieve these targets by bringing you tea and biscuits when it suits you, giving you space and respecting your wishes as a human being wanting to improve your life – which will ultimately benefit them too. If you are lucky then one or two will weed the garden for you while they wait for the tea break to talk.

And if that doesn’t work – employ someone else as a mentor/consultant who has an air of authority who can help you stick to your goals and empower you to get the message across to those that need to hear it.

So – what are the real reasons for working from home then?

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Photo credit: Photo by Fabio

Just when you thought you had a handle on all the opportunities the internet provided, you suddenly find yourself faced with a new one – an audio revolution. Yes, the internet evolved from one that gave us quick and easy written content was now moving us into another dimension with audio content.

Then internet radio was born, which paved the path for the podcasting development. The audio progression on the internet proved to be more of an opportunity for business owners than was ever originally thought.

“What is Internet Radio and Podcasting?”

Internet radio was developed in the early ‘90’s for informational and entertainment purposes. It was a simple means of bringing the radio to the internet, but some users found it cumbersome with having to retrieve the content through one file at a time.

Over the years, the internet radio developed to become a media outlet brought by internet streaming media programs such as MP3’s etc. Users found this to be much more reliable and flexible as they could download the shows and listen to them later on.

Podcasting came along when RSS feeds were widely popular. It was found that one could provide audio content to users by delivering it via these feeds. This enabled a user to download the content onto their portable media players as well as their computers.

One could listen to the podcast whenever and wherever they wanted without being constricted to their computer. The convenience this provided was one of the reasons this media option became so popular.
Podcasting is generally pre-recorded in smaller segments and then uploaded for any user to access when they choose to. This allows for more options in content and programming than radio since editing can make your segments be exactly what you want them to be.

“What are the Benefits to Online Business Owners?”

Podcasting was always known as a great medium for informational purposes and entertainment, but it has become an ever greater tool to use for marketing any online business. Here are some benefits your business could be rewarded with through the use of podcasting:

Popularity in your field- If your podcast becomes a successful one, internet users will keep coming back for more and more. Your business credibility and trust builds quickly with potential customers and your name inevitably becomes synonymous with your particular business field.

Increased traffic- The more users that tune into your podcasts, the more traffic you could receive that would want to check out your business site and see what you have to offer them.

Edging out Competition- While podcasting is popular today; most business owners still don’t use this medium to market themselves. By taking on the podcasting revolution, you can rise above your competitors easily. Clients or customers will remember you far more often, when they need a product or service in your field, than any of your competitors.

Quick advertisement of your products- The quickest way to advertise your products is through a podcast. Simply record a podcast offering information about the product and those who have subscribed to your feed can have instant access to it.

Search Engine Friendly- Podcasting provides those search engine web crawlers with link popularity and fresh content on a regular basis.

With all the marketing tools available to choose from, podcasting should be one of them. It’s one of the best ways to give internet users a different medium while making their experience a more interactive one.

Watch out for the Women Unlimited podcast which is coming soon and will feature interviews with women that are running their own businesses, both small and large.