September 2009

Business Development: Is Your Price Right?

In this article, I will discuss the thorny subject of pricing for service businesses, why most businesses underprice and a 5-step formula for calculating your price. Check that your price is right Chris Cardell, the marketing guru, is firmly of the opinion that most small businesses underprice their products and services because they fail to [...]

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Business Development: Useful Slogans To Enhance Your Life

Using slogans and affirmations to improve mindset is a well-documented technique for helping us to achieve our goals and poerformance.  Here is a list of slogans for your main course followed up with some positive affirmations for desert. Why not choose one or two from the list below, or create your own, and post them [...]

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Business Development: 21 Reasons For Business Success

Here are 21 reasons for business success (or do the exact opposite and you will also have 21 reasons for business failure!) Have a clear . Your customers are your top priority Patience – your ability to take a 20 year view Stick to your knitting – avoid pointless diversification The ability to focus on [...]

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Business Leverage: Creating Value From The Ether

This is article 6 in the series of articles on business leverage – designed to add rocket fuel to your business growth. In this article you will be given some key ideas for creating value out of ‘thin air’ by using your innate powers of creativity and that of others. The 20 Idea Method Have [...]

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Business Development: What Does Success Mean To You?

This article will discuss some of the key areas that bring success into our lives. ‘Emperor’ Norton Success means different things to each of us and it is important to understand that we are each responsible for our own happiness i.e. nobody else can give it to us. Here are my benchmarks for evaluating success: [...]

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Business Leverage: Removing The Risk

This is article 5 in the series of articles designed to explode the growth of your business. Whenever a customer makes a purchase, they take a risk that your product or service will not work. Are your customers taking a risk when buying from your business?  If so, you need to work on removing the [...]

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Business Leverage: Learning To Listen

This is article 4 in the series of articles about applying the sort of leverage to your business that fuels exponential growth. Learning to REALLY listen to your customers, your staff and your suppliers is a critical skill in business that cannot be emphasised enough. Listen and learn Most people do not listen properly because [...]

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Business Leverage: What You Can Measure You Can Manage

This is article 3 in the series of articles on business leverage – the keys to growing your business fast. Measure and compare everything You need to measure the results of each business development initiative you implement.  Why? Because, if you don’t know the numbers, how can you improve them? Once you have recorded the [...]

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Business Leverage: There Are Just 4 Ways To Grow A Business

This is article 2 in the series of articles about using ‘leverage’ in business. The principles outlined in this article are the reasons why I entered business consulting – they are so powerful that I wanted to teach them to every business owner I encountered. In simple terms, there are just 4 ways to grow [...]

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Business Leverage: Gearing Up For Business Success

This is article 1 in the ‘Renegade Leverage’ series of articles which discuss key points of leverage available in every small business that, when acted upon, can grow your business exponentially. It’s easier to grow your business with leverage In this first article, we will discuss how gearing can be used to rapidly grow (or [...]

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The Very Stuff Of Life

It’s very easy to miss out on the important things in life. A new ‘renegade’ just 56mm long! For example, I missed out on every occasion when my wife went for a scan for our two children.  My banking career must have seemed more important at the time!  How sad is that! Here’s a picture [...]

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Three Ways To Get Wealthy

Many years ago I listened to Richard Dobbins speak at a seminar.  Richard is a highly qualified business consultant.  Among many other things, he bought a publishing business for £1 and sold it for £49 million pounds several years later.  He went on to write an excellent book entitled ‘ ‘What self-made millionaires really think, [...]

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Bookkeeping: The Miracle Of Compound Interest

There is an excellent article at the Motley Fool site entitled ‘The Miracle of Compound Returns’.  In my view the impact of compound returns should be the first lesson taught at school because young people can make the concept work in the favour because they have time on their sides. There are many people who [...]

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Vision: Begin With The End in Mind

In ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’ by Stephen Covey, the second ‘habit’ is ‘Begin with the end in mind’.  This This is not ‘the end’ I had in mind! is based on the principle that all things are created twice.  This means that we first create things in our mind before we create [...]

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Would You Like To Find Your Life’s Purpose?

This article discusses some ideas for finding your lifes purpose and how that can be integrated into your business and personal life.  At the end of the article there are some quotations related to ‘lifes purpose’. Simply write the question ‘What is my lifes purpose?’ at the top of your paper or computer document and [...]

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Goal Setting: What You Can Learn From Joga Shoker

I attended the Utility Warehouse MAD Day (Massive Action Day) yesterday.  The most outstanding speaker was one Joga Shoker, a young asian man of around 30 years of age.  After last years MAD day, he had written to the Operations Director of Utility Warehouse, stating that he would become a Group Director by the next  [...]

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House Prices and the Economy

Read this article ‘Real Estate – the 800,000 pound deflationary gorilla‘.  It sets out what is happening in the US property market.  Conditions are deteriorating and forecast to continue deteriorating until 2011/12. Keep your hat on, its not over yet! Apparently Banks are now hiding foreclosures and refusing to list foreclosed homes on the market.  [...]

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Success Is One Step Beyond Defeat

In the classic book ‘Think and Grow Rich’ by Napolean Hill, I was struck by the following sentence: ‘More than 500 of the most successful men this country has ever known told the author their greatest success came just one step beyond the point at which defeat had over-taken them.’ That means that they pushed [...]

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Bookkeeping: A Classic Mistake

I visited a care business today.  They supply domiciliary care services to elderly people, supporting them to live in their own homes.  The business is about 2 years old and expanding rapidly on the back of mainly low-margin business offered through social services. Don’t use a sledgehammer to crack a nut! They have made a [...]

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Would You Like To Get Out Of Debt?

Thousands In The UK Can Now Get Out Of Debt Who Never Thought They Could As you know from reading ‘The Renegade’ page, I was a bank manager up until 2001, when my disgust with banking finally became too much to bear and I resigned voluntarily.  I determined that my personal integrity was worth more [...]

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