This is a picture of some of the wine racks in the stock room of our liquor store. You can actually buy specially designed metal shelving and wine racks for liquor store stock rooms. Instead, my mother scrounged up some book cases. Then she used cardboard wine boxes and their dividers to make perfectly functional…
Keys to Your Business Managing You Desperately say “yes” to every opportunity. Assume everybody is doing what you told them to do. Assume everybody understood what you said. Procrastinate. Set yourself up as the only person that knows how to do it. Constantly allow exceptions to the rules. That list comes from David Gaither of…
When it’s just you in the business, or you’re the boss, no one makes you keep hammering away at what needs to be done except you. Marketing may be the most important activity in your business, but it’s also hard to be consistent, with everything else you have to do. Here is one system you…
Every week, I open a new Basket. I call it the Brag Basket, but it’s not really about bragging. It’s about sharing. I started this so you can introduce yourself, share some good news, or congratulate a friend. How can that change it all? By inspiring one person, by motivating you to achieve something new,…
Suzy and Tracie make bread in a little strip mall in Mishawaka, Indiana. They have a franchise with Great Harvest Bread Company. They give you free slices to sample. (Apple Scrapple is very good.) They are like lots of bread stores in lots of towns.Their store/bakery is only a couple miles from our daughter’s college,…
Last year at the Oklahoma Entrepreneurship Conference, we had two people tweeting: me and @stargardener. When we announced the hashtag we were using for the event, we got the oddest reactions. We had a tweetup, with just the two of us, and it was great. And the brand-new-at-the-time @OKCCoCo was there. This year, there were…
Our crack research staff (my husband) caught a discussion thread about tourism websites. This one happened to be on a hunting safari forum, but there are lessons for anyone’s tourism website.(If you don’t like hunting, or hunting pictures, don’t click through: here is the original hunting discussion thread.) A hunting and tourism operator asked the…
Every small business has to market itself, but not many small businesses have a marketing plan of any kind. Even fewer have one they actually use. That’s why I developed the Simplified Marketing Plan, back in 2006. It’s high time to update it. The plan is simple, so you’ll actually do it. There are just…
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