Make it easy for your people to serve customers. They shouldn’t have to say, “Don’t tell anyone I did this for you.” Instead, be the Ritz-Carlton. Each employee is given an individual, daily budget to create a wow experience for a customer, or for “service recovery.” (That’s to fix, or even over-fix, an error or…
Each Friday, I open the Brag Basket for the weekend. It’s designed as a fun place for you to share your projects and accomplishments. But you can also cheer for other people, give shout outs, congratulate, and even give someone a well-deserved pat on the back. Think that bragging is a bad thing? Read how Tony…
Print material is a thing of the past, a dying dinosaur! Have you heard that yet? It was presented as a statement of fact at a meeting I recently attended. Big city newspapers are shutting down. Magazines are opting for online editions instead of print you can touch, so to speak. We can read books…
[You can download the ebook of this series in our Subscribers’ Vault. ] By Denise McGill This is the last article in a series of four to help small and rural businesses write sales-generating web content, product descriptions, sales letters and more. In last week’s article, Write with a Clear Message, I discussed writing your…
Kenny and Dayna Wederski live in Woodward Oklahoma and opened Competition Sports, LLC, their new sporting goods store in January. They spent about four months in the planning stages before the doors opened. Some of the important steps they took to get to that successful opening included Writing the plan for the business Developing the…
People wonder about developing an online presence. People question the value of using twitter. People debate whether twitter should be used for marketing or PR or anything significant. One such conversation was happening at a conference on blogging one Saturday morning recently, with marketing professionals passionately making claims. During the conversation, I leaned over to…
[Guest author Shashi Bellamkonda has a small business profile to share. It may be from downtown Chicago, but I think we can find some good ideas in it. – Becky ] I was at SOBCon in Chicago and had a problem. I had been traveling for a week and did not get a chance to…
The old definition of success for rural counties was growth. But growth frequently means more problems, high land prices, loss of shared values, etc. So if you are growing, you aren’t happy. If you aren’t growing, you’re stagnating, so you’re not happy either. So no one is happy. But the new definition of success may…
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