This is an old project management saying: how to apply it to your own business

Remember I mentioned reviewing your knowledge from your previous career. Well as a project manager, that’s all I did. Plan, plan and re-plan. Without a plan you have no direction.

Any road will do when you don’t know where you’re heading

How do you know you’ve arrived if you don’t know where you’re going?

True also that life is the journey not the destination.

Another old project management saying is: When you are up to your arse in crocodiles it’s easy to forget the objective is to empty the swamp.

Okay – enough already.

Let me tell you my story on how I started with my first life plan and how that evolves in to my business and marketing plans.

I was 28 (in my head I’m still 28 even though I’ve had my 43^rd birthday). I decided to take stock. Where did I want to be, what did I want to be? That’s the most powerful question of all. Who Do I want to be?

I knew I wanted to be a good manager. I had come across so many ‘bad’ managers in my time working for Rolls Royce Aero Engines and British Rail Trains. I just wanted to be a good manager. And I knew that one day – by the time I was fifty (which seemed an age away at that time) - I would have my own business. I’d like it to be based on Betties Tea Rooms in Yorkshire, England. Why? Because it’s the best experience of customer service and good food that I had ever come across. I liked the attention to detail to create a great dining experience. I liked that I could be served by a lady in 19^th centaury dress, that I could buy tea and coffee from the adjoining shop to take home and that they made their own chocolate on the premise.

I manoeuvred myself around the company I was working for at the time and hunted out and applied for promotions as the opportunities presented themselves. These new jobs took me up the senior management ladder. By the time I was 34 I had a really nice company car and a great salary. The problem was it felt more like corporate slavery than something I was passionate about. Yes I was now a senior manager with all the trimmings, but I hardly saw my kids, I didn’t enjoy the 3-4 hours of travel every day and I just knew that working this hard wasn’t fun anymore. I had achieved exactly what I set out to do and in just a few short years had more than doubled my salary. I was even earning more than my husband and he was better educated than me. I remember thinking, if I had my own business and worked this hard for me rather than for someone else, based on past experience, I had a good chance I would find success.

Then tragedy struck!

I lost my sister – she was 10 years younger than me and my ½ sister. She had learning difficulties and had always been picked on at school. She was beaten up by a group of her so-called friends.

It was a turning point for me.

My reason why, went off the scale. I knew first hand life was too short to do anything I didn’t feel passionate about any more.

I planned to go part-time and started my home staging business in the other ½ of my time. It took me 2 years before I had enough courage, customers and money, to leave the security of my day job.

If I hadn’t taken the time to make my life plan, I wouldn’t have seen the opportunity or Devine Inspiration when it came. But boy did I have a dreadful kick up the backside. The plans had been there but it was more comfortable to stay in the day job than to act. When tragedy struck, that was my wake-up call.

In the plan that was just sitting there, I had created a number of actions I would like to complete: like taking my son to piano lessons, buying and renovating a period house house, starting my new business. 5 years later, I found that piece of paper. It felt strange to see the list. All of which I had achieved over the previous few years. I know firsthand, that’s the power of writing down a plan. It focuses the subconscious mind to find a way of making it happen. If I hadn’t bothered to do the plan, I would have had no direction or purpose and would have drifted, goodness knows where.

I now make a point of designing a life plan every 7 years and up to now, it’s working well. I’m on my 3^rd iteration.

I started writing the plan as a list of things I wanted to get, do and achieve on a sheet of paper, then I went on to create a dream book, where I would cut out pictures of things I wanted to get, do and achieve and paste them in. I now I use a similar method of creating a journey board and placing it on the wall over my desk so I can see it every day. I cut pictures from magazines of the car I want to drive, the places I want to visit, and place on it the people I want to be with like my family and kids. I’ve even been known to cut out my head and stick it on to the bodies of others in an image that I want to recreate. I then put dates against each picture. I understand that the brain reacts better to pictures than words and the subconscious mind goes to work to make it happen. I wish project management planning had been so easy and so much fun. I really does work. Before I relocated to the USA I created my next 7 year dream board together with the month we planned to move, picture of the house we would live in and what month our UK house would sell. It worked spookily well. My husband has now got use to my ways and knows it something that works for me.

If you’ve just been downsized, lost your job or are taking stock, developing a life plan like this can really help you get the balance in your life. You could even print out checks to yourself to signify the kind of income you want. Those of you who have read The Secret will know what I’m talking about. Go to www.thesecret.com and to www.mikedoodley.com for more ideas on how to leverage your life plan and create a journey board or book.

If you haven’t considered developing a 7 year life plan, I seriously suggest you do.

The Business Plan –  I had come from an IT background as a projects manager and I had built business cases which helped me to develop a business plan for my own business. Many new business owners think they only need a business plan if they are looking for funding from the bank. This is perhaps the one most overlooked parts of building businesses. Many business owners keep it in their heads. It’s easy to get away with that when you are accountable to no-one except yourself.

But I would seriously suggest you not only create one when you start your business but you continually update it on a regular basis. It’s a great way of capturing your ideas and prioritising the work you will do. It helps you to think about the return on your time investment too and helps you identify your reason why behind a particular idea or strategy.

Remember I said that I sometimes find myself up in the middle of the night working on my Devine Inspiration? Well sometimes it’s just getting the idea on to paper that helps me get back to sleep. Maybe there is some initial action, perhaps it’s a ‘to do list’ of things I need to do. The Business Plan is a great place to collect all these ideas together. When you have those moments of ‘what’s next’ in your business, you can review your ideas and decide what’s next based on your reason why and your current objectives. It’s a great place to go on those ‘stuck’ days when you can look up and see where you are heading, make any readjustments or postpone some of the less important trivia that keeps you busy but not always in the most productive way possible for your overall objective.

The Business Plan is also worth reviewing at the end of the year when you are planning for your new year. It helps you to identify your resources and your time commitments on each area of your business.

Review, revise, reposition.

Three things which will be critical in this market when you are having to work harder for every $

Key elements of a business case:

SWOT Analysis

Channels to market

Who are your clients (everyone is not an option) – Define demographics – age/income, location

The first pass of your business case is to answer as many of the sections as you can – putting questions in the areas that you can’t complete. The first pass through is a ‘brain dump’ session. The questions will stay in your subconscious for a while, at least over night. In the morning you may have a moment of Divine Inspiration. Act on it. Document what you will do even if you don’t have time to do at that very moment. Think of your Business Plan more as a Divine Inspiration Idea Catcher.

When my 16 year old daughter, came to me with her latest business idea, the first thing I wanted her to do was to capture the idea in a business case. She woke up at 2pm and couldn’t get the idea out of her head. Boy I know that feeling. Talk about being a daughter of mine.

Writing the idea down in a business case structure helped her to document the idea and get it out of her head and help her to get down the questions she needed to find answers to. As she discovered more information, it became clear there were a number of obstacles to overcome. That she might need to compromise on the initial idea and she need to ask herself deep questions like, if she couldn’t do it this way but could do it that way, would she still want to? This business case took 3 weeks to complete before she came up with the realisation that it’s probably not practical. She did all this without spending any money. She did loads of research and even spoke to people outside the family about it. Do you think she learnt a lot from the exercise? Do you think it will help her with her next business project? You bet it will and I’m sure Emma will be a business owner at a much younger age than I was. Here is a copy of her business case. If you’ve not already got your idea on to paper, take a couple of evenings to write it down. It really helps you get clear about what you want, where you will compromise and what you will have to do – and ask yourself – Am I prepared to do it.

Review the business case regularly. Add in more information as you find it and change it if you need to. Don’t try to keep it all in your head. It really does help clarify and give you focus, even if you don’t need funding. It helps you to keep tabs on your own personal investment of time.

Don’t be a busy fool – get focused.

Then go through the next section and make sure you have clarity of vision and definition – then you can start work on your USP and complete the business case.

After you have created this high level document called The Business Case, you can start to think about forming your Marketing Plan for your business. We’ll cover that in more detail later, because the purpose of this book is to help you develop your marketing plan – which for accuracy we’ll call your Visibility Creator Plan. As we go though the next sections I will give you ideas to add to your visibility and credibility so you become the ‘go to’ girl or guy for what you do. You get known for something. You get expert status.

Sign up for the Solopreneurial Marketeer Newsletter

To Book Tina as a Speaker www.tinajesson.com

Take some time out and review these 5 things from YOUR life experience…before you start a business, before you start a project, before you say yes to an item of work, a reagular job or business opportunity and ALWAYS when you need to reposition yourself in the market.

Natural Ability – what you LOVE to do – the stuff that makes you get up in the morning, puts a smile on your face, makes you feel GREAT! You look forward to it and you find remarkably EASY! The other thing with natural ability is that you don’t have to be particularly good at it (you may be but its non essential – yet), but you love it anyway. If you leverage your natural ability and build a business around this key success factor, you have a very good foundation.

Capability – what you are good at. There’s some things you CAN do. You are good at, but you don’t get the same buzz as the Natural Ability stuff. You may want to increase your capability at the fun stuff in the natural ability section. A good combination of natural ability and capability means you’re on to a winner. You’ve heard the old adage - just because you CAN do something doesn’t mean you SHOULD. I’ve met many people who take their old day job and set-up their first business doing the same thing in their new business. If that’s what you love, that’s great. But lets just check that you aren’t missing something. If you didn’t like the work you did in the last job, then it wont be any more interesting when you are out on your own. When looking at capability don’t just look at what you’ve been doing recently, go back in time if you need to. Look at all you did. If you can find something you enjoyed which you where you where good at you’ll have a better chance of success.

It’s all about uncovering your authentic self. For years I worked in the wrong job and it was only when I started to run my own business that I discovered what I was REALLY capable of I found my authentic self and natural ability shone through.

Credibility – what are you already know for? What can you demonstrate easily? This might include qualifications, a book, a website, a personal connection, a reference or a client testimonial. It could also be the market or industry you have worked in before. All these factors contribute to your credibility. There maybe there is something you did at school that helps build your credibility. My son for example had his first poem published in a book of school poetry at the age of nine. He’s now following a literary career which started when he was nine. It all helps…it all helps build credibility.

Collateral Ability – Remember Natural Ability. Collateral Ability is the ability to leverage any collateral you may have collected along your working, business or private life. It might be physical materials you have created from courses you’ve taken, writings or know-how, products or ideas, photos taken or forms created. If you have created it once, chances are you can recreate it and improve it the second time around. By leverage I mean your ability to reuse anything and everything you can from your experience. Now I not talking about taking the stuff you did for your last employer as legally that is their IP(Intellectual Property), but there may be ideas you were exposed to which you can LEVERAGE (not copy or steal), that can be reformed or recreated or give you a basis in some way, for your new business. That’s Collateral Ability

Visibility – the final success factor is your visibility. This is where you get known for something. Try to keep this down to one thing or an umbrella of things that are congruent.

Things that are, a) true to you, and b) make sense when you put them together

Reviewing these 5 Keys to Success makes doing what we do for a living ‘easy’. If you get up every day and find yourself in ‘flow’ you know you’re doing a lot of the right stuff. You start attracting the right people and experiences.

If you feel you’re hitting your head against a wall, so to speak, every day, you might need to go back to step one and find out where your passion lies. If you feel you’re hitting your head against a wall, so to speak, every day, you might need to go back to step one and find out where your passion lies. It shouldn’t be hard. God didn’t put us on this earth for live or business to be hard.

Reviewing your Collateral

In this market you need to review everything you have ever done and evolve it so you can leverage it into your new business. Your past collateral or body of work should be reviewed to see if it can be reused, remodelled and reapplied in some way. A blank page is always a difficult place to start. If you have something you can use you should look how you can leverage it.

 I’ve been lucky because I ran my own business before. I created a great deal of collateral. I had created procedures, forms, reports, templates, invoices, marketing plans, style guide on using the brand, training materials and even books. Just having a format for creating a document can be time saving in itself and look far more credible than having no format defined. Establishing document standards early in your business not only makes life easier for you because it’s already done for you, it also adds to your credibility because it looks more professional and less ‘thrown together’.

If you are currently an employee and work for a company you may not be able to a) access such materials or b) have any rights to reuse these materials but what you can do is use them for inspiration, even if you have to recreate them. Take a look at all the training courses you have been on and see if there is anything in there that can be used, either to help you with the back office systems that you’ll need to create for your new business or if there is anything you can adapt for your clients.

Reviewing your Natural Ability

As we discussed previously, it’s important to be your authentic self. We’ll cover congruency in more depth later, but this exercise in reviewing your natural ability is an important one to do. Your natural ability might include such things as being creative, being articulate and enjoying meeting new people; or it might be being great at detail, hating speaking to new people and being great at websites.

Take a moment to look back on your life and look at a few things you have done and ENJOYED doing. This gives you immense insight in to your natural ability. List your top 5 attributes which embrace your natural ability.

1.      ____________________________________________________________________

2.      ____________________________________________________________________

3.      ____________________________________________________________________

4.      ____________________________________________________________________

5.      ____________________________________________________________________

When I started my first business I looked back at one of my previous positions. At one point I came to a cross roads in my career. I had the choice of 2 promotions. One as a Project Manager where I would be responsible for delivery of projects to clients and one as a Business Development manager where I would be responsible for selling and making promises direct to clients. I chose the first role as I thought at least I would be able to deliver on my promises if I controlled the development of the IT systems being built. What I really wanted to do was the Business Development role as I love meeting new people and getting ideas across, but I knew that once the idea was sold, I had no control on the delivery.

When I started my new business I had control of both and I really loved doing business development for my company. My business partner in the new business was someone I had worked with in when I was at the same company. Jillian did business development, but she hated meeting new people and could never understand why they couldn’t understand her ideas. When we came together to start www.homestagers.co.uk , we basically ended up switching roles and we where both able to put our respective natural abilities to work. We made a great complementary team. I was able to go out and meet new people and express the ideas clearly. She was able to keep the back end operations of the business on track and deliver what I needed at the front end. I had absolute trust that she could deliver and she did. She had absolute trust that what I wanted to do, was the right thing. We stayed in business together for 7 years and we are still best of friends.

Play to your natural abilities. It can pay massive dividends. If there is something you don’t like or want to do, reform your business model so you either don’t need it, can partner with someone you trust or your form a strategic alliance with someone who can help you. (See more later on strategic alliances, virtual teams and mastermind groups)

Only do what only you can do. As your business grows this is a key component for success.

You have 3 options:

1.      Remodel your business so you don’t need it

2.      Outsource it and pay someone to do it for you (I’ve done this with both appointments scheduling and bookkeeping)

3.      Partner with someone on a revenue share or barter basis (where you trade skills to help each other).

Another couple of natural abilities I have is being creative, thinking out of the box and coming up with new angles on a problem or situation and I absolutely love public speaking and presenting. It took me a while to realise that I did enjoy presenting. I remember going on a presentations course with one of my previous employers and having the presentation videoed. I really died on my feet. But it was something I really wanted to master and over the years I have done. (more on presentations and public speaking later).

I also remembered that at the age of 10 I was on local radio. My school had been involved with Science 77, an event where schools in the area had an opportunity to showcase some form of science learning. My project was with my friend Wendy (she hated speaking up in class and was painfully shy) I recorded a scene as a bumble bee going about its normal working day. I recorded in effect a voiceover acting out the role of a bee that could talk, in bee speak, about how he collected honey and how the hive worked. It went out on BBC Radio Derby one Saturday evening. Little did I realise then that I would be doing voice-overs and public speaking when I ran my own business some 30 years later. That’s what I mean by natural ability.

What have you done in your childhood or at school that you could apply?

Reviewing your Capability

Remember I said I worked in IT (Information Technology) for 15 years? Then I retrained in interior design, then after I sold my home staging business I created a new marketing business. How did I do that? Why did I do that?

I didn’t want to “DO” IT any more but the knowledge I learnt whilst working in IT helped me do certain things in my first business. I worked as a business analyst for a while, which meant I had to take user requirements and take the concepts to the programmers, the web specialists who actual converted the wants in to something that could work. Although I’m not ‘that technical’ myself I understood enough about how to construct a website, how copy is king and how to get up in the search engine rankings. With that knowledge I managed to get www.homestagers.co.uk to a number one position in www.google.co.uk the only search engine that really counts in my book. The search terms where home stagers, home staging.

Another capability I brought across from the world of IT is the concept of build once: use many times. In IT world this refers to creating a piece of software and with only minor changes, using it for other applications in other industries. I used this method to define services for various markets. I developed a core service and renamed it so it became attractive to other buyers in different markets. I now work with small businesses to help them to do the same. Call it repackaging, repositioning or rebranding in the world of marketing, but I do this based on the build once: use many times method I learnt in the world of IT

I’d also managed an IT support call centre so I knew about ‘the client experience’. So when we started to outsource the appointments line, I was able to create a procedure that defined the caller types and how I wanted them to be handled, to give the potential client the best experience possible.

I had worked in quality in the late 1990’s and had got my department through ISO9001so I knew about department operating procedures, which meant that as I brought staff in to the business I could document how I wanted certain functions to operate and when I came to sell that business, I had something to hand over.

I had worked on creating commercial business cases detailing the benefits of implementing new systems, so I knew how to write my business plan for my business. It was one of the most well thought out business plans my business advisor had ever seen.

But even with all this large company experience, nothing could have prepared me for running a small business. But I learnt quickly. Not only do you have to wear many hats as YOU are the business, but you do things on a smaller scale and you do things differently. You learn very quickly that time is of the essence and that you run with the less than perfect, and refine it later. And that the buck stops with you.

I also knew that when you start something new, in a new area that you need to hang your hat on some form of credibility so you are taken seriously. I knew I needed at least some basic interior design training to get me started. So I went back to college. The program I took then became the minimum requirement for the stagers I trained. No sense in reinventing the wheel.

Then as the clients came, the case studies where written and the visibility and credibility came.

Think about how you can bring your past experiences, knowledge and capability in to your new business. And think about where the gaps are. Then plan to fill the gaps. Sounds like a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) More about that in the next section.

Defining Your Credibility

The one basic rule to learn and then follow every single day is very simple…

Do what you say you are going to do; when you say you are going to do it.

Do it with clients, contacts, people you meet at networking events, enquiries and especially the media.

What I learnt in my first business is that we won the business BECAUSE we responded the fastest not because we charged the least, or had anything particularly superior to our competition, simply because we responded quickly.

I have my own personal credibility rule.

If I could tell you just one thing to do to help your personal credibility, that would be it.

Respond, respond, respond.

I’m a great believer in the power of the Universe and Devine Inspiration. Opportunities come along and must be seized upon. I may wake up with a great idea. That’s Devine Inspiration. Then I get up and ACT upon it. Many people who know me personally know that I’ll send emails out a 3am or I’ll create a newsletter or website at 5am. My greatest work has come as part of Devine Inspiration. Now it’s not to say that you can go to the bank manager with this as a strategy – doesn’t work. And it’s no replacement for your life plan, business plan or marketing plan – but once you have defined the WHAT it is you want to achieve, act on Devine Inspiration to help you with the cursed HOW’s.

Ref: Mike Dooley: CD’s series Infinite Possibilities

The only difference between the person who also had the same idea as you (and that does happen). It happens all the time. In nature – when blue tits where first recorded to peck the tops off milk bottles in the 1960’s, it happened simultaneously in the south and in Scotland.

It’s the same with any idea and especially relevant with business ideas. The number of people I have met how said they had the idea of starting a home staging business but didn’t act on it.

What about innovations. The wind up radio, the bag-less vacuum cleaner? All ideas that many people had at the same time, but only a couple of people ACTED on it.

The best way to grow your credibility is to take some action and follow it though.

That way you can be the first to market or at least you get to market.

ACT: RESPOND:ACT: RESPOND

When it comes to dealing with the media, it’s all the work you’ve put in to your business, your credibility and visibility that has got the phone to ring in the first place. Don’t throw the chance away. Your competitors are just one phone call away.

Ref: The Personal Credibility Factor – Sandy Allgeier

For a FREE video guide on how you can get visible go to www.britishacademyofsolopreneurs.co.uk

For Training & Audio products by Tina Jesson

The British Academy of Solopreneurs Book Store

How do you know you’re in the right business? This is something every new solopreneur should ask themselves.

The 5 Keys to Success

It’s so easy to dive in. Or spend weeks or months fumbling around in the dark. Then when someone finally asks you – Do you do…? the temptation is to say YES! Then you are under pressure to deliver and to take their money. But what happens afterwards and you found you hated doing that job. It’s not quite what you had in mind? Have you made a terrible mistake going in to business? Do you clock it up to experience and say you’ll never do that again? These 5 success strategies have been designed to help you BEFORE that happens, but it’s not too late if it already has.

Take some time out and review these 5 things from YOUR life experience…before you start a business, before you start a project, before you say yes to an item of work or business opportunity and ALWAYS when you need to reposition yourself in the market.

Tina Jesson

Founder of The British Academy for Solo-preneurs

www.tinajesson.com and www.whatthemediawants.com

What’s holding your business back right now? What are your frustrations? What do you need to start moving forward again? Is technology a help or a hindrance?

Below are just some of your answers…

·         Finding prospects with $ to spend

·         Implementing a complete marketing plan

·         Time (working efficiently/effectively)

·         Customer base – getting to the right clients

·         Focused thought or lack of it

·         Understanding

·         New business without credit

·         Getting the word out that we are here

·         Why use us instead of other (company)

·         Determining the next step

·         Lack of recognition in the community

Here are a few tips to be getting on with…

To find the right prospects with $ to spend, you need to find ways to get in front of your target audience. This is where niching comes in to its own. The tighter your niche the more relevant your offer can be positioned. Do you need to sell a few items or many? If you need to sell many lower value items think how can you get others to distribute for you? What larger businesses might be interested in your offer? The sales effort can be the same to sell one or sell many - so think BIG! Always have a few BIG BANG prospects in your pipeline or marketing plan at any one time. That’s one strategy to be most efficient with your time. Can’t think BIG! on your own? Then brain-storm with others. Getting together with others in business to do this can be more valuable than you can ever imagine! 

How can you determine ‘who has the dollars’? Never, never, never, measure others ability to pay by your own poverty. You need to discover what your potential clients or prospects see as ‘value’. Build your proposition around the value your customer sees or values your prospect has and it becomes an easier ‘sell’. Find out where your prospective clients hang out – on-line and off-line. Offer something that will help you to build relationships, trusted relationships. That way you’ll start to build a business with a few, repeat customers who can then help you build your business.

If you are a new business without credit, you need to find the most cost effective ways to get your word out. That should be in your Visibility Plan.

Follow these 3 simple steps:-

·    1.  Identify who your customers are and how you can reach them, in the most cost effective way possible. (Remember: EVERYONE is the WRONG answer here)

·     2. Plan, plan and plan with the end in mind. Then follow the plan. Getting crystal clear on WHO you want to attract, how you can get in front of them and how you can capture their interest. Ask who do I know who…, who do you know who…(at networking events and of colleagues) and what can I DO with what I have now…

·    3. Build relationships with them, offer something just for being interested. Keep them ‘hooked on you’ because when they are ready to buy, they will buy from you, not a competitor, just from YOU. You’ll leave them no alternative.

I trust you find these tips of help. I’ll be sending out more Tips from the British Academy of Solopreneurs, to help you focus and keep you moving forward in your business.

Creating the right business, identifying your strong reason why and developing YOUR story is the normal starting point of getting great visibility and starting that virtuous circle, unstoppable marketing engine. Let’s look at Lena’s story to demonstrate this point.

Lena Lucas grew up in Kiev, Ukraine, only 80 miles from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. She was 14 at the time of Chernobyl nuclear explosion. Lena along with other teens under age of 16 was evacuated away from Kiev to Crimea region for four month. Her farther was not permitted to leave Kiev. He died from cancer caused by the nuclear radiation within a year after the explosion. Even today, Ukraine and some parts of Belorussia have not recovered from the disaster of 1986. The rate of cancer related diseases have skyrocketed in Kiev. In fact, the death rate is higher than the birth rate in the Ukraine

Lucas received MBA in Marketing from Kelly School of Business. She has 11 years of experience in Marketing and has been a business owner since 2005. In 1997, Lena moved from Kiev to Indianapolis, USA where she encountered another kind of air pollution – in her own home.

Her current business, Emerald Healthy Environments was started out of a concern of indoor air pollution produced by particleboard furniture. After Lena and her daughter moved into a new home, her daughter developed severe allergy symptoms. Lucas soon discovered the cause: furniture in her daughter’s room was emitting formaldehyde. Lena cleared the room of the furniture and her daughter’s symptoms disappeared. After months of research Lucas turned her air pollution concern into an enterprise. Emerald Healthy Environments has been a pioneer in the state designing, manufacturing and installing custom all wood toxin free closets and cabinets.

Myhomegreenpages.com is a low cost online marketing tool for Indiana green businesses and the place for consumers to obtain hard to find information about green products and services in their hometowns. Via this site, Hoosiers can read and write free product reviews and interact with local green business owners.

Along with the online green business directory, Emerald Healthy Environments has launched the Green Business Network (GBN) that provides face-to-face interaction for Indianapolis green business owners. The mission of Green Business Network is to make Indiana a sustainable and healthy place to live for the future generations by empowering Indiana green business through education, promotion and connection.  GBN promotes green businesses through structured and systematic process of word of mouth advertising, mutual referrals and collaborative marketing.

Lena works tirelessly connecting Hoosiers with Indiana green businesses. “Buying local products and services that are health conscious and safe for the environment we all contribute to making our lives healthier and sustainable”, Lucas says.

Not surprisingly, Lena is becoming a recognized figure on the ‘green’ map in Indiana.  Last month, she appeared on Fox TV promoting the products of members of the GBN.

Not surprisingly, Lena is becoming a recognized figure on the ‘green’ map in Indiana.  Last month, she appeared on Fox TV promoting the products of members of the GBN.

Lena has a powerful story and a very strong reason why motivated for a personal and a business reason. She connects with a range of potential clients and she is getting visibility as a result.

Sign up for your FREE training video, Training Information & Special Limited Offer

Tina Jesson Founder of The British Academy for Solo-preneurs

www.tinajesson.com and www.whatthemediawants.com

 “Tina Jesson is the ONLY …female British speaker and trainer who works with small and solopreneurial businesses – where YOU are your business -  to discover their ‘unique me’, develop razor sharp positioning to get maximum visibility and market penetration, so you start attracting clients who buy from YOU and only you, blasting competition out of the water“

Author of ‘How to Play the Property Game’ and ‘The Solo-preneurial Marketeer’

Founder of www.homestagerstoday.com & www.homestagers.co.uk & The British Academy Of Home Stagers

Tina Jesson Enterprises LLC

This helps people understand were you are coming from and is the first step in establishing credibility. If the people who you want to buy from you understand your motives, they respect you and you make a connection. You start to attract like-minded people, people who think that they too can benefit from your service or product and they make a real world connection with you.

After all, people do business with people and the solo-preneur can maximise on this fact and compete at this level rather than being a faceless un-personal large company. Never underestimate the power of personal relationships, which we will cover in more detail later.

Think about it for a moment. In today’s economy the bucks will flow between the people with the strongest relationships, not based on price. So if your sales strategy is based on under cutting your competition, you’re on a sticky wicket. Spend time building strong relationships and people will buy from you regardless of price. That’s not to say you can over charge, but what you do is price for value. Price for the value that only YOU can give. You become a category of one – THE go to person.

People buy on the basis of Know, Like, Trust

Visibility gets your name out there so you are known, building your personal credibility builds your relationships so YOU become liked, and demonstrating your knowledge and capability by helping those people builds the trust. Using the ‘know, like, trust’ model and by turning it in to a virtual circle you create sustainable, unstoppable visibility. That’s how I achieved over $1million dollars worth of visibility in a single year. I became known as an expert, I grew my personal credibility (more on how I did that later) and was able to demonstrate my capability to become a trusted individual. That got me more visibility. Visibility really does spawn more visibility and creates a powerful marketing engine which you just can’t stop.

If you have a power story to tell, then please feel free to post it here and I’ll happly allow you to link back to your site.

If you are interested in finding out more about the training opportunities available from The British Academy of Solopreneurs then please sign up for the newsletter.

PS - You don’t have to be British to join in, sign-up or take part

PPS - Sign up for your FREE training video, Training Information & Special Limited Offer

Tina Jesson Founder of The British Academy for Solo-preneurs

www.tinajesson.com and www.whatthemediawants.com

“Tina Jesson is the ONLY …female British speaker and trainer who works with small and solopreneurial businesses – where YOU are your business -  to discover their ‘unique me’, develop razor sharp positioning to get maximum visibility and market penetration, so you start attracting clients who buy from YOU and only you, blasting competition out of the water“

Author of ‘How to Play the Property Game’ and ‘The Solo-preneurial Marketeer’

Founder of www.homestagerstoday.com & www.homestagers.co.uk & The British Academy Of Home Stagers

Tina Jesson Enterprises LLC

I was in corporate IT for over 15 years in my ‘first life’, but I actually found IT quite dull. Now don’t get me wrong. I use IT systems and websites in my businesses, but I wouldn’t want to DO it for a living. I retrained in interior design to enable me to follow my home interiors passion and establish www.homestagers.co.uk I started with answering the question “what do I feel passionate about” and went and got the training I needed to gain capability and to make a start building my credibility.

Why you need the PASSION?

You probably already know that 9 in 10 new businesses don’t make the first year. That’s due to a number of things; planning; investment; time and also passion. If you are really passionate about something, you’ll move heaven and earth to make it work. If there’s no passion you’ll fall at the first sign of trouble because you won’t have a strong enough WHY.

What YOUR why?

Andy Gilbert, creator of ‘Go MAD Thinking’ (where MAD stands for Make A Difference) taught me the importance of the reason why. The stronger you’re ‘why’ the most likely you are to stay with it and succeed. If you’re not focused on your why, you’ll get distracted easily and find a new ‘toy’ to play with.

This is probably the biggest issue an entrepreneur has to face. What shall I do? I could do …so many things…you need to establish a focus quite early on, within 3 months. Test a few things out by all means (at little or no investment) test yourself out and say to yourself. “Can I?” But most importantly, WILL I? How comfortable am I to do this? How much do I want to DO THIS?

Many people have away from motivation when they look to set-up in business on their own. Away from the politics in the office; away from a boss they can’t get on with; away from the uncertainly and stress of potential job loss; away from not having a job and any income.

To maximise your chances of success, you need to consider your ‘attracted to’ motivation. I’ve always want to…have my own coffee shop; I always wanted to…help others; I always wanted to… have my own design business; I always wanted to…? What’s yours?…

Unfortunately, this new ‘job title’ doesn’t come with a marketing manual – until now.

In this blog, you’ll learn how to put the building blocks together to create maximum visibility for your fledgling business in the most cost efficient and most sustainable way possible. You’ll learn the fundamentals of how to build your credibility, visibility and capability, how to review your own collateral and natural ability to ensure success, how to define yourself in the ‘category of one’, how to build your personal profile and your personal brand, how to basically stand out from the sea of new start-up businesses when you have little or no money. Yes it can be done, and this blog shows you how. It’s not based on theory, but on sharing what actually can work in the real world with illustrations taken from the author’s own experience of starting a number of businesses, together with interviews and case studies from a catalogue of small businesses in both the US and UK which the author has worked with over the years. You will be taken along a journey of self discovery and realisation that you can supercharge your leverage to expose your business to the masses and start to attract people to you, who want to buy from you and BUY NOW! You’ll learn how to build your virtual team and tap in to knowledge and experience learnt from people who have gone before you.

Never before has all this information been presented in such a structured, easy to follow way, aimed specifically at the solo-preneur.

Tina Jesson Founder of The British Academy for Solo-preneurs

www.tinajesson.com and www.whatthemediawants.com

“Tina Jesson is the ONLY …female British speaker and trainer who works with small and solopreneurial businesses – where YOU are your business -  to discover their ‘unique me’, develop razor sharp positioning to get maximum visibility and market penetration, so you start attracting clients who buy from YOU and only you, blasting competition out of the water“

Author of ‘How to Play the Property Game’ and ‘The Solo-preneurial Marketeer’