Are You Making These Mistakes with Your Business Card?

One fact alone should make you determined to have a quality business card: unless you have a high-traffic website, more people will see your business card than any other item in your marketing inventory. Yet business cards do not always serve us well. Or at least not as well as they should. Startups in particular make common mistakes in the design and production of their cards. Here are some of the most serious mistakes that you want to avoid.

Continue reading

What? No Website? What a Horrendous Mistake!

If you’re an encore entrepreneurs without a website, I want to show you how simple and how essential it is to create one. When I started my business in 2001, the smartest thing that I did in the first three months was to develop a website. Over the years this one move has paid immeasurable dividends and brought me untold new business. It’s simply short-sighted to do business today without a web presence.

Continue reading

Seven Avenues for Maximizing Personal Influence

In selling ourselves to others, our purpose is to gain their cooperation, collaboration, business, or support. Without influence, we can accomplish none of these objectives. And if this is true of people in general, it’s particularly true of small business owners. To achieve their dreams and to do so with their limited resources, small business owners must daily capitalize on their ability to influence people. As an encore entrepreneur, your self-improvement agenda should therefore make it a priority to enhance your capacity for exerting influence.

Continue reading

Why Small Business Owners Burn Out

People start businesses with a dream of the freedom the business will give them. Then they find themselves a few years later frustrated, exhausted, and on the verge of burnout. One of the primary reasons that this happens to small business owners is that they never shed an employee mindset to assume an entrepreneurial mindset. Had they done so, they would have structured their time and their business much differently.

Continue reading