small business marketing Archives - Excellerate Associates

What To Do When Your Business Grows So Fast Your Hair Catches On Fire

March 8, 2012 by Lisa Mininni Leave a Comment

There’s a moment when you reach the tipping point of your business. A tipping point is that split second when something reaches critical mass. It is also seen when the line on the chart starts to shoot upward.

Once my clients systematize their marketing, they reach this tipping point quickly. Their prospect pipeline is filled and they bring in consistent income. Then, it happens. The person they hired to help them decides to move on to another opportunity. Just as the momentum starts, they need to put out another fire.

When business is expanding fast, there are two quick questions to get you through the growing pains. To get a handle on it all, ask yourself:

What’s Most Important?

This simple question cuts through the minutia and into what matters most. As you list what’s most important, keep that list under control by rating each task using 1, 2 or 3, with 1 the most important and 3 the least important. Jot down each task’s due date. When doing this, check with your clients. Your timeframes may be much more aggressive than their timeframes.

Place each task on your calendar as you would any appointment and work through the task at the allotted time. This will give you a visual if it is achievable to complete the task or if you need to adjust your due dates. Cross off completed items to see how much has been accomplished and re-evaluate any remaining items.

2. Where is there leverage?

If you’re performing a task over and over, you may have an opportunity to automate your process. As my reach expanded to 11 countries so did the requests for speaking engagements. What I discovered is that most hiring organizations ask for standard information when booking an engagement. My online Media Kit contains most of the information needed to hire me. Because everything is at their fingertips, including the biographical summary, pictures, keynote description and keynote objectives, it saves them a ton of time in determining if my topics can be used at their summits. I also use an automated process on inquiries from guests who ask to be on my radio show. They make the request online and get instant access to the information we need. When they send us what we need, we determine when it fits and it gets scheduled.

Another type of leverage is delegating. Delegation is a skill you must master if you want that growth trend line to continue shooting upward. When you try to do all of the work on your own, you limit the amount that your business can grow. There are side benefits to delegation. Your transferring of responsibility develops your contractors or staff, helping you to spend your energy on client and revenue-generating activities.

Your business can grow like wildfire, but it doesn’t mean you have to burn the candle at both ends. These simple questions will help you to be more productive, provide timely customer service, and grow your business with less effort.

If you’re missing out on business growth because you lack the systems and automation to grow it, then you’ll want to join us for my upcoming Entrepreneurial Edge System 3-Day Intensive. This complete boot camp covers everything you need to know to fill your prospect pipeline automatically with pre-qualified prospects and systematize and automate your internal processes quickly no matter how long you’ve been in business. The tools, models, scripts, templates, and examples are handed to you in an easy to implement format. That’s why my clients have gotten such great results from it. Learn all about it at

Using the L Word to Grow Your Business

November 17, 2011 by Lisa Mininni Leave a Comment

Have you ever asked yourself, “How can I get it all done and get my business to the next level?” This is a common question I get from my new small business clients. In fact, recently, I received an email that read, “How do you manage to keep up with your emails, clients, customers and travel? You are just amazing and my hero!” When at a meeting last week, I got a similar question from a networking colleague, too.

So if it seems effortless, a lot of it is! However, it wasn’t always that way. It was only after I adopted the L word: leverage. What do I mean by leverage? By definition, leverage is a lever allowing you to lift or move a heavy object with a lesser amount of energy.

The truth is leverage is a mindset and separates an ordinary business from a highly profitable one. If you’re not leveraged, you are working way too hard. It is one of the most important elements that helped me to grow my business each year.

Your business cannot be dependent on just you. If you do everything yourself, there is no leverage. When applied, leverage works like magic. Unfortunately, most people don’t apply it or believe they need lots and lots of money to start and run a profitable business or expand an existing one. This is a common self-limiting belief many entrepreneurs have. In many cases, they are leaving a lot of money on the table because they aren’t taking advantage of things they already have.

While it is important to invest in yourself and in your business, you may have a lot of leverage slipping through your fingertips that won’t require any additional investment. While going through one of the leverage exercises we cover in my annual three-day intensive workshop, a client remembered a long-forgotten program she created. She immediately realized she could start marketing it and instantly brought in income for herself.

It’s actually very easy to apply leverage to a small business, get more done, and make more money. If you’ve been in my reader community, then you know that I rely on systems to do my heavy lifting. But systems are only one of many ways to leverage your small business. In this article, I’ll get you started in leveraging your business so you get more done starting today:

First, list all of the activities you can automate or outsource that aren’t directly related to generating income or clients. This includes administrative tasks that are necessary but can be outsourced or automated.

Second, determine the amount of time it takes for you to do these activities yourself. Identify which ones you can outsource. Think of all of the resources you have at your disposal, including interns at the local college or stay-at-home mothers who are looking for work they can do from home.

With just these two steps, one of my clients freed up more time on his schedule when he outsourced a process. He was sending letters to each new networking contact but this activity was administrative in nature. Although it was necessary, it wasn’t directly related to bringing in income or clients. Instead of sending out the letter himself after attending a networking meeting, he notifies his virtual assistant who then sends a letter to his new network colleague. He now spends more time on revenue-generating activities and other relationship-building activities with his clients. In just the first couple of weeks, he brought in two new clients considerably offsetting what he paid his virtual assistant.

There are many exciting forms of leverage, including licensing products, automating, and using the latest technology to take over manual processes. Leverage is an essential tool to catapult your business to the next level and grow your business exponentially with a lot less effort.

Keeping in Touch is More Important Than You Think

October 6, 2011 by Lisa Mininni 3 Comments

With just 4% of people willing to do business with you the very first time they hear about you, keeping in touch with your prospects is more important than ever. The other 96% will do business with you only when trust has been established.

Yet, business owners continue to work hard at talking to prospects, networking, and implementing business-awareness marketing strategies, but lack solid systems to cultivate trust and stay in touch with those people whom they meet. Incredibly, keep-in-touch systems are often forgotten about or neglected by many small business owners. With only 20% of leads actually followed up on, that’s a heaping pile of lost opportunity.

Just as important to having a system to keep in touch is how you approach using your system to cultivate your relationships. One wrong move and you could be creating more work without developing a strong return on your relationship investment systems.

There are three main elements every entrepreneur should consider so that their keep-in-touch systems work for them:

• Make your system permission-based,
• Be Consistent, and
• Develop Stakeholder-Specific Keep-in-Touch Systems

Make Your System Permission-Based

One of the major mistakes entrepreneurs make is create an e-newsletter and call it their keep-in-touch system. They will attend networking events and erroneously place everyone they meet on their list. They think they are growing their list but wonder why it’s not working for them. It’s not only important to have a system, but how you approach using that system.

There are four things fundamentally wrong with adding someone you just met to your system without their permission. First, not everyone you meet will want to receive information from you. They may not tell you that directly but they will forward it to their junk email in which case your email doesn’t get read. You’re also putting the ownership on a person you just met to opt out – not a way to start a relationship. Second, not everyone is your ideal client. Third, if you add them and they didn’t asked to be added, you did not get their permission. You run the risk of being reported as a spammer. Further, each time they receive an email from you, it will be a source of annoyance because their email is already filled to capacity. Rather than eager with anticipation to read something they asked to receive, your email will trigger a negative emotion. Fourth, it becomes a quantity versus quality list. Quantity does not work if nobody on your list would ever do business with you. It’s the people who want to receive your value-added content that you want to establish a rapport with.

With a permission-based and opt-in only system, they are making the choice to join your community. When they opt in, they are choosing to receive information from you and likely will have expectations of receiving value-added content. With a permission-based system, you are reversing the sales process by pulling in those prospects who opt in rather than pushing hard by adding them to your list.

Be Consistent

Consistency over time creates trust. There’s nothing worse than establishing an expectation and not following through on it. It does nothing for your credibility or for cultivating a strong relationship with a prospect, customer, or referral source.

Whether you send a card to a predetermined number of prospects each week or an email to your entire list community, make sure to establish regular contact. My mortgage representative has developed a nice stay in touch system. Several times a year, I receive a newsletter in my mailbox that has home decorating tips and other interesting market information about home ownership. Each year, she also invites us to the local cider mill to enjoy cider, donuts and conversation. I always look forward to receiving the newsletter and the invitation to the cider mill. Your system doesn’t have to be expensive or online but it does have to provide value and remain consistent for you to be top of mind.

Develop Stakeholder-Specific Keep-In-Touch Systems

One size does not fit all. Some of your prospect-related communications may not be appropriate to include with a referral source you just met. A referral source is someone who has the same target market as you do and who may send you referrals. Your approach and system would be different for a prospect and a referral source. When you send a letter to your referral source, cultivate the relationship by asking them how you can help them. With a little ingenuity, you may come up with a way to make them look good for their clients or simply make an introduction to someone they have been trying to connect with for some time. Having stakeholder-specific systems helps you to tailor your message and keeps your database current. In sending out a regular letter to my referral sources, I discovered several referral sources changed or expanded their target market. They returned a response in the self-addressed, stamped envelope I included with my letter. My referral sources thanked me for asking them about any updates to their contact information and their target market. It also keeps my database up to date so when I send referrals their way, they are spot on.

Keeping in touch should be more than a year-end holiday card. With value-added systems, you can close your communication gaps, establish trust, and, most importantly, be top of mind with both your prospects, clients and your referral sources.

In what ways do you keep in touch with prospects, customers, referral partners or referral sources? (Leave your comment below.)

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