Business Coach and Business Coaching Articles

When you think of the end of the year, what do you think of? Most small business owners think of taxes. It’s not only a good time to analyze, but also plan ahead for the next year.

1. Make sure that you ask all of the right questions so that you truly understand your prospect's needs. Don't assume that you know what your customer wants or that they have the same needs as all of your other customers. Ask. This way you'll be sure. 2. Give your customers exactly what they ask for. "Sort of" doesn't count. Make sure that you are delivering quality each and every time. In addition, don't oversell. Persuading a customer to take more product than they actually need will quickly make you a one-time resource. 3.

If you want to become a masterful strategic networker, you have to be the one that makes it happen and that means taking a proactive approach to referral marketing. “Don’t wait for the good luck referral. Good luck if you get one, good luck if the person referred to you will talk to you, and good luck if you close it,” states Tim R. Green of President of Referral Institute of Michigan.

7 Mantras to help you attract wealth today No matter how hard you try to deny the fact, money has an important place in the world. Money makes life easier and more comfortable and gives you and your loved ones amazing opportunities that would otherwise lie beyond reach. Money also gives you incredible leverage in helping others, and for furthering causes you believe in—and hey, you get to buy some really amazing shoes, too! Listen ladies, you’re likely going to have to work hard anyway in this life, so why not make a lot of money doing so?

Have you ever asked yourself, “How can I get my business to the next level?” This is a common questio I receive and recently answered on a Q&A call for my Success Circle members. One of the important elements to get your business to the next level is that your business cannot be dependent on any one person, including you. If you currently do everything yourself, there is no leverage. Moving your business to the next level will be impossible. An important question in growing your business is to ask, “Where is there leverage?”

One of the questions I get asked frequently when I speak to groups of self-employed women is “Sue, how can I make sure that my business succeeds?” It’s a risk to open a business. We are putting our life’s energy and our money on the table, saying “I can take my life’s remaining days and my money, and I can create something that serves others and makes a profit.”

1. Make telephone calls No one will buy from you if they do not know of you, your company/products/services. Every sale has its own cycle. Depending on what you are selling, it could be a short cycle of a day or two, or it could be a long cycle of a year or two. Your call is your introduction and the start of your entire sales process. Without that initial prospecting call, you will not close any sales. 2. Make a lot of telephone callsr If you have only one prospect to pursue, that prospect becomes overwhelmingly important.

Crossing Lines It is not unusual to find that people who are foggy about their money also display a lack of healthy boundaries in other areas of their life, not just with money, but with people, their time, and their energy. Emotional and self awareness, self respect, honest communication and saying the hard stuff (even when you don’t feel like it), are necessary ingredients for defining your boundaries, designed to create a safe space in which you can function. Here are so

Originally a maritime reference, the phrase “steady as she goes” referred to the ships that navigated difficult waters. It was important to keep the ship steady so that it didn’t take on water. The old ships would sail along especially well in predictive seas. The first sign of unpredictability, however, can put the ship into chaos requiring a strong leader at the helm. A similar analogy can be used to describe people who are naturally hardwired as stable and methodical. They will go with the flow steadily and deliberately plotting their way to their destination.

While many fears, like a fear of heights or of fire, are designed to save our lives, other fears can hold you back and prevent you from achieving (and enjoying) success. In extreme cases, fear of failure, change, or risks can have a debilitating effect on your business, too. Your company could get stuck in a rut, because you're unwilling to try something new or face a challenge head-on. Here's how to overcome fear and unleash the courageous spirit within. Separate rational and irrational fears. It's OK to feel a few butterflies before an important interview.

Most business owners are good at pitching clients or reaching out to new customers. It’s the follow-up where they fall down. Why? Because they figure, “if they wanted my product, they’d finish the transaction,” or they worry that, “if I bug them too much, I’ll come off as needy.” Here’s the thing: while you’re worrying about bugging a prospective customer or telling yourself that maybe “they’re just not that into me,” someone else is following up and sealing the deal!

In the last 13 years as a Law of Attraction business coach, I’ve had the pleasure to interview hundreds of very successful entrepreneurs. I was able to ask them the secret to their success.

One of the first steps new business owners check off their list is designing their website. After all, you figure it can help establish your credibility and attract new clients. Fast forward a couple of months and you haven’t gotten a single person visiting your site.

You hear the stories about coaches earning 6-figure. You have the passion; you are an amazing coach deeply committed to the success of your clients; you are completely dedicated to making your business work. But ...you are still struggling. Don't worry, there is hope.

Some people are naturally poised and confident in front of a crowd. Then there's the rest of us. If you're not a born public speaker, are you doomed to sit on the sidelines? Certainly not! With coaching and practice, most people can develop their public speaking skills and improve their confidence, which in turn can help improve their business’ visibility. Here’s how to get started and boost your confidence. Study videos of yourself. Watching yourself on camera can be less than fun. (What happened to my hair? Is that really how I sound?) but it’s also extremely helpful.

Are you still trying to figure out how to integrate social media into your Marketing Mix? You’re not alone; many small business owners are confused about how to blend social media into their business. You might have signed yourself up for LinkedIn or Facebook but you find yourself wondering if social networking really works. Then, weeks go by and you keep hearing about how important social media is to growing your business but aren’t quite sure what next step to take.

Before you jump right in and ask your best friend to be your accountability partner for the rest of your natural-bo life, there are several questions you want to ask yourself before committing to a long-term relationship. These questions will help you figure out what you want in an accountability relationship. Take your time thinking through your answers; the only mistake you can make is to jump in too fast and commit to something that's not right. - Where are you in your bu

Having a business partnership can help grow your business into a success. There are many things to consider when selecting a partner, and not all of them are obvious. If success in business is your goal, it is vital that your partner or partners be compatible in a number of ways.

Fran excitedly hops into the conference room where Accounting is meeting and is just thrilled that she just landed one of the biggest accounts of her career and the largest in the company’s history. Rather than the excited response she anticipated, she was riddled with questions about how the contract was going to be implemented.

Juggling a million projects at once, burning the midnight oil, and traveling nonstop may sound like roads to success. But they’re also a recipe for burnout. Once you reach that point, it can be difficult to pull yourself out of a funk. Your health and productivity will suffer, and you’ll find it tougher to get jazzed about going to work or coming up with creative ways to market your business. Here are five ways to beat burnout – before it beats you down. 1.

“Any successful relationship, whether personal or business, is unique to every pair of individuals and evolves over time. It starts out tentative, fragile, full of unfulfilled possibilities and expectations. It grows stronger with experience and familiarity. It matures into trust and commitment. As it deepens, it evolves through three phases: visibility, credibility, and profitability” states Dr. Ivan Misner along with David Alexander & Brian Hilliard in the New York Times Best Selling book, Networking Like a Pro Turning Contacts into Connections.

Whether you're just starting a new business or you're looking to grow an established business, Feng Shui can help you. By working with the natural energies of the world, you can help draw opportunity and possibility to you just by changing your environment. Here are several tips you can use to grow your business – no matter where you're starting out from. 1. Look for dead things – Whether it's plants or items that simply don't work, if you want to grow a business, you need t

Online business is the new buzz in the non-business lot. A number of working professionals are looking at the online space as an alternative income source. Most of them want to start up a website or their own or adopt a business model that is already running successfully. Irrespective of the scale of operations, every business requires Business Planning. With growing competition, it is quite naive to expect that earning money with online startups is a cakewalk. Competition is

A day care center should essentially provide a safe, nurturing, and healthy environment for children of all ages. Prior planning on how you want to develop your day care center is very important to get appropriate resources, funds, and staff. Sample business proposal will be developed with rough estimations. For the final plan, actual estimations and calculations will be derived from these numbers only. Sections of a Day Care Business Plan Sample of business plan for a day ca

The traditional image of workplace coaching has been for the reserve of executives or individuals with high potential within an organisation. It is now reaching the shop floor with organisations realising that managers using coaching skills in the workplace can provide direct performance and business benefits.

In the relationship you have with your clients and customers, how far are you willing to go? Let’s speak about the product’s side first. If you sell goods or products on the internet or from a store, are you tracking your sales and returns by customer? A customer that is a buyer on a regular basis, do you have an established method of staying in touch with them? Are you aware of their interests, likes, dislikes and more, so you may add value to their daily lives? How about returns?

If you haven't already, it's time to plan for your success in 2011. I find most entrepreneurs fall into one of two categories when it comes to planning. See which one resonates with you. You resist planning, thinking that it will restrict your freedom and creativity. This means that you just let your business flow in any direction. The result is that you probably are frustrated that you don't get any truly big success or momentum. Or you love planning so much that you never s

Serving people and being a people pleaser is not the same thing. Pleasing yourself first brings an abundance of joy and energy that can be used to serve others. When you light the internal flame you can shine your light on family, friends and community. People pleasing habits conversely snuff the inner light and you end up burned out and unable to serve anyone. If you are not quite sure what people pleasing might look like in your own life, here are 30 characteristics of a chronic, ingrained people pleaser… The perpetual people pleaser… 1. Avoids asking for, and accepting, help.r

You may have heard before that you want to use your social advertising platforms as an avenue to demonstrate your expertise, and give your customers an incentive to buy from you. It's important that you are growing relationships with people, and nothing will hurt you more in the long run than having your social networking sites look like long sales letters. But I have a confession to make...

Fibroids are benign tumors of the uterus and they are present in 20-50% of all women. No one knows what causes fibroids. Carolyn Myss says they represent our unbirthed creativity – dreams and images of ourselves that have never seen the light of day. Fibroids are often associated with conflicts ...

There’s only one instance where you don’t have to worry about how to position your brand. You’re in a category where there is no competition. Simple enough, right! But we’re living in a global village. We’re dealing with ever-changing consumer needs, new technologies and more competition than ever before. Clearly, it’s becoming more difficult to create a compelling personality around your brand that is meaningfully differentiated in the mind of the consumer. OK. H

I am going to date myself here so don't laugh but, when I was growing up my parents taught me to get an education and get a job. Well I was still in the era that I should get a high school education, find a man and have a family plus get a job. This was in the 70's so some of your understand. I did go to the career class in high school and looked at my options. I was really tall, 5 ft 11 in, and I expressed an interest in being an airline stewardess. I was told that there was

How To Identify The Target Market for Your Pet Sitting Business What Is a Target Market? A target market is simply the group of people that you aim to have as clients for your products or services. In regards to the pet sitting business, it’s those people whose pets you want to sit for and ...

Do you want to inspire people? Do you have a burning desire to share your life experiences and tell your stories so that other people can benefit? If so, there are a number of things to consider when writing an inspiring speech. This last summer I was inspired by what I witnessed at the Beijing ...Do you want to inspire people? Do you have a burning desire to share your life experiences and tell your stories so that other people can benefit? If so, there are a number of things to consider when writing an inspiring speech.

Oh yes, the speaker proposal.... You ask yourself, "Where do I start?", "How do I create a proposal that will get noticed out of hundreds of proposals?" Lost in confusion and frustration, you toss together a simple, plain ol' proposal in hopes it will catch the eye of the hiring party. No, no, no we don't want you to do that and that's why I wrote this article to help you customize and create an eye-catching proposal.

We sleep, but we don’t sleep enough. We eat, but not the right foods. We relax, but in front of the mind numbing television. We take great care of everyone else in our life, and we don’t take great care of ourselves. We allow ourselves to come dead last in the scheme of things. What is wrong with this picture? As parents and caregivers, it’s common to neglect self-care. We are so busy fussing and worrying about our children (or sometimes our parents), we forget about our own needs.

More and more consultants are offering their services in the online arena. If you’re one of them, I wish to help you succeed in your new endeavor. Here are some tips that I would like you to always bear in mind: 1. Take advantage of training programs. Right now, there are training programs that are specifically created for those people who would like to start a consulting business in the online arena. I highly recommend that you take advantage of them. Pick those that are o

If it were easy, everyone would do it; everyone would have it. That "IT" is prosperity and we're all trying to achieve that stage in our lives where wealth, health, success are a daily part of our lives. So what's the problem? Why aren't some of us living a prosperous life? Read on, my ...

Not only do entrepreneurs need to be able to answer questions for prospective investors, they need to be able to ask questions to investors in search for the right fit. Some of the basic questions that entrepreneurs ask are: • Tell us what you think of our strategy, how we size up the competition, and our game plan. What have we missed? Whom have we missed? • Are there competitors we have overlooked? How are we vulnerable and how do we compete? • How would you change th

The recent years have seen a lot of entrepreneurs moving to online platforms to grow their business. Specifically, by using social media websites to establish a profile and brand for their company online. The importance of using social networking sites has become apparent to business owners, but unfortunately a lot of bad advice is out there on how to grow a custom social network.

Powerful. When faced with Inc. magazine's picture of Jordan Zimmerman, founder of the eponymously named advertising agency, forcefully propelling his bike into the dark, early hours of the day, you can't help but think this is a powerful, motivated and productive human being. In fact, their entire feature on "Secrets of the Highly Productive" is densely populated with powerful, accomplished, productive people. The idea was to highlight tips that we mere mortals can embrace to

In 1998 I wrote my first book, Sales Skills for An Unfair Advantage: 104 Sales Tips for People in a Hurry. Sales professionals still seem to be in a hurry! With speed in mind and a focus being to help in particular, here are 35 tips to help introverts and shy to sell more easily. Sales ...

We went to a beautiful wedding a few weeks ago for a couple we have been friends with for quite awhile. My girlfriend had two children from a previous marriage (one boy, one girl) & had told us to feel free to bring our own children if we came. This was a nice change for us since we have six children, and it always stresses out at least one child to not be invited to a wedding.

The only way to achieve your Retail Sales Goals is to write down the figures! The entire team (each member) and most importantly your front receptionist must know their sales goal. Why include the front receptionist? The receptionist’s job position is the most important job for any business. Being the first personal contact the public has to your business makes this job, a true MVP team position! The receptionist is a director, the story teller and the keeper of secrets. Th

The 4 C’s of Teamwork The top priority for many leaders is how to make the team work as a TEAM! Successful projects depend on how well the team works together. Definitely in the world of business, no team is perfect. To begin working as ONE team, the starting point is to clearly outline the vision of the project. Several studies and research have revealed that to lead a team as one, we need to look at factors such as commitment, contributions, communication, and cooperation. Commitment

In any company or group situation, interpersonal conflicts are bound to happen. When two or more people with varying personalities work together, communication differences, work style preferences, and conflicting opinions are inevitable. The key is to be able to overcome any differences so everyone stays productive and the organization excels. Whenever interpersonal conflict arises in your day-to-day dealings with others, put these 5 steps to conflict resolution to work. They

There is an old adage which states, “It’s difficult to soar with the eagles, when you’re scratching with the turkeys!” While this is absolutely true, it gets worse - scratching with the turkeys can actually keep you from enjoying the success which is available to everyone! Of course, in the ...

Successful business leaders tend to be very observant and are exceptionally good at decision-making. Part of what makes them good at making the right decision quickly is their education and past experiences. A business-savvy executive acts fast, but not without clear intentions and strategic ...

Just like any other business, setting up a fitness business requires a systematic approach. In fact, it needs more dedication and you should know all the details such as infrastructure, formalities, and skills that come into play when setting up a fitness business. Here is a step-by-step account that will help you if you are setting up a fitness business. How to get into the fitness business: If you are looking to set up your own fitness business then your first step will be to get the proper certification to instruct fitness classes.