How To Double Your Profits By Giving Customers What They Want

““The difference between selling and service is inversely proportional to the quality of the product.”” – MMF Last week I met with a travel agency that has been struggling to bring its fledgling business into profitability. In the period of time I’ve worked with this agency, it has made a great deal of progress. They…

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Where Should You Be Doing Business?

A famous business publication interviewed me once and asked me this question: “If every one of your marketing concepts but one was taken away, which would you hold on to at any price?” I didn’t need a second to think about the question. I immediately answered that I’d never give up using endorsements. Why endorsements?…

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Learn How to Give Criticism and Praise

There is something in business (and life) we never learn well enough – how to criticize and encourage those who rely on us for advice. It’s more than a skill; it’s an art. Because, like other arts, criticism and praise are always imperfect (so they contain within them both the affirmation of their need and…

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Why You Should Raise Your Prices On A Regular Basis

““Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.”” – Anonymous When Norm Brodsky writes about business, I listen to him. A “veteran entrepreneur” whose six businesses include two in the $100 million range, Brodsky writes the occasional essay for Inc. magazine. Recently, he wrote a piece for Inc. on “the case…

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Measuring And Improving Your Personal Productivity

Today let’s do something very simple that could make a big difference in the time it takes you to accomplish your goals – and in the satisfaction you experience working towards them. First, Review Three Weeks’ Worth of Daily Task Lists I am making the assumption that you are using some sort of daily task…

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Retiring In Paradise

On Friday I got carried away with selling you beachfront property in Nicaragua. I meant to introduce my Big Idea to solve your Big Retirement Problem (i.e., you can’t have one). The Big Idea that will solve your Big Problem with retirement…. The idea of retirement is a recent one. It was invented after WWII…

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Writing Good Sentences, Part 2

“You don’t write because you want to say something: You write because you’ve got something to say.”” -F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Note-Books When we talked about writing good sentences last week, we discussed some of the fundamentals – length and structure, mostly. Today, I’d like to talk about another, perhaps more subtle, rhetorical device you…

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How To Find Your Personal Money Tree

““I can’t say I was ever lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.”” – Daniel Boone How do you attract the best possible people to your business? How do you snag that rare person who can help you grow and improve your company? How do you find someone capable of doing what you…

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Rise Early and Catch the Golden Worm

I hope you have considered what we talked about Monday –the enormous impact price has in any market, in any business situation …even in any personal situation. And I hope you figured out your life goals yesterday. Today we are going to talk about something just as important – a morning routine that can guarantee…

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