In this video:
00:54 What happens to your business if something happens to you?
01:40 What will be needed as a minimum to close out your business?
02:41 Marketing Specials at Christmas (B 2 C)
03:17 Great opportunity to get yourself ready to beat the competition in the new year
03:40 Tech Tip – How to Use the Web Smarter
04:52 Distractions – How To Master Them
05:25 Santa Story to Learn From This Christmas
Hi, I’m Jamie McKean –
First business question that came across my desk this week that I really wanted to share with you and look, it’ nearly Christmas, and i’m all festive but this one might put a dampener on it. I’m going to share with you anyway:
What if something happen to you?
ie you die.
How will your business carry on without you? Will it carry on without you? Will it just stop dead in its tracks (no pun intended)?
A Succession Plan?
That’s one whole topic of conversation:
How to have a succession plan in place so that your business can carry on.
If your business today will stop in its tracks if something happens to you then potentially the question is – Do you have a business? Or you’re just working for yourself, by yourself and so you actually don’t have an assett. You don’t have a business.
It’s all in your head?
In reality, you just have a job, not a business.
Succession planning is more about how to get “it” out of your head:
- building the processes,
- building procedures,
- even building products that can sell without you.
That’s how you can build your business to be an asset.
A Recent Sad Entrepreneur Story To Learn From
But the point I wanted to cover was a story where a gent died recently and his wife just didn’t know what to do:
– didn’t know how to get on to his computer,
– didn’t know how to contact his clients,
– didn’t know what bills were outstanding, etc.
So even a smallest piece of writing down all the steps in your business (just in case something did happen to you), to answer the question: “what will be needed at least to close out your business?”, is a really powerful step you could take right now.
It may only take you half an hour to an hour to do that – but well worth it especially for peace of mind for your loved ones – because that’s what we’re here doing it for. Isn’t it?
You’ll Have Insurances, Right?
Of course, I assume you’ve got the relevant insurances to cover your loved ones, I’m talking more about an extra step to help, just-in-case.
Back To Festive Times!!
So moving back to a more festive Christmas – it is the Winter Edition and I’m here in the UK. It’s Northwest of England. Blustery weather outside and some floods locally.
It’s thanksgiving today, so Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends, and colleagues, and clients over in America. Hope you have a wonderful day and hopefully you’re rolling out of your seats right now with very large stomachs. 🙂
Marketing News
For Business to Consumer
It is coming up into Christmas and if you’re in a business who sells to consumers (A B to C business), are you already doing your marketing specials? Are you doing your Christmas specials? Has that already started for you?
You’ll see in supermarkets nowadays that from about October there’s Christmas specials, they’re trying to get an early year. It needs to be the right timing for you but it should have started now okay, and at the end of November, you should have already started Christmas mode.
And especially for the business to consumer market you should also have an annual marketing calendar, with Christmas being just one of the campaigns in front of you.
Do you have one of those in your business yet?
For Business to Business Marketing –
Right now, most of your clients have probably started winding down for Christmas – they’ll be thinking more about the family holidays than their own business. This is a great opportunity to get yourself ready to be on all cylinders when it comes around to January, February time.
This is a great time now to be looking at your own systems in your processes, maybe even building assets for the future like automation for your business.
Okay?
If you want some help, just look http://automatingyou.com
The Entrepreneurs Tech Tip for the Week
A tech tip for you this week, come across on my desk called: zapier.com
Potentially a new way that we’re going to interact with the Web – very clever, it’s drag and drop,it’s really easy to use. But you can setup how all of your web services work together.
What do I mean by that?
Let me give you an example.
Working Smarter With The Web:
If you’ve created a Google event (if you use Google apps like I do for my business) and if you were to create a Google Calendar event, you could have an Evernote automatically setup.
That’s great when you use Evernote to track your meetings like I do.
If someone tweeted about you that could be fed into Evernote, so you could read it later.
If someone wrote an email to you in a certain way, that could be sent as a tweet.
All of these different systems, it’s an “if, when and then” – If someone does this, then do this.
All drag and drop. There’s a free trial.
I suggest you should go and have to look at it if you use quite a lot on the web – Zapier.com
Productivity Tip Of The Week
On a productivity level, I want to talk about distractions:
The Four Types of Distractions
Distractions: I teach this in my productivity courses.
There are four types of distractions and YOU are the main one – you are your biggest distraction.
Always be on the look-out for strategies to control what you do and get better at what you do so you don’t become your biggest distraction.
A good little tool you can use to help on this that I picked up yesterday from Tim Ferris – Author and Speaker, is a tool called Rescue Time.
That’s something that you can put on your computer. It monitors what you do while you’re at your desk.
You can then start seeing how you’re distracting yourself and that gives you insights.
You Need To Measure To Manage Your Distractions
And like everything in business: what you can measure, you can manage.
So once you start seeing what you’re doing, you can actually better control to minimize you as a distraction.
To finish up for the week, a funny for the week, as this week is coming up to Christmas.
Don’t Get Stuck Like This Santa Did!
In one of a local shopping centres here, there were about 3,000 people, as someone dressed up as Santa Claus was abseiling his way down to the bottom so he could switch on the Christmas tree lights for the Christmas event.
Unfortunately, Santa got stuck.
His beard got stuck in the abseil equipment so Santa – for about 45 minutes – was swinging by the rope – 3,000 people watching.
In the end the lights were switched on without him, and he was up there still in the sky until an army gent dropped his own rope down, abseiled next to him and chopped his beard to free him from his own contraption!!
So little tip there, if you are going to do anything special this Christmas just make sure you don’t have a very long beard that’s going to get stuck anywhere.
And if you do, please share it with me – just for comedy sake!
If I find video for that I will share it.
This is Jamie McKean , speak to you again soon.
Bye for now.
Lots of Great Ideas for Entrepreneurs at JamieMcKean.com