business management

We are in the year 2011 and it’s amazing to me that people are still cold calling, leaving voicemails, asking for appointments, and, in general, trying to pull out their Felix the Cat tricks that were dead and gone the moment the Internet reached awareness. (No offense, Felix.)

What is your social responsibility?

With the advent (or should I say onslaught) of social media and business social media, people are finally coming to their senses of what constitutes of social responsibility.

“Jeffrey, come down to the office, there’s a guy here who has cookies for you! They’re those Biscoff cookies, the ones that you like.” How could I resist? I love those cookies. I’ve eaten them for years, predominately on airplanes, more predominately on Delta. They also have them in the Delta lounge, and occasionally you can find them in the grocery store.

Cost and time over-runs are every construction manager’s nightmare. There are many factors that can contribute to these, but as a series of case studies show, one of the best ways to avoid them is to specify the right equipment for the job and use it correctly. In fact, as many of the projects featured in this article illustrate, using the right equipment can mean a competitive advantage for contractors, allowing them to finish work ahead of schedule.

I read Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive by Harvey Mackay in 1992. It was a life-changing, and career-changing, book for me, and millions of other readers (hopefully you). The #1 New York Times bestseller Swim with the Sharks contains a hundred short business lessons that are both impactful and actionable.

What do your emails look like? Just like everyone else’s? How is that helping you “differentiate” yourself? How is that helping you make a sale? How are you accessing your social media sites? How are you creating an automated sales campaign? How are you accessing sales tips as you need help in real situations? How are you creating your weekly ezine (aka proactive value messages to your customers)?

In my early intensive days of learning sales and attitude (1972-1973), I was taking a four-hour sales and attitude training class EVERY DAY from 8am-noon. Every day.

All of my fellow learners (there were nine in the group) immediately took a lunch after the training – except me. I scheduled a sales appointment every day at 12:01pm.

SCENARIO: I need buttons for my upcoming Social BOOM! book launch. I want 1,000 buttons with the word BOOM! on them for people attending the launch party. Buttons will be an easy way of identifying who has registered and who has not. The buttons will also be a souvenir from the event.

I never met him, but I knew him. I never talked to him, but he spoke to me often. I never saw him present live, but my vision of him is burned into my brain. Steve Jobs has left the earth, but his legacy and remains are among each of us, and will be touched every day for decades.

Are your sales (finally) on the increase? It seems as though there’s a slight sales surge going on, but no one’s talking about it much – probably because no one wants to jinx it. The economy is still very fragile, the world is even more fragile, and with elections taking focus, politicians of all sorts are finally realizing that jobs and small businesses are the priority. That only took three years.