So, they’re as good as the next guy.

Is that any way to advertise yourself? Is anyone going to switch battery brands (or, more importantly, start working with a “virtual” partner on mission-critical tasks) because they’re “as good as the next guy” ?

Marketers talk about your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) for a good reason. If you can’t show a prospect why you are the only possible choice, why you are the perfect match for them, ask yourself: why should they choose you?

If you’re only as good as the next guy, what happens when the next guy gets just a little bit cheaper, or a little better, or both?

(By the way, even if you’re far better than the next guy, if you can’t show a prospect why you’re a perfect match, consider the possibility that they aren’t a perfect match for you.)

Oh, really? That’s like saying “It will feel like you have a headache.” Uh, yeah.

Here’s the truth: there will be days when the only reason you don’t turn in your Entrepreneur’s Badge in a miasma of frustration, anger, and disgust is because you can’t find the flipping phone number of whoever takes the “I Surrender!” calls, and that’s because you can’t bear to crawl out from under the covers to go look for it.

Y’know, like yesterday.

Then sleep, with its magical power to strip us of reason and pour beautiful dreams back into our souls, will gently wipe away the smudges and push you out the door to do it all again.

Y’know, like today.

These days I know better. No project is certain until the money’s in the till.

So many metaphors come to mind. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch, f’rinstance. It’s easy to say, look, we’ve got eggs, therefore, we’ll have chickens. Or, look, we’ve got hot prospects, therefore we’ve got a project.

Speaking of eggs, don’t put ‘em all in one basket. If you earn your living primarily from a single client, that client owns you. In reality, you’re en employee, not an entrepreneur. Have plenty of smaller eggs, not just one large one.

And more than one basket, if you can arrange it.

Twenty small streams of income is more stable than 2 large streams. Seems nothing is stable these days, so when you start juggling all those chickens and eggs and baskets, be prepared to lose a few.

If you’ve got spares, there’ll always be enough for that omelette.

When tea first arrived in England it was expensive. Not, a little bit pricey expensive, but prohibitive, only for the rich expensive. But it caught on quickly, because, well, it’s great.

One woman in the south took a full pound of her expensive cache and sent it to her sister in the north, telling her how marvelous it was. Her sister boiled it, dumped the black liquid off and served it like a vegetable. She wrote back about how terrible it was.

She’d prepared it like a vegetable, which she understood, instead of seeing it for what it was: something entirely new.

Some business folks hear about the ‘new marketing’ and assume it’s just more of the old marketing, except online. They still want instant results, measured in dollars return on dollars invested. They want ways to convince people to buy, no matter what they’re selling. They spend time and money bolting a website and blog and email autoresponders onto their old-school advertising.

They’re dumping the tea and eating the leaves, and then they wonder why it doesn’t work.

If you help your clients with their marketing efforts, you may, like the first woman in the story, assume that they’ll know how to brew a pot of social media marketing. Erm, tea. Whatever.

But, like the second woman, they don’t. They can’t. Because it’s so foreign to them, they have nothing to connect it to. Give information away, with no firm plan for monetising it? That don’t make no sense!

Had the first woman included some simple instructions along with her glowing praise, the story may have had a happier ending. Don’t leave anything to chance. Clients who are new to the new marketing will need a lot of hand-holding, a lot of encouragement and explanation and nudging.

Don’t assume they get it, unless you actually see them drinking the tea.

Or perhaps you are looking for your niche in the virtual world. How do you determine what it is you really want to focus on?

Now there’s a tool with practical exercises to help you discover your passion. Visit Business Heretics to learn more.

Reticular Activating System

How is that possible? The same way you can even follow a conversation in a crowded room: it’s your reticular activating system. (It’s in that picture over there. Isn’t it lovely?)

Here’s another cocktail party game: remember that time the person you were stuck talking to was so boring you were considering pulling your own ears off, but instead, you started listening to the folks sitting behind you? Never took your eyes off the snoozing boor in front of you, and you could even still hear their voice if you chose to, but your attention was elsewhere. (Oh, come on; you’ve done it. Yes you have.)

Sometimes, there’s just so much going on that you jump back and forth, mentally, between two conversations—without moving a muscle. Just shift focus; over here, then over there.

So what on earth does your reticular activating system have to do with business?

Your clients have one, too.

Ask most small business operators who their target client is, and they’ll say “everyone!” Remember the cocktail party? When some random person across the room says “hey; wanna hear a joke?” you don’t even hear them, because your RAS doesn’t pick up stuff like that. It’s a focus tool, and you don’t focus on random.

Neither do your clients.

When your marketing materials speak directly to a specific narrow niche, you cut through the clutter, and they hear you. If you’re writing to ‘everyone’, guess who hears you? No one.

But if you’re writing to single moms with school age children trying to start a service business they can operate while the kids are in school, which the kids can help with during the summer—all of a sudden, when those folks read your blog or hear you speak at an event, they hear you loud and clear. Their RAS focuses them on your message, because it is obvious that you’re speaking to them, not to the room in general.

Specific narrow niche. Choose one, speak to it, get heard, and grow.

Let us show you how—take advantage of our free 30-minute coaching session. Bring your biggest business challenge, and we’ll show you how the commonsense principles of the book can help you overcome it.

(By the way, when we say ‘free’, we mean free. No obligation, no pitch—no kidding. If you’d like to talk to other VAs who’ve taken us up on the free offer, just ask and we’ll put you in touch with some.)

But it’s not a rudder they’re missing. It’s motion.

A sailboat is a fine thing, even sitting at the dock. But sitting at docks is not what they’re designed for; they’re designed to use the wind to push against the waves and, between the two opposing forces, create forward motion.

And now, once the sailboat is under way, the rudder starts working.

You can sit at the dock ’til the cowfish come home, swinging the rudder from side to side, and you’ll never find direction. It’s only in movement that we can measure our progress against any kind of standards to see if we’re heading somewhere we want to go.

Feeling rudderless? Get away from the dock. Head, first, into the safety of a nearby harbor. Check out your rigging and stock the galley with supplies. Do what you reasonably can to prepare for the journey.

And then go. ‘Away from the dock’ is automatically ‘toward something new.’ Keep one eye on the compass to see where you’re heading, and one on the horizon, to see where you want to go.

And now, now that you’re moving, you’ll find direction.

I’ve been in the chaos between two Sigmoid curves lately. My consulting, speaking and coaching business was originally called ‘The Commonsense Entrepreneur’, which is also the name of my first full-length business book. Lately, though, that name has come to mean the book, specifically, and not necessarily the business.

My speaking gigs and my coaching have leaned more and more toward two things: building a business based on the trust that comes from communication that’s more human, and being a career renegade; making a great living doing what you love.

Those aren’t best conveyed by the phrase ‘commonsense entrepreneur’ so I’m changing that.

For now, ‘The Commonsense Entrepreneur’ is the book and its accompanying website. My business is me; Joel D Canfield. (If it doesn’t have the ‘D’ it isn’t really me, and you might note the lack of a period after the middle initial.) Until a brilliant new name strikes me, I’ll be presenting myself as author, speaker and business mentor Joel D Canfield, co-founder of the Northern California Association of Entrepreneurs.

What are you changing today?

It’s a notebook.

I’ve spent an hour this morning trying to remember the details of a conversation I had with a client, so I can write an outline for our next coaching session. I feel like I’m not providing the real value I want to deliver when I can’t get back in the emotional moment that sparked a very clear picture of our next chat; our direction for the next session.

Thing is, I really was taking notes—but on what my client was saying, not on what I was saying. I mean, I’ll remember my own words, right?

As a matter of fact, no; I don’t.

I’m planning on recording these calls, strictly so I can go back and review what was said and how it was said, to recapture the emotional impact. My benefit comes from changing how people feel based on what they think about, not just sharing facts for them to sort out in their own head.

My dad never went anywhere without a little thirty-nine cent notebook in his shirt pocket (he write in it with a fountain pen, in green ink—but that’s another story.) When he needed to remember something, he just wrote it down. Not only did he actually remember things later (reviewing the notes) but his mind was free to concentrate on the moment instead of spending part of its energy remembering the three simple little things he needed to remember—they were in the notebook, not his head.