Wish you didn’t have a boss?

I’m in sunny, warm Tucson, Arizona vacationing for a few days.  I will be attending a workshop here to further my education in marketing and branding my business.  It’s wonderful building my own business and not having a boss…  I know, because I had one (in fact many bosses) for 24 years.

Wish you didn’t have a job or a boss?  You can do it,  just like I did.  If you’re ready to (or thinking about it) to move up and on,  make sure you check out my website at www.soulpreneursuccessstrategies.com to learn about my new Soulpreneur and Get Clients Now programs starting soon. 

In the meantime, here’s a little humor from the Jokes Journal Blog to get you motivated!

Employed by the human-development center of a corporation
in the Midwest, a young woman trained employees in proper
dress codes and etiquette.

One day as she was stepping onto the elevator, a man
dressed in jeans and a golf shirt got on with her.

Thinking of her responsibilities, she scolded,

“Dressed a little casually today, aren’t we?”

The man shrugged,

“Yeah, well, that’s one benefit of owning the company.”

5 Strategies for Overcoming Your Client’s Erroneous Zones

Ego is the unobserved mind that runs your life when you are not present as the witnessing consciousness.

-         Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

A couple contacted my husband several months ago about building a new home.  We spent many hours taking them through the design process, finding out specifically what they wanted in their new home, and how their budget could best be utilized.  They spent several thousand dollars purchasing a lot, paying for my husband to do the home design, and installing a septic on the home site.  The building permit is now ready to pick-up.  Our clients are at the final decision making stage.  The only question remaining is will they or won’t they sign the construction contract…

As we were going through this process, the housing market took a nose dive.  Suddenly the perception of our clients, and most of those folks in the market to build a new home, is that they should be paying a price per square foot comparable to existing houses that have decreased in value significantly. 

Consider this scenario.  If you were a home builder paying astronomical gas prices, which affects every part of the building supply industry; you had to deal with suppliers and subcontractors who also have rising costs; and you had employees who expect to eat and pay their bills regularly, does it make sense that any of your costs would be going down?  I think not…

So, here we are at a crossroads with our customer.  Their perception and our reality are very different, and ne’r the two shall meet.  Where does this leave us?  How do we overcome the disparity between us and our customers? 

As well as looking for ways to cut costs and get the best prices on materials possible, it’s part of our job to educate our customers about what’s going on in the building industry, and the value we can add to their project.  What is not in our best interest is criticizing, judging, and allowing bad feelings to dominate our lives until it carries over into our business relationships, which could lead to the death of our business.

Here are five strategies to help you overcome negative feelings and move into a positive mode of caring for your customers and your business, when you are faced with a similar situation.

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Is Your Marketing Up to Snuf with PepsiCo’s?

For those of you who haven’t joined the blog and social networking revolution because you’re not sure it works, you might be interested to know that PepsiCo, with their $98 Billion Worldwide Retail Sales, has jumped on the bandwagon. 

In PepsiCo’s latest Annual Report I read that they are "leveraging the world’s most interactive communications environment to put their brand at the core of pop culture by creating consumer "buzz" using internet blogs, online video views, and interactive promotions."

I don’t know about you, but I’m sure their marketing and research budget is quite a bit larger than mine.  So, I think I’ll take this blog and networking thing a little more seriously.

How about you?