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10 Quick and Easy Organising Ideas
by Marcia Francois
This week’s tips are quick and easy because we’re all busy people and I’m sure you want to get down to business, right?
If you’re anything like me, that is! 
People often think they need to have HUGE blocks of time to make any progress with organising. That’s not true and is, in fact, one of the biggest organising myths around.
Like Flylady says, you can do anything for 15 minutes.
For those of you who have phoned my cell phone, what does my voicemail message say???
“Small results, repeated consistently over time, produce huge results”.
Here are some ideas when you have a spare 5 or 10 minutes:
1. Connect with an old client.
2. Delete some of your contacts, especially if you can’t even remember who they are.
3. File or delete 10 emails.
4. Enter some business cards in your contacts.
5. Make a list of things to update on your website.
6. Go through your RSS feed reader and organise your blogs.
7. Go through your cell phone and delete old messages.
8. Plan your projects for the next month.
9. Go through the bookmarks on your computer and delete those you don’t need.
10. Compress and crop some photos
My challenge to you
1. Print out this list. Or make your own one.
2. Aim to do one of these tasks every day for a week.
Want to use this article in your ezine or on your blog? You may, as long as you include this complete blurb.
Marcia Francois is a time management and organising coach who empowers small business owners and other busy professionals who want to make the most of their time. You’ll get simple, practical organising and time management secrets to help you work less and enjoy life more! Visit http://takechargesolutions.org for your free Organising Success Pack.
Making your Networking more Effective
As business owners we are all looking to make the our time at Networking Evetns more effective. Why else would you attend, right?
I recently came accross the following tips from Women Promoting Women Blog written by Tracie Harvie, a fellow Virtual Assistant here in London, Ontario from notes that she took from the “Power of the Purse” event held at the Hilton on June 4th.
- Give more than you receive.
- Don’t have a microwave mentality about Networking (it takes time and trust to form a relationship).
- Smart networkers stay in touch with internal customers and suppliers (you never know who people know).
- Strong networkers create a personal safety net.
- Networking is not chit chat (networking is about the other person, always ask for someone else’s card first, build the relationship with conversation and then ask for the business card).
- Start networking before you have to.
- Learn what people in your network know and who they know.
- Make real contact (look people in the eye and shake hand with two shakes).
- Be interested in others and offer something of yourself.
- Set goals when you attend networking functions.
- Another tip one of the speakers mentioned was to staple all the business cards you received at an event to a peice of paper and label it with the event name and date. That way it’s easy to refer to.
What other networking tips do you have to share?
Finding Local Networking Groups
In order to promote your business, you need to get out there and be seen and be heard.
Most of my initial clients came from local networking groups that I attended. Every town or city has a few groups that are specific for business networking.
But how do you find them?
- One of my favourite websites to check for local Canadian groups is Networking Today. As a BONUS, if you sign up to receive updates you will get a Free Report – “44 ways to Stay Connected and be Remembered“.
- You can also ask friends and family that are business owners to see if they attend any. You might even be able to attend as a guest a couple of times before joining.
What other ways have you found to network locally?
How To Attract All The Clients You Need
Fabienne Fredrickson, the Client Attraction Mentor and founder of ClientAttraction.com has a generous offer (well, free offer) that I think you’ll really enjoy. She developed a step by step system for attracting clients to your small business – incorporating all the essential elements needed to ensure you have clients attracted to you. Fabienne is known for helping solo-preneuers around the world attract more clients, make more money and have more time off to enjoy it all. Fabienne has a FREE audio CD entitled “How to Attract All the Clients You Need.” It retails for $24.95 and she is giving this away for FREE. Thousands of people have listened to it and have had dramatic results in their business as a result.
To get your copy of the free CD, please visit:
In this FREE audio CD Fabienne covers how she developed the system and reveals her secrets for attracting clients consistely and having your business work for you, as opposed to you always working for the business.
Here’s that link again: http://tinyurl.com/nktsb4
Outsource And Be Rich: The Little-Applied Secret ALL Wealth-y Entrepreneurs Use
The following post ended up in my in-box a few weeks ago, it was such a brilliant article that I wanted to share it with you.
By Fabienne Fredrickson
Let me share a big secret with you that all wealth-y solo-entrepreneurs know: If you want to have an ideal business, work less and make a whole lot more, I can assure you that you CANNOT do it by yourself. You must outsource!
You know how I know this? Because for years, I tried! For years, I tried to do everything in my business by myself, like the good “lone ranger” that I thought I was. You know what? It didn’t work. In fact, a few years ago, I remember getting on the phone with my coach and crying for the first 8 minutes of our coaching call. He listened patiently as I sobbed and then said just one thing to me:
“Fabienne, Frank Sinatra didn’t move his own pianos.”
Silence on the phone. I stopped crying and it was like The Truth had been spoken. It may seem like a “duh” moment to you, but when I heard this for the first time, it felt like the skies had parted and the answer to all my problems were streaming down from the sky. I realized that I had been trying to “move my own piano”, instead of focusing on my brilliance and my “genius” work – the stuff that I’m good at and that only *I* can do in my business.
The minute he said those words to me, a surge of energy went up my entire spine. I realized right then and there that I was trying to do the impossible by doing it all myself and that I would never be able to grow my business further if I didn’t change the way I did things.
So I changed my whole way of doing business and I started DELEGATING different aspects of my business to others. And I’m deliriously happy to report that my business, my bank account (and my sanity) have never looked better!
Fact is, you cannot do it all on your own either. No matter how much you like to think that you can do it better, faster and more efficiently than anyone else, the fact remains that you will eventually burn out. In his book “No B.S. Business Success”, Dan Kennedy talks about the worst number in ANY business is the number 1. Meaning, you never want to be the only one working in your business.
You MUST leverage your time and resources if you are serious about running a successful business, getting clients and finally making a good 1ncome being self-employed. There’s just no way around it. And getting it ALL done means you have to eventually start outsourcing and delegating.
Thing is, you can wait like I did until you nearly crumble into a state of near exhaustion where things are falling through the cracks left and right OR you can come from a Full Practice Mentality and start getting assistance NOW, before you ever get to that place.
Proper outsourcing means delegating specific things to someone who’s happy to do them for you:
- Stuff you’re not good at
- Stuff you don’t know how to do
- Stuff you don’t have time to do
- Anything outside of your brilliance/genius (meaning, everything other than the stuff only you can do in your business)
Delegating allows you to strengthen your strengths, instead of trying to “better” your weaknesses. It means only working on your core competencies and focusing on your brilliance and genius work. In turn, you’ll get more done, you’ll make more mo-ney, and you’ll enjoy more time off for the important things in life (like your family, your friends, you know, the important stuff.)
It’s the ULTIMATE leverage!
Now, I have a team of 7 virtual assistants and one in-person assistant helping me on a part-time basis. On top of that, I get help from bookkeepers, attorneys, accountants, fulfillment houses, etc., so I can focus on doing what I do best: speak, write, coach and create products. Oh, and marketing too. Don’t forget that. And because of it, I’m personally able to PRODUCE so much more than I’ve ever been able to.
But I know what you might be thinking. “That’s fine for you, Fabienne, but I’m not in a place where I can bring on a whole staff of people.” Well, believe me, I know about that because I used to be there too! This wasn’t an overnight thing. It’s taken me a few years to get to this point. But the good news is, you can start slowly and ramp up from there, like I did.
Here’s what I want you to do:
- Calculate what you’re worth per hour when you’re doing your Brilliance/Genius work; that which only you can do
- Make a list of all the things you do each day
- Attach a dollar value to what you could pay someone to outsource this to
Example: Let’s assume you’re worth $200 per billable hour. Ideally you should be generating $200 or more for EACH hour you work. However, I’ll guess you’re doing DOZENS of things each day that someone charges less for (and is happy to do for $15, $25, $45, $75, etc.) These are the things you want to outsource, so you can make $200 every hour you DO work. It’s all about working smarter and more efficiently.
To justify this, REPLACE the time you’ve saved with doing your Brilliance/Genius work and working on your Client Attraction assignments. Why? Because marketing = more clients = more do11ars. Enough said. (That doesn’t mean you can go goof off. That’s NOT the point, at least not at the beginning.)
Makes sense?
If budget is an issue, just start small. Focus first on tasks that will immediately make you money (stuff you’re not doing now, stuff you don’t know how to do) and set a maximum hour cap per month. Then, as re-venue comes in, you can grow from there.
Within months of my taking the leap and doing this, outsourcing helped bring in so much mo-re mo-ney, I was able to increase the hours I could delegate and outsource some more and I eventually doubled my revenues in ONE year.
You can too. It’s really easy.
Your Assignment:
So, take out a sheet of paper and do the following:
- Calculate what you’re worth per hour when you’re doing your Brilliance/Genius work; that which only you can do
- Make a list of all the things you do each day that don’t fall within the category of your Brilliance/Genius work
- Attach a dollar value to what you could pay someone to outsource this to
- Begin to outsource and delegate, little by little
I guarantee that you too will catapult your 1ncome as you focus more and more on business development and Client Attraction, as well as your genius work. You won’t believe you ever did it any other way.
Need some resources on how to clear the decks and make Client Attraction a priority by outsourcing? Then get a copy of the Client Attraction Home StudySystem. I’ve outlined every Client Attraction technique in detail, including outsourcing, and it’s all there so you can start using it right away to get similar results. It’s all step-by-step, not a big mishmash of things. So, you do step one of the system, and when you’re done with that, you move on to step two, and so on. SO easy. That’s why my clients have gotten such great results from it. All the tools, scripts, templates, and examples are handed to you on a silver platter. You can get yours at TheClientAttractionSystem.com.
2009 Client Attraction LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Want to use this article on your website or your own ezine? No problem! But here’s what you MUST include:
Fabienne Fredrickson, The Client Attraction Mentor, is founder of the Client Attraction System?, the proven step-by-step program that shows you exactly how to attract more clients, in record time…guaranteed. To get your F.R.E.E. Audio CD by mail and receive her weekly marketing & success mindset articles on attracting more high-paying clients and dramatically increasing your income, visit http://www.clientattraction.com/.
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