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The Tip: SWOT Analysis for Your Small Business Is a Commitment To Your Product or Service

Take a deep dive into your business approach

SWOT Analysis for Small Business - A Strategy for Success

While passion is the essence of commitment, market research is essential to determine your business’s viability and pathway to sales. Know your talents, strengths, and differences (a.k.a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats) as compared to your competition.

New business owners make a common mistake by marketing to a broad base of potential customers. Unfortunately, this is counterproductive. Through conducting a SWOT analysis, we commit our energy to a specific niche, increasing the likelihood of success.

The work of marketing becomes nearly effortless because we have fewer competitors. It also prevents us from feeling overwhelmed. Just like sunlight, when it commits all its energy through the magnifying glass, it creates fire.

Case Study:

An attorney was passionate about helping clients with a variety of family law needs: families with children, gay couples, divorced couples, and elder law. Still, she couldn’t find her ideal market or generate enough business.

After completing a SWOT analysis for her small business, she made a 30-day commitment to a target niche: families with children. Her commitment led her to determine the best method of contacting these families.

The Outcome:

By learning how to conduct a small business SWOT analysis, the attorney landed not only several family law clients; she got the opportunity for numerous speaking engagements in front of the right audiences. During one of her first meetings with a client, this attorney was asked to work with the client’s elderly mother.

This example shows that committing to one market does not mean saying “no” to potential clients, but rather, focusing on one market may help lead you to opportunities in other markets. With a focus on finding the right niche, the rest will follow.

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Your Passion, Your Story, Your Revenue

How to drive cash flow

Passion is the foundation of any great business and can be the impetus to accomplish things beyond our own expectations. It makes us feel confident. It also gives us the energy and willpower to transform an idea into reality, a reality that will become a story that others would love to listen to.

Creating a compelling story and brand around your passion and learning to develop the brand into revenue are the keys to success. The Truth About Succeeding in Small Business today is that passion, plus vision and purpose are keys to results.

The Case Study:

Business owners and entrepreneurs can share their visions by learning how to create a business development plan for a new product or service. They are eager to talk about their ideas and what they are doing to grow their companies.

Through my conversations with countless entrepreneurs and small business owners, both young and old, I have found a common thread they say, “I have the best product, service, or idea.” This statement is often followed by: “How can I increase my revenues?”

Writing your strategic approach for a small business or service will help you sort out and clearly define what your business is about. It should include your service’s value proposition and demonstrate your understanding of the market and clients. What are the unique selling points that differentiate your business? If your product is the best, tell your potential client exactly why.

The Outcome:

While most entrepreneurs have a clear passion for their product or service and can share their stories about why they were excited about their business, few have spent the necessary time evaluating how their story resonates with their target market, calculating the exact revenue numbers they need to sustain and grow their companies.

When trying to understand what’s working and not working in your strategy, the following steps must be employed to generate revenue and achieve results in any company:

● Do Your Homework – Passion can’t replace research. You can’t know how to market your product until you know the answers to the following questions: “What other products exist in this marketplace? How much do those products or services cost?” and “Where/ How are these products or services being sold?

● Ask Questions – Make a few information-gathering calls to test the waters. Ask potential client’s what factors they consider when determining whether to buy your product or service.

● Create a Plan – Once you are done with research and data gathering, it’s time to create a marketing plan. Your plan can incorporate steps 1 and 2. Depending on your business, this may involve sending a mailer to potential clients or targeting a list of potential affiliate partners. Regardless of the plan, make sure you have a clear picture of what you want to do and when you want to do it (deadlines included).

● Execute Your Plan – Commit to executing your marketing strategy and do not allow any operational activities, personal obligations, or distractions to get in the way of implementing your marketing strategy. As a small business owner, what you do today affects what you earn tomorrow. We must stay focused to see results.

● Evaluate – As new small business owners, we should take the evaluation phase seriously. We must measure the results of our marketing plan in order to understand what needs to change. Waiting until the end of the year to evaluate your marketing strategy puts the business in danger of wasting time and money on less-effective strategies that don’t produce results.

● Seek Help – If you have trouble with any of these steps, do not hesitate to ask for help from someone experienced in business. No small business owner can be expected to know how to do everything. In fact, even if you have a good sense of what needs to be done, the second set of eyes can offer a different perspective and allow you to make improvements that you might not see.

Whether it is a business partner, family member, friend, or business coach/consultant, you are sure to improve your efforts with a little help!

Managing Emotional Intelligence - Business Management - employee motivation in workplace

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Emotional Intelligence Is Essential for Effective Business Management

How to manage emotion and unleash your potential

Case Study

The hardest work of creating and running a business lies in navigating the many obstacles that will arise. Entrepreneurs face multiple hurdles daily; how they view and respond to them is what defines their success.

There is more work to be done with fewer people to do it, making small business leadership skills more essential than ever before. The daily churn of business in this current climate has entrepreneurs and small business owners running on empty. Therefore, struggling to manage emotions, performances, and reactions as they juggle more tasks. It becomes more difficult to make consistent positive contributions to employee morale when our own morale takes hit after hit.

Studies show that there is a powerful link between feelings and performance. Day after day, we hear complaints about how a company’s leader is impeding the growth of the business and making the workplace a difficult place to be productive.

A good leader develops Emotional Intelligence which includes optimism and resilience, someone others look up to for inspiration or motivation. With the proper skill set, they have the power to change the direction and respond logically, not emotionally, which will eventually lead to business success.

The Outcome:

A positive and engaging workplace motivates employees in your small business. Creating such an atmosphere means that any obstacles you encounter will be less damaging to employee morale, which is inevitably linked to productivity.

To successfully manage obstacles, we must become experts at managing our emotions on three levels: Individually (ourselves), relationally (those we work and deal with), and organizationally (the whole company). Emotional Intelligence is the bridge between Intelligence and emotion, and to be able to make decisions based on recognizing both.

By having knowledge and skills on all three levels, we significantly improve the climate around us and the company’s communication and path to becoming a solutions-based organization instead of a problem-based one.

“Staying stuck in the problem is a negative but working on the solution is a positive.”

Rather than dwelling on problems, take the opportunity to grow and learn. The door to success opens when we bounce back from failure. You will gain a higher level of self-respect and maturity just by going through the process of managing emotion and act strategically.

Whether it be sales, money, time management, relationships, technology, toxic people, and situations or procrastination, it all comes down to how we manage emotions, what commitments we make, and how we are accountable for our results.

business strategy - development coach for entrepreneurs

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Do small businesses need a strategy?

What is a Business strategist?

A business strategist helps companies to understand their customers and how they behave. They help businesses to create products that are more relevant, useful or attractive for the customer.

Business strategy is all about making sure that a company can thrive in the market, and that it can make the most of the opportunities it is given. An effective business strategy is crucial for every small business. The right strategy will ensure that a business is able to make the most of its resources, and it will also ensure that the business is fully prepared for the future.

Why do you need a business strategist?

Every business needs a good strategy to succeed. A good strategy requires more than just a good idea. It requires planning, research, and execution. It requires a team, a plan, and a lot of work. Strategy is everything. A business strategy is a plan for achieving a goal. It starts with an objective, then it spells out the actions needed to achieve it. It’s an overarching philosophy. A plan for the future and a mission statement. It’s a path to strategic growth. and what you do and why you do it. A good strategy is about the vision and the big picture. It’s long-term and not a single idea. A good strategy is a series of choices, tied together in a string of decisions. It’s the beginning, middle, and end of your business. Strategy is the reason you’re in business. It’s the reason you’re building a business. It’s the reason you’re trying to grow. A good strategy doesn’t just happen. It needs a team, takes a lot of work and needs to be flexible and fluid. Strategy is a plan. It’s a lot of work. It can be a risk. It can fail. That’s why you need a good strategist and a team to help you execute it efficiently.

What value can a small business strategist add to your business?

Business strategy is not something that most small business owners spend a lot of time thinking about. They get up in the morning and go to work or start working on their business and they don’t stop until they go to bed. But it doesn’t mean that they don’t think about their business every day. A good business strategist will be able to help you a lot with your business. A very, very big amount of value. And that’s why I love working with small businesses and startups. They are the ones who need it most. The ones who have no idea where they should be going or what their next step is. It’s my job as an entrepreneur coach to help them figure out how to get there. To make sure they don’t miss any steps along the way.

Conclusion:

The best way to grow your business is by using the right tools at hand. You need to know what works for your company so that you can use it effectively. This article will help you find out how to do this.

You should always be on top of any changes in technology or trends affecting your industry. If you are not keeping up with these things, then you could miss an opportunity to take advantage of new opportunities.

Catch me over here on August 6th 11am – 1pm where I will be discussing more on this topic and business development and marketing.

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What If Plan A Is Not Working?

What is your plan B?

It’s been about five months since I sent my “monthly’ newsletter. I had to surrender to my writer’s block and allow myself the space to be inspired to write something worthy of your reading.

It is a world of uncertainty, and the small business owner has been hard hit. I see three main issues:

Isolation– and the impact it is having on our mental health, with the need to develop inner resources, and connection to others.

Over communication– We are worn out from this over-communication world we are living in. Email, social media, zoom, our relationships to the screen and the Internet.

Multiple Priorities– There is way too much on our plate. the demand for managing multiple priorities and our efforts to turn something into results is just simply creating an exhausting scenario.

Here are three examples of clients that I’m working with now:

A 42-year-old man year-old married man lost his job due to Covid. He was in the midst of buying a home, and that fell through. They had to move into his in-laws. He and his wife are living in a tiny space, he is working at a job beneath his skill set and is now not feeling well. We must come up with some strategies to rebuild his life, health and business.

A 45-year-old woman taking over the family business, scaling the business up is also living with her parents, and literally has 12 full-time roles. She must manage her personal and business development and how they can work together successfully.

Multiple clients are trying to understand what it takes to be seen and found when nothing they do seems to generate business

What is the answer? How do we address these issues?

In my coaching, we look at a reality-focused business model which is based on what’s going on in your target market and on the kind of life model you want to create. One that is manageable, satisfying, sustainable and prosperous. This is wholly tied to commitment. A commitment to your product, service, revenue, and yourself. This must be set in the present reality, not future planning. Often our ideas and desires are not based on what makes sense right now. I am interested in the gestalt of looking at what is possible in the here and now. What will bring us results now? What gives us momentum?

The second is the importance of connectedness. Now is the time to work with a coach or join a group. It is impossible to do this alone. The importance of working with a coach or in a group, and being connected creates focus, education, accountability, and that value is immense.

In attending networking and meetings, listening to webinars, listening to clients, presentations, and the issue of over-communicating is causing people to tune out, not listen, not read, and lose any value that might be presented.

Here are three key behaviors that will help us in all three of these issues.

Strategy: Every decision we make, every ounce of communication, every interaction is defined by a mental-emotional, thinking process and applied to the context of achieving an outcome or outcomes. Strategic is a skill you can acquire. Before you plan any meeting or any talk or any communication, ask yourself these questions:

What outcome do I want to have happened?

What is the most principled and authentic approach?

What do I need them to know?

What am I thinking?

What am I feeling,

How will I communicate this effectively? Which leads me to……..

Brevity the art of learning to communicate in brevity and clarity in the spoken and written word is more important than ever in our over communicated, over spoken, overwritten world and saying what you need to say in a few impactful words as possible is imperative.

What do they need to know?

What do I want them to hear?

What do I want them to do?

If we are going to be seen and heard speaking in brevity is an imperative skill to acquire!

Conversion: In all conversations, in all correspondence, whether it be our website, LinkedIn, newsletter, or blog, the goal is to educate and engage our audience and move them to action. Our phone calls, presentation at networking or sales must be strategic including both emotion and logic and easily demonstrate:

Why they want to do business with you?

Why they want to do business with you now?

My hope is that you will understand we are all in the same place, whether we’re scaling up or scaling down, trying to find some ease and harmony in our new world and acting effectively to best utilize our talents and skills.

If your Plan A is not working, maybe it is time to strategize Plan B. I hear you; I see you and together we will gain clarity about what will best serve you right now.

I have a few slots left in my one-to-one coaching. I have groups starting in the end of September .

If you are looking for a partner that can help you strategize both personally and professional, speak with brevity and convert your efforts into success let’s work together.

Schedule here to talk.

Best,

Shelly Berman-Rubera

Personal and Business Strategist

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End Of The Year/ Start Of The Year- 3 Session Coaching Package

3 Session Personal/Business Coaching Package

As the holiday season falls upon us, we get pulled in so many directions that we tend to neglect business development tasks that really must be done and often find ourselves starting the new year in old patterns and behaviors that we had hoped would change.

I am excited to offer you a 3-session coaching package meant to finish the year strong and get started on new initiatives right off the bat.

What is on your “I want to do list”?

Improved business owner performance, focus and productivity, emotional management, team training, marketing, hiring, website, sales, more revenue?

Let’s pick 1 or 2 high level “I want “and let’s get them done!

I like action oriented personal and business development and I am known for getting

sh…t done!

Here is my criteria for my “right fit” clients:

Smart…they know their profession and are great at what they do
Smart… enough to learn and receive coaching/consulting
Smart …enough to say, I know this needs to be done, but I can’t do it and delegate it to Shelly to do!

Are you Smart enough to work with me now?

Call Shelly at 617-201-7224

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HOW CAN PERSONAL AND BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT COACHING HELP?

The old paradigm for coaching is that the coaches’ job is to ask the powerful questions to the client with the belief that the clients hold the answers and we the coaches are to then facilitate the client in finding them.

Now enter the new paradigm and an experienced Personal and Business Development Coach can help. I believe business owners do want to be asked questions and they are seeking “answers, executable answers.” They want to be paid 100 percent dedicated attention to their challenges and their issues. A Personal and Business Development Coach is somebody who helps you move from where you are to where you want to be, and does so by solely focusing on you, the owner and your life and your business.

In my experience, every day starts out with the greatest of intentions and opportunities and then the day to day distractions and multiple priorities distract and impede progress. Nothing worse than starting over every day, week or month.

After all, you’ll never really know what you’re capable of until there’s someone to push you outside your comfort zone. Just ask any athlete or top performer. If a Personal and Business Development Coach is something you’ve thought about recently but aren’t quite sold on getting one yet, here are four reasons why you should:

To Have an Intelligent Conversation

Imagine spending time, simply brain dumping and discussing your business and leaving refocused, re-energized and with specific strategies, ready to implement. Would that help your month? You bet it would!

To Explore New Ideas

Having a sounding board and an experienced ear to listen and bounce things off of is invaluable. By allowing allows the coach to facilitate your thoughts and ideas we can create a strategic path.

To Be Accountable

A coach serves as an incredible accountability partner who challenges you to strategize and prioritize your tasks while aligning your efforts toward achieving them. What does it feel like to have someone in your corner who genuinely cares about your results and is dedicated to keeping you on track? ( it feels great)

To Receive Guidance and Solutions

A Personal and Business Development Coach will challenge your thinking, goals, and willingness to grow. A coach also acts as a role model because of the experience that he or she shares. Additionally, a coach has unique insights that broaden your personal and business awareness. I call it the “third eye” Often when we are simply trying to figure out the next best move, or the language to respond to a situation, it can be so beneficial to be able to reach out and get an effective answer.

To Gain the Wisdom to Best Utilize the Knowledge

Wisdom is a noun that refers to the ability to make sensible decisions and give good advice because of the experience and knowledge that you have. Someone may have all the knowledge about a subject but may not have the wisdom to utilize this knowledge properly to be able to act in a sensible manner! A good Personal and Business Development Coach will have years of experience and wisdom to move you ahead fast.

Life is great, and life is challenging! I get it!

Let’s schedule a 3 hours Laser Personal/ Business Development Coaching Session

The Truth About Succeeding in Life and Business Today

a company is only as good as its owner

From executives to business owners, we are struggling with the demands of building our businesses and managing our families. It is simply too much for most of us to be effective at all we must accomplish.

We become exhausted and not able to make smart decisions or operate from a strategic approach.

This coaching program will help you to:

Manage emotion and energy and operate at a higher level
Define tactical steps to greater effectiveness
Develop a revenue-generating business model
Achieve managing multiple priorities

3 Hour Laser Coaching:

We will work on the specific issues that are getting in your way and impeding your progress and then we can discuss how on-going support will best serve you.

Setup a complimentary consultation to discuss this session now

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Success Is So Much Fun

What are the tools that are really working?

As I shared with you in the last email, my own marketing had fallen by the wayside while I was taking care of my client’s needs. This is embarrassing as I firmly believe in 30-day commitments to marketing.

You got to love email marketing! The results of my email blast speak for themselves, 40% of the recipients opened the email, 30% clicked through to read the blog, a colleague immediately called and asked to use the article in her blog to 4,000 readers and 3 people scheduled the

3-hour Laser Business Coaching!

I simply do not know any better way to get in front of your prospects, past clients and affiliates better than email marketing.

Seventeen years ago, I brought my daughter to her friend’s house for a playdate. It was the first time that I met the little girls Dad. Of course, we chatted, “what do you do?” He was one of the original engineers at CTCT, who created the software. ” I said, you are kidding me?” There is a way to reach all of your clients in one platform? I had a whole file cabinet of over 1,000 personal training clients and how else could I gain immediate contact with them and view the results of that outreach? And thus began my relationships with email marketing and CTCT!

SBR is named an All-Star for 2017 and is Re-Certified for 2018-2019

As a Personal and Business Development Coach, I still choose to partner with Constant Contact to provide my clients with the best online marketing products and services available. Although there are no many platforms to choose from, I remain using Constant Contact for my clients. The reasons include pricing, user-friendly editing, design, events, and automation!

Every year they recognize top-performing users with their annual All-Star Awards. I’m proud to announce that out of hundreds of thousands of customers, my work for 5 clients has earned me a 2017 All-Star Award. (and to boast just a little, I have been awarded every year for the past 6 years!)

As a Certified, Award Winning Constant Contact Provider, I can assist you to organize and segment your database to get it ready for email marketing, get you a complimentary template that matches your website so it is like emailing a live website, teach you the tricks of getting your emails opened create leads via click-throughs and teach you effective marketing strategies or I can even do all of this for you!

If you’re ready to implement award-winning online marketing services to your business contact me!

You can receive 40% off Constant Contact for 3 months

Get started today using promo code SPSC18 at checkout

This offer ends July 31st!

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Getting Stuff Done! Summer Time Productivity

Now’s the time to enjoy jumping into a body of water. It’s also a great time to jump into marketing and business development. As busy business owners, we spend so much time on client work that we don’t spend enough time on our own business development, client acquisition, and next steps.

As children, we finish the school year and we’re off to enjoy the summer at camps and the beach. As children, we had the chance to enjoy the season. Now, as adults, we must accept that we simply don’t get the whole summer off. It’s about finding balance and, while business may slow down, we’ll be very quickly heading to the last quarter of the year. Now’s the ideal time to reflect on what’s working and what needs to change

Due to my vast experience, I can work with clients in a results-oriented, laser-focused method. I love my “Laser Business Coaching” that allows me to work with clients to create a strategic plan that can be executed, while we have a bit of breathing room.

Here is my winning formula for generating the path to making change and improvements.

The Laser Focus Conversation Will:

Identify the problem(s)
Identify why it is a problem
Define a strategy (or strategies) to make the problem less of a problem or even make the problem go away!

Since January, I’ve been neck deep working with my clients on developing their amazing business. I’m so grateful to be a part of their team. As a serial entrepreneur for over 40 years working with over 1,000 small business owners, I tell you I get it! It’s been very challenging to pay attention to my own business’s marketing. My clients are the small business owner who needs to gain a share of the market, to update their websites with positioning to design to successful busy companies, where there’s so much to do and so many contemporary systems and strategies to improve. The common goal is to increase revenue and the number of clients and to improve marketing, communication, and collaboration with the owners and staff to ensure that we’re all on the same page heading to success.

I understand it’s hard to understand what a business coach might do for you. You might even be saying to yourself, “I need help. I need a business coach,” but you don’t know how to make a commitment to working with a business coach because you don’t even know where to ask for help.

I’ve created 20, 3-hour slots from now until August for this laser coaching. Schedule Here!

I invite you to bring me your challenge(s) and let’s work together to help you fully enjoy your summer and the months to come! We all need marketing and breathing room!

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Where Has SBR Been and What’s in it for you?

I hope this blog post finds you healthy, happy and busy at work! After a busy year last year, I purposely pulled back a bit from mid-November until after the first of the year to enjoy the holidays and re-charge. Since then I have been going full throttle and loving it, but like all of you, getting my newsletter out is a challenge. I believe that blogs and newsletters are one of the most important marketing strategies and my goal this month is to share with you what else I think is important for us to do to build our businesses and stay in touch with our audiences.

In the past, if you wanted to become a successful small business owner, it took passion, a skill, a great personality, and a willingness to meet people. But in today’s world, you need a strategy and system and an understanding of what will work in your business to bring in clients.

This is what I hear all of the time.

“Maybe I need to:

Ø post more on social media…”

Ø spend more time cold-calling…”

Ø join my local Chamber of Commerce…”

Ø hire this guru or that expert…”

Ø buy another promised result program”

And so it goes, until we are burnt out or in despair.

We are usually too busy taking care of our clients to pay enough attention to our own marketing and we really don’t know what to do or say, so we do nothing!

Here’s how I see it:

Ø It starts with knowing exactly WHO your best clients are (and no, you can’t be all things to all people).

Ø Your positioning and messaging must be clearly defined on a contemporary website that attracts prospects and converts them to leads. (It must be beautifully mobile optimized like this one. Be sure to view this on mobile).

Ø You must be sending a branded, compelling, and educational newsletter delivered on a regular basis that positions you as a thought leader.

Ø You must have a branded and well-composed LinkedIn in profile (like this one).

Ø You must develop and execute a LinkedIn outreach strategy (depending on your target audience, other social media sites. You do not need them all.)

Ø You must develop and deliver an educational presentation (like this one).

Ø You must have the ability to hold a brief, compelling conversation that engages the prospect to WANT to work with you (whether that is on the phone or in person).

In my experience, when we have these pieces in place, we can most effectively grow our business.

How many of these pieces do you have?

How many are working for you?

What needs improvement?

Will you let me help you?