We get this question all the time from small business owners and lifestyle entrepreneurs diving into the blogging world, and the answer is, “Anything related to your business, products, services, industry, which would also be informative and entertaining (and not sales-y) for your Ideal Audience.”

And that answer, while accurate, just isn’t helpful.

Because (as we’re finally realizing) when our clients and prospects ask what to blog about, the question is also a stand-in for a host of other concerns:

• What’s the point?…
• How will this get me more business?…
• I’m not a writer…
• There’s fear involved in “putting myself out there” in this way…
• I don’t know where to start…
• I’m overwhelmed by the idea, the technology, the fitting-it-in around the rest of everything else I have to do as Chief Cook and Bottle Washer in my business…

You get the idea.

Assuming for now that you will be jumping in to the blogging world, here’s the easiest formula I can come up with for a successful blog post, which I laid out for one of our clients in a Progress Report last year:

To sum up, blogging can be as simple as:

1. Reading an industry news story
2. Formulating your opinion on it
3. Typing up your opinion and supporting it with your unique set of knowledge

Could each of [your exceutive team members] do that in 15-30 minutes or so, once (or twice) a month? If so, your blog will be a roaring success.

As an example, ClosetPlace, a storage and organization systems company out of Wolfeboro, NH, is going through blogging training with our buddies at Acorn Creative as I write this. Their new website is going live this week, and they’ve opened a new showroom as well - big year for them!

I met with ClosetPlace’s Bill Huntley yesterday, and we got to talking about how new closet systems affect the resale value of homes. I checked out Remodeling magazine’s 2007 Cost vs. Value annual report, and was surprised to see that they didn’t include anything storage or organization-related.

That lack of inclusion is blog-worthy. In fact, if it had been included, it would also be blog-worthy, but for the specific situation, let’s put it this way:

Imagine you’re Bill Huntley, and you’re at a cocktail party. Someone comes up to you and says, “I heard Remodeling magazine didn’t include storage systems in their Cost vs. Value report. What do you think about that?”

“I think that’s short-sighted,” you say.

“Why?”

“Well, some custom closet installs run about $12K, which is in line with some of the lower-cost projects they’re tracking. Storage and organization is a multi-billion-dollar industry, so it’s worthy of Remodeling’s attention. And a closet system is just as much of an upscale addition as a kitchen remodel, in terms of making the home more attractive to potential buyers. In a tough housing market, that could make the difference between selling and sitting on another year of mortgage and escrow payments.”

That exchange is, literally, what Bill could post on his new blog about that report. He has his own inimitable personality and style of talking and writing, so it would end up reading differently, but in terms of creating the outline of a blog post, that’s exactly all he has to do.

Of course, he could add one more thing. He could then write a question and a call to action for his readers: “Was the sale of your house affected by a closet system? Or was a closet system one of your deciding factors in choosing to buy one house over another? Leave a comment and let us know!”

And I’m about to do the same thing, for our own purposes. So, does that example give you an idea of what to blog about, and how? Leave a comment and let us know!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 11:25 am and is filed under Blog Bits, Inciter Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

For business owners, lifestyle entrepreneurs, and otherwise savvy professionals, creating content to help get their message, mission, and vision OUT THERE can be daunting sometimes - especially if you don’t fancy yourself a “writer” or some other media-producing maestro.

And sometimes, we make things more complicated than they have to be. Heck, as “The Content Lovers,” we can obsess over this stuff like there’s no tomorrow. It gets in the way of taking action, and moving forward with our business and vision.
With that in mind, we offer you these seven really good bits ‘o advice for easily creating powerful and consistent content, regardless of whether you deliver it with text, audio, photos, or video. (Knowing, of course, we personally use this advice ourselves.)
1. Mine what you already have. It’s excavation, not creation. Take content you’ve already developed - like the answers you’ve given to clients in emails, phone calls, and in person - and use those to develop content. If one person’s asking, others may be, too. Then, you not only look like an expert, but you never have to answer the question again!

2. Give ‘em bite-size chunks. We all do it - overwhelm people with the knowledge we can share about our business or field. But at a certain point, people’s attention just turns off. Don’t try to shove 50 tons of diamonds into a 5-pound sack. Offer seekers of your content bite-sized chunks of knowledge, and the option to go deeper.

3. Leverage other people’s content to support your own ideas. Ever hear marketers throw out headlines like, “What Steve Martin can teach you about your own marketing and branding”? They use the content generated around well-known events, ideas, people, and pop culture references as analogies to buttress their own messages. And you can do the same.

4. Use other people’s content outright. With appropriate permission, of course, and preferably with an opinion to share. As the person who’s screening the entire realm of knowledge in your field, picking and choosing a select few to share with your audience makes you look like the expert who holds forth on the usefulness (or lack thereof) of the information out there. Be the filter. Be the trusted resource.

5. It’s about content over time. Relationships don’t happen overnight, in love or in business. By making a list for yourself of the ideas, magnets, and solutions of your business, you can authentically share new and helpful information over the long haul.

6. Good enough is good enough. In economics, there’s this thing called the Law of Diminishing Returns. In layman’s terms, it says that at a certain point, the effort you put into improving something will cost you more than what you get out of that effort. It’s the same with producing content. You can spend weeks, months, and years jiggering and editing and trying to get everything “just right.” Or, you can send your content out on a catapult, where it can reach your Ideal Audience, so you can get to work on your next endeavor.

7. Be conscious (and conscientious!) about what you put out into the world. People have a way of finding content months and years down the line. This can be a very good thing…or a very, very bad one. If you’re less than impeccable with your word, it’ll come back to bite you in the proverbial posterior. As Bogie said in Casablanca, “Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.” This is the Law of Attraction in action - what you focus on and put “out there” to the universe is what comes back to you. Act with honesty and integrity, and everything’ll be a-okay.

Good luck, fellow content creator! No matter how you choose to get your content out there - newsletters, webinars, comic strips, whatever - these seven tips will help guide you through the process of making those all-important connections with your Ideal Audience.

Remember, people aren’t sitting around trying to figure out ways to give you money. But they DO want to: learn, be entertained, find specific information, get more time, freedom, money, and pleasure, and especially AVOID PAIN AND MISERY. Help them do any or all of the above with your content, and they’ll reward you for it.

WANNA USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR EZINE OR WEBSITE?
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(c) 2008 Epiphanies, Inc. As the “Content Lovers” of Epiphanies, Inc., Lani & Allen Voivod help lifestyle entrepreneurs and million-dollar small businesses ‘A-Ha Themselves!’ in fun, innovative, and profitable ways. For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business, sign up for their ezine, ‘The Inciter,’ at EpiphaniesInc.com!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 11:16 pm and is filed under Inciter Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

In the world of small business — or any kind of business building or creative pursuits, for that matter — there are two schools of thought:

A) You have to know everything, research everything, plan everything, measure everything, analyze everything, evaluate everything, anticipate everything, budget for everything, and have the means to finance everything…BEFORE you start.

B) You don’t.

“Group A” types are the Sensibles. ”Group B” folks? The Nuts. 

To the sometimes dismay of my husband/business partner, a Sensible who likes to operate in the world of concrete deliverables and see nets before he leaps, I happen to be in that ”Group B” category.

Sensibles aren’t stupid or unimaginative. On the contrary. They’re often bright, reasonable, practical professionals. More often than not, they have read the text books, know the elements of growing businesses and bottom lines, and have sound, informed advice to offer on the subject of what works and what doesn’t.

Many brilliant, wonderful, seasoned SCORE counselors are Sensibles. They’ve owned and managed all types of businesses for multiple decades, so they’ve made their mistakes and purchased countless hard-won lessons with their own sweat equity.

Nuts understand and respect Sensibles (though we can be delinquent in showing it). Whether Sensibles believe this or not, Nuts listen to their input, value their point of view, and often think they’re probably right.

Why, then, do Sensibles usually see us doing exactly the opposite from what they recommend? Because we, too, know — or think we know — a thing or two about business ourselves.

Right or wrong, here’s what we believe, whether we admit it or not:

1. Perfection Is for Sissies

The widely-held assumption is Perfectionists operate with a higher set of standards than most of us. To that I say “Phooey!” Perfectionists gouge ideas, scrape up strategies, and poo-poo planning docs until all the lifeblood is drained out of them. Why? They’re frozen with fear! It’s scary to put your stuff “Out There,” to the discerning public, where critics lurk, markets speak, and well-meaning friends and relatives tell you exactly what they think of your ventures, whether their feedback is positive or not. I’ve seen some very smart and talented people wait for decades to act on an idea or passion because the timing, environment, circumstances, or equipment weren’t exactly perfect. Oh, it hurts to watch!

2. Failure Is ALWAYS an Option

We’ve all heard the allegedly hard-core creed “Failure’s Not an Option.” Au contraire, my friend. Failure is not only an option, it’s a statistically high probability. Next time you have lunch with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Albert Einstein, or any of the countless other inventors and innovators who lived on nothing but failure with a side of “Oops!,” just ask them. They’ll tell you if you’re not failing, you’re not doing enough. Failure pushes limits, forces unconventional solutions, and tests mettles without kid gloves. Are you serious about success? Then you better love the smell of Failure, because it’s part of the entrepreneurial experience.

3. You CAN Build Your Wings on the Way Down (and It’s a Downright, Rock ‘n Roll Rush When You Pull It Off!)

Comfort Zone? No, not for Nuts. I wouldn’t say we’re all adrenaline junkies, but our closest Sensibles may tell you otherwise. Still, when the luxury of looking back at an unlikely victory presents itself, there’s definitely something very cool about replaying the scene. Back against the wall, warnings everywhere, total annihilation just millimeters away from every move and decision you make…Yeah. When you have no choice but to remove life’s distractions to avoid a physical or metaphysical SPLAT, those wings get built. They may not be pretty, but they flap like heck and carry you somewhere you can pause to catch your breath.

4. Ignorance CAN Be Bliss

Look. We don’t want to appear or admit to being - for lack of a better word - stupid. But the truth is, the less we know, the less we’re bullied by total downers like “What’s Possible,” “What’s Realistic,” and that pesky tagalong, ”Our Limits.” Let’s face it: Sometimes “The Facts” can really squelch a person’s creativity. So sometimes we ignore them. Or choose to do things without the proper due diligence. Or skip along like the village idiot while our profit and loss statements are making our bookkeepers weep uncontrollably. Sorry. But sometimes - only sometimes - those numbers have less meaning to us and our plans than a petrified legume has to a carnivore. Tra-la-la…we can’t hear you…

5. Life’s Short. Play Hard…and for Cryin’ Out Loud, LIGHTEN UP!

Mortality. Ugh. Yet another buzzkill to deal with. Sadly, though, we can’t seem to kick this one to the curb. One of my favorite poems, Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” does a good job in putting the whole Mortality thing into perspective. The poem is one giant, beautiful, exquisitely hilarious pickup line. He’s trying to convince a young maiden to sleep with him, and tells her if he had all the time in the world, he’d admire each of her body parts for thousands of years, and wait patiently for her to come around. But that’s not the case, is it? So with his last six lines, he says:

“Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.”

The Nuts say, “Ditto.”

So the next time you see us across your conference table, nodding politely in response to your very rational and comprehensive list of why our ideas, suggestions, and solutions would never work for your business or anybody else’s, look more closely. Odds are, while our eyes are on you, our brains are somewhere else in our own indexed resource library of “What’s Possible” and ”What’s Realistic.”

While you’re citing statistical probabilities and telling us about industry expectations, existing norms, and outdated rules, we’re off in our wild ’n wacky fourth dimension. That’s the place where we twist words, scour success stories, flip visuals, and mash up mountains of our own data.

It’s the place where we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that more things are possible and realistic than most of us dare dream. And if everyone remained governed by the keen and well-intended Sensibles, most microbusinesses, solo-preneurs, and small business owners would never even attempt the impossible and ridiculous — i.e. going into business for yourself.

What a shame that would be, because it’s REALLY fun out here in Nutty Land.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 8:46 am and is filed under Inciter Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

(c) 2008 Epiphanies, Inc.

As the “Content Lovers” of Epiphanies Inc., Lani & Allen Voivod help lifestyle entrepreneurs and million-dollar businesses “A-Ha Themselves” in fun and profitable ways. If you’d like to see the FREE report that generated over six figures of additional client work in less than two months, you can check it out at http://www.GoNutsin2007.com!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 11:09 am and is filed under Inciter Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Back in 2003, we had a dream:

To escape the constricting cubicles of corporate America, get out of Dodge (or in our case, Los Angeles), and build a business together that could support a family and a lifestyle so we could enjoy both to the greatest extent possible.

It wasn’t an original dream. Billions of dollars of man hours are lost in corporations worldwide to those who daydream within their cubicle confines.

And, maybe because it’s such a common daydream, more than a few people openly shared with us the “fact” that we wouldn’t be able to live a happy, financially sustaining, creatively fulfilling life out of a major metropolis’s arms’ reach.

Thank goodness we ignored those people - even though many were good friends, trusted confidantes, and even trusted mentors. Because that little, unoriginal dream has come true, and continues to unfold to bigger and better possibilities seemingly by the hour.

And this is what we know for sure:

Dreaming makes all things possible.

It is not a frivolous act.

It’s not something reserved for the idle, the impotent, the naive, or the lazy.

It’s the cornerstone for all progress. The key to all things good and beautiful in this life.

Room to Dream.

Permission to Dream.

The Tools to Dream.

The Freedom to Dream.

Time to Dream.

We need these things as much as we need air and water. We need them to live, love, grow, and become who we were meant to be.

WHAT IS “A DREAM”?

A dream is nothing more or less than a vision of how things could be. It’s one possible reality.

It’s hope and faith with colors and details.

It’s creativity unbridled.

It’s the human spirit at its best, without worries, fears, bills, illness, doubt, and anything else that falls into the category of the soul’s ambient crud.

SLEEPING DREAMS vs. WAKEFUL DREAMS

Sleeping dreams show you just how far your mind and imagination are willing to go if you let them.

They’ll show you the nooks and crannies of your everyday observations, strengths, and fears. They’ll turn things upside down and backwards, hoping you’ll look at the world - and yourself - from new angles, through new lenses, and with fresh perspectives.

Sleep dreaming kicks your ego and presumptions out the door so your brain can play with your mind’s arts and crafts table without adult supervision.

It invites your own personal cache of guest speakers, performance artists, set designers, writers, musicians, architects, teachers, rebels, and a slew of others sent from your subconscious to entertain, inform, and beguile you.

Wakeful dreaming is the toughest, because once you start doing it, you understand its power. It’s for real. You really are in charge of your own destiny. Anything you can imagine truly is possible.

If you find this fact to be daunting, intimidating, scary, or uncomfortable, do everything you can to snap out of it. It’s the blessing of your life. It’s your life’s mission to:

• Dream well
• Dream often
• Dream big
• Dream with passion and purpose
• Dream with love, compassion, and sincerity…

…And live your dream.

WANNA USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR EZINE OR WEBSITE?
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(c) 2008 Epiphanies, Inc. As the “Content Lovers” of Epiphanies, Inc., Lani & Allen Voivod help lifestyle entrepreneurs and million-dollar small businesses ‘A-Ha Themselves!’ in fun, innovative, and profitable ways. For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business, sign up for their ezine, ‘The Inciter,’ at EpiphaniesInc.com!

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 24th, 2008 at 3:30 pm and is filed under Inciter Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

By Lani & Allen Voivod, aka “The Content Lovers” of Epiphanies, Inc.

If you’re a small business owner, you know that cash flow is the number one killer of small and microbusinesses. We owners are time-crunched, and the tasks we choose to do at the beginning of a day rarely match up with the list of things we actually did at the end of the day.

Considering this triple whammy, it’s no surprise the idea of marketing planning tends to get a big “Why bother?” out of people.

One of our new clients, Fox Hill Remodeling in Nashua, NH, has a lot going for it. They had a great year financially and project-wise in 2007. They’re about to launch a new “3-Week Kitchen” concept that blows the doors off average renovation project timeframes. And they’ll be appearing at five home shows this year, whereas in past years they only did one.

They understand the importance of how marketing boosts a business’ success. But when it comes to marketing planning, they raised a question we hear from a lot of other businesses, too:

“Why should I spend money on a plan, when I could just spend it on the marketing itself?”

That question touches all the core issues we flagged in that first paragraph. Owners want to spend their money wisely, they don’t have time to waste, and they know what happens to the best-laid plans of mice and men.

But…

Without a good solid plan in place to guide, track, automate, and oversee the next 12 months of your marketing efforts, how will you make sure:

•    The money you spend on one-off marketing efforts serves the Big Picture success of your business?

•    You’ve got something – more sales, more clients, more revenue, a better reputation, more respect in your field or community, increased brand awareness, etc. – to show for your marketing efforts and investments?

•    Your business has a stronger, more consistent and more solid foundation, online and off?

•    You’ve increased ways and incentives for people to “take the next step” with you – whether that means spending money, investing time and energy, recommending you to their friends and associates, or simply thinking of you next time they need your particular product, service, or expertise?

•    You stay competitive, creative, focused, and realistic about what you can do with the budget and resources you have?

The simple answer? You can’t, and you won’t.

Ouch. Not good, for your business OR your bottom line.

Still, when cash flow is everything, it’s hard to justify spending thousands of dollars just to have someone give you yet another to-do list you:

a) Can’t see the value of

b) Don’t think you have the time, money, or resources to implement, or

c) Fear won’t produce results

More than anything, then, you need to know what separates a waste-of-time marketing plan from a customized, focused, professionally-crafted marketing plan designed specifically around your business’s short and long term success.

A customized, focused, professionally-crafted marketing plan:

•    Begins with your end goals in mind.

•    Develops everything around your core message, mission, and vision.

•    Aims to communicate with your distinct target market, using their language, solving their unique problems, and highlighting the benefits only you can deliver to them.

•    Makes the most of your marketing budget, helping you track the impact and effectiveness of marketing campaigns and outreach efforts.

•    Is solid enough to weather any storms, yet flexible enough to seize opportunities when they come along.

•    Delivers results.(!)

Odds are, you wouldn’t trust a home builder who chucked a bunch of wood and nails in a pile and told you he could build your dream home from scratch based on nothing but whims and instincts. Why, then, do so many business owners trust their reputations, growth, and revenue-generating opportunities to accidental marketing?

While there may not be any guarantees in life – especially when it comes to marketing – there are ways to exponentially increase the chances of quantifiable, measurable success with the right strategic plan in place.

So, if you’ve never before invested in a plan to streamline your marketing, boost your bottom line, rev-up your reputation, and produce measurable results, this would be a great time to give it a try.

After all, what do you have to lose except the nagging feeling that you could’ve done better this year and the years to follow, if only you had set a plan in place to make it happen?

WANNA USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR EZINE OR WEBSITE?
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(c) 2008 Epiphanies, Inc. As the “Content Lovers” of Epiphanies, Inc., Lani & Allen Voivod help lifestyle entrepreneurs and million-dollar small businesses ‘A-Ha Themselves!’ in fun, innovative, and profitable ways. For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business, sign up for their ezine, ‘The Inciter,’ at EpiphaniesInc.com!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 2:25 pm and is filed under Inciter Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

[Note: I just found an old blog entry that I tweaked a bit and submitted through http://www.ahaarticles.com/, our article submission service. Now I'm posting it in our "Inciter Articles" category, to keep our submitted stuff all together, so I can find it easily when the need arises (and it does, more often than you think). Happiness is finding easy-to-repurpose content on your blog, in your notebook, or wherever decently-constructed rants hang out!]

You have an idea. A business. A passion. Something to say.

The question is: How important is this to you?

“Well, I have a website/blog/brochure/business card,” you say. And that’s a good thing. You should. They’re all part of your self-marketing efforts. They’re all virtually essential these days. You want to have your information retold, repackaged, and reinvented in various forms, to suit your audience’s content consumption preferences.

So why not take it a step further and turn your singular information, concept, strategy, philosophy, process, or knowledge into an eBook?
 
Make it interesting. Make it readable. Give it titles and subtitles, sidebars and sass.

Make it easy to download and email.

Share it with people, groups, websites, and associations that would find value in it, or be entertained by it. (Or preferably, both!)

More than anything, make it available…for FREE.
 
“But, I don’t have time to spend on creating and developing a FREE eBook?!!” you yelp. “Why the heck would I waste my time/energy/billable brain power on that?”

Well, don’t you already?

Don’t you already think about your own passions, ideas, business, systems, or solutions in a fairly obsessive way?

Wouldn’t you like a clean overview of your might and mission to hand off to prospects, fans, clients, consumers, strategic partners, website visitors, email recipients, and accidental tourists so they could sample your wares? Experience your voice and style? Scan over your offerings? Dig into your ideas? Benefit from your expert status?

Essentially, consume a premeditated, decently configured version of YOU?

What’s more, wouldn’t it be valuable to YOU to put your fleeting thoughts and down-the-rabbit-hole analyses into some semblance of order and refined context?
 
Hey - we’re talking a free eBook here. It doesn’t have to be a $20,000 project. Make it neat. Format it nicely. If you can get a designer to help it look good, that’s a plus, but if that’s not possible right now, let it go.

Most importantly - HAVE SOMEONE PROOFREAD IT so you don’t embarrass yourself, or worse, lose business because of grammar, spelling, or blatant nonsensical communication skills.

Earlier this year, we joined forces with Acorn Creative - a top-notch branding firm and our key strategic partner - to create a FREE 18-page Special Report that generated more than $100,000 in new client revenue in less than two months. That little document took us less than two weeks to put together. Not bad on the ROI scale, wouldn’t you agree? (You can check it out at http://www.gonutsin2007.com/.)
 
Don’t make it harder than it is. If you’ve just got 10 pages, turn it into a Special Report or White Paper. You can always expand or add to it over time.

BOTTOM LINE:
People can’t learn to know and love you - your products, services, passion, advice, know-how, brilliance, ideas, insights, offerings, deliverables, voice, style, personality, vision, business, unique promise of value, philosophies, etc. - if you don’t give them anything to know and love.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 9:51 pm and is filed under Inciter Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

July is the new January for lifestyle entrepreneurs.

Think about it.

Cubicle-minded professionals start making plans, resolutions, and target objectives just moments after they’ve put away their December decorations.

By March, goal gusto diminishes significantly.

By the end of June, it’s all but non-existent. Why? Because everyone’s waiting until September to ramp up and maestro that last-quarter push to cash flow success. And by then, they’re lost in the stressed-out mix of everyone else desperately trying to make their numbers work miracles.

Please, don’t be a biz calendar lemming!

Use July and August to Review, Reward, Regroup, and Reinvent your path and plan, so you’ll be toasting to your amazing, breakthrough success come New Year’s Eve.

Here’s how.

1. Review. Block out time to check in on the progress you’ve made on your January goals. No taking or making phone calls, no sending or receiving emails. Don’t judge or sulk, just breathe in the summer vibe, evaluate with objectivity, and review the steps you’ve taken to achieve (or thwart) your goals so far.

2. REWARD! One of the things small business owners almost never do is stop to appreciate what they’ve already achieved. Well, what DID you accomplish during the first six months of the year? Identify five specific successes, and celebrate them by doing something nice for yourself and/or your business team.

3. Regroup. Okay, so you’re not in the exact place you thought or hoped you’d be way back in January. Who is? The question is, where ARE you? What’s working? What isn’t? Are you on (or near) the right track? Have your vision and priorities changed? Once you understand the reasons behind your progress or shortcomings, you’ll have a much easier time with the fourth and final step.

4. Reinvent. It’s time to course correct. Look at your successes, challenges, and other discoveries, and decide to either:

• Keep doing what you’ve been doing, because it’s working or you’re convinced it will if you give it more time.
• Make changes to your tactics, strategies, and methods, because you think the ideas are good, but the execution needs tweaking to make it effective.
• Abandon the goals altogether, because they’re hurting your business, or taking too much time away from things that are working well in your business, or because you’re just not getting the kind of results you hoped from them.

So after a long hot July day, take some time in the cooler evening to pour yourself an ice-cold drink, enjoy the late sunset, and reflect on what you’ve done so far this year. Allow yourself to be pleasantly surprised a