This is the fifth part of the “Is Your Business Making These 10 Mistakes?” series. Part 1 can be found here, Part 2 is here, Part 3 is here and Part 4 is here.

Plan the Next Six Months, Not the Next Five Years
I’m sure a lot of people will disagree with me on this one, but I don’t recommend spending a lot of time planning your long term goals, because things change too fast and too often. This is what I do for myself and it works out great for me.

1. I think of where I want to be in six months.
2. I reverse-engineer the process to come up with an action plan. For example, if I want to launch a new line of products in six months, I write down all the milestones I need to accomplish and their deadlines.
3. I take the first milestone and break it down into actionable steps. “Find manufacturers” isn’t an actionable step because it isn’t something you can do without having to break it down into smaller pieces. “Search Google for ‘deodorant manufacturers’” is an actionable step because it’s something very specific I can do.
4. I plan each week and decide what I need to do this week to be on schedule for my plan.
5. I plan each day.
6. Every day I get the actionable steps done and I move on with my plan.
7. I adjust the plan of action every week because things change every day. That’s why you don’t want to sit down and plan the next five years.

It’s All About the Back-End
A front-end offer is the first product a customer buys from you. Back-end is everything else you sell them. One of the most valuable lessons I learned through the years is that the money is in the back-end. People that bought from you in the past are a lot more likely to buy from you more often and buy more expensive products (assuming their first experience with you was great).

Ninety-five percent of all businesses stop marketing to their “old customers” after the first purchase. This is insane! After they bought a cell phone from you, sell them extra batteries, airplane chargers, cases, upgrade their plans and sell them broadband Internet.

When a customer places his first order with you, that’s where your real marketing should START, not end.

This is the fourth part of the “Is Your Business Making These 10 Mistakes?” series. Part 1 can be found here, Part 2 is here and Part 3 is here.

Be Good at Delegating
One of the hardest things for entrepreneurs to do is to delegate. We think that we can do everything better than everybody else. Most of the time, this is true, because we know our businesses better than everybody else, we care more about them than everyone on our team and we have a broader set of skills than our employees.

However, just because we are better than other people at something, it doesn’t mean that we have to do it. If you make chocolates, take orders and deliver them, you’ll hit saturation point very soon. That’s bad for your business and your health. This is a lesson that took me a long time to learn.

First of all, let me start by saying this: there ARE people out there that are better than us at what we do. But, there are two problems:

• When you’re getting started, you can’t afford them.
• Entrepreneurs have a wide range of skills and we tend to look for someone that has the same skills but is better at them than we are. This is almost impossible because different people have different skill sets. The solution: find ONE person for each skill. Maybe you’re great at web design, copywriting, sales and finances. It’s not very likely that someone out there has the same skills and is better than you at them. But I can guarantee that you will find a better web designer than you. You’ll find a much better copywriter too. Don’t look for all the skills in one person.

OK, we talked about why you need to delegate and how you can find the right people to delegate tasks to. Now, let’s talk about effective delegation. These are some tips that will help you become really good at delegating:

• Give SPECIFIC instructions.
• The outcome should be MEASURABLE.
• The goal should be REALISTIC.
• There should be a DEADLINE.
• Give people all the MATERIALS they need to complete the task or tell them where they can get them from.
• Explain the REASONS and goals. People work a lot better when they understand why something is being done.
• Tell people whether they have FREEDOM to choose how to do something (as long as it’s done) or if you want it done in a specific way.
• Give people FEEDBACK on their results.
• UNDERSTAND that the process will get better and better as you work more with those people and they learn how you like things done.
• Ask for INPUT. Ask the people on the trenches how you can improve the process.
• Make yourself AVAILABLE for support.

How to Become a Great Problem Solver
There are great books written on problem solving, but my approach is a lot simpler.

1. Is there really a problem? What is the worst thing that could happen if I do nothing about this?
2. If I decide there is a problem and it needs to be solved, I take a pen and a notebook, and create three columns: problems, reasons and solutions. In the problems column I write down what’s going on. In the reasons column I write down why I think it’s happening. And, in the solutions column I write a step-by-step plan of action to solve the problem. For example, last month I had very little free time to finish a very important project. In the problem column I wrote “little free time”. In the reasons column I wrote “John Doe calls me five times a day and we stay on the phone for half and hour each time he calls”. In the solution column I wrote “1. Figure out a nice way to tell this client that I can’t keep doing this anymore. 2. Call client and communicate my decision to him.”
3. Don’t get hung up for weeks trying to find the perfect solution. Act now and correct later if necessary.

If you have a hard decision to make, I have two suggestions for you:

1. Sleep on it. I’m not saying you should wait two weeks to make a decision, but one or two days is OK. Don’t think about the solution all the time. Think about something else and often the solution will come to you (yeah, it sounds a little spooky, I know, but it really works this way).
2. Talk to other people. Sometimes outsiders have a much better perspective than you.

I hope your liked this article. Look out for Part 5 of this post tomorrow.

This is the third part of the “Is Your Business Making These 10 Mistakes?” series. Part 1 can be found here and Part 2 is here.

Meditate Often
Do you know how they say outsiders have a better perspective of your problems than you do? That’s because as a business owner, you’re so involved in the details of your business that it’s often hard to see the full picture.

This is one of my favorite quotes: “In business and in life, doing things right is not nearly as important as doing the right things.”

We, business owners, often get caught up doing the wrong things. That’s why meditation is so important. When you get away from work, you start analyzing everything you do. You don’t get caught up on HOW to do things better; you start thinking IF WHAT YOU’RE DOING IS WHAT YOU SHOULD BE DOING.

As a business owner, your goal should be to SPEND YOUR TIME DOING THE HIGHEST INCOME-PRODUCING TASKS ONLY. (Read this sentence again. It will change your life.)

I’ve read several meditation books but I have to admit that I don’t use most of the techniques I learned. All I do is to lie in bed with my eyes open and think. I think for an hour about the things I do and whether those are the things I should be doing. I always take a notebook and a pen and I write down my thoughts.

If you think you can’t afford to spend an hour per week meditating, let me tell you something: you can’t afford NOT TO.

Be Consistent
Every day there’s a new “get rich fast opportunity”. Stay away from the “latest thing”. Be loyal to your business model. Work hard and smart. Trust your instinct. If something looks like BS to you, it probably is. You know your business better than anyone else. Most book writers make less than $50,000/year. You make much more than that. Why would you do what these gurus tell you when you know you should do something else?

I hope your enjoyed this. Look out for Part 4 of this post tomorrow.

This is the second part of the “Is Your Business Making These 10 Mistakes?” series. Part 1 can be found here.

Trust Your Instincts
This one is hard to explain. Some people believe in instincts and some people don’t. All I know is that every time I followed my gut, I made the right decision and every time I didn’t, I screwed up. I don’t know how it works, but I know it does work.

A lot of people will disagree with me, but my advice to you is, “if all the data in the world is telling you that you should make a certain decision but your instinct is telling you the opposite, follow your instinct.”

What do you think? Do you agree?

Something Good Done Today is Better than Something Perfect Done Tomorrow
A very successful entrepreneur told me this story once:

“When I was starting my business, I needed to order shelves. They had three sizes: small, medium and large. My partner started doing all the calculations to figure out how many of each we needed. A week later, he was still working on it. Finally, I said, ‘let’s order 25 small ones, 50 medium ones and 25 large ones’. We placed the order and moved on.”

I asked, “how did that work out for you? Was what you ordered exactly what you needed?”

“Kind of”, he said. “A month later we had to order two more large ones and there were four small ones that weren’t completely full.”

“So you made a mistake rushing that decision”, I said. “You should’ve waited for your partner to finish the calculations, right?”

“No, absolutely not”, he responded. “You need to make decisions and move on. You can adjust your decisions later. But, something good done today is better than something perfect done tomorrow. We had a business to start and we needed to focus our energy on getting new clients and growing our company. We had no time to figure out the perfect order for shelves. We had important stuff to do.”

This was one of the most important lessons I’ve learned in my life.

1. Figure out what are the top 2-3 priorities in your business (if you think choosing the right color for your website is a priority, let me tell you: “it’s not!”)
2. Get your top priorities done very well.
3. Everything else should be done as fast as possible and you should move onto the next thing.

I hope you liked these lessons as much as I do. Look out for Part 3 of this post tomorrow.

Last week I was asked to put together a presentation for a group of entrepreneurs. They asked me to talk about some of the most common mistakes entrepreneurs make. I shared with them 10 very important entrepreneurship lessons that I learned the hard way.

Because this one ended up being a very long blog post, I decide to break it down into 5 parts and I’ll post one part every day of this week (from Monday to Friday).

Work in the Industry You Want to Take Over
My friend Matt told me this true story.

Acton has one of the best entrepreneurship graduate programs in the US. A few years ago, Acton had this extremely bright student. He was the best of his class and his teachers knew that he was going to make it big.

A year after his graduation from Acton’s program, a couple of his old teachers went to Starbucks to have a cup of coffee and saw this student working as a cashier. The teachers talked to each other about this and realized that if the best student they’ve ever had was working at a Starbucks after graduating, Acton must have been doing something very wrong.

They called the kid and invited him to meet with them and the director of Acton’s entrepreneurship program. They told him that they were very concerned that their best student was working at a Starbucks and asked him what they could do better in the future to avoid this from happening again.

The kid laughed and then answered, “I’m about to open a huge coffee store chain in Mexico. I’m working at Starbucks because I want to learn the business. I’ve worked two weeks in each area of the company for the last six months. I’ve done everything from serving coffee to planning marketing strategies. I feel I’m much more prepared now to run my new business.”

This guy is a true genius. If you want to start a business in an industry you don’t know, either work in it for a few months or partner with someone who understands the business very well.

Learn From Your Competitors
There seems to be a huge stigma around copying your competitors. I think there’s nothing wrong with it and that you should do it as much as you can.

Visit your top 10 competitors and learn from them. Learn from what they do right and what they do wrong. Survey their customers. Find out what are the top three complaints they have and build a business around that value proposition. For example, let’s say that you want to open a bakery. You then go to the top bakeries in your town and after talking to their customers you realize that they all complain about the bread never being “fresh from the oven”. There you have your tag line, “Fresh-from-the-Oven Bread 24/7″.

That’s what will make you unique and you shouldn’t copy someone else’s Unique Selling Proposition (USP). But you can copy everything else. Some examples:

• If 9 out of 10 of your competitors offer newspapers to their customers, it must work. You should do the same.
• If your competitors have a display right next to the checkout line, it must work. You should do the same.

Your competitors have been in the market for a long time. They’ve tested pretty much everything. Piggyback from their experience as much as you can. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel with everything you do. But remember: you should have your own USP.

Look out for Part 2 of this post tomorrow.

On Monday I wrote about my favorite Internet marketing books. Today I’m going to share with you the 10 entrepreneurship books that shaped me as an entrepreneur and even as a person. I believe that these books can make you a more successful business person and, more importantly, a happier person.

Ready, Fire, Aim
Michael Masterson is my hero. The guy is a very successful serial entrepreneur and teaches some of the most important business lessons ever in his book Ready, Fire, Aim.

Go Big or Go Home
Wil Schroter has a way to approach business that makes him unique. Don’t even think about starting your own company without reading this book first.

The Knack
I really enjoyed reading this book. Norm teaches a lot of great business lessons using stories, which makes the book very fun to read.

The 4-Hour Workweek
Tim Ferris is like no other guy I know and his book is certainly unique. What I like about The 4-Hour Workweek is how it’s all about making enough money to be happy (and then spend the rest of your time living your life) instead of making as much money as you can. This book will make you re-think a lot of your assumptions about priorities and life.

StartupNation
Jeff and Rich Sloan are two very successful entrepreneurs and the founders of StartupNation.com, the #1 online community for entrepreneurs. Their book shares a lot of great stories that will give you the inspiration you need to grow your company.


The Big Book of Small Business
I really liked Tom Gegax’s approach to business. He talks a lot about being a great leader and building remarkable teams. Highly recommended.

The Art of the Start
Guy Kawasaki is one of my favorite people in the whole world. He’s smart, funny and overall a great guy. The Art of the Start has some of the brightest business lessons I’ve learned in my life.

The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur
Mike Michalowicz did a great job writing this book. It’s all about how entrepreneurs overcome obstacles and achieve their goals. This book is full of great ideas for the small business owner.

Go It Alone!
Go It Alone! is fun to read, full of stories, tips and step-by-step guides.

Flying Solo
A great book that will teach you how to balance work and life and how to put your priorities in order. If you’re a business owner, you have to read this book.

What are YOUR favorite entrepreneurship books?

Shooting a video and posting it to YouTube is OK; it’ll definitely help with your marketing. But, if you want to be really successful at video marketing, you need to take it to the next level.

In this article I’ll share with you 3 of my favorite resources for video marketing.

Video Marketing Resource #1: TubeMogul
TubeMogul is an awesome tool that allows you to distribute your videos to a lot of video sharing sites at once and gives you statistics that you can use to learn what works best (so you can do more of it).

Video Marketing Resource #2: UStream.tv
What’s better than online video? LIVE online video! This website allows you to broadcast your videos LIVE to the whole world.

Video Marketing Resource #3: Advanced YouTube Tricks
Did you know that you can download YouTube videos, embed high-quality videos on your site and make your YouTube videos autoplay on your website? These are some of the coolest YouTube tricks.

“We learn from failure much more than we learn from success.”
Soichiro Honda

As an entrepreneur, I’ve made hundreds of mistakes. You’ll make mistakes too, but I don’t want you to make the sames mistakes I made. Learning from other people’s experiences is one of the smartest things you can do. I want to share with you 7 costly mistakes I made so you can avoid them in your own business.

Not All Sales Are Good
I used to think “as long as it makes us money, it’s a good thing”. Now I now how wrong I was. High-maintenance clients will actually LOSE you money. Plus, they’ll take so much of your time that your focus will be taken away from growing your business.

Use the 80/20 rule: 20% of your clients will suck up 80% of your time. Fire that 20% and go get more like the other 80%.

Also, detect what parts of your business are the most profitable and get rid of all the others. A few years ago I had a company that used to sell cool gadgets over the Internet. We were doing really well but we were too busy all the time to grow the business. My partner and I sat down and wrote down all the things that were taking a lot of our time. We realized that shipping internationally was very time consuming and so was gift-wrapping. About 5% of our orders were international and 7% of our orders were gifts. We decided to stop shipping internationally and we lost 5% of our sales. We decided to stop offering gift-wrapping and instead of losing 7% of our sales, we only lost 2% (as it turned out, some people were asking for gift-wrapping only because it was available, but they would’ve ordered from us anyway).

So, we lost 7% of our sales but we freed up 15 hours per week. We spent those 15 hours to market the company and tripled our sales in the following 6 months.

Analyze your numbers and time logs; identify what’s sucking up a lot of your time/money and eliminate those parts of your business. Focus on what you do very well that makes a lot of money and do A LOT MORE OF IT.


We Tend to Lie to Ourselves
Nobody likes failing and because we don’t like failing, sometimes we subconsciously choose not to see the truth. Our revenues have been dropping for the last 6 months and we keep telling ourselves it’s just temporary. More and more employees leave our company every month and we tell ourselves there’s something wrong with them. Our marketing doesn’t work and we tell ourselves things will “pick up” soon.

Lying to yourself will kill your company. It takes guts to acknowledge there’s something wrong with your company but it’s the only way to get things fixed.

Take a sheet of paper and make two columns: problems and solutions. Now figure out what’s broken and how you’re going to fix it.


When Most of Your Income Comes from One Source, You’re in Trouble
A few years ago we got a huge account. It was bigger than the rest of our clients combined. I was really excited. I started working 80% of my time for this client and I instructed the rest of the team members to do the same. This client was thrilled with our services but after 4 months they reduced their marketing budget and they stopped using us. I was devastated. Not only was this big client gone, but a few of our smaller clients had left us too. I was so focused on the “big guy” that I neglected everybody else.

Today, I’d rather have 30 clients each paying $2,000 a month than one client paying $100,000 a month.

If most of your income is coming from one single source, start working on changing that.


Reserves Can Save Your Business
No matter how strong you think your business is, things can always go wrong. Reserve cash can save your company when that happens.

Twice in my life I made the same mistake. The first time an employee stole a lot of money from me and put our company at great financial risk. The second time is when I lost my big client and a few small ones. In both cases I needed to borrow money to get out of the messes I got myself into. I was lucky enough to have friends with money that helped me out, but for most people that’s not the case.

Today I have a rule: 10% of our profits always go to a separate bank account. I don’t even think of that as “my money”. That’s the company’s money and the company will some day need it. I know it will.

Not only is this a great business decision but it also gives me the peace of mind I need. Now I know that when something really bad happens, our business will remain strong.


You Better Have an Excellent Reason to Have a Partner
Most people have partners for the wrong reason: “because he’s a really good friend”, “because he’s fun to work with”, etc. I don’t care if the person you’re thinking of asking to partner with you is your best friend and very funny. That’s a good reason to watch the Superbowl with him or go shopping with her, but not a good reason to go into business with that person.

Your partner should bring something to the table that you don’t have. It could be money, connections or a skill you don’t master. For example, I’m great at marketing but suck at finances. I get clients for our business and my partner keeps the business profitable. For one of my businesses I partnered with a guy who knows his industry extremely well. He brings to the table specialized knowledge and I bring to the table my marketing skills.

Every time I tried to partner with friends because they were good guys or fun to work with, I ended up regretting my decisions.


It’s All About Working with the Right People
Do you ever find yourself explaining someone how to do something over and over again? Do you ever feel like if you want something to get done right you have to do it yourself? I have news for you: you don’t have the right people on your team. I stressed for years because people I hired didn’t do as well as I expected them to. After a while I realized that if 99% of my employees weren’t doing a good job, I was hiring the wrong people.

When you hire the right people, everything becomes easier and more fun. The way I know someone is the right person for the job is if I can tell them WHAT to do but not HOW to do it. Tell smart people the outcome you expect and they’ll find a way to make it happen.


Your Happiness Shouldn’t Be Tied to Your Results
Every time I lost a client, I was really sad. Every time I got a new client, I was really happy. I don’t do that anymore. It’s just not good for me. Failures and successes are part of the game. Some things work out and some things don’t. If you can’t accept that, you shouldn’t own your own business or you’ll always be unhappy.

It’s great to work with a goal in mind, but you should enjoy the journey too. Otherwise, nothing makes sense. Love what you do and do it as well as you can. Some days you’ll see great results and some days you’ll find obstacles along the way. It’s the way it is. Accept it and keep on moving on. Enjoy your successes and failures. Remember: you’ll learn much more from failure than you will from success.

TweetBeep
Awesome tools that notifies you every time your name, brand or any keyword you choose is mentioned on Twitter.

FriendOrFollow
Find out A) who’s following you that you’re not following back and B) who you’re following that isn’t following you back.

Twitter Tools
WordPress plugin that allows you to pull your tweets to your blog. It can also update your Twitter status every time you post.

Ping.fm
The easiest and fastest way to update your status on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and over 40 social media sites.

Qwitter
Are you losing a lot of followers? This fantastic tool can help you understand why.

Twitter Grader
Do you want to find out how good is your reach and influence in the Twitter community? This tools can help you.

TweetDeck
An amazing Twitter client that allows you to sort your tweets into
replies, topics, groups, keywords, etc. You can even filter the results.

HootSuite
In my opinion, the coolest and most powerful suite of Twitter tools out there. Track your stats, manage multiple Twitter accounts, monitor your brand, schedule tweets, update all your social networks and much more.

TwitPic
Cool Twitter app that allows you to send photos on Twitter.

TweetStats
A great tool that gives you a very valuable insight on your Twitter marketing campaigns.

Last night a friend of mine asked me “what are the top 10 Internet marketing books?” I asked her to give me a few minutes to think about it and I finally emailed her this list.

Trust Agents
This book is the social media marketing bible.

Crush It!
Gary Vaynerchuk teaches you how you can make money doing what you love. A must read.

Inbound Marketing
A very smart approach to online marketing, website planning and social media.


Duct Tape Marketing
This book will give you dozens of great marketing ideas for your business.


The AdWeek Copywriting Handbook
Copywriting is the most important marketing skill and this is the best copywriting book I’ve ever read. Enough said.

Guerrilla Marketing
Trying to grow a company on a shoestring budget? This book is for you.

Call to Action
This book will show you how you can transform your website into an effective marketing tool.

Don’t Make Me Think
Do you want to make an easy-to-navigate and intuitive website? You gotta read Steve Krug’s book!

The Expert’s Edge
A very good read that will teach you how you can position yourself as the #1 expert in your market.

Changing the Channel
This book talks about the importance of having multiple marketing channels and gives you a lot of great marketing ideas.