Author: Ethan Theo

Abe WalkingBear Sanchez is an International Speaker / Trainer / Consultant on the subject of cash flow / sales enhancement and business knowledge organization and use. Founder and President of www.armg-usa.com, WalkingBear has authored hundreds of business articles, has worked with numerous companies in a wide range of industries since 1982 and has spoken at many venues including the Shakespeare Globe Theater in London.

Work Life

3 Keys to Sharpen Your Focus and Accelerate Your Productivity

Post author By Ethan Theo
Post date February 9, 2015

I was lying flat on my back in the grassy outfield, trying to come around. I had drifted back from my third-base position for the Little League team White Sox into shallow left field to catch a fly ball. I missed the ball with my glove and instead caught it with my forehead.

Someone said, “Son, you’ve got to keep your eye on the ball.”

Little comfort when your head is killing you and your ego is dead with embarrassment.

And you find out later that regardless of how much you keep your eye on the ball, it won’t help.

I needed glasses. My focus was off.

How do you know when your focus is off at work? That you’re not catching the positive ways to increase sales with greater productivity so you get out of the office earlier?

Here are 3 Keys to Sharpen Your Focus and Accelerate Your Productivity:

Deflect Distractions

For some people, the sky falls daily.

You know who they are. You cringe when they walk towards you. You sigh when they come up on Caller ID.

Deflect these distractions of negativity with two steps:

Step 1: Grab the handle

What can you learn from this Chicken Little? You can discover a lesson…at least that the sky fails to fall daily.

Step 2: FLUSH!

Flush the negativity, and any distracting emotions with them. Clean your mental bowl often.

Define Reality

You can imagine your business at its best. Or, you can worry. Same mental function.

Dale Carnegie once said, “If you can’t sleep, get up and do something instead of lying there worrying. The worry gets you, not the lack of sleep.”

Define your current reality and move forward instead of sideways with worry. Timeline your project and do it one step at a time. Examine your cash flow and track back to your marketing funnel and sales conversions. Where do your customers come from? Go get more of them.

Do the Unfamiliar

Change your routine and you force focus. Your creative innovation emerges from the disruption of the familiar.

Do unfamiliar little things first. Commute a different route. Change the way you shave or brush your teeth or shower in the morning.

These small disruptions emerge into larger ones that focus you on creative solutions to customer problems and requests, making you more productive.

When you deflect distractions that may be unfamiliar.

When you define reality, that may be unfamiliar, also.

To focus on the positive at work in this negative world, do the unfamiliar.

And Work Positive as your sales increase and your productivity grows greater so you can leave the office earlier to do what you love with those you love!

About the Author

Dr. Joey Faucette is the #1 Amazon best-selling author of Work Positive in a Negative World (Entrepreneur Press), coach, and speaker who helps business professionals increase sales with greater productivity so they get out of the office earlier. Discover more at www.ListentoLife.org.

Online Business

Four Easy Ways to Save Money when Creating a Business Website

Post author By Ethan Theo
Post date January 31, 2015
1 Comment on Four Easy Ways to Save Money when Creating a Business Website

Whether you already have an existing business or are thinking of starting one, creating a website should be one of your first orders of business. A good business website can do you a number of favours, from helping potential clients find you to selling your products. Many beginning entrepreneurs put off creating a website, thinking that hiring a web designer will incur a hefty fee. Yet there are many ways to minimise your start-up costs and get online. The following tips can then help you save money.

Conduct Preliminary Research

One of the most common mistakes that start-ups make is throwing a website online without taking the time to look at current design trends or formulate a clear strategy. To get started, you’ll need to think of a clear picture of what your goals are with this new website. Are you looking for a simple blog to post articles and interact with readers? Or are you more interested in selling your products and creating a user-friendly online store? These would be two very different websites, so it’s important that you clarify what the end product needs to look like before you begin.

Use a Free Blogging Platform

For a fairly basic website, you can use a free platform like Blogger or WordPress. These blogging platforms allow you to choose from a variety of free templates and offer a simple content management system. You can also select and register a domain name through these sites; although it will cost money if you want to register “yourbusiness.com” rather than “yourbusiness.blogger.com.” WordPress also allows you to pay a bit more to customise your blog with unique colour themes and your company logo, rather than using one of the free templates.

Shop Around and Find the Best Website Builder

If you want a more polished and fully customisable website, you might decide it’s worth paying for a professional web designer. Web design fees can vary quite a bit, and if you shop around and obtain several quotes you might snag a bargain. Don’t only look at local web designers. For example, you may have a business based in New York but find that a San Diego web development team offers more competitive prices than those in Manhattan. Web design and development can be contracted from a distance, so look at the bigger picture to get the best deals on a reputable company. You can save on a lot of trouble and time by searching for professional website builder services on dedicated website builder search engines such as www.top10bestwebsitebuilders.com to find the best website builder for you.

Promote your Site on Social Media

Once your site is up and running, you’ll need to think about how to make sure that visitors can find it. It doesn’t make much sense for a start-up business to pay for advertising, when there are so many free or low-cost online marketing possibilities. One easy way to promote your business is by setting up social media profiles. This gives you an easy outlet to broadcast new products, sales, and other important news to your customers.

Building a website and network takes time, but it doesn’t necessarily have to cost you any money.

Success Attitude

3 Strategies to Deal Positively with Interruption

Post author By Ethan Theo
Post date January 21, 2015
1 Comment on 3 Strategies to Deal Positively with Interruption

Interruptions intrude everywhere into your daily flow: marriage conversations (and other intimate activities if you have children at home), phone conversations, and your work flow.

Research indicates that it takes you anywhere from 10-20 minutes to re-engage fully with the task you abandoned when interrupted. So if you encounter 3 interruptions daily at work, that’s about one hour lost.

So when was the last time you had just 3 interruptions?

More like 33, right?

How well do you deal with these interruptions?

Implement into your work flow these three strategies for positively dealing with interruptions and watch as your sales increase with greater productivity and you get out of the office earlier to do what you love with those you love:

Listen

There is a line in the movie Pulp Fiction that goes something like this: “Are you really listening or just waiting to talk?”

As we really listen to each other, our eyes contact, our intellect and emotions connect, and we give full attention to the communication experience. An interruption-resistant bubble forms around us…if we’re really listening.

The common courtesy of listening isn’t so common these days with mobile technology’s immediacy ever in hand. A beep or ding intrudes with alarming regularity.

The path to extreme productivity lies in really listening to people and projects. When you listen, you focus intently and deflect interruptions.

Locate

Interruptions happen regardless of how well you listen. A client calls. A customer walks in. A team member has a question.

Locate your interruptions strategically. Establish appointments with yourself to return voice mail calls and emails. Create team meeting experiences and push others to jot down questions and bring them to that time.

When you must put out a fire, locate your place in the project or the conversation. Think of it as a bookmark, or dog-earing a page. Jot a post-it note. This simple act reduces your search time in getting back into the flow.

Leverage

Sometimes an interruption is fortuitous. It intrudes with new information that is directly applicable to a person or project. Leverage it in that moment with gratitude.

Or, the interruption brings knowledge relevant to another task on your to-do list. Locate it for easy reference later. Make a quick note for later leverage and return to the person or project at hand. By doing so, you keep your current listening engaged, locate it readily when you’re ready, and leverage the interruption, transforming it from pain to profit.

Sure, interruptions intrude multiple times daily. When you listen, locate, and leverage them, you implement your profitable actions with greater productivity while increasing sales so you get out of the office earlier to do what you love with those you love.

About the Author

Sales & Marketing

6 Essential Online Marketing Ideas for New Restaurants

Post author By Ethan Theo
Post date January 6, 2015

People Queueing in a Cafe

Are you starting a new restaurant? Do you want it to grow faster with online marketing?

The number of people who are connected to the Internet is growing at an exponential rate. Many restaurant owners are looking at it, and they are trying to latch onto the trend.

There are many ways to market your restaurant online. In this guide, we will only look at practical ideas that a fairly new restaurant can do to bring patrons to its doorsteps.

People & Relationships

3 Royal Strategies for Your Team to Play to Win

Post author By Ethan Theo
Post date January 5, 2015

If you picked the San Francisco Giants to return to the World Series this year, the odds might have been in your favor based on their last 5 years’ performance.

But who would have picked the Kansas City Royals?

Really?

With all of the fat contracts and top-heavy payrolls of other American League teams like the LA Angels and the NY Yankees, who would pick a mid-market, under-capitalized team who hasn’t been to the World Series in 29 years?

So how did the Royals do it?

And what can you discover from their success about how you and your team can succeed?

Here are three Royal strategies to build your team around today as you create a championship-winning, Work Positive team:

Be Humble

Remember: It’s not about you. It’s about you and the team.

Play your role on the team. Try to be “a person” not “the person,” and know that it’s enough.

Before the post-season, other than rabid Royal fans, who knew the names of the starting line-up players? Or the bullpen trio?

It’s amazing how much company sales increase and team productivity soars when you pay little attention to the accumulation of personal accolades and more to growing a championship-winning team.

Be humble. Be about the team.

Ask yourself as you Work Positive today, “Why am I doing what I’m doing? To be ‘a player’ on the team? Or, ‘the player’?”

Play for Mutual Benefit

Team is primary. There’s a Gestalt to team that defies understanding by those who bend inward to their ego, who insist on economic navel gazing—“I got mine. You get yours.”

The whole team really is greater than the sum of its parts. Sports writers talk about teams of destiny; teams that achieve greatness without the typically recognized player profiles.

An orientation to mutual benefit drives achievement beyond individual accomplishment. Kansas City made it to the World Series by playing “small ball,” i.e., with singles and stolen bases that depend on each player doing his part instead of the “sultan of swat” dominating the game with home runs.

Think of it this way in your work team: So what if you’re leading the company in sales if it still shows a significant loss each quarter?

Ask yourself as you Work Positive today, “How will my actions benefit the team? How will the company achieve its goals because of my unique contribution?”

Work the Golden Rule

Regard team members as highly as you do yourself.

In this day of celebrity-status, multimillion-dollar contract players sending signed baseballs with cell numbers to female fans during a game, it’s positively refreshing for an organization to clarify vision as “be a teammate.” You can’t buy that core value.

Brian Tracy says, “Successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others.”

The Golden Rule works. Work the Golden Rule.

Ask yourself as you Work Positive today, “What golden help do I share with my teammates?”

Want to build a championship team that consistently wins at increasing sales with greater productivity and more time with family and friends?

Be a humble, mutual benefiting, Golden Rule-guided teammate as you Work Positive today.

About the Author