Over the years I have looked at various Network groups to help with my referral business. All have been a disappointment in one-way or the other. Some had high fees and dues and almost all had rigid requirements that left me uncomfortable.

With the help of a chiropractor friend, we decided to start our own group, without some of the things we didn’t like in other network groups. We call our group Bridges, which stands for (Business-Relationships Involving Development, Growth, Expansion & Support).

The important part for our group is relationships, support, quality of character and less rigidity. There are no dues or fees but one needs to show up on time and regularly attend.

We have over twenty professions currently but our looking for many more in the SE & NE part of Portland. We allow only one profession per person and will be looking to grow to least forty.

We meet at the Monarch Hotel in Clackamas right off 205, Thursday mornings at 7:15 AM and end promptly at 8:30. If you are looking for quality referrals and business support with a great group of quality people give me a call at 503-496-3641 and ask for Dom or E-mail dsitowski@crownmail.net.

You can’t win the game focusing on the scoreboard. Focus on the game of engagement and the traffic will come.

Social networking, by definition, is designed to get you involved AND keep you involved.  Building a large following, in a sense, becomes a game.  In business, it is not about who has the most followers, but are you gaining more customers?

While it is important to build your following; your following is NOT the business building activity, communicate with your network is.  No matter if you are on Twitter, Facebook or you own blogsite, knowing your going for a targeted audience is always the best approach.

Answer the following questions:

1)    Who is your desired audience.

2)    What topics interest your desired audience.

3)    Why are they interested in that topic?

Create a social marketing plan, stick to the plan, feed you audience’s desires.

Ed Bejarana
Zenith Exhibits, Inc.

With the trade show season getting started AND the recession going strong (and looking like a double dip)–I am sharing these trade show tips to help you maximize your return on investment.

Pull a crowd to your trade show booth. Use an interactive display, such as a quiz or game on a computer, a contest draw, a scheduled demonstration; it doesn’t need to be fancy to draw people’s interest and get them to cluster around your trade show display rather than the others.

Ed Bejarana
Zenith Exhibits, Inc.
(503) 709-1454

Small business owners can end up paying a high price for neglecting to pay attention to their company’s finances. The typical scenario is the busy business person who turns the banking and accounting over to a bookkeeper, and then fails to keep an eye on what’s going on. After a while they begin to notice that no matter how hard they work, the company never seems to have enough cash. The reason of course is that their trusted bookkeeper is not so trustworthy.

The financial fraud statistics are grim. There are estimates that employee theft is growing at 15% per year and that as many as 40% of small companies are victims of embezzlement.  Estimates suggest that one third of bankruptcies and 20% of business failures are the result of employee theft.

Prevention is not difficult. Taking a few simple steps not only pays off in terms of protecting your assets, but it also does your employees a favor by removing opportunities to steal that might be a temptation to them.  Here a few ways to cut the risks of financial fraud and embezzlement in your company.

A key step is the hiring process. When hiring accounting and bookkeeping personnel it is critical to know as much as possible about them before you hand them the keys to the treasury. This should include checking references and talking with old employers. A comprehensive background check is also an excellent, cost effective way to protect your company.

A second easy step is to require your bookkeeper to take a vacation periodically. Often issues come to light when an embezzler is not on hand to intercept incriminating documents or smooth over other discrepancies.

The most important step is to segregate responsibilities. Don’t allow the same person who makes deposits to also record the transactions in the accounting records, and reconcile the bank account. Lack of segregation increases the possibility of fraud and the likelihood of honest accounting errors and omissions will not be detected.

Finally business owners need to look at the financial data of their company periodically. At a minimum they should review monthly bank statements, scan check registers, and look over a profit or loss statement. If they see something that is unexpected or unusual, they should follow up with some questions and analysis.

Stephen Ashby CPA

The Billups Company CPA’s Inc.

www.billupscpa.com

Do You Follow Up With Your Customers?
Do You Even Know Who Your Customers Are?

There is not a business alive that can succeed without sales. That is how revenue is driven. I don’t care what your business is. You have a product, or service, and your success is driven by how well you deliver that product or service to your clients or prospects. Do you know who your customers are?  How do you follow up with them?

It doesn’t matter if you are in a traditional sales oriented business like car or insurance sales, a retail shop like a Beauty Salon or Book Store, a professional like a CPA or Attorney, a Realtor or Mortgage Broker, you cannot exist without customers. How do you follow up with your customers?

You also cannot exist without the assistance of other, third party companies. There are others who provide essential services to you as you do your job. Some of these are essential to your success, others provide services upon which you rely upon. Do you know who your key partners are? How do you follow up with these key people?

Even within a large corporation or government entity, there are people without whom your job would not exist. The payroll department is reliant upon every other employee. Without them their job would not be necessary. The Insurance claims analyst has an external client (the policy holder), and many internal customers (all of the other employees whom he or she works with on the policy or claim). Do you know who your customers are? How do you follow up with them?

My point is that every one of our jobs is reliant upon the assistance of others. Whether it’s the end customer who uses our product or service and pays the bill, or the various co-workers or vendors who help us do our job in order to satisfy the end customer. Our success is tied to how we respond to others and how they respond to us.

I’m a mortgage broker as well as a referral marketing coach. I have an end customer, the homeowner who is looking to purchase or refinance. But in order to do my job, I am reliant upon a variety or internal co-workers, a wholesale lender with who knows how many people influencing my loan, an appraiser, possibly a Realtor, inspector, Title & Escrow company, and possibly verification of income, rent, assets and who knows what else…

While it’s easy to say I have 1 customer, there are a lot of people reliant on me and that I am reliant on to get the deal done.

Here is how I followup with my customers and key partners.

I have found that it is always better to be proactive and nice in order to get new clients and loans through the system. This takes more time, but the payoff is worth it. It also helps to have a system to spread that honey.

I use a combination of high tech and low tech services to bring in new business and facilitate the work flow on existing business.

Here are a few:

• In Person: Usually best for cementing relationships, but most time consuming. You also need to be concerned about your appearance and that of your meeting place.

• Telephone: Also very good as long as you are a good listener and can convey your thoughts. I use my office phone, iPhone and RingCentral for fax and 800#.

• Internet: Great for attracting new clients and transferring information easily and effortlessly. I have several websites that allow prospects to find me, easily leave information for me to get back in touch with them. I use facebook, ActiveRain and twitter, as well as others sites to attract new clients and make my work easier. In fact, my mortgage and Referral Marketing businesses could not exist without the Internet.

• Email: I have a love hate relationship with email. I need it, but about 50% of what I get is SPAM. Chalk it up to my success on google… I have also found limited success using email to draw in new clients. It is to easy to leave a bogus email address or for a well intended email to end up in the SPAM folder. Trust me, it happens.

• E-Newsletters: I send out several e-newsletters and know that they work, but they also can easily end up in the SPAM folder or wear out their welcome.

• Personal Greeting Cards: Everybody loves a personal greeting card. We are bombarded with email, junk mail, bills… But when we get a personal letter or greeting card, we get excited. I use SendOutCards to easily, and cost effectively send personal greeting cards. It takes a couple of minutes to create the card, push send and it’s printed at our factory, delivered to the Post Office and within a few days delivered to the mail box. I can even send a gift.

How do you followup with your clients? Do you know who your clients and key partners are?

What I suggest is to take a good look at your business or job.

• Identify where your revenue comes from. Who are your clients who bring you money or what were you hired to do?

• Identify the different steps involved in providing that service or attracting new revenue sources.

• Identify who else is involved in the process of assisting you in meeting the needs of that revenue source.

• Identify the steps where communication is best served and the method best for the situation. This should involve a variety of resources including personal visits, telephone, Internet, e-newsletters and personal Greeting Cards.

• Setup a plan and put it into action. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Just intentional.

Larry

NiceTouchMarketing

Tradeshow exhibiting is a lot like retail clearance sales.  Lots of people walk by your booth, and many, when asked, are “just looking”. We all know that emotion can be a power sales tool, but more often than not, time is the catalyst for triggering the emotional reaction.

Build the impression of demand into your trade show display.  Customers will want your products more if they think they’re in high demand.  Place a strategic sold sign on one or two items.  You might even leave a display spot empty, giving the impression that you’ve been too busy to restock.

Ed Bejarana
Zenith Exhibits, Inc.
(503) 709-1454

Time management, everybody has an idea, but few do it well.  So, how is that you manage your time, er, life?  David Beardsley, in April/May 1998 published an article titled “Don’t Manage Time, Manage Yourself.”  He writes about David Allen’s cure. Allen, who was 52 at the time was teaching people how to get unstuck.  His firm conducted seminars and one-on-one coaching sessions throughout the US. 

Allen asks, “Why do we feel so overwhelmed?”  We clutter our minds with what we think we should do, what we could do and find there is always more to do than there is   time to do it.  He goes on to say that most of the stress that we fee doesn’t come from having too much to do—it comes from not keeping agreements we have made with ourselves.  When we tell ourselves we ought to do something and then don’t do it, we experience self-doubt and frustration. 

Bear in mind that productivity is about completion.  Thus to obtain the control over our life/time, we need to identify all those incompletions in our lives, from the mundane to the most pressing responsibilities and as Allen say, “…isolate the simplest next step to complete them.”

However simple this may sound it is evident that most people don’t do it.  Allen says that we think too much about doing it and too little time actually performing the deed.   So, your assignment if you wish to accept it is to identify those incompletions and do them.  Watch what happens to your time.

Coach              http://www.coach-charles.com

The tradeshow season is upon us, are you getting ready for a show?  To help with your efforts I will publish short tips for improving your tradeshow return on investment.

Think neatness and visibility when putting your trade show display together.  Hang some of your products at customer eye-level to draw them into your display.  Make sure your display is organized and tidy; customers will be turned off by messiness or by having to do too much searching to find what they want.  Have all your prices clearly marked.

Ed Bejarana
Zenith Exhibits, Inc.
(503) 709-1454

Good Morning All,

What networking group do you belong to?  (Chamber of Commerce, Leads Groups, etc.)  Also, how can people get in touch with your organization to get involved?

“Many bloggers won’t consider any pitches from people they don’t have a pre-existing relationship with…”

– Kevin Briody, The Very Basics of Blogger Outreach, SocialMediaToday.com August 14, 2009.

Sometimes it is good to hear someone else say the same thing in a different way.  We say don’t make a sales pitch, Kevin, in his article, highlights the reason why (as well as several other basic blogging tid-bits.

How, then, should you use PortlandBusinessCommunity.com to help you business grow?

The same way you use a chamber of commerce.  Attend, get involved, meet new people, start conversations, give good advice and be seen!  When planning your business marketing strategy, did you take into account how many new people you need to meet each year?  How many referrals do you plan on per contact?  What marketing weight are you placing on your company web site?

My business is internet marketing: running a bunch of websites is easy for me.  Bear and I created Portland Business Community to help small business folks who can NOT run their own blog because of time constraints.  We also both felt the chamber meetings lacked a bit on the “helping business succeed” motivation.  Often the chambers seem more interested in generating revenue for the chamber that for the members.  Selling expensive website ad space, news letter ad space, tabletop ad space at the meetings…

Portland Business Community is your blog space where you can meet other business people, share ideas, build a referral pool and get new ideas on how to improve your business–and the price tag is ZERO!  We, of course, do sell eight ad spaces for $25 a month to keep the expenses paid, but not membership dues, no posting fees, and no publication restrictions–beyond the don’t make sale pitches, don’t bad mouth other business and don’t spam other participants on this blog site.

Happy Blogging!

Ed Bejarana
Zenith Exhibits, Inc.
Co-founder of PortlandBusinessCommunity.com