Posts Tagged ‘local businesses’
Keep Your Eye On The Ball
By MARK RIFFEY - After every election, it's painfully easy to lose focus. Don't.... more
Warming Up Your Cold Email
By MARK RIFFEY - With double digit below zero weather arriving in Montana this week, the last thing any of us need is a cold email.... more
Brainstorming A 2017 Business Roadmap
By MARK RIFFEY - Ready to start working through the first task on the detailed 2017 business roadmap that you painstakingly carved out over the last month? ... more
Preparing to Sell Your Business…Or Not
By MARK RIFFEY - As you get a little older, one of the natural things you start to think about is “What am I going to do with this business?”... more
The Smell (or Aroma) Of Sales
By MARK RIFFEY - Sales is tough work. One of the things that makes it challenging is starting a conversation with someone you don’t know.... more
Focus Isn’t Enough
By MARK RIFFEY - When it comes to your business, what drives your decision to let something slide a little, be it a day, a week or "forever"?... more
Don’t Forget the Ice
By MARK RIFFEY - Does your merchandising save your customers a trip? It should.... more
Are you Using Your Marketing Data Effectively?
By MARK RIFFEY - Presumably you have a budget and as a part of it, income / revenue goals. How certain are you that you’ll hit them this month?... more
The Ups and Downs of Complexity
By MARK RIFFEY - Business people (myself included) seem to have a habit of making projects more complex than they should be.... more
It’s Time To Sell Something
By MARK RIFFEY - Selling the right product to the right person so they can do what they need to do (or get what they want) is honorable work.... more
What Are You Afraid Of?
By MARK RIFFEY - Is your business clinging to fear-driven artificial barriers? Limiting thoughts had my software company stuck on a sales plateau.... more
New Project Idea? Do This First
By MARK RIFFEY - Wouldn't it be nice to know if a project was going to fail after two weeks rather than two years?... more
The Danger Of Presumption
By MARK RIFFEY - There are many ways that assumptions can endanger your projects. The key is to have a process that does as much as possible to eliminate them.... more
The One Sentence That Can Make Or Break You
By MARK RIFFEY - How are you spending your downtime? You may not have any influence over your team’s downtime, but you can still set an example.... more
Christians, Lions and Wives of New Jersey
By MARK RIFFEY - How are you spending your downtime? You may not have any influence over your team’s downtime, but you can still set an example.... more
A Recipe For Teamwork
By MARK RIFFEY - If you had to make up a recipe for teamwork, what would you stir in?... more
Are you Hiring Millennials?
By MARK RIFFEY - Where will your company be in 15-20 years if you don't hire, groom and train 18-34 year olds over the next 10 years?... more
Take Ownership
By MARK RIFFEY - Whether you like it or not, anyone who sells for you, advertises for you, reps for you or in any way helps you sell what you do REPRESENTS YOU.... more
Context Equals Opportunity
By MARK RIFFEY - When your client is under pressure, you have an opportunity to create a memory that can last a lifetime.... more
How Do You Protect Your Business?
By MARK RIFFEY - Business owners protect their business by reducing risk, managing cash flow, getting appropriate legal advice and insuring their people and assets properly.... more
Strategies to Improve Your Black Friday/Small Business Saturday/Cyber Monday
By MARK RIFFEY -The rushes are over. What did you learn? What can you fix now? What needs to be fixed for next time? Write it down.... more
Lessons From Working at Home
By MARK RIFFEY -Geoffrey James put together a list of 10 lessons learned from his working from home. I’ve worked at home and in my kayak since 1999 so I thought I'd chime in. ... more
Your Referrals Leave An Impression
By MARK RIFFEY -Only a fool would believe that a referral doesn’t reflect on the one who makes it. So why do it poorly?... more
Making Employees Feel Safe
By MARK RIFFEY -When people don’t feel safe, it damages every conversation. Often they say nothing, as if they have no opinion, have nothing to add, and agree with whatever’s already been said.... more
The Ones You Can’t Trust
By MARK RIFFEY -Stop putting up with them. Stop encouraging them. Stop tolerating them.... more
On The Playing Field, Little Things Matter
By MARK RIFFEY -Little things drive the quality of your customers' experience but they don't happen by accident.... more
Selling, Marketing and Wyoming’s Cutt-Slam
By MARK RIFFEY -The fish rejects your fly for the same reason that prospects ignore your message.... more
Experience Management Matters
By MARK RIFFEY -Delivery of a product or service is about far more than the act of your client opening the box or getting the service they paid for.... more
Beware Of National Distraction Season
By MARK RIFFEY -National distraction season is upon us. Are you ready? I’m referring to election/political season and the drama it brings to the workplace.... more
Extinguish Employee Drama
By MARK RIFFEY - It’s critical to the long term success of your career as a manager, or as an owner, to create a culture of drama non-proliferation at your business.... more
When The Smoke Clears, Will Your Reputation?
By MARK RIFFEY - How your business delivers when things are tough sets the tone for your future.... more
Get One More Per Day, Week, Month
By MARK RIFFEY - Doubling the sales of a business tends to result in doing things the same way, but doing them twice as often, or somehow doing twice as many of them.... more
Communicate When Fire Threatens
By MARK RIFFEY - Send the right message to the right guests in a timely manner in the right way. Build trust. Practice, automate, document, delegate.... more
Summer Fire Communication Can Burn You
By MARK RIFFEY - Even though the Reynolds Creek Fire is only 65% contained, the Going-to-the-Sun road is mostly open. 99.97% of the park is not burning and it remains more than capable of wowing.... more
Why Do They Want To Disrupt My Business?
By MARK RIFFEY - The big word in the startup world is disruption, as in “We will disrupt the what-cha-ma-call-it market.” ... more
No Customers Beyond This Point
By MARK RIFFEY - I’m in the market for a new-to-me rig. I don’t switch rigs very often, so it’s a slow process to make sure I buy it right.... more
What Do You Do About Bad Competitors?
By MARK RIFFEY - I don’t talk much about competitors. First, because you have far more to gain by investing time and effort into improving your own business.... more
Filling Cracks With Automation and Metrics
By MARK RIFFEY - Metrics tell you what happened and in some cases, what is happening, but they don’t tell you what to do next. By themselves, metrics can get lonely.... more
Good Metrics, Better Metrics
By MARK RIFFEY - Hiding inside most good metrics is better, actionable information.... more
The Importance of Performance Metrics
By MARK RIFFEY - Quality and performance metrics drive your business. Do you know your critical metrics?... more
The Care and Feeding of Leads
By MARK RIFFEY - Coming up with the right question can be a lot harder than not having the answers. And answers are better than assumptions.... more
The Care and Feeding of Leads
By MARK RIFFEY - How are you caring for the warm leads that you get each day? It matters.... more
Play It Missoula! Downtown Pianos Delivered Friday, June 5
Three Play It Missoula! pianos will be delivered to Downtown locations this Friday, June 5, 2015 for First Friday festivities. You gotta check em out!... more
Sunshine Marketing as Self-Defense
By MARK RIFFEY - Have you ever signed a non-compete, non-disclosure clause as a condition of employment? Do you make your employees and / or contractors sign one?... more
A Forecast of Shadows
By MARK RIFFEY - Warning: I’m about to discuss some technology things (yes, again), with good reason. IT affects every business niche, including yours. This isn’t about IT. It’s about everything.... more
Can You Predict Future Revenue?
By MARK RIFFEY - What would you be able to focus on if you weren’t running about the place trying to chase down enough sales to make next week’s payroll?... more
Robots, Rural Small Business and China
By MARK RIFFEY - Would robotics address rural small business challenges like it does in China?... more
What Your Customers Don’t Know
By MARK RIFFEY - What you think they know, what they really know, what they've forgotten. Why Messaging is so important in marketing your business.... more
Winning Against the Chain Store
By MARK RIFFEY - Yesterday, I sat down in a store that’s part of a Montana-based coffee shop chain. I drove past a national coffee chain to reach this place. Why should I drive past them to vist you?... more
The Hardest Part of Helping A Business
By MARK RIFFEY - There are a lot of rewards that come with helping businesses improve beyond what they expected.... more