The Entrepreneurial Savant

When someone asks you for a price quote, resumé, copy of an article, name or phone number, estimate or for any other information, get it to them as soon as possible. My brother Richard, who owns a custom cabinetry business, has found that one of the most effective ways to beat the competition without price cutting is to get his quote back to the client ASAP, the next day if possible. This sends a clear message that he is businesslike and will not drag his feet through the job, a primary concern people have when hiring outside contractors.
We’re all time conscious and with the advent of overnight delivery and email, the expectation time frame for delivery of information went from weeks to days, hours or minutes. Most e-commerce businesses are now including one or two day shipment as a matter of course compared to those ‘delivery in 4-6 weeks’ notices that used to be common in mail order. All of these things mean we are time conscious to a degree never known before. The early bird truly does get the worm nowadays.

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If you want to learn more about the fringes of your business or art, read the classifieds at the back of the trades and on Craigslist. If you want to know more about all the work options out there suscribe to email feeds from Indeed.com. If you want to know about the hopes, dreams and delusions of your friends and co-workers, read the personals.
The classified ads are a window into all kinds of special interests, desires, opportunities and lifestyles. Like all information sources they lead the reader to all kinds of unusual subcultures. They can be very specialized if found in a web site or very general like those you pass by everyday in the daily paper. For small business owners, freelancers and anyone selling a product or service they represent many opportunities to form profitable alliances. Try reading just the help wanted once a week for a year. You’ll begin to get a feel for the economic ebb and flow of your community. You’ll find out who hires who and why. It only takes a few minutes to cruise through the ads.

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A rainmaker is someone who makes things happen. In a business she may bring in new sales when things are slow. In a creative situation, he may break up logjams and get things going again. Being a rainmaker means taking situations where things are not happening and looking for a way, sometimes any way, to get the momentum back. Rainmakers look for new angles, they throw ideas on the table, no matter how absurd or unusual, they ask people to do things outside of their job description or expertise and they look at a process that is stopped up and try to find a way around the stop.
Rainmaking is a skill requiring creative thinking and the nerve to go out on a limb. Sometimes it might mean being the first to say or do something that everyone has been hesitant to do. Often, it means diverting attention way from the thorny difficulty that has everybody stymied and back onto the bigger picture. Rainmakers say things like ‘Is this worth the effort?’ or ‘let’s just pick one small problem, solve it and then go on to the next’. They ask secretaries and dock workers what they think. Whatever gets the job done.
Rainmakers always find their way to the center and take the risks that take them to the next step. The best ones develop the people and listening skills that help them enlist others into their rainmaking.

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Every salesperson knows what a ‘cold call’ is. Its a telephone call to someone you don’t know that you make for purpose of furthering your cause. If you’re selling something, you may be seeking an appointment to make a presentation. If you’re raising money for a cause you may have a similar goal. If you’re trying to learn about a new career or resource you may simply be trying to find the right expert for advice. Whatever the reason you make the calls, they are often the only way you can accomplish your goal(s). Unfortunately a very human and common fear of rejection keeps most of us from making cold calls and we get stuck, unable to make forward movement.
There are many methods of beating the fear. Use a script so that when fear freezes you up, you can keep going with what you wanted to say. Rehearse your script ahead of time with a co-worker or spouse. Find common ground ahead of time through research so that you can turn a feared encounter into an opportunity to share interest. Most importantly, make a certain number of ‘cold’ calls everyday. These shots into the dark can lead to many new resources and profitable relationships.
Give yourself an incentive to make your calls everyday. Think of them the way a salesperson might. A good cold caller knows exactly how many calls they need to complete to make an appointment and how many appointments it takes to make a sale. Knowing their average profit on each sale, they can assign a dollar value to each and every call, no matter how successful. For instance a real estate agent may call on homeowners to get houses to list and sell. She knows that for every twenty calls she completes (reaches a person), she gets one appointment. One half of her appointments result in listings for which she averages a commission of $1500 each. The math shows each call she makes to be worth $37.50. ( 40 calls = 2 appointments = one listing @ $1500. 1500/40=37.50) It kinda warms up those cold calls doesn’t it? Take your goals and reduce them to the value of a phone call done three times a day, day after day. The value of each of those dials may be a pleasant surprise.

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Synergy is defined as the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. Synergy is what makes planning so important. By planning how to reach your goals through a well defined set of steps you get the added bonus of synergy. It works like this: Every effective action you take multiplies the effect of any other actions you take. If you are seeking publicity for an event you’re working on you make a plan to reach every potential source of publicity. You call the radio and TV stations with a good story about your event. You send press releases with pre-written anecdotes about the organization, perhaps its history or influential founders. You build a website, place ads on Google and send out an email blast, all according to your basic plan. What happens? People hear your event announced on the radio on the way to work. You’re in their E-mail later that morning. The paper features a story about the eccentric millionaire who started your group and mentions the fund-raiser. That night, they flip on the news and there you are again, building the decorations. Wow, they think, this event must really be the thing to do. And the power of synergy reinforces and reminds them about something that now seems much more than just an event in the paper.
Professional promoters and public relations people do this all the time, but there is no reason why you can’t get in on the action. The event you are promoting might be yourself. Maybe you want a new job or a new client. Make a plan and use the power of synergy to make it many times more effective.

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Strategy is the overall plan to achieve a goal. Tactics are the tools that are used to enact a strategy. When marketing a new product, a company develops a strategy by identifying the customer or market and determining how best to reach that market. All kinds of research is done and decisions are made about what steps are necessary to attract the attention of the market and then supply the need you have created. This overall plan is a strategy. The tactics used may be packaging, advertising, publicity, testimonials, sales training, etc.
When planning, start strategically and proceed using tactics, individually and together to create synergy.

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