Look at this picture:

Those are pretty big smiles don't ya think?

Well, those are my kids. And the reason they are smiling so much is that today is their last day of school.

Do you remember how you used to feel on the last day of school. I do. I clearly remember how good it felt. Knowing that I was done with whatever grade I was in. And that I had the long, fun summer to look forward to.

So, why am I telling you this?

Because I want you to think about the last time you felt this way in your business.

When was the last time you were really excited after accomplishing a goal. Enough so that you really celebrated and relaxed for at least a day or two after accomplishing it.

As an entrepreneur, too many times it's go go go.

We must all slow down sometimes to enjoy life. We need to enjoy the journey of becoming a successful entrepreneur.

To do this, you need to constantly be setting goals for yourself. Annual goals, quarterly goals, monthly goals, weekly goals and daily goals.

And for certain goals, after you achieve them, you should reward yourself.

Sometimes the reward might be as small as giving yourself a coffee break or a piece of candy.

At other times, a weekend away or a day off makes sense.

But you must achieve pre-set goals, and you must reward yourself. That makes the journey fun and enjoyable. And it ensures that you continue to make progress towards completing your journey and entering the land of the outrageously successful entrepreneur.

A fair portion of “Productivity Secrets for Entrepreneurs: How to Get More Done, Make More Money and Take More Time Off" discusses the importance of goal setting and rewards for you and your employees. It teaches you to set the right goals and achieve a whole lot more. Learn more here.

When I started Growthink over a decade ago, I thought I knew more about management then I did.

One of the things I clearly did wrong was running meetings. Looking back, it pains me to think of the literally hundreds of hours lost on inefficient meetings.

Fortunately, over the years, my team and I have read and tried pretty much every technique for making meetings more efficient, and boiled it down to just 8 essential rules.

Following them will make you and your team MUCH more productive. Here's my list of the 8 rules:

1. Start on time. If 3 people wait an average of 2 minutes per meeting for the fourth to arrive, that adds up to hours of lost productivity over the year. It's also extremely frustrating, and starting a meeting in a state of frustration kills creativity.

2. Have a written agenda. Ideally circulate your agenda 24 hours in advance of the meeting so that you and all the participants are as prepared as possible.

3. Everyone must participate. In meetings you want to encourage all viewpoints so you can make the best decisions. So get everyone involved.

4. Stick to a schedule. The entire meeting and each agenda item must have a time limit.  If an individual agenda item goes long, revisit it at the end of the meeting (if there's time), or schedule another meeting to discuss it. The discussion for each agenda item should end only when specific action item(s) have been determined, written down, and assigned.

5. Stay on topic. While it's ok to go off on an occasional tangent, you must guide the discussion back on topic. The agenda and time limits will help with this.

6. Don't hold unnecessary meetings. If you have trouble creating the agenda (in that there's nothing too important to discuss), it might mean that you shouldn't hold the meeting in the first place.

7. End meetings with complete clarity regarding the key action items and who will complete them. This is key. Coming up with great ideas during a meeting is meaningless, unless those ideas are documented and assigned to individuals to execute on.

8. Improve. Every five or ten meetings, get feedback from your group regarding ways to improve how your meetings are run.

These 8 rules will make your meetings more productive, and you and your team will accomplish much more and be much more successful!

For tons of other productivity tips and tactics, check out my Productivity Secrets for Entrepreneurs here.

10) Keep Launching, Innovating and Growing

Running and growing a successful business requires that numerous jobs be performed at once, and well.  The start of a new year provides an opportunity to take stock of your most precious commodity: your time. 

What are you best at?  Where do you add the most value? 

Learn how and when to delegate or outsource certain tasks and responsibilities.



8) Build and Improve Systems and Processes

Most successful businesses are successful because they have effective systems in place.  For example, if you walk into any McDonalds across the country, and order a Big Mac, you know exactly what to expect. 

As Michael Gerber points out in The E-Myth Revisited, it’s critical that entrepreneurs build businesses, rather building an ever-increasingly stressful and taxing J-O-B. 

Especially if you're interested in selling your business, you want to be able to walk away from the business and have it continue to run. 



7) Build and Nurture an In-House Email List

Whether you run a dental practice, a restaurant, a software company or a social networking website, chances are you could be getting more out of your website traffic. 

One way to improve the efficacy of your website is to offer an email newsletter via an online email submission form. 

Building and maintaining an email list could be one of the best ROI decisions you make in 2009.  Constant Contact and AWeber are two recommended resources for email communications. And, if you run a blog, you can set up blog-to-email newsletters using services like FeedBlitz.



6) Participate in Online Conversations

If you haven't already done so, start a blog, create an account at Twitter, sign up for Facebook, join LinkedIn... whatever your website or tactic of choice, get online and contribute to the conversations about your industry online. 

Issue press releases using PRWeb.  For an excellent tutorial in online marketing and PR, I recommend reading David Meerman Scott's The New Rules of Marketing and PR, as well as his blog Web Ink Now.



5) Meet More People (Out in the "Real" Offline World)

Join new networking groups to establish relationships and potential partnerships with people and firms in your area.  One great way to jumpstart your offline networking is to leverage MeetUp.com.  MeetUp.com has thousands of business networking groups.  If you don't see a group in your niche, you can even start your own.



4) Get a Life (Outside of Work)

It's critical that you take breaks from your business to enjoy life.  Make a resolution to enjoy physical as well as mental vacations from your business every once in a while.  This is not only good for your health and sanity and relationships, it's also good for business!  You'll gain relief the stresses of growing your business, and once you return, you'll be reinvigorated with a new perspective on your challenges and opportunities.



3) If It's Not Working, Ditch It

Let’s be honest.  Not every marketing strategy, fundraising strategy, partnership, or product line will be a winner.  If you tried something in 2008 and it wasn't working, you might want to admit that and move on.  Focus your energy and resources towards those priorities that will deliver the greatest return on investment (both in terms of time and money). 



2) Learn Something New, Again and Again

Make a commitment to continual education.  Stay updated on your industry while branching out into new areas of knowledge.  Read blogs, books, newspapers, and magazines. An easy way to incorporate learning into your every day routine is to listen to interviews, audiobooks and podcasts.  Summary.com is a great, convenient service for integrating business education into a busy schedule.



1) Continually Update Your Business Plan and “To Do” Lists

Update your business plan weekly, monthly and quarterly, depending on what’s changing in your industry and what you’ve accomplished in your business. 

Updating your plan can be a critical factor in both your ability to raise capital and your ability to properly execute on market opportunities.  The sections that typically require periodic updates include the milestones, competition, management team and financials sections.

To increase your personal and corporate productivity, take advantage of tools like Basecamp which allow you to track tasks and milestones online in a collaborative "wiki" environment. 

For a great read on productivity, we recommend The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes.  As Chet recommends, focus on the daily tasks that are most critical to your growth, and keep the daily “to do” list brief (no more than 6 items). 

What is your New Year's resolution?

Over the past few weeks, I've spent a lot of time studying a field called Landing Page Optimization. It's a fascinating field that deals with improving landing pages, which are the pages of your website that visitors come to either organically or through paid marketing initiatives. The goal of Landing Page Optimization is to maximize conversions (e.g., sales, newsletter signups, etc.) of these visitors.

One of the guiding principles of landing page optimization is that landing pages need to be simple. If there is too much information on the page, the reader gets confused and either clicks the back button or closes the browser.

This principle is the same as a guiding principle of business plan development; mainly that the plan, and particularly the executive summary, needs to present the business concept concisely so that the audience quickly understands it. If not, they will simply discard the business plan.

Interestingly a concise message might not only improve your business plan and your landing page, but your entire business’ success. Consider the case of Google. The Google homepage has always had very little text on it. In fact, if you go to it, it doesn’t even say that it is a search engine. But, by having a big empty box in the middle and having a button underneath it that says “Google Search”, it is pretty intuitive that Google is a search engine.

Now, when someone was referred for the first time to Google over the past few years and came to Google.com, what do you think they did? Well, due to its simplicity, I think we can assume that nearly all people who came to Google.com typed in a search term and hit the search button. Then, they instantly saw high quality search results and were sold on the fact that Google is a great search engine.

So, by keeping their landing page and business concept/proposition extremely simple, Google was able to get people to try its product. Because the product is high quality, those trials resulted in loyal users.

While there are many examples out there, one interesting company that I think could really improve its business plan, landing page, and thus chance of success is SpinVox. I first read about SpinVox in this Guy Kawasaki post in which he says, “This service translates voicemail to text and then sends a text message to your phone and/or an email to your computer.”

While Guy Kawasaki does a great job clearly explaining SpinVox in this 22 word sentence, I don’t think SpinVox does. On its homepage, SpinVox has the following text:

"SpinVox captures spoken messages and cleverly converts them into text. It then delivers your message to a destination of your choice – inbox, blog, wall or space. Right in the moment. Giving you the power to Speak Freely... Simply put, we do one thing – turn voice into text. But it's one thing that can be applied to the many ways you communicate, from your Voicemail to your Blog. Use the finder below to find the right one for you."

If I were to come to this page without Guy Kawasaki’s clear explanation, I would most likely leave without trying the service. It neither clearly explains the most common use nor the value proposition of the service.

To sum up, KEEP IT SIMPLE. Use simplicity to hook the investor, the customer, the partner, or whoever else you are trying to influence. Once hooked, over time (which could be as little as 2 minutes later), you can tell the full story.