Business Would Be Boring If...

we didn't laugh a little. A very good friend once told me we should play as hard as we work. Since hearing that bit of wisdom I have tried to take it to heart. Perhaps you should as well. Here a some funny quotes about business to hopefully at least make you smile.

• "A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation." Howard Scott.
• "I'm spending a year dead for tax reasons." Douglas Adams.
• "I always arrive late at the office, but I make up for it by leaving early." Charles Lamb.
• "In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock." Orson Welles.
• "Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
• "The definition of a consultant: Someone who borrows, your watch, tells you the time and then charges you for the privilege." letter in the Times newspaper.
• "In the business world an executive knows something about everything, a technician knows everything about something and the switchboard operator knows everything." Harold Coffin.
• "The first rule of business is: Do other men for they would do you." Charles Dickens.
• "Few great men would have got past personnel." Paul Goodman.
• "When I asked my accountant if anything could get me out of this mess I am in now he thought for a long time and said, 'Yes, death would help'." Robert Morley.

Create Some Buzz

One of the goals in business is to get people to talk often, favorably and in the right way about your products. Below are three ways you can spur the buzz about your business - best off all two of them are free!

Develop a high quality product.
The first step to generating buzz about your business is to produce or sell a meaningful and quality product. It must possess a quality that is worth talking about. Your product may be something that improves the quality of life, innovative, and connects or elicits passion among its customers. People will not hesitate to pass on or recommend to others a product that they think offers something valuable.

Ask for it.
Don't hesitate to request your customers and prospects to recommend you to any other person or organizations they think might benefit from your products or services. A happy customer will be more than willing to talk about you to their circle of family and acquaintances. Request them to give you a list of friends or family members that you can contact or include in your mailing list. Also ask people to pass the word about important company news and product developments.

Set up a formal referral system.
Referrals can allow you to bring in quality new customers at a fraction of the cost of advertising. The key is to start with a quality product or service that other people can feel confident about referring your business to their friends, family members or others. Then give them incentives to spread the word about your business.

One effective way to solicit referrals is to approach businesses that offer complimentary (but not competing) products or services, then requesting them to refer clients to you. For a business selling baby books and videos, a good referral partner would be a business selling baby clothes or furniture. Same market, but different products fulfilling different needs. For every client referred to you, you will pay them the agreed referral fee.

A Free Way to Market Your Business

If you offer complementary consultations send those who take you up on it an invoice showing your cost and value after your "discount."

If you are like many small business's, you may offer a free or no charge complimentary consultation as a way of getting your foot in the door of prospective customers, to simply educate prospective customers about your business, or as a way of meeting other small business owners you can refer business to and to get out of the home office.

Do NOT forget to send them an invoice with one line showing the actual cost they would have spent on your service if you didn't offer this service for free (this is a good time to review what you talked about in the description field). Make sure to add another line showing the discount which reduces the bill to zero.

You can also suggest that they write a compliment on a social networking site, their web site or Blog, or for your web site. Just remember to make it easy for them to do and to not take more than a minute or two to complete. An example would be to suggest that they write a sentence or two about how their business "fill in the blank" benefited.

That way, your value is in front of prospective customers and they are less likely to take your services for granted. In most bookkeeping programs, you can set up income and discount lines to track this marketing expense (even if the net is zero dollars) and see how effective this type of marketing really is.

A bonus tip! After you make a first sale/service to a new customer send a thank you letter along with the invoice. I have many repeat customers because of that thank you letter.