“The men who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try to do nothing and succeed.” - Lloyd Jones

“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.” - Peter F. Drucker

Commentary: Peter Drucker is one of my favorite thinkers and quotes like this one show why. Many small businesses correctly focus on efficiency but they end up being efficient in things that don’t matter. Conversely, some small businesses are doing the right things very inefficiently. The key is to make sure you are doing both: focussing on the right things and doing them right.

Craigslist.org, the popular classifieds listing site, has a CEO with some unique thoughts on running a successful business. Many seem counterintuitive but craigslist has been running a huge site with a very tiny staff successfully for many years and was recently purchased by eBay.

Some thoughts include:

• No meetings, ever. “I find them stupefying and useless.”
• Put speed over perfection: “Get something out there. Do it, even if it isn’t perfect.”
• Listen to what users want. Try to make the site faster and better.
• He doesn’t reply to any of his 100 daily messages, most of which beg Craigslist to do a deal. “I’m not real chatty on e-mail.”

I love CEO’s that go against conventional wisdom - something tells me he’s on to something.

“A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.” - Gen. George Patton

Commentary: As we’ve written before, planning can go on forever until everyone thinks it’s perfect. However, many times a good plan is good enough and the quicker you start working on it the faster things will get done.

The Marketing Experiments Blog has a great article on 10 things you can do today to improve your internet marketing that includes:

• Build a new headline for a high traffic landing page.
• Add a new testimonial to a high volume landing page.
• Place an order on your own site.

These internet marketing ideas are great and many can be done quickly and today!

People often wonder how to cancel an existing FEIN (Federal Employer Identification Number, also called a Federal Tax ID) when closing a business. The IRS has information available HERE on this topic.

We can make the process of closing an existing business simple and painless! Just visit our page on Additional Corporate Filings and fill out the quote request form to have a custom quote emailed to you.

Seth Godin has yet another great article on customer service:

No, of course Sumner Redstone can’t answer every single letter sent to Viacom. But…

Shouldn’t every single inbound call be answered in one ring? Shouldn’t there be as much spent on self-service customer support as is spent on the design of the selling part of your website? Shouldn’t you be tracking in the finest detail what people have to say when they call in? Shouldn’t you be rewarding call center operators by how long they keep people on the phone, not how many calls they can handle a minute? Shouldn’t there be an easy, fast and happy way for an operator to instantly upgrade a call to management (not a supervisor, I hate supervisors) who can actually learn something from the caller, not just make them go away?

Customer Service is always a balancing act. You don’t want to spend your entire day on the phone with customers who’ll talk your ear off or complain about the tiniest of issues. However, you also want to make sure you spend time on your phone etiquette, escalation procedures and systems so you can concentrate on your high value clients.  When I call most customer service lines, the quiet subtext of the conversation from the representative is “leave me alone” “I don’t care” and “please go away” when it should be seen as an opportunity to impress me as quickly and efficiently as possible - that’s what I’ll tell other people and that’s what will keep me coming back.

“Anyone can be a genius, if they pick just one specific subject and study it diligently just 15 minutes each day.”   - Albert Einstein

Commentary: Einstein is right. Is there something that you want to become a genius/expert at? If you dedicate just a bit of time everyday to the study of that topic you can be amongst the greatest in the world at that subject.

Which one topic or subject, if you could become an expert at, would make the greatest difference in your life and/or business?

BusinessWeek has an article about starting a one person corporation. The reader’s question is about setting up a corporation instead of an LLC so he can issue stock to employees.

The basics of the article are:

• Setting up a corporation is not as complicated as most think.

• Most states recognize a “1 person corporation” (Editor’s note:  ALL states now recognize 1 person corporations or LLC’s).

• As a 1 person corporation, make sure to issue stock certificates and keep meeting minutes.

• LLC’s can also offer employees equity stakes in the company, though not as straightforward as corporations. The overall simplicity of the LLC makes this option attractive to small businesses.

Of course, none of this is news to us. Our incorporation and LLC formation packages are perfect for one person companies and include the necessary minutes, stock certificates, a handbook and even a checklist for doing the proper startup procedures step-by-step.

“The distance between you and your dreams is often the length of a single idea.”  – Vic Conant

Commentary: Sometimes all it takes is a new idea or thought to make you look at the world differently. One business idea (intelligently acted upon) can change your life. In business, you only need to be successful once and you’re set for life. Always be on the lookout for the idea that could change your life.