The first step in my view if I was starting business today would be starting out by just focusing all my attention on getting better marketing.  So I’d be spending most of my time on marketing.  If you’re in business you should spend 50 percent of your time on advertising and promotion, particularly if you’re in a product focused business.  If you’re in a service focused business and you get really busy, obviously you need to cut that down, which is one of the disadvantages of a service based business.

Let’s imagine you’re a mechanic.  So you start your mechanics business.  What’s the number one thing you need in order to succeed?  Well, you need money.  How do you get money?  You need new customers.  So what I would be doing is focusing on testing – 3, 6, 9, 12 different marketing campaigns as quickly as possible.  And you may want to get some campaigns going and you want some templates for joint ventures and internet marketing and getting the lead generation process happening both online and offline.

But the key is to focus a minimum of 50 percent of your time on your advertising and promotion and develop relationships with your clients to get them coming in.

So let’s say you send out a flyer.  You spend a thousand bucks on this flyer and get $500 dollars back.  I’ll put that one aside.  You try something else.  You spend a thousand dollars.  Well you get $800 dollars back, okay I’ll put that aside.  You try something else.  You spend a thousand dollars.  You get $3,000 dollars back.  Now there’s no reason why you can’t replicate that over and over and over again so that for every thousand dollars that you’re investing you’re getting $3,000 dollars back and maybe you can do that every week.

So if you send out 5,000 flyers in your local area there’s no reason why you can’t send out 5,000 flyers next week and 5,000 flyers the next week and 5,000 flyers the next week and all of a sudden you’ve got yourself a business.  What some people do is they’ll focus too much on systems and procedures getting things right in their database.  This is important, but without customers nothing else matters.  So the important thing is to get the customers and then get all those systems set up.  That’s what I would be doing if I was setting up a new business.