If you try to teach a pig to sing, two things happen:
You make the pig mad
You waste your time and your money!

Each of gets paid, whether we own our own company or we work for someone else, for our contribution to the marketplace. It the quality and quantity of that contribution that determines our value to the organization and the corresponding income we earn. Want to earn more money? Find a way to improve your service to others.

Is your furnace, boiler or air conditioning on its last leg or costing too much to operate? Then let Blau come up with the solution. Our installation department can replace your present equipment with Space Age technology at down-to-earth prices. Make an appointment today with our customer service assistant who will be with you in just a moment.

This is an one of one of eight messages our customers hear when they get put on hold after calling our company. Here’s another:
Thank you for calling. We’re proud to be the only company in town serving over 24,000 satisfied plumbing, heating, and air conditioning customers yearly. Please hold just a moment longer.

Acquiring a company is nothing more then marketing for customers. When you deal out your money for a yellow page ad, a direct marketing piece, or any other conventional marketing tactic what are you expecting in return—A customer, right? Well, I believe conventional marketing is the riskiest investment you can make in business today. No one can guarantee a specific marketing tactic will work for you. You can hope it does. Maybe you have historical evidence that a particular tactic works. That’s great. Keep riding the success of your tactic until that trend falters. Trends are like tides—always changing.

Once a month, I invite a smart business expert to be my guest star on the Bare Bones Biz Teleseminar call. We ask folks to join us on the call to share and learn and have some fun with business building. In April, my guest was Simon Sinek, www.sinekpartners.com . You could call Simon a marketing expert. However, his approach is unorthodox. He doesn’t talk about products and features and services and company names and yellow pages and radio ads. His consulting process can be summed up in one word:

Let’s open with this question: If you were offered the opportunity to invest $10,000 and get $100,000+ back in five years, would you make the investment? Business owners who understand the value of training are making this kind of investment regularly and reaping the rewards. Read on to learn the benefits of training and how to calculate the return on their training investment.

There is a significant difference in price between a water heater with a 5-year manufacturer’s warranty and one warranted for 10 years. A couple of years ago I pondered why this is so. What is the difference between the two products?

So we did a little “reverse engineering” and spent a day taking apart a 5-year and a 10-year heater. First, we weighed the two products on the industrial scale, and found they weighed exactly the same, to the pound.