My business currently has eight key members in it, including myself. Two of them has been assigned functions and decision making power. They can run their own show and get a piece of the action as an incentive to perform. Two of them have clear roles, work independently, and require very little supervision. The last three require day to day monitoring - to date I have only given them tasks instead of functions and I am personally responsible for managing them.

That’s about to change with two of them this week.

I believe that the first thing that holds entrepreneurs back is the inability to delegate anything and bring people on. You can always do a better job yourself and you don’t want to spend the money to bring on help. Your time is spent on the high value and low value work and you’re a one person show. You can only grow so much because you will always be limited by your time.

Some entrepreneurs break free and bring on help. Even if it’s only a few hours per week or you bring on an unpaid intern, you start taking the steps to remove some of the roles from your plate so you can focus on the high value work. These entrepreneurs typically assign tasks and the employees come every day asking for what the next project to work on will be. The second thing that holds business owners back therefore is the inability to delegate functions.

When you can delegate functions you are ready for real growth. This means giving the people who work for you the ability to make decisions and act on their own without calling you for an answer. Provide them with the tools and the opportunities so you can focus on the continued growth of your business. As you hand off functions you can focus on the big picture of where you want to take your business.

Over the past few weeks I have found myself being caught up in day to day activities managing the three people I have in task based roles. I got caught up in the typical entrepreneur’s dilemma where I knew I could do a better job and did not trust them with guiding an entire project on their own as they have very little business experience. The two positions are also very important functions in my business and could mean the difference between my success and failure.

One of them is advertising and the other is managing the over 1,500 authors who write for my site. If the person I put on advertising causes problems then I won’t be making much money from my site and if the person managing my authors makes mistakes I could find myself without content to promote. This line of thinking has always led me to do it myself and will continue to hold me back until I can delegate those functions out. So that’s what happening this week.

The two people I have in the office will each be given a new portfolio and will be trained on what to do. I will be able to monitor them and answer any questions that come up on the spot. If it turns out that the position is above their capabilities, I have at least begun the process of taking that work off of my plate and the role will be set up for someone else.

My most valuable time as a business owner comes from setting the strategic direction of the company, meeting with new potential partners, discussing our business with the media, and motivating and training my staff. It will be a big step to offload these responsibilities and some mistakes will be made, but the business will, in the long term, be better for it.

If you are just starting a new business, are a solo entrepreneur, have brought on a few staff, or are quickly expanding your business there are always things that you should not be doing and should delegate out to someone else.

What are you going to stop doing today and delegate to someone else?

Evan Carmichael

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“Being first is more important to me,” says Ellison. “I have so much more money. Whatever money is, it’s just a method of keeping score now. I mean I certainly don’t need more money.”

He is the CEO of the second largest software company in the world; he was named Entrepreneur of the Year in 1990 by the Harvard Business School; and he is the 9th richest person in the world as ranked by Forbes, with a net worth of $18.4 billion.Larry Ellison transformed his small start-up into not only a multi-billion dollar company but also the fastest growing database software company in the world.

“There’s a wonderful saying that’s dead wrong,” says Ellison. “‘Why did you climb the mountain?’ ‘I climbed the mountain because it was there.’ That’s utter nonsense…You climbed the mountain because you were there, and you were curious if you could do it. You wondered what it would be like.”

Ellison wondered what it would be like to run a billion dollar company and he didn’t let anything stand in his way from finding out. From being the son who nobody wanted, to having more money than even he knows what do with (“I thoroughly recommend it,” he laughs), Ellison has created a legacy for himself as a pioneer and innovator, as well as a colourful character in an otherwise often dull industry. How did he do it?

“I think about the business all the time. Well, I shouldn’t say all the time. I don’t think about it when I’m wakeboarding. But even when I’m on vacation, or on my boat, I’m on e-mail every day. I’m always prowling around the Internet looking at what our competitors are doing.

It’s my job for Oracle — the number two software in the company in the world — to become the number one software company in the world. My job, is to build better than the competition, sell those products in the marketplace, and eventually supplant Microsoft and move from being number two to number one.

The most important aspect of my personality, as far as determining my success goes, has been my questioning conventional wisdom, doubting the experts and questioning authority. While that can be very painful in relationships with your parents and teachers, it’s enormously useful in life.

When you’re the first person whose beliefs are different from what everyone else believes, you’re basically saying, “I’m right, and everyone else is wrong.” That’s a very unpleasant position to be in. It’s at once exhilarating and at the same time an invitation to be attacked.“

Being an entrepreneur requires challenging conventions and doing something outside the box. Is your company really doing something different to stand out from the rest of the competition?

Evan Carmichael

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For this edition of Entrepreneur University we turn to small business expert Don Doman. Don is a published author of self-help books on small business. He and his wife own Ide as and Training, which supplies business training products to organizations around the world. Don and Peg also own and operate PNW Video Productions, which produces video productions for distribution and internet viewing.

Don shares his wisdom about the importance of buying back your customers when running your business:

“Five other peoples joined us for dinner. My wife and I ordered “medium rare.” We were served “well done.” Three others in our group weren’t happy with their dinners as well. I didn’t cross the establishment off my list. I complained.

I’m a writer. I write. I complain. I’m also a teller. I tell people. I tell people when I’m happy. I tell people when I’m irritated. I tell people about my experiences. Most people are simply tellers. They tell their friends about places where they should go, and they tell about places they shouldn’t go.

My little group was out for a good time. The place was packed. It took ages to get our dinners. The waitress didn’t even know how to open a bottle of wine. She must have been brand new. She was friendly, and looked like a hard worker.

I’m not sure how much money we spent, collectively, but I know that we shared three bottles of wine ($25.00 a bottle) around the table. There were some mixed drinks and the food of course.

The restaurant had a website. I hate businesses that don’t have websites. They can’t bother? They can’t afford it? To me, the lack of easy communication via the net is a good reason for not giving them my business. I went to the website and wrote my comments. I only complained for my wife and me, however.

I received a call two days after submitting my complaint. I was offered a gift certificate for $20.00. I probably could have demanded more and received it, but I wasn’t looking for a payback or a free ride. $20 barely covered one meal. Two days later the mail delivered the gift certificate. There was not even a letter, but the certificate was enough. We returned two days later.

My wife, Peg and I brought a friend and had a nice time. We came at a less hectic time. The food was good. The waitress had no idea that we had complained. She was even more accommodating than she had been before. I’m sure if we had asked for wine, she would have not needed instructions for opening the bottle this time. We switched to micro-brews for the evening.

Our bill was just under $80.00 plus tip. The restaurant probably made their twenty bucks back on the beer alone. The restaurant bought my wife and me for $20.00, and we spent considerably more. I’ve already told two people that originally ate with us about the return trip. They were impressed.

People who don’t complain usually don’t come back and they spread the news about why they don’t go back. Customers who complain are an opportunity. They can be bought. We were bought, and we’ll return . . . and bring more friends with us.”

Evan Carmichael

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Louis Barnett is a 15 year old British entrepreneur making waves in the chocolate industry. He has a great story of turning negatives into positives and overcoming obstacles to achieving success.

When Louis was 11 years old he was diagnosed with dyslexia and dyspraxia. He dropped out of school and began making chocolates at home.

In four years he has turned his hobby into a business, hired his parents, and won lucrative contracts which have allowed him to move to his own factory.

“I’ve always been a very foody person and conscious of where my food comes from. I’ve been doing bits of baking and making cakes with my mum since I was about four or five and really it was just one of my passions.”

Louis’ first machine made 12 oz (340 gram) chocolates which he would create one at a time and sell to family and friends.

The business quickly took off and since August his company has supplied 36,000 boxes various delis and supermarkets. Louis has also recently been nominated for a young entrepreneur of the year award.

According to his mother, Mary Barnett: “Louis has been like this right from day one, he is a hard worker and is very enthusiastic about his product.”

Evan Carmichael

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The robots.txt file is not a typical Google filter but it can have a dramatic impact on how search engines see your website. Most search engines try to respect the wishes of websites owners. They want to know which pages you want them to see and which you want to keep private.

In order for you to communicate with the search engine spiders which visit your site you need to speak the same language as them. The industry standard is called the Robots Exclusion Protocol. According to robotstxt.org, the authority on the robots.txt file:

The Robots Exclusion Protocol is a method that allows Web site administrators to indicate to visiting robots which parts of their site should not be visited by the robot.

In a nutshell, when a Robot vists a Web site, say http://www.foobar.com/, it firsts checks for http://www.foobar.com/robots.txt. If it can find this document, it will analyse its contents for records like:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

to see if it is allowed to retrieve the document.

You can also use a Robots Meta tag:

The Robots META tag allows HTML authors to indicate to visiting robots if a document may be indexed, or used to harvest more links. No server administrator action is required.

Note that currently only a few robots implement this.

In this simple example:

a robot should neither index this document, nor analyse it for links.

As Google and the other search engines will look to your robots file before adding your pages to their index, make sure that you are not using the robots.txt file incorrectly. Improper use can result in Google not adding your website or sections of your site.

Evan Carmichael

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Cristian Dorobantescu is a part time entrepreneur from Eastern Europe that started blogging back in 2005, with his Small Business Entrepreneur blog.

He enjoys writing about real life Entrepreneurship experiences, small businesses and knowledge resources for any entrepreneur wanna be. He is the founder behind Entrepreneur-Interviews.com.

Entrepreneur-interviews.com is about finding out true stories about real life entrepreneur and their businesses. It’s about business ideas, funding, opportunities, putting together teams, starting up and failure.

It’s the Entrepreneurs “reality-show”. Entrepreneur-interviews.com is out there because business owners love to tell their stories and wanna be entrepreneurs are dying to hear how this works.

Recently, Cristian interviewed YoungEntrepreneur.com founders Adam and Matthew Toren. Here is a sampling of the questions asked.

• Adam, you started while in your teens. Have you (or your brother) ever been hired as an employee?
• Your success stories are mostly based on spotting an under performing business, making it efficient and selling it later. I would be scared like hell buying a poor business, what ‘hidden’ skills do you have? What’s your strength in doing so?
• A question I’m dying to ask (since my own company has 2 sisters as partners). How do you manage to delegate authority? Who makes the final decisions and what happens if you disagree?
• I’ve talked with several entrepreneurs lately, so what do you think, starting a business in the family is good or bad?
• I’ve heard that you are also planing to launch a book “The Innovative Entrepreneur”. Can you unveil some subjects we are going to find in the book?
• In the last 4 years you have run a media company that launched 3 affluent lifestyle magazines and recently sold one of them to another media company in California. The remaining 2 are full-color, full-gloss publications reaching over 250,000 readers per issue which provides content that celebrates the lifestyles of the area and communicating important and interesting content to the affluent readers. What’s the success story behind them?
• So what’s next for you?

How did Adam and Matthew respond?

You can read the full interview here: Interview with serial entrepreneurs Adam and Matthew Toren.

Evan Carmichael

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He grew up in rural Nova Scotia in a house without plumbing and a wood stove for heating.

Today, he has eight cars, owns a $60 million golf club resort, and has so much money he has even offered to fly people on trips anywhere in the world if they can help improve his golf swing.

How did Ron Joyce get to where he is today? He did it by building a tiny coffee shop by the name of Tim Horton’s into one of Canada’s most beloved and successful brands.

Thanks to Joyce, Canada has been called by some the “Timbit Nation.” Even the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have an unofficial radio code for Tim Hortons, as 10-99 or “Tango Hotel.”

Every single day, for a product that costs just pennies to make, Tim Hortons brings in revenues of nearly $6 million.

How was this young boy from rural Nova Scotia who grew up on welfare able to become one of Canada’s most celebrated and successful businessmen?

“The amazing part of this story is that a young kid can leave small-town Nova Scotia at an early age, and be successful working hard at what he believed in�It�s a great story of what you can achieve in this country.

When you find the niche you love, that becomes your passion. For me it was Tim Hortons. It was my world.

I think people who excel in anything are often totally dedicated to it, but are only really good at one thing.

I look at the great athletes of all time, like Michael Jordan, who went from basketball to baseball and it didn’t work. Or Wayne Gretzky, who probably wouldn’t have been great at anything but hockey.”

You could waste years of your life heading in the wrong direction doing work that you are not meant to be doing. For tips on finding your calling, read our post from March: How To Find Your Calling.

Have you found your calling?

Evan Carmichael

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How do you generate sales for your business? If you’re like most entrepreneurs you’re not doing enough to drive more revenue into your company. One of the fastest ways to drive more immediate business is through cold calling.

Cold calling is full of rejection and is often the most feared part of the day for many salespeople. For this edition of Entrepreneur University we looked for advice on how to make cold calling easier by turning to sales expert Ari Galper.

Ari is the creator of Unlock The Game™, a new sales mindset that overturns the notion of selling as we know it today. With a Masters Degree in Instructional Design and over a decade of experience creating breakthrough sales strategies for global companies such as UPS and QUALCOMM, Ari discovered the missing link that people who sell have been seeking for years.

Here is Ari’s advice for achieving cold calling success:

“Cold calling the old way is a painful struggle.

But you can make it a productive and positive experience by changing your mindset and cold calling the new way.

To show you what I mean, here are 7 cold calling ideas that even the sales gurus don’t know.

1. Change Your Mental Objective Before You Make the Call

If you’re like most people who make cold calls, you’re hoping to make a sale — or at least an appointment — before you even pick up the phone.

The problem is, the people you call somehow always pick up on your mindset immediately.

They sense that you’re focused on your goals and interests, rather than on finding out what they might need or want.

This short-circuits the whole process of communication and trust-building.

Here’s the benefit of changing your mental objective before you make the call: it takes away the frenzy of working yourself up mentally to pick up the phone.

All the feelings of rejection and fear come from us getting wrapped up in our expectations and hoping for an outcome when it’s premature to even be thinking about an outcome.

So try this. Practice shifting your mental focus to thinking, “When I make this call, I’m going to build a conversation so that a level of trust can emerge allowing us to exchange information back and forth so we can both determine if there’s a fit or not.”

2. Understand the Mindset of the Person You’re Calling Let’s say you’re at your office and you’re working away.

Your phone rings and someone says, “Hello, my name’s Mark. I’m with Financial Solutions International. We offer a broad array of financial solutions. Do you have a few minutes?”

What would go through your mind?

Probably something like this: “Uh-oh, another salesperson. I’m about to be sold something. How fast can I get this person off the phone?”

In other words, it’s basically over at “Hello,” and you end up rejected.

The moment you use the old cold calling approach — the traditional pitch about who you are and what you have to offer, which all the sales gurus have been teaching for years — you trigger the negative “salesperson” stereotype in the mind of the person you’ve called, and that means immediate rejection.

I call it “The Wall.”

The problem is with how you’re selling, not what you’re selling.

This is an area that’s been ignored in the world of selling.

We’ve all been trained to try to push prospects into a “yes” response on the first call. But that creates sales pressure.

But, if you learn to really understand and put yourself in the mindset of the person you call, you’ll find it easier to avoid triggering The Wall.

It’s that fear of rejection that makes cold calling so frightening.

Instead, start thinking about language that will engage people and not language that will trigger rejection.

3. Identify a Core Problem That You Can Solve

We’ve all learned that when we begin a conversation with a prospect, we should talk about ourselves, our product, and our solution. Then we sort of hope that the person connects with what we’ve just told them. Right?

But when you offer your pitch or your solution without first involving your prospect by talking about a core problem that they might be having, you’re talking about yourself, not them.

And that’s a problem.

Prospects connect when they feel that you understand their issues before you start to talk about your solutions.

When people feel understood, they don’t put up The Wall. They remain open to talking with you.

Here’s an example based on my own experience. I offer Unlock The Game™ as a new approach in selling. When I call a vice president of sales, I would never start out with, “Hi, my name is Ari, I’m with Unlock The Game, and I offer the newest technique in selling, and I wonder if you have a few minutes to talk now.”

Instead, I wouldn’t even pick up the phone without first identifying one or more problems that I know VPs often have with their sales teams. Problems that Unlock The Game™ can solve.

For example, one common problem is when sales teams and salespeople spend time chasing prospects who have no intention of buying.

So I would start by asking, “Are you grappling with issues around your sales team chasing prospects who lead them on without any intention of buying?”

So, come up with two or three specific core problems that your product or service solves. (Avoid generic problem phrases like “cut costs” or “increase revenue.” They’re too vague.)

4. Start With a Dialogue, Not a Presentation

Let’s return to the goal of a cold call, which is to create a two-way dialogue engaging prospects in a conversation.

We’re not trying to set the person up for a yes or no. That’s the old way of cold calling.

This new cold calling approach is designed to engage people in a natural conversation. The kind you might have with a friend. This lets you both of you decide whether it’s worth your time to pursue the conversation further.

The key here is never to assume beforehand that your prospect should buy what you have to offer, even if they’re a 100 percent fit with the profile of the “perfect customer.”

If you go into the call with that assumption, prospects will pick up on it and The Wall will go up, no matter how sincere you are.

Avoid assuming anything about making a sale before you make a call.

For one thing, you have no idea whether prospects can buy what you have because you know nothing about their priorities, their decisionmaking process, their budget, etc.

If you assume that you’re going to sell them something on that first call, you’re setting yourself up for failure. That’s the core problem with traditional old-style cold calling.

Stay focused on opening a dialogue and determining if it makes sense to continue the conversation.

5. Start With Your Core Problem Question

Once you know what problems you solve, you also know exactly what to say when you make a call. It’s simple. You begin with, “Hi, my name is Ari. Maybe you can help me out for a moment.”

How would you respond if someone said that to you?

Probably, “Sure, how can I help you?” or “Sure, what do you need?” That’s how most people would respond to a relaxed opening phrase like that. It’s a natural reaction.

The thing is, when you ask for help, you’re also telling the truth because you don’t have any idea whether you can help them or not.

That’s why this new approach is based on honesty and truthfulness. That’s why you’re in a very good place to begin with.

When they reply, “Sure, how can I help you?,” you don’t respond by launching into a pitch about what you have to offer. Instead, you go right into talking about the core problem to find out whether it’s a problem for the prospect.

So you say, “I’m just giving you a call to see if you folks are grappling (and the key word here is ‘grappling’) with any issues around your sales team chasing prospects who turn out to never have any intention of buying?”

No pitch, no introduction, nothing about me. I just step directly into their world.

The purpose of my question is to open the conversation and develop enough trust so they’ll feel comfortable having a conversation.

The old way of cold calling advises asking lots of questions to learn about the prospect’s business and to “connect.” The problem is that people see right through that. They know that you have an ulterior motive, and then you’re right back up against The Wall.

These ideas may be hard for you to apply to your own situation at first because trying to leverage calls based on what we know about our solution is so engrained in our thinking.

If you stay with it, though, you can learn to step out of your own solution and convert it into a problem that you can articulate using your prospects’ language.

And that’s the secret of building trust on calls. It’s the missing link in the whole process of cold calling.

6. Recognize and Diffuse Hidden Pressures

Hidden sales pressures that makes The Wall go up can take a lot of forms.

For example, “enthusiasm” can send the message that you’re assuming that what you have is the right fit for the prospect. That can send pressure over the phone to your prospect.

You must be able to engage people in a natural conversation. Think of it as calling a friend. Let your voice be natural, calm, relaxed…easy-going. If you show enthusiasm on your initial call, you’ll probably trigger the hidden sales pressure that triggers your prospect to reject you.

Another element of hidden pressure is trying to control the call and move it to a “next step”.

The moment you begin trying to direct your prospect into your “sales process”, there is a very high likelihood that you can “turn off” your prospect’s willingness to share with you the details of their situation.

It’s important to allow the conversation to evolve naturally and to have milestones or checkpoints throughout your call so you can assess if there is a fit between you and the person you are speaking with.

7. Determine a Fit

Now, suppose that you’re on a call and it’s going well, with good dialogue going back and forth. You’re reaching a natural conclusion…and what happens?

In the old way of cold calling, we panic. We feel we’re going to lose the opportunity, so we try to close the sale or at least to book an appointment. But this puts pressure on the prospect, and you run the risk of The Wall going up again.

Here’s a step that most people miss when they cold call. As soon as they realize that prospects have a need for their solution, they start thinking, “Great, that means they’re interested.”

What they don’t ask is, “Is this need a top priority for you or your organization to solve, or is it something that’s on the back burner for a while?”

In other words, even if you both determine that there ia a problem you can solve, you have to ask whether solving it is a priority. Sometimes there’s no budget, or it isn’t the right time. It’s important that you find this out, because months later you’ll regret not knowing this earlier.

Putting the Pieces Together Have you ever wondered where the “numbers game” concept came from?

It came from someone making a call, getting rejected, and the boss saying, “Call someone else.”

But with the new way of cold calling, it’s not about how many people you call. It’s about what you say and how you come across.

Do you remember the definition of insanity—continuing to do the same thing but expecting different results?

If you go on using the same old cold calling methods, you’ll go on experiencing the ever-increasing pain of selling.

But if you adopt a new approach and learn how to remove pressure from your initial cold calls, you’ll experience so much success and satisfaction that it’ll really change the way you do business, bring you sales success beyond your imagination—and eliminate “rejection” from your vocabulary for good. - Ari Galper”

Evan Carmichael

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Phanta Media is a Markham, Ontario based, fully integrated video production company, who specializes in effective video based communications.

The company is run by Mark Drager, a 24 year old new entrepreneur who is married and has a one year old daughter. The company was founded in December 2006 and Mark has an ambitious goal of becoming a million dollar a year business within five years.

What’s his plan to get there? Help companies increase their staff motivation, generate more leads, and speed up the sales cycle by helping their customers improve their communications with prospects, clients, and internal staff.

Capturing the audience’s attention and communicating your message is the meat and potatoes, but the secret sauce is the ability to market yourself without hitting your audience over the head with it. They also give their clients the peace of mind of knowing that their video production is grounded firmly in business objectives.

I asked Mark what his advice would be for other young entrepreneurs who are trying to build a million dollar business:

“I was told once by a mentor to “do everything yourself until it kills you” and that has worked wonders – although it means working long hard hours, and wearing many hats, it meant that I was able to bring my first fiscal year profit margins up to 93% - it also meant Phanta was able to be fully profitable and debt-free within 9 months of launch.

• Keep in contact with everyone you have ever worked closely with - because one day they can easily become a client

• If you are struggling, ask for help – other entrepreneurs, managers and even CEO’s will most likely do what they can to help you out if you are sincere and reasonable in your requests.

• Get an outsider’s point of view (I hired a third party business development consultant and it was the best thing I ever did!) - 5 months into my business I realized I wasn’t on course with my original business plan, I brought in a business development coach (if you can’t afford to pay a consultant it can be anyone – as long as they are honest, hold you accountable and offer an outsider’s point of view). Since bringing them in my revenues tripled.

• Find a way to get outside of your comfort zone – for this my BD Coaches hold me accountable, but stepping out of my comfort zone is the most rewarding experience, as what used to terrify me, quickly becomes second nature and I can do the things that need to be done (like cold calling).

• Be hungry for success – when I launched my business everyone thought I was crazy because my wife was at home with a 3-month-old baby and I was the only source of income. But what that did was motivate me to succeed – I had to succeed otherwise my wife and child would have no roof over their head and no food on the table… pretty motivating.”

What is your million dollar plan?

Evan Carmichael

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New websites have the hardest time getting indexed by Google because they are an unknown quantity. So many spam websites are created every day that it is difficult for Google and the other search engines to determine who is the real deal. While it will still take some time to get a brand new website listed, here are the steps to take to get indexed as quickly as possible.

1: Get a good domain name

If you can purchase a domain name with your keywords in it you will reduce the amount of time needed to get ranked for those keywords. Domain names are becoming increasingly difficult to find but most of the domain registration firms will give you a suggestion tool to help you identify domains which are currently available.

2: Create quality content

Once you have picked your domain name you should create a homepage with at least 300 words of text on it. Make sure it is valuable content and contains the keywords you are trying to rank for. Use on site SEO factors such as the title and h1 tags with your keywords in it. The more quality content you create the more likely you will get picked up by Google.

3: Submit your site to Google

I have talked in the past about creating Google sitemaps and submitting your individual pages to Google. Google has to sort through millions of websites on a daily basis. Chances are Google will not find your brand new site automatically so make sure you tell them you exist. Only submit your site though after you have created at least one page of quality content.

4: Get links

Your value in Google depends on the amount of links you have to your site. The more quality links you have, the higher you will rank. Try to focus first on links that are relevant to your industry. A link that has relevance to your topic carries more value than a completely unrelated link. Too many unrelated links can also get you penalized.

5: Continue building and wait

Unfortunately it will still take time for Google to pick your brand new site up. The more content you have and the more quality links you have to your site, the faster you will get indexed. Continue working steps 2 to 4 and believe in the process. Eventually it will pay off for you!

Evan Carmichael

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