Business Solution Tips

Ph.Ds. Your experience becomes expertise when you look squarely at your problems and create solutions. You just need to know how to think like your own consultant.

Fix Your Business

Follow six steps to think like a consultant, and fix your business.

1. List your problems.

Here’s a technique called The Power of Negative Thinking, from Barbara Sher’s Wishcraft. Get a friend and give him a pad and pen. Launch into a standup comedy routine. That’s right. Stand up. Talk loudly. Complain. Bitch and moan. The theme is: Here’s what’s wrong with my business. Have your friend write down every complaint.

Once you’ve bemoaned your business’s biggest issues, you have a list of the problems in your business, and you’ll feel better, too.

2. Pick one.

So now you have a list of problems. But you can only fix one at a time. So pick one.

How? Well, try this. Which problem:

• Is killing your business?
• Is driving you nuts?
• Looks like an easy place to start?
• Can you fix yourself, with little or no help?
• Will bring in, or save, the most money?

Answer any of those questions. Pick one; then get moving.

3. Fix the right problem.

If a doctor gave you heart medicine for a stomach problem, you’d be mad. But in business, people fix the wrong problem all the time.

If sales are bad, don’t push your sales people harder. Fix the mistake in marketing. The key to being your own consultant is to think like a physician, an engineer and a troubleshooter: If this is the symptom, then where’s the problem? A business works like a set of gears, and all businesses operate more or less the same way. In every business, you’ll have to address these issues:

1. Know your target market: Who would benefit from your product or service?
2. Reach your customers: Use advertising, promotion or networking to meet your customers where they already are. Show them their pain. Show them your product or service is the solution.
3. Bring your customer to your store or website.
4. Persuade your customers to buy your product.
5. Deliver the goods.
6. Collect testimonials and referrals. That brings you back to step 3.

Follow that cycle over and over.

4. Diagnose before solving.

So you’re ready to fix the right problem. But are you sure you know the solution?



There’s a great way to get to the bottom of a problem. It’s called the “Five Whys?” Take a problem. Ask “Why is this happening?” five times.

ou can find a cheap expert to cut down on costs, but who wants to go to the lowest bidder for heart surgery? If this is your business, be willing to pay for the expertise that will solve the problem correctly, and solve it forever. Pay once for the best, instead of paying for a fix that breaks again and again.

So how do you hire an expensive expert cheaply?

It’s simple. Do most of the work yourself. Most of us experts spend most of our time asking you what your problem is until you give us a clear answer. Then we waste more time persuading you to do what will work.

Skip that part. Do the work of defining the problem and understanding possible solutions yourself. Then hire the expert for a second opinion. That takes very little time and costs very little money. But it ensures you’re on the right track.

6. Make the solution stick.

I just got back from a meeting with a client who has a beautiful website. She looked at Madonna’s site and thought “Wow, look at all this cool Flash.” So she made a site like that. Her husband dove in, learned Flash and made a beautiful site. Then he went back to his day job