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Your Business Plan – Roadmap to Success
A well developed business plan helps you as a business owner to focus on future business success and guides you in gathering all the necessary resources to achieve that success.

It is a well documented observation that most businesses do not plan to fail – they simply fail to plan. Having the “hows and whys” of your business documented provides a powerful focus to help you achieve success. It also provides a monitoring tool to measure progress towards your goals.

There are three reasons why you need a “living” business plan, (not one that you created years ago that is now gathering dust in a file somewhere).

1. A good business plan is your roadmap – a guide for you to refer to as you make decisions about how to run your business.
2. As you bring team members into your organization, or train and educate your existing team, your business plan provides clear direction and reinforces your culture.
3. Banks, governments and business partners are increasingly requiring business plans to support their decisions relating to lending and providing financial assistance, and a good business plan can make the difference.

If you are ready to put a business plan in place for your business, click here to find out more and register for our next session!

Face it, Facebook changes the way it works all the time, and doesn’t always tell us about it! If you plan on using Facebook as a place to market your business, you need to keep up to date on these changes and how they affect your business marketing and how your business shows up online.

Some of the hints and tips you will learn in this webinar you may already know about but haven’t acted upon. Others you may not be aware of yet.

In this free webinar, you will learn about recent changes to Facebook and:

• How to make a simple change to your profile to make your business page accessible
• How to educate your audience so they will see more of your content
• How to interact with your market as your company
• And more!

Date: Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Time: 5:00 PM Eastern (4:00 PM Central, 3:00 PM Mountain, 2:00 PM Pacific)

Register Here

Customers need the same attention you offered them as a prospect. Offer that same personal attention and they will become loyal advocates, or possibly even a raving fan!

CRM stands for ‘Customer Relationship Management’. It’s about knowing your customers and using this knowledge to form profitable relationships with them. What is new about CRM is the development of software applications that can be the basis of a customer relationship management system in any business. We will talk about how these systems can be made to work, and why they often don’t.

A good Customer Relationship Management System can deliver a profitable focus on customers that can really pay off for any size of business. In this webinar, you will learn:

• Steps to developing and implementing a CRM strategy
• How to tell if you’re getting value out of a CRM system and which are the most important metrics to monitor
• Valuable ideas for creating a communications plan for staying in touch with your customers, prospects and referral partners

These are fail proof methods for turning your prospects to customers and your customers to raving fans. And that is worth a whole lot to your bottom line!

Date: Thursday, December 16, 2010
Time: 1:00 PM Eastern (12:00 PM Central, 11:00 AM Mountain, 10:00 AM Pacific)
Cost: $27 General Public (On Target Community Free Members $17)

Click Here to Register

On Target Entrepreneur, Business or Executive level members may attend free. Log in to Member Portal to Register

Discover how to develop new referral relationships and enhance existing ones by creating an active presence on LinkedIn. Here’s what we cover:

• A Good Profile is your calling card – Learn how to tune up your profile.
• Stay Connected – Build better relationships with people you already know and meet in your day to day business.
• Discover your best Connections and how to find them – Learn to grow your connection list with good contacts you already know, and learn how to find more.
• Increase your visibility – Learn to take actions to bring more attention to your profile.

Date: Thursday, November 18, 2010
Time: 1:00 PM Eastern (12:00 PM Central, 11:00 AM Mountain, 10:00 AM Pacific)
Cost: $37 but only $27 if you register by November 12

Click Here to Register

On Target Entrepreneur, Business or Executive level members may attend free. Log in to Member Portal to Register

PDCA Contractor College Webinar – November 16, 2010

Presenter: Linnea Blair, Advisors On Target, PDCA Approved Contractor College Instructor

You can identify your revenue and profit goals for the year without developing a real plan to achieve them. This almost always means you will fall short of your expectations. Putting together a detailed and strategic Profit Plan or Budget for the year gives you a framework to achieve success. This PDCA Contractor College Webinar provides techniques and tools to help Painting Contractors to create a realizable Profit Plan and Budget for 2011. Put your plan in place now, so you can hit the ground running in January implementing action steps that will give you the edge over your slower moving, less organized competitors.

Date:Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Time: 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM Central

This event is an online webinar open to PDCA members.

If you are a member of the Painting & Decorating Contractors of America,  Register Here

Business Planning: Plan to Succeed instead of Failing to Plan – October 28, 2010

Develop a business plan and get control over your business operations and improve your opportunities to step back and work ON rather than IN your business.  In this webinar, we’ll discuss how to create a complete plan for the business or just a set of action steps to cover your critical areas of operation.

A business plan is an excellent tool to define your personal assets and liabilities, describe the competitive conditions in your market, your financial needs, ways to promote your products and services, and assess the skill sets your team needs to be most productive.

You will learn the key steps required to create a business plan document for your business and how to use it as a blue print to run your business, to introduce your company vision and strategy to team members, and  to represent your business  with banks and other potential investors or lenders.

Date: Thursday, October 28, 2010
Time: 1:00 PM Eastern (12:00 PM Central, 11:00 AM Mountain, 10:00 AM Pacific)
Cost: $37 but only $27 if you register by October 15

Click Here to Register

On Target Entrepreneur, Business or Executive level members may attend free. Log in to Member Portal to Register.

Relationship Marketing – Leverage your Connections to Get More Business

There is gold in your contact database if only you take the time to mine it. Every business owner has a list of clients who love your product or service, a list of prospects who have contacted you for a bid even if they didn’t hire you, and a list of valuable business contacts who can refer business to you. The secret to getting more business by leveraging your relationships with customers and contacts is to nurture those relationships by staying in touch. With some organization, some planning and some tools, your company can begin to reap the rewards of good relationship marketing

Increase Business and Referrals with B2B Marketing – October 5, 2010
Whether your company has other businesses as your primary clients or if other businesses are great referral sources for you, getting your foot in the door of good prospect companies can be daunting. Maintaining a business relationship can also be challenging over the long term. B2B marketing often requires a different approach than B2C or business to consumer marketing. We’ll discuss differences between business and consumer marketplaces and talk about the marketing strategies you can develop to be successful with business to business marketing and developing referral relationships.

Tap into the Value in Your Customer List – October 12, 2010
When you realize that much of your business comes from existing customers or referrals, it’s surprising that many businesses don’t market to their existing customers, or if they do, they don’t do it very well. Most of us like to think that our customers will always remember us when they have a need for our services and pick up the phone and call us. Some undoubtedly do, but many more may need a prompting to inspire them to call us instead of our competitor who just sent them a flier, or another company their neighbor recommended.

Think of your customer communications as relationship building. We’ll discuss how to create a useful database for your contacts, how to classify your customers and other contacts. You will also learn successful strategies and marketing tactics you can use to keep your company top of mind with your clients, prospects and referral sources.

Take Advantage of Social Media – October 19, 2010
Most businesses these days can’t afford to ignore Social Media. Whether or not you are already active on Social Media networking sites, you can benefit from learning how to get better at incorporating social networking into your overall marketing plan.

Social networking online works hand in hand with social networking offline. We’ll discuss how you can effectively use LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to increase your audience and expand the reach of your message to your target markets.

Create a Stay in Touch Marketing Plan – October 26, 2010
With the best of intentions, many businesses fail to execute their marketing plans. The key is to decide on your strategy for relationship marketing for each of our target groups of customers, prospects and referral partners and then map out a plan and timetable to execute it. You need to find the right tools and delegate tasks to the right people to make your plan work for you.

In this final webinar we’ll help you get started in creating a workable plan. We will also teach you about some easy to use and low cost tools and strategies to help you stay in touch with your customers and your other connections to keep the business coming in.

Dates: 4 Tuesdays, October 5, 12, 19, 26, 2010
Time: 1:00 PM Eastern (12:00 PM Central, 11:00 AM Mountain, 10:00 AM Pacific)
Cost: $147 but only $117 if you register by September 28
Register Here