The 30-Minute Business

I dedicate a lot of time to my Avon business. I can't help it, I love what I do. But there are definitely days when I just don't have the time to give 4-6 hours a day to my part-time business.

If you only had 30 minutes a day to dedicate to your business, how would you spend it? Mine would look something like this:

5 minutes: Input receipts into Shoeboxed.com
5 minutes: Review any new materials on youravon.com
10 minutes: Contact customers via email/phone/postcards/constantcontact.com
5 minutes: Look at upcoming brochures. Plan sales strategy for next campaign.
5 minutes: Listen to a podcast, audiobook or something inspirational

It's not a lot of time, but you can squeeze a lot of mileage out of just 30 minutes a day on your business

"Hi, Would You Like to Win Some Free Avon Products?"

I sat in on a sales conference call a few weeks ago with the delightful Deb Bixler.  Deb is the creator of "Create a Cash Flow Show" and I love her because I completely believe in her gospel of how sales parties are the way to generate cash flow for your business.

Deb was talking about working a trade show, something that caught my ear since I knew that I would be working the Women & Food Expo in just a few weeks.

She gave this great piece of advice when trying to get people to hand over their contact information. She suggested we ask, "Would you like to win some free products?" instead of the ususally heard, "Do you want to enter a drawing?"

"Would you like to win some free products?"  Sure! Who doesn't want free products? It's inviting. It's innocent. It's non-threatening.

"Do you want to enter a drawing?"  Uh, no. I'm busy. You're going to take my information and call me, aren't you?

I'll give it a shot today while I'm at the Women & Food Expo!

Financial Site: Shoeboxed.com

Last week I was interviewed by Ryan at Outright.com about how I was using their spectacular site. I told him that I was so impressed how easy Outright was to use, and how a non-financial person like me could even understand it.

Ryan asked if there were any features that I'd like to see and I commented that I would like to be able to scan my receipts (ala Neat Receipts) and have those receipts auto-imported into Outright.

"Have you tried our partner site, Shoeboxed? With Shoeboxed, you can do just that; scan your receipts and have them imported directly into Outright."  I was beyond stoked.

Last night I registered an account with Shoeboxed, scanned some receipts and started playing around. With the free account, Shoeboxed does not auto-scan and OCR your receipts; you still have to manually import the data from the receipt into Showboxed. However, one thing I DO like about this is that the format to input the data is more like a form and less like a traditional ledger. For me, that makes it much easier to see and understand.

The instructions on how to sync Shoeboxed and Outright were a little confusing; the link was a little hidden. I had to take several trips to the "help" screens to figure it out. However, once I got it configured, magic happened.

All of my receipts were then synced with Outright's site, all of the details were ported over, and best of all, there was a link to see the original scan of the receipt. Way. Freakin. Cool.

To be fair to Shoeboxed, there is a service that ranges from $10-$50 a month that allows you to mail in your receipts. Shoeboxed with scan your receipts and I believe they will attempt to populate all of the fields including date, store, amounts, and even the credit card used for purchase. I'm not sure that I generate enough receipts yet, but I can see that being a valuable upgrade.

Final report? Shoeboxed is awesome. Marry it to Outright, and you have some downright spectacular tools. This is going to make tax time next year so much easier.

How to Avoid Sucking

From WorkAwesome

What is Sucking?

There are really two types of sucking or “sucks” in this world:

• Something that takes away from what you should be doing.
• The results of your performance when you were spending too much time in something that takes away from what you should be doing.

For the sake of simplification, I’ll call the first examples “sucks” and the second examples of “sucking.”

Common Sucks

Television

It’s a suck because it rarely gives back. It robs of you of valuable time if you let it. The news used to be one of the examples where you got something in return for your investment of time, but with the advent of 24 hour news networks and the return of “yellow journalism” (not to mention the stories that tend to rely on increasing fear rather than knowledge) that has pretty much gone out the window. I’m not saying don’t watch it – I take in a few programs a week – but limit it. There’s much more out there to accomplish that involves turning your eyes and ears away from the television than there are keeping them glued to it. It’s not called “The Idiot Box” for nothing.

Read the rest of the article

Free Online Bookkeeping - Outright.com

 Is your business growing to the point where it makes sense to keep track of your expenses for next year's tax time?  Don't want to pay for an online bookkeeping service like Quicken?

Take a look at Outright.com. I've been using it for several months and it fits my needs.

From their website:

Streamlining the work involved with working for yourself, Outright.com will help you pay the right taxes, simplify record keeping, and keep your business on track and growing. Created after watching entrepreneurs struggle to capture business deductions, mileage, and manage contractors and believing you spend way too much time and effort on the least enjoyable part of your livelihood, Outright's goal is to make it simple; free bookkeeping on auto pilot to get you the right answers, right now.

Outright.com is completely free. Set up your account today and get your business in order.