15 Powerful ideas to help you grow your business

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It’s said you are often just one idea away from the breakthrough you have been looking for.

So here are 15 powerful business development ideas, to help you achieve the breakthrough results you need.

1. If you write a blog or newsletter, ask yourself, if you’re building a tribe or simply writing drive-by content? Almost everyone gets this wrong. Here’s why this is so important.
2. Embrace brevity. People are busy and their attention has never been in more demand. Keep your marketing messages as short and useful as possible.
3. Do at least one thing each day, which your future self will thank you for.
4. Remind yourself that the process of giving and receiving starts with giving. Making selfish demands from strangers doesn’t work. It also damages your reputation. Bring your seed, not your need.
5. Fail more often this week than you did last week. Why? Because if you’re not failing often enough, you’re sticking to things you already know. This means you are no longer growing. This is why Steve Jobs famously reprimanded members of his team, if they were not failing regularly enough. Then, fail more often next week than you did this week… repeat.
6. Stop aiming for perfectionism. It will stop you getting started, kill your creativity and block your progress. The next time you find yourself blaming perfectionism for your lack of progress, call it out for what it is: a stalling tactic.
7. Stop doing work purely because it pays the bills. Start doing work that makes a difference. This post explains why.
   
8. Get expert help in any area of your business, where you are under performing. Things don’t just change for the better because you hope they will. Hope is essential, but it’s not a business strategy.
9. Remind yourself that you pick your clients, they don’t pick you. This is true of 100% of the most successful business owners and consultants I know. Pick clients who value you and allow you to do your best work. Build your client base deliberately. Here’s what you need to know.
10. Get serious about the value of your time. No one ever lay on their deathbed, regretting they hadn’t spent more time watching TV. Throughout the day, ask yourself, is this the best use of my time right now? If it isn’t, go and do something more productive.
11. Make the decision to do the tricky stuff. Every business owner claims to give their business 100%. What they REALLY mean, is that they give their business 100% of the stuff that they are comfortable with. Decide to get less comfortable with the limitations of your comfort zone. This will help you.
12. Learn to embrace your inner freak.
13. Get the most from your creativity. There are hundreds of free, creative thinking ideas here.
14. Believe that almost anything is possible. No matter how bad things may be right now, with courage, hard work and passion, you can achieve almost anything. This post gives a great example of what I mean.
15. Build a great reputation by setting deadlines and delivering on them. Think about it: Telling a client that their project will be ready “by the end of the week” is far less powerful, than telling her it will be ready “by 9am Thursday”. Keeping your deadline promises is a superb way to earn trust and build an excellent reputation. I explain this in more detail here.
16. Give people more than they expect. Don’t under-promise though. Instead, over-deliver.

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