You may recall my last blog about getting on the phone and making cold calls - with exceptional results.

Well, we actually held the seminar last week, which was also really the launch of our new business Pure Bookkeeping. The outcome we were looking for from the event was to sell licenses to the Pure Bookkeeping System at the reduced price for our launch of around $4k. We had 12 people along on the night. Of those 2 had already bought the system, 2 were partners and one was an employee of Deb's, so we had seven prospects. A good rule of thumb for these sort of nights is to convert one in four, so I said to Deb that two sales would be a good result. So how did we go?

I was at a workshop last weekend - Passion, Power and Purpose. It was a three day bootcamp that Trish had won a ticket to, and kindly offered it to me.
 
It was run by an organisation called Beyond Success. The workshop had a ticket price of about $3k, although most of the 80 people in the room had paid $25k for a one year program.
 
I was fairly disappointed in the workshop. I didn't leave with any great increase in my passion, power or purpose. I think it was partly because I've done a lot of personal development over the years, and so a lot of it wasn't new to me. However I also thought that a lot more work had gone into marketing the workshop than designing the workshop itself.

I have a coaching client who runs a web development business – let’s call him John.

At the start of the year his business had three major issues:

• Sales. John was effective at selling when he felt confident, but as soon as he felt a bit anxious or down, he wasn’t successful.
• Cash flow. Like many small business owners, John had cash flow challenges. This mainly stemmed from clients who were slow payers. Of course this added to his anxiety which in turn impacted his sales.
• Managing clients. To build a website John and his team need content from their clients at certain points in the development life cycle. Often he had to spend time chasing this content. Apart from not really enjoying this, it spread the projects out, made them less efficient and less profitable, and delayed when he finished the sites and got paid. Which also impacted cash flow.