This week, Profit Wise by Jeff Morrill came across my desk and I had the chance to add it to my book queue. For the business law clients that I work with, this book is a good primer on some tactics you can use to make your business more profitable. As you've probably encountered, there's no shortage of books for business owners these days. Released in March, Mr. Morrill has highlighted the main areas you should be considering as you launch a business, including
- Hiring
- Leading Your Team
- Marketing
- Customer Service
- Being Productive
- Long-Term Planning
Marketing Tips from Profit Wise
Whenever I'm given a new book on business, I'm always interested when it discusses marketing. Unfortunately, lawyers don't tend to have the most innovative marketing in the world, so we often find our inspiration from other businesses. If you're in the Dan Kennedy world, you focus on the triangle of Media, Message, and People. For Mr. Morrill, he's drilling down to the start of the business and looking at your business name, your slogan, and the methods you use. For the marketing methods, he focuses on four channels,
- Paid media - advertisers who disseminate your message for a fee, such as radio stations and internet banner display companies.
- Owned media - your own resources, including your website and customer list.
- Earned media - reporters, bloggers, and others who tell your story.
- Social media - internet networks of affiliated people such as Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.
If you are a business that is just starting out, I think you should focus as much as you can on your Owned Media to start. Getting your internal assets in order can help you expand and grow your business down the road.
Being Productive as a Business Owner
Another big interest of mine is productivity - especially with all the challenges that we face as business owners. Mr. Morrill has some tips in this regard as well,
- Take your bullets early in the day
- Recognize the dysfunctional relationship between perfectionism and procrastination
- Arrange your day so it aligns with your natural energy flow
- Know when to quit for the day
- Leave some slack in your daily schedule
- Beware the cost of interruptions to your productivity
- You don't need to respond to every email, but you do need to respond to important emails
- Bring the right attitude to your problems
If you're new to productivity literature, this is actually a very solid list of a variety of tactics that you'll likely run into. You could hang this list in your office to remind you of how you should be designing your day and your workflow. Mr. Morrill also discusses the Eisenhower Matrix, another favorite of productivity literature, which is a good way to determine what is the next thing on your agenda that you should be doing.
Final Thoughts
These are all pretty big topics to try to tackle in one book and Mr. Morrill even spends some time addressing when it's time to move on from your business and take those next post-business steps. You can find more on his website if you're looking for some templates and worksheets to complement your read of this book, and if you're looking for some other business reads for your queue, you can check out TCK Publishing.