Is your Business Overwhelming You?

You too can increase profits without necessarily increasing sales!

How?

The “Profits Leak Detective Newsletter” offers regular tips and strategies to help you identify and plug those leaking profits.

You may never have known you have them.

Subscribe to receive a FREE Case Study on the success of just one strategy.

BONUS free report “7 Clues to a Profit Leak”, valued at $47.

How do you know that you should be looking for leaks?

Are there some clues or symptoms that are telltales saying that a

bit of drilling down into your business might pay some dividends?

Possible leaks could be anywhere.

This report provides 7 clues that should put you on alert for a profit leak.

Be alert - SUBSCRIBE NOW

"Adam, over the past six years, I've had the pleasure of 'bumping into you' on at least three business and marketing related forums. Your contributionsto discussions have always been courteous, astute, incisive and practical,delivered with good humour, and based upon 'real-world' business experience. You are clearly an experienced business professional who actually knows what he is talking about. I wonder if your clients know what a gem they have in you? As one business professional to another, I salute you.

Good Wishes,
John Williamson - The Wealth Coach
www.thewealthcoach.com
www.retaildisplaysecrets.com

+++++++++++++++++++

I just LOVED "7 Clues to a Profits Leak".

Steven Walker - Profit Improvement Advisors
Calgary, Canada

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You will be proud how your protégés are proceeding! We have expanded the business to Katherine and Alice (Tennant is also on the list). T he catering side of the business is far less stressful and is actually profitable, now that we only take the good jobs.
We will never forget the assistance you gave us in re-inventing our business!

Karen Sheldon

Managing Director

Karen Sheldon Catering

Darwin, Australia

+++++++++++++++++++

The chap is Adam Gordon whom I have known for many years. He is a former resident of Darwin having lived here for perhaps 25 years, is an excellent communicator and has a very good appreciation of small business, business plans and all that goes with it. In fact Adam is regarded as a business guru.

Charles Wright, QS Services, Darwin, Australia

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Thanks for the catch-up the other day. It's great to be working with a legend in the small business community.

AJ Kulatunga, BLKMGK ICT

Darwin, Australia

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The 7 Clues is a great.

What I like the most in the Seven Clues report is that it clearly explains that accounting is merely a subset of proper financial management and

that only the business owner can practise financial management. The accountant does the accounting, and in doing so supports the business owner's financial management. And the business owner uses the accountant's information, but relying on the accountant to do full-blown financial management is short-sighted.

The report nicely "grounds" an otherwise complex topic which many business owners are afraid of touching, so they often move ahead in blissful ignorance. The water hose and the soggy soil under the leak makes an excellent and easy-to-comprehend example, upon which the financial management concept is nicely built.

Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan, Organisational Provocateur Dynamic Innovations Squad
Personal and Firm-Wide Performance Improvement for Management Consulting Firms

Vancouver, BC Canada

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
You have played a very important role in my development in business.

You were there with the right information at the right time, I thank you for that.
By adding the next level of systems, and marketing knowledge that you brought to the table we able to identify our objectives, acknowledge the gaps in our business and put in place the planning so as to achieve those objectives. Within 5 years we achieved 9 of our ten stated objectives. In that same year we won the NT Telstra Small business of the year"

Greg Haigh
Director - Trade Group
Regional And Northern maintenance services
RANms

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Recent newsletters include:

How well do you know your market?
How turning away customers leads to profits
How to create Superior Value
How to win against your competition
Do you need to make changes to your business?
"Our customers are costing us too much!"
Why competition is good news
What makes a web site effective?
Most businesses have one, but...
How to improve your quotations
How to raise prices without losing sales
Is your business resilient?
How to develop a new product in your niche
How big is your profit gap?
How discounting destroyed value
Benchmarking for best practice
From all customers to some customers
How to take the guesswork out of growth
Should your USP be based on logic or emotion?
How to triple your quotation success rate
How to dramatically improve your quotations
How to make more effective decisions?
How to develop your USP
Do you want to make better planning choices?
Are youmaking these mistakes in planning?
How to use SWOT properly
Does your sales conversation balance the scales of justice?
The perils of profitless cash flow!
So what is more important, cash flow or profit?
Are you getting value from your pricing?
Do you report to yourself monthly?
Follow the money trail!
Performance also counts!
Get more bang for your buck!
Without measurement there can be no improvement!
Where would your business be without customers?
Using your monthly report to improve your profits
Just who is your customer?
And what do you know about your customer?
How branding can increase your profits!
Can branding make you more money?
How to balance the value equation
Tilting the balance in your favour
How to pin the tail on the donkey
Are you groping in the dark with your real cost of labour
Mastering core marketing principles
Building a 5P marketing plan
Profit leaking processes
Should you be trying to increase or decrease cash flow
At times it is folly to hasten
5 steps to create your future
What will be the X-Factor in 2009
Lies, damn lies & statistics
How to use a squad profit leak detectives
Confidence leads to action
Increase sales - so easy to say
So you want to know how to increase sales
Is selling a necessary evil?

Is your Business Overwhelming You?

What causes Overwhelm and Stress

Have you ever felt that there were too many decisions you had to make in your business, too many competing interests for your limited time, not being able to decide which were the important decisions or what you needed to know to make decisions? In short being completely overwhelmed by the flood of demands on you in running your business.

The more fraught you feel, the more your mind locks up, unable to be able to make even simple decisions. "Researches show that when under stress, the part of our brain responsible for logic and decision-making degrades. Instead, the part of the brain responsible for emotional and instinctive responses takes over." (Lawrence Cheok)

And because you have so many jobs to complete and decisions to make, you work longer and longer hours, and take increasingly less time off. The result? You get sucked into the never-ending list of to-dos and end up feeling overwhelmed and stressed.

That overwhelm and stress leads to poorer decisions, and so the cycle goes on.

Looking at this in more detail there are a number of factors which lead to these feelings.

Poor decision making - it happens. We all do it; make a poor or even bad decision. As they say, 'the person who never made a mistake, never made a decision". The problem is that poor or bad decisions lead to less than optimum outcomes, and that ground has to be recovered, time in which you could be doing something more useful.

Expectation -A major source of stress and anxiety is your own expectations on a particular result. Many people place unnecessary pressure on themselves In trying to satisfy that expectation, thus causing stress.

Overburdening yourself - People often take on too much, either because they don't delegate properly, or they are trying to please others. Many people are just not good at saying NO. Saying no is a powerful tool in improving businesses. Good intentions are one thing, but not if they lead you to commit to more than you can realistically take on. Your time and energy is just drained away.

Near enough is not good enough - Do you take pride in being a perfectionist? Needing to do everything perfectly often leads to things not getting done at all, and not getting it done, finished, launched or whatever leads to feeling overwhelmed by the task at hand, and all the others piling up behind it. More stress.

The Need to Control - Are you the type of person who feels they need to be in complete control of everything. It is not an uncommon feeling when running your own business. After all, you no doubt started small, even as a one person operation, and gradually built up the business.
The problem is, as the business grows you cannot do everything yourself. But you may feel that others are not able to do the particular task as well as you, which may well be right.

So you find yourself doing or wanting to do everything yourself, but at the realization not have the capacity to do it all. The end result can be left feeling overwhelmed at the mountain of tasks that needs to be done - by you.

The good news is that there are remedies, and I'll suggest some practical remedies in your next blog.

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