Late last year I made a very important decision for my business. I joined BNI.

Choosing to join and completely engage in that organization has had a tremendous impact on both myself and my business. Every week I get the chance to meet and present before 35 or more of the most important and influential entrepreneurs in my town. Perhaps more importantly, I am now able to call these people my friends and partners.

One of the brightest lights shining in my local chapter is Elaine Gibson of BB EnviroSystems. She and her husband Nevin are top-producing dealers for EcoQuest International, the indoor environmental equipment company.

Elaine invited me to present to a group of over 100 other EcoQuest associates at a training event she produced locally. All of us in attendance were fortunate to hear personally from the CEO of this amazing company, Mike Jackson. It was a very high-energy event.

This week’s podcast is my presentation to the group on the topic of Education-Based Marketing. As you listen, think about the impact that my relationship with Elaine - via BNI - is having on me and my business. I’ll be talking about another amazing blessing which has come my way through BNI very shortly.

Stay tuned!

People often ask me about my background - where I cut my teeth in business. In this podcast you get a pretty clear peek at my entrepreneurial roots in the printing business.

This week I was invited to speak to the Franklin Technical Society, a group of folks involved in providing printing and information services to government agencies, corporations and other large organizations here in the Washington, DC area. It was quite a trip down memory lane.

In attendance were executives from the American Red Cross, Library of Congress, Government Printing Office, United States Army and large local printing companies including Stephenson Printing and our hosts, Goodway Graphics.

Though I spent over 25 years in the printing industry, it had been at least six since I last addressed a room full of printers and their clients. This industry has been enduring wave after wave of technological onslaught for decades. And, every time they think they can come up for air, another unforseen marketplace upheaval rocks their world.

Well before desktop publishing, optical disks, the Internet and sub-$100 desktop inkjet printers with photographic quality, printers have dealt with revolutions like the Linotype in the late 19th Century and offset printing in the mid-20th Century. The pace of change only seems to accelerate over time.

If you’d like to hear me tell some stories on myself, and learn about how one industry has continually adapted to change, give a listen to this week’s podcast. And post a comment to let me know what you think.

In a recent post about Education-Based Marketing, I told you…

Very soon I’m going to bring you an interview with an executive from a huge multinational corporation which has just begun employing Education-Based Marketing in a very novel way.

Well here it is. In this week’s podcast you’ll hear from Mateo Alejandre, Senior Marketing Manager with Dell Computer in Round Rock, Texas regarding Dell’s new Small Business 360 initiative.

Let’s face it, IT (Information Technology) can be confusing. Hardware, software, networking, servers, email, web sites, Internet marketing - YIKES! Small business owners had enough headaches to deal with before all this wonderfulness entered our lives in the 1980s. Fortunately, the good folks at Dell have heard our cries in the wilderness and are mustering resources to help us.

Interestingly, Dell’s direct-marketing business model was part of the impetus behind Small Business 360. Their sales consultants were hearing the same problems and concerns being expressed over and over by their small business customers and it occurred to them that taking a proactive approach to helping their marketplace solve those problems would be a win-win for everyone.

There is a lot of territory being covered in a short amount of time in this podcast. If you find it interesting during the first listening I highly recommend you listen to it all the way through again. I’ve picked up different bits and pieces every time I’ve listened that I missed previously - and I did the interview for goodness sake!

I also want to strongly encourage you to check out Small Business 360 and tell Mateo and his team what you think. What are they doing well? What are they doing poorly? How can they bring you more value?

After all, they’ve created this enormous information resource for us. The least we can do is tell them what we think about it and help them grow it into an even more valuable solution source going forward.

In this podcast I interview Gina Watkins, Regional Development Director for Constant Contact, about Email Marketing 101 - how small and mid-size businesses can use email marketing to grow their sales.

In this interview Gina differentiates successful email communication from the flood of SPAM we all receive in our in-box every morning and describes:

Who you should be mailing to
How to grow your mailing list
The various forms your email message should take
How often you should send email
What Your “From” line should say
What Your “Subject” line should say
How to track your results
How to improve your effectiveness over time

If you’ve been thinking about adding email to your marketing mix - or even if you’re a current email marketer looking to improve your results - you owe it to yourself to listen to what this master email marketer has to say.

Click on this link to get started with your own free, 60-day account with Constant Contact.

As a lifelong learner and admitted information junkie, I am always on the lookout for top-quality educational resources.

I have also found that the best medium for me to consume information through is audio. I don’t have time to sit and read but I do enjoy listening to interesting information when I’m driving or exercising. I would much rather listen to an audio book than read the same printed book.

That’s why I was so excited when I found out about Conference Call University, which I wrote about here last week. As I mentioned then, I was privileged to do a telephone interview with Marty Fahncke, the founder of Conference Call University, which is now posted as this week’s podcast.

Marty and I discuss a number of things including:

What Conference Call University is
What categories of information are available
Who the presenters of the information are
How much the resources cost
How to access the information
How to grow your business with information products
How Conference Call University makes money

I very much enjoyed my time on the phone with Marty and the opportunity to learn more about how I can grow my knowledge - and my business - with Conference Call University.

I know you will too, Frank

Today’s podcast includes another Enterpreneurial Success Story Interview, this time with Paul Ingenito, founder of Flavors Catering in Springfield, Virginia.

Paul and I discuss how he found his passion for preparing fine food very early in life, and pursued it for over twenty years working in restaurants and private clubs before founding his own catering business five years ago. Paul’s personality and success speak for themselves. I think you’re really going to enjoy meeting him and hearing his story.

I’ve also included a short interview with Virtual Assistant Rosanna Tussey, where we discuss what VAs do, how much their services cost, and how they can help business owners get more done in their own busy lives.

This is the first of my Entrepreneurial Success Story Interviews, in which I ask successful business owners how they handle each of my Six Disciplines of Entrepreneurial Mastery.

John’s business is particularly interesting in that he is able to provide executive-level training to federal agencies across the country from a home office with no overhead, no inventory and no employees.

Additionally, John’s business plan includes the ability for him and his wife to travel several weeks a year - rather than allowing the company to run their lives as happens with so many entrepreneurs.

If you’ve been wondering what I’m talking about when I keep pounding on the idea of the “Successful Entrepreneurial Lifestyle,” you need to listen to this interview.

I am a member of BNI (Business Network International), the world’s largest business networking organization and give it my highest recommendation. If you are serious about building your business through networking and what is now called Word of Mouth Marketing, you need to be a BNI member.

SendOutCards is a company I became aware of in late 2005 and have been using ever since. Their online system for sending personalized notecards is an unrivaled follow-up and referral generating tool.

This short interview will tell you most everything you need to know about these two organizations and whether you should become involved with one or both.

While the seminar was originally created for members of the real estate industry, I published it here for all to hear because the vast majority of what is discussed is applicable to any business owner.

In this segment, Ken and I discuss the latest developments in audio and video on the Internet including YouTube, Google Video, Podcasting and what I call Video Brochures.



In the first segment, Ken and I had a more general discussion about what Web 2.0 means to the owners of small and mid-size businesses.