Get this right and the results will be staggering – as this three minute video interview with one of my clients explains…

The back-story is that Ben had been trying for over two years with telemarketing to reach some key people in large corporates, but found they would simply never take his calls.

The great thing about corporate customers is that they have plenty of money and large volumes of work available.  But everybody wants a piece of the action, so the people you want to speak with are being bombarded all day long with marketing materials and sales calls.

Because of this pressure, they can come across as unfriendly or overly busy.  In reality, they don't have the time to look at all of the offers that come their way, so they tend to ignore everything unless it really catches their attention.

That's precisely what I helped Ben to achieve.  I showed him an idea for a series of direct mail letters, supported by extra materials that were specifically chosen to be relevent to his customers.

When the first letter was sent out, with a Where's Wally? book (as seen in the video!), Ben received an email within 24 hours from a manager who would simply never take his calls, asking for an appointment.

As we continued with the marketing campaign, we made sure his prospects would pay a great deal of attention by being creative and standing out from the crowd.  Within weeks, they were picking up the phone and ringing Ben for more information.

In 2011 too many businesses have struggled to win new customers.  Instead they have battened down the hatches to try and just stay solvent.

Meanwhile I've personally helped a small group of clients to swim against the tide, achieving strong growth in trading conditions that are leaving their competitors gasping for survival.

If you are ambitious and like to stretch the boundaries of what's possible, we should talk.  Fill out the contact form and let's find out how fast and how far your business can go.

I have been inspired by Jobs because of his passion and profound ability to relate to his customers and deliver precisely what they want.

He did not invent the MP3 player, yet the iPod is the dominant force now in mobile music.

When I grew up, I listened to a Sony Walkman and bought several generations of them over the years. The Sony Walkman was mobile music.  Every other player simply imitated what Sony created.

When MP3 players emerged I found the whole experience of trying to put music onto them too difficult and clumsy, so I didn't bother.  The iPod was a revelation, integrating a great source of music at a reasonable price (iTunes) with a player that is incredibly intuitive and pleasant to use.

When Apple entered the mobile phone market, they re-invented the genre with the iPhone and gave us another device that showed an incredible understanding of the customer experience.  Make it wonderfully easy to use and beautiful to look at and people will love it.

Yet Steve Jobs was a university dropout and took the road less travelled.  He was sacked from Apple 10 years after creating it with his friend Steve Wozniak and went on to create Pixar and come back to Apple as its saviour in the mid 1990s.

In this speech he gave at Stanford University he gives inspiring advice for anybody in business – and life.  If you have a passion for business, you will enjoy this.  If you don't have a passion for your business, it might make you stop and think about why are you doing it…

Will you recognise your rescue?

Nobody could be blamed now for forecasting another recession, a second dip because the whole world is just too badly screwed up by the greedy bankers and the egos of the politicians.

But for most small businesses, it doesn’t feel like the first recession ever really went away.  Trading is very tough and you’ve got to take clear action to protect your business.

When times are tough, some people simply trust to luck and hope it will get better soon.

Here’s a true story that sounds just like a joke I know (I've included the joke later on for you)…

Many years ago, I went to see a man who ran a building supplies company.  His business was in real trouble.  A friend of his had asked me to go see him.

A quick warning – it mentions God a few times.  I don't have strong religious convictions, but religion is central to this story (and it gives an important lesson too).

So we met at his offices and went through the problems in his business – there were plenty – staff who didn’t care, high costs, customers who kept going bust without paying him, cut-throat competitors, suppliers who wanted cash before they would deliver to him.

The list just kept on going.

He seemed like a truly broken man, his eyes almost glazed over in acceptance of some terrible burden that he had to carry.

I told him it didn’t have to be this way.  That he could fix things if he would just try doing some new ways of doing things.

He shrugged his shoulders and said, in completely genuine tone, “I trust my God to look after me.”

He went on to explain that he was a very religious man and that the only thing that kept him going was his faith.

I was left speechless.  This man had a family to feed.  A community in which he lived to feel proud.

I understand religious faith.  But faith is about hoping you are doing the right thing, not sitting back and praying that some mystical force will do it for you.

I tried to help him.  He was in such trouble, I was scared for him.  I told him three things he needed to do in the next month to start turning things around.

But he just stuck to his guns, saying, "What can I do?  I am just one man.  In God's will I trust."

Talking to my mutual friend later, he told me this man had failed in business several times already, by doing exactly the same thing – sitting back and hoping it would fix itself.

They say that the definition of madness is to keep doing the same things and expect different results.

In which case, this gentleman was living proof of the saying.

Here's the joke…

A man lives in a house in the country and has devoted his life to God.

His government decide to build a dam downriver, which will cause the land all around him to flood.

When planning to build the dam, they send him a letter offering to buy his house off him at full price, and relocate him somewhere better.

He writes back and tells them, “No thanks, in God I trust.”

As the dam is built, the water gradually starts to build up.  They send a boat down to his house, and offer to take him to safety.

He smiles and waves to them, “No thanks, in God I trust.”

The water gradually builds into a deep river and they send in a helicopter.  They find him sitting on the roof, smiling serenely.  The winch man is lowered down to him and…

He smiles and says, “No thanks, in God I trust.”

A week later, at the pearly gates, St Peter is surprised when our hero arrives, wet and bedraggled with a look of surprise and anguish on his face.

He says to St Peter, “I have devoted myself to God.  I was not swayed when the government destroyed the beauty of the countryside.  Why did He not save me?”

St Peter replied, “Didn’t you get His letter, His boat or His helicopter?”

The problem with "In God I trust" is that it's excusing you from taking any action.

It says that you are helpless.  It's up to some supernatural force to decide how the dice will land.

Look around at successful people and you spot one thing about them all – they fight tooth and nail when things get tough.

They don't just sit back and hope things will get better.

If they were religious, you can bet they would say that "God helps those who help themselves."

I do not hold strong religious beliefs, but I do believe in this saying.

Doing nothing right now is not an option.  Too many people depend upon you to take decisive action to protect them.

Right now, you need to do whatever you can to help yourself, to provide for your family and to protect all the hard work that has gone into your business over the years.

Dark tides are coming our way, carrying much doom and despair, rising jobless figures and unrest from the unions (who are just as bad as the politicians).

So whatever you are doing, if things aren’t going right and your business is at risk, try something new.

Don’t throw everything at one wild strategy, but try new things out, measure the results, and don't give up.

Whatever you do, keep your faith that you can get through this.

Dr Paddi Lund enjoying tea at his private dental practice

On Friday evening I went to dinner with a dentist from Australia who has consulted with England's rugby union team (helping them on their way to the 2003 World Cup), a major UK holidays firm and countless dentists worldwide. I wanted to interview him for the book I'm writing, "Double Your Business".

As an independent dentist working with support staff, Dr Paddi Lund was able to gross well over $1M per annum while working about a third of the hours of a typical dentist.

In Paddi's book, "Building The Happiness Centred Business", he talks about taking a chainsaw to the reception desk at his dental practice, clearing it out and replacing it instead with a waiting room that resembles a coffee shop.

At the same time, he introduced private waiting rooms for those people who wanted to sit quietly alone without looking at other people waiting for treatment.

As a patient, you would know the nurse who looked after you – she would be your single point of contact for booking appointments, greeting you on arrival and generally looking after your welfare while at Paddi's practice.

The result was a very strong relationship between his clients and his dental practice.

He introduced many, many small touches that differentiated his business from any other dentist around. They are difficult to spot unless you are carefully looking for them, yet together they make the whole experience feel so much better than an ordinary dentist. He called these things his Critical None-Essentials, or CNEs.

One of the special ideas was a big button that his patients can press to make him stop. He gets them to try it out on their first visit, so they have the confidence that they are in control, not him. He installed a TV in the ceiling (way back in the 1980s before anybody else thought of it).

His total focus was on making everybody happy – himself, his staff and his clients. This scared off some patients because his prices shot up along with his service, but for the customers he wanted, it was the perfect solution.

It was the topic of CNEs that Sir Clive Woodward wanted to understand and apply to his rugby team. According to his book, "Winning", the 2003 World Cup winners had 127 extra ideas to help them get a little edge on their competition.

None of these 127 ideas alone made the complete difference, but altogether they helped to create a winning mind-set for the players and give them a practical, mental, emotional or skill boost that took them to the top, helping them to win 42 out of 47 matches from 2000 to 2003's World Cup final.

This isn't about rugby, just in case you're thinking it is.

It's about getting an edge over your competition. Which is what winning in business is all about.

At the restaurant with Paddi on Friday, he noted that our orders were taken by a waitress who was attentive and friendly. She took the time to build a relationship with us and we had some fun.  She asked how our steak should be cooked and what side-dishes we would like.

But then it was delivered by a completely different waiter. He had no idea who had ordered which dish and so had to ask us.

Worse than this, he made assumptions about the side-dishes and gave us the wrong ones (in fact, one was missing altogether).

The same thing happened for coffee.  I wanted normal, but Paddi wanted decaffeinated.  She took the order and another guy we'd never seen before delivered it by stumbling through the question of "Who ordered the decaff?".  It was terribly clumsy.

We did not feel special at all. Each time we were served, we both felt just slightly let down, but not so much that we might have thought to mention it.  Except we were talking customer service and were looking for the cracks.  For a meal that cost around £60 per head, it was not good enough to make us want to go back.

If you are in business, you need to be great at customer service. It should occupy a lot of your thoughts, because it's where the battle for customer loyalty is won or lost.

It is not enough to simply do the same things as your competition, because that will give you no edge at all. Clive Woodward looked outside rugby to a mad dentist with a chainsaw.

The French restaurant where Paddi and I dined was a nice place, great food and a decent setting. I'd happily eat there again, but I won't plan to go back again with other friends, or to tell anybody about it.

I am a mainly satisfied customer. But satisfied customers aren't very loyal – you need delighted customers for that.

If you want your business to stand head and shoulders above your competitors, a simple place to start is to think outside the box for ways to delight your customers.

A few weeks ago I wrote an email about a client called John Carmichael, who runs central heating firm Superwarm Services in Edinburgh. His business has doubled this year in part because we have applied some lessons learnt from selling consultancy services to selling new boilers. His customers love it, and so does he.

I have worked with hundreds of businesses and sometimes we can apply novel ideas from another industry into yours. Ideas that none of your competitors have used.  These CNEs are the difference that makes the difference.

If you want to win in business, make your service extraordinary. It has doubled Superwarm's sales, it was worth $1M a year to Paddi Lund and it helped England to a Rugby World Cup. What could it be worth to you?

Watching the programme, it was clear that his own expectations and standards were light years away from those of the franchisees' sites that he visited.

But perhaps a bigger issue for him is that of negative publicity for his brand.  For what makes good TV is sensationalism, so the cameras and editing focus on all the problems and fun scenes.

This makes it good watching, but it can't be great advertising for the brand.  The problems with hygiene (if you saw the show, you'll know about the uncooked, open chickens left in a basket on the floor of one run-down branch) are not going to do much to attract new business.

But shown publicly on a show like this could damage the long-term health of the brand.  The Daily Mirror was delighted to announce today in a headline that "Multi millionaire fried chicken boss calls his food sh*t".

The press is not interested in reality (especially the gutter press); they just want to sell papers and have their headlines quoted everywhere.

The truth was that he did a "secret shopper" visit to one branch and the cameras didn't follow him in.  When he returned to his car, before testing the food he expressed grave concerns about the way the branch was being run and the service.

Sadly, they just showed him eating the chicken and being disgusted by it, then failed to come back to finish the story off with what he did about it.

That's a great pity.  It would have done his brand a huge amount of good if he had closed a branch down for simply being too poor for words.

Instead, it finished with the same kind of story that every episode of The Undercover Boss seems to do: light reprimands, thanks for the insights the staff gave him, a showing of generous support to help them make changes and the seemingly obligatory free holiday for a poor member of staff (although this time at least it was clearly appropriate).

Channel 4 have to be commended for their investment in business programming -they really are leaders in this niche and long may they continue.

But as media specialists they should also help the owners of these businesses to understand how to manage their branding through the process. Warts and all is great TV, but for providing great content for the show, I hope the owners are given a little more than the chance to be light entertainment or shock value.

If you run your own small business, you want something simple and practical that you know will work.

Which is precisely why I created the One Page Core Marketing Plan Template you can download from this page.  It will give you a simple series of steps to help you produce incredible results.

Marketing has been too complicated for too long.  In the past month, one of my clients, a small removals business, increased their sales by 60% in one month by taking massive action using the first three steps of the plan.

Meanwhile a £1M turnover company that sells business to business, wanted a marketing plan to capture utility companies as customers.  In this case the first 4 steps have been completed and the results are staggering.

With my help in the execution, they have captured 8 utility companies as clients in less than 6 months.  These new sales alone should be enough over the next two years to double their turnover.

When looking through the marketing plan template, you'll see that things like market research and SWOT analysis have been left out.  These can be really helpful to prepare your thinking for putting your marketing into action, but for most small businesses the key to success is in the five steps presented.

Download it and let me know how you get on.

If you think this will be useful to you, please tell your friends about it.

And remember to sign up for my mailing list to get lots of great ideas to grow your business.

Networking is often one of the first strategies I'll recommend to a client looking for more work.  It is especially effective for smaller businesses and startups because it allows you to build personal connections with people who then feel more comfortable to place work with you.

However, it's also a very effective strategy for many professional services firms like accountants, solicitors and so on, because the level of trust built through relationships makes it easy for people to approach them.

Over the past 10 years, times have changed and people are now networking online through sites such as Linked-In, Facebook, Twitter and many more besides.  There has never been an easier time to make and maintain effective relationships thanks to the technologies of the Internet.

But this brings with it a whole new set of challenges.  How do you integrate social networking into your marketing?  Should you even bother?  And what's the right balance of time to devote to networking in order to get a sensible return on investment?

Heather stands firmly on the side that says that networking is the key to building your business.  This is probably the topic on which we differ – networking is a great strategy, I have no doubt.  But it's not the only way to generate more leads and sales.

Like most things, you need to find business development strategies that suit your personality and the skills of your team.  A great example of this comes from one of my past clients, The Mortgage Broker Limited.

Financial services firms typically get most of their leads from networking, yet The Mortgage Broker Limited grew from 25-30 mortgages per month with networking as their main lead source to a peak of 225 mortgages using Internet marketing.

However, if you are going to use networking as one of your cornerstone strategies, it pays to have a clear strategy to organise yourself to get the most benefit from it.

There is no point spending hours on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn every day if you don't get a corresponding amount of business in return.  This is where Heather's book comes in.  She is a veteran user of social media and generates all of her own business through networking, both online and offline.

There's also another angle to networking – in the much-quoted Think & Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill covers what he calls your mastermind.  This has often been taken to mean a formalised master mind group.

However, read the book carefully and you'll see that Hill really means to build relationships with people who can help you, and who you can help in return.

That's perhaps the strongest reason to recommend this book.  Heather understands how to build a single unified network that seamlessly operates across the online and offline worlds.  If you want to do the same, this book is a good addition to your armoury.

Stephen, the owner of a CCTV business asked for my help with getting more sales.  When I visited them, they had a big office and a number of staff.  The business had grown to a decent size turnover but they were making practically no profit at all.

I realised then that their biggest problem was not sales, but management.  We sat down and spent just a couple of minutes looking at their annual accounts.

The Gross Profit (how much they make before paying for fixed costs like wages, rent, utlities etc) for the year showed that on average, they were making 30% or less per job.  Yet Stephen insisted that every job he quoted for was at a 55% margin.

This is where the turnover is vanity, profit is sanity phrase comes in.  The owner, Stephen, wanted to grow sales when the real problem was with his margins.  Something was going wrong on each job so that his profit was being whittled down from 55% to 30%.

If we had put lots of effort into improving his sales, it would have been more work at the same low margins, producing little profit for lots of effort.

Fortunately there was a paper trail to help us track down exactly where the money was going.  It turns out that many jobs were taking twice as long to complete as a result of the engineers having to fetch spares or tools from the office half way through a job.

The time being lost to these return trips was stealing all the profit from the turnover he was doing.

And profit is what pays your bills, while turnover is what you brag about to your friends!

A quick fix to his business involving better systems to make sure engineers had everything they needed took no more than a couple of days to put into place.

With gross profits at 30%, sales were just high enough to break even.  With the new systems in place, margins were up at 50% and set the business up to make around £143,000 profit.

If this is all sounds like jargon to you, the chances are you don't understand your own accounts either.

You might even be suffering from a case of turnover is vanity, profit is sanity!

But what can you expect from the book when it's published?

Here's a description taken directly from the proposal agreed with my publisher, Financial Times Prentice Hall:

An extraordinarily effective "how-to" manual for everybody who wants to enjoy a more successful business. Double Your Business teaches you how to leap the Growth Barriers that stop ordinary businesses in their tracks and to propel your business to giddy new heights of success. It's a blueprint for success for the ambitious small business owner.

I created the concept of Growth Barriers after recognising that so many small businesses seem to get stuck for different reasons.  It's not just about marketing, but your abilities in leadership, management, marketing, sales, finances and others.  In fact, as I reviewed past clients I realised that there are many things that can hold you back.

This is because everybody tends to work according to habits – you do the things you’re comfortable with and avoid areas you don’t understand.  In business this translates into small problems that grow with your business until they block further growth – they become your Growth Barriers.

At certain points of turnover, your business simply becomes stuck and stubbornly refuses to budge until you figure out exactly what’s holding you back. This scenario plays out daily in businesses everywhere and finally a solution is at hand in this book.

Imagine being able to pinpoint exactly the problem that stands in the way of your success and being given a powerful action plan to eliminate it; this is the essential secret of Double Your Business.

This book does not randomly try to fix everything about your business; like my coaching services, it concentrates your effort where it will produce the biggest rewards.

The solution lies in the new and powerful concept of ‘Growth Barriers’: when your business hits the buffers and you don’t know how to kick-start it back into growth, you have hit a Business Growth Barrier.  There are 37 different barriers to growth within the six broad business disciplines:

• Leadership & Vision
• People Management
• Marketing
• Sales Management
• Financial Control
• Systems & Processes

Double Your Business: How to break through the barriers to higher growth, turnover and profit" helps you to diagnose which of the 37 Growth Barriers you’ve hit and gives a practical action plan to break through to the next level.  There will be resources available online too.

The manuscript is well under way with almost 30,000 words written.  It's why I've been quiet this year!

It will be published in Spring 2012 and will be available through Amazon as well as major book shops.  Make sure you sign up to my list and I'll keep you informed of progress and even give you some "sneak peeks" at what you'll find inside.

People often ask what kind of results are possible through coaching programmes working with The Double Your Business Coach.

In this two and a half minute video, Paul Marsden, the managing director of Virtual Business Source Limited, explains how his sales have grown substantially in just 12 months.

The business is a £1 Million turnover payroll and bookkeeping business and we've built a lead generation machine for his business now that is reliably producing 2-3 times more leads than ever before.

With the strategies we have put in place, that figure is likely to grow a lot further over the next twelve months.

This video started life as a test of the camera for using with client testimonials.  We did it as a kind of practice run to see how my camera would work.

Anyway, when I got back and watched it, I realised that this was a great bit of relaxed fun, and Paul surprised me when he put a number to his sales growth, so I couldn't resist putting it up here for you to see.