Business Development

The biggest struggles I and many of my clients have had are around setting and navigating boundaries in business. The client that asks for extras–and you feel queasy inside as you say “Ok…I guess that wouldn’t be that big of a deal”. The person who wants to trade with you [...]

Sometimes I find I just can’t go full speed with the socializing, online or otherwise.
Part of why I created my own business was so I could spend long stretches of time doing my own thing. Alone. No contact with people, not even email contact. Not even Twitter. Perhaps especially not Twitter.
I really prefer a few [...]

A marketing formula is a way of reaching your target market that consistently works and you can rely on to create a steady stream of new clients.
Your marketing formula works hand in hand with your clearly defined niche to create a flourishing business.
Your marketing formula is unique to you and your business.
The problem with a [...]

When you have made mistakes, or are in a desperate place, it’s easy to fall into the habit of criticizing yourself or beating yourself up.
There is often a voice that says something like, “I need to beat myself up to keep myself on track. If I don’t, I might become lazy or worse and then [...]

People are attracted to truth. If you want people to follow you, stand for something. Stand for something you believe is true and good, and make your business reflect that.
Write a credo, a manifesto. Why are you in business? What matters to you?
And then demonstrate it.
For example, let’s say you do massage.
You credo might sound like [...]

“Prosperity consciousness” is usually associated with material abundance. But there is a subtle poverty that is deeper than the scarcity people feel around money (although they are related). And no “abundance” strategy will heal it if it isn’t dealt with first.
We often live with daily emotional and spiritual scarcity. We don’t feel like enough.
We don’t feel [...]

All emotional suffering and stuckness is caused by closing down and contracting around pain. Pain happens, and change happens – this is the nature of life. However, suffering is an add-on that we create through our reaction to that pain and change.
Healing is the process of grieving and accepting this pain and change, and [...]

This is a common story: a skilled artist or creative decides to become a designer because there is more job security. Or a lawyer. They never really develop their creative talent and feel unfulfilled.
Or the other side: a skilled artist decides to work at a cafe to have free time/brain-space to pursue art. They never [...]

Several years ago I was talking to a friend about marketing and she said, “I was struggling with how to market my business, but one day I had a breakthrough. I just realized that duh, marketing is just about _________!”
And I totally expected her next word to be “focus”. (It wasn’t.)
Focus was my breakthrough word/concept [...]

Today is Friday. I love Friday’s because I get to do my accounting.
You might think: Couldn’t a bookkeeper do that better? Why don’t I have an accountant manage my money?
Isn’t my time better spent doing something that only I can do?
Sometimes, but not always.
There is this idea that you should outsource everything that you can [...]

This is in response to Sarah’s excellent
Rants From the Geek Lab: Improving Your Blog.
The questions hungry bloggers want to know: How do I make money from my blog, should I put ads on it, how much traffic to I need to make money?
The short answer is: you are asking the wrong questions.
First, pageviews aren’t the [...]

I’ve been all about the GTD thing lately. I got my lists, I’m getting things done! I’m biggifying! I’m awesome!
And then yesterday I realized, I’m completely exhausted.
Here’s what GTD is missing: sometimes you need to re-evaluate your commitments. Not just come up with the next thing and do it. Sometimes you’ve got to ask yourself [...]

This post is in response to Mark Silver’s post Can Branding Ever Be Heart-Centered?
Mark wants to rename branding “worldview”. I don’t – I like the word “branding”. It means something specific – but maybe not what you think it means.
Your associations with this word might be from seeing graphical logos or “brand names” on clothing, [...]

I was musing with a friend and colleague recently about our different styles – we decided she was like water and I was like lava – a combination of fire and earth. Fire is transformative, explosive, quick-moving, but can burn out quickly without the right nourishment. Earth is grounded, practical, always there. Lava is a [...]

I once had a prospective customer call me up and demand a sales pitch. He said “Sell me what you’ve got”. I was caught off guard. I’m used to people calling to ask me questions, not calling to demand I sell them something.
I said, uh, well, have you looked through the website? Yes. Did you [...]

I was at Fred Meyer today getting some storage bins and three of the lids slipped off the shelf and clattered to the floor in three different directions. I halfheartedly tried to catch one, but for the most part I just let them fall. I said “D’oh!” under my breath and looked sheepishly at a fellow shopper nearby [...]

When I first started doing web design, I accepted trades eagerly. It sounds great, doesn’t it? I’ll work for you, you work for me, it’s all very equitable and communistic. In theory.
However, I noticed that my projects that were paid for in trade didn’t always go the way I had hoped.

They would take a lot [...]

Amazon had a service called the Mechanical Turk that lets people complete small tasks for a fee – or, on the flipside, submit tasks to be completed. It was originally designed to make it easy for developers to let humans do tasks that computers are very bad at – such as distinguish text within photos. But [...]

I’ve been reading the lastest issue of What is Enlightenment which is my new favorite magazine. The theme is “bright green” environmentalism which is about going beyond the guilt-Luddite dynamic that says we should all feel bad for breathing precious oxygen and go back to living in caves. That kind of environmentalism just hasn’t worked. It [...]

Mentoring is not just about the transfer of knowledge. What happens when we enter into a relationship with a teacher, mentor, or even a group that has members more expanded in a certain area is that our energetic vibration expands and elevates to match that of the leader or the group.
We may learn specific skills [...]

Employed people from time to time tell me something like this: “My job sucks. I have to work all the time. No one appreciates me. Maybe I should start my own business. Oh, but I don’t know. My job pays pretty well. And I have benefits. Maybe I should just be happy with it.”
If this [...]

We all know people who created a business which turned into a monster and ate all their time and energy. This is lame and it doesn’t have to happen to you.
As you become successful, you enter a potentially dangerous time. In our culture, it is easy to get caught up in the myth of More [...]

Sometimes working so hard at a thing, you become used to struggle.
Abundance is flow, it’s the thing happening at the right time, better than you expected, glorious and full.
And when it happens, you have to let it in. You have to let it become your new reality. Let go of the pain of the struggle. [...]

This morning, I nervously contemplated this question: “If I asked my business what it really needs right now, what would it say?”
The answer came back:

a bookkeeper
a tax advisor
a full time programmer

Oy. Well you can guess why my business isn’t getting these. All my issues!
Letting people look at all my money dirty laundry is scary. Trusting [...]

What is Codependency?
Robert Subby defines codependency as “An emotional, psychological, and behavioral condition that develops as a result of an individual’s prolonged exposure to, and practice of, a set of oppressive rules.”
The term comes out of treating alcoholics and their loved ones, who developed codependent patterns to cope with the alcoholic’s behavior. Codependency is a [...]

Darren over at ProBlogger speaks about The Secret of Sustainable Blogging being making sure that your blog not just serves your readers but you as well, or else you will burn out and get bored of it.
This applies to any business I think, and it’s a beef I have with books like The Four Hour [...]

The last time I moved, I was looking for boxes on craigslist. I saw a guy posting an ad “$1 per box, I deliver anywhere in Portland”.
I thought to myself “Yeah–but there are all these postings for free boxes, why pay $1 if I can get them for free?” So I jotted down the time [...]

We’re all addicts.
Tim’s book The Four Hour Work Week has an entire section devoted to “Elimination”: getting rid of distractions that keep you from being effective. The biggest offenders are “work fidgets” – things we do that we don’t really need to do but they fill time. Like checking email 20 times a day.
Recognizing myself [...]

Right now I’m reading Tim Ferris’s book The Four Hour Work Week, and I’m deep in outsourcing mode. I’ve got an Indian company that I’m courting to redo my accounting system and I’m testing out VA (virtual assistant) companies.
Here are my tips so far:
1. Don’t get desperate and try to unload the store on someone. [...]

Hi Emma.
As an aspiring web designer, I have a dilemma, and it brings up a deeper spiritual question.
Many people are asking me to design/develop their web site for free or almost-free with the possibility of future job opportunities or income.
For example a professor friend of mine asked me to develop his site for free, with [...]

Humans are one of the few animals that walk upright, with two feet on the ground, face to the heavens, and heart open and exposed to the world. These three levels – earth, heaven, and heart – work together to manifest your creative dreams and potential. You can also become blocked or imbalanced in any [...]

My first introduction to Prosperity Consciousness was through a friend of mine who introduced this idea to me that to become rich, I would have to give up the idea that money was evil or rich people were evil. If I wanted to become something, I couldn’t go around defining it as evil, or I’d [...]

There are a lot of strategies out there to build passive income (ebooks, newsletters, real estate). However, I think it’s important to first focus on a conceptual shift, because any business can be creatively converted to utilize these principles if you open to your own creativity.
If you focus on strategies too early, your mind might [...]

I’ve recently met a colleague who spoke of spending many years struggling with the “Follow Your Bliss and the Money Will Come” mindset and making no money. It wasn’t until she finally realized she had to learn some things about money and business that she started seeing that money come in. She was still following [...]

Many people get interested in passive income and the enormous potential that websites have to offer, but have no idea where to start. Here’s my advice for newbies:

Keep earning money the way you know how. Don’t start any passive income project with the idea that it will make you rich overnight, or in the next [...]

Hi Emma,
I ran across this [Genbucks] while going through Craigslist job listings & wondered if you would give me your take on it. Since your SECP presentation my situation has changed from employed to a mixture of job hunting & developing my own freelance/residual income models. In time I want to create a site or [...]

Custom Hourly Work
I pay you $60. You work one hour for me.
Problems with this system:

Your income is capped by the inescapable limit of the number of hours in a day.
You have to keep working day after day, year after year.
You get no return for each hour of work except the wage you have assigned yourself.
You [...]