Susan L. Reid has an article for Financially Preparing Small Business Owners for 2010 at the American Express OPEN Forum.

The first two ideas are to hire a business coach and focus on the near-term. I believe that both of these are fantastic ideas. I use a local free service via the University of New Hampshire Business School for business coaching and I have found their assistance to be invaluable.

Focusing your efforts and thinking on the near-term is also very good advice. The important thing is going to be to get to the end of the year “in the black”. The results of the 2010 mid-term elections in the US are going to be anybody’s guess right up until November, so small business owners need to focus on being prepared for just about anything.

The third idea, I believe, warrants even more discussion.

3. Reinvent your business.

2010 will be the year when you will have to reinvent yourself and your business. The world is not the same world you inhabited just a few years ago. Don’t get caught up in thinking that, once the economy settles, we’ll all be returning to the way things were. There is no going backward. And, honestly, even if you could, would you?

To respond to events, do something new and innovative. Something other people would not expect you to do. The old way of doing things doesn’t apply any more. So be brave and try something new in your life and business.

While the next 12 months will bring new challenges, look forward to more signs of recovery in the upcoming months while, at the same time, putting into place a plan for your business that will weather a double-dip if and when one should occur.

How can you re-invent your business? I can think of at least two examples:

Turn a service into a product

If your small business is a service of some sort, turn part of it into a resource that your customers can purchase. For example, perhaps an bookkeeper manages the accounts of some specialty firms and has created spreadsheets with all sorts of custom templates and macros. One of these may be applicable to other businesses. These potential customers may not be able to afford your ongoing bookkeeping services, but they may be interested in purchasing the accounting tool and doing it themselves.

In addition, you now have the opportunity to market to these customers with other products that you develop, or possibly add services in the future. Make the product once, sell it multiple times. Sell upgrades. Sell customization.

Turn a product or service into a training course

Once again we are looking at something that you can do once, convert it into a digital format, and sell it multiple times. Whatever your business I am sure that you have a set of frequently asked questions or frequently recurring situations that you must handle for your clients or customers.

Turn this FAQ resource into a training tool, using PDF or audio or video format. That is what Brad Shorr and I did with the Writing for the Web course, to teach our own clients the basic tools of do-it-yourself SEO (Search Engine Optimization). By adding this training course to our website packages we were able to cut down the amount of time spent coaching our clients on the same information over and over.

What type of small business do you have, and how can you re-invent part of it for 2010? Share in the comments.

The likeliest sources of great ideas are in the most unlikely places.

What unlikely places, or unexpected people, have produced amazing ideas for you or your business?
Share in the Comments.

Three years ago I developed a special kind of calendar for my own Getting Things Done practice. It was so helpful and useful in terms of learning how to implement a ‘Hard Landscape‘ and get real control over my time and my appointments/meetings.

Updated for 2010!

A revolution in calendar design, that you can print for yourself!

What exactly should a calendar do? And how should you use it to get the most out of your day?

Rule number 1: Your calendar should not work against you.

Your calendar should be your guide, a map or a directory to get you through your day. The layout of the information should be designed to work with your natural viewing habits. It needs to help you, not hurt you.

Rule number 2: Your calendar is not a ‘to-do’ list.

A calendar is a tool that is supposed to tell you where you need to be and when you need to be there, or when something is scheduled to happen.

For those of you familiar with David Allen’s Getting Things Done productivity system, you know that only three things are to be entered into your calendar. Three things. That’s it.

1. Time-specific actions

“Time-specific actions” are, simply put, appointments or meetings. These are the things that have to happen at, you guessed it, a specific time.

2. Day-specific actions

“Day-specific actions” are things that need to get done on a certain day, but not at a pre-arranged time. For example, you may need to print out the latest sales figures sometime on Thursday, because you have a meeting to review those figures at 9:00 am Friday. “Print sales figures” goes into the calendar for Thursday as an Action, while “Sales Meeting” goes into the calendar for Friday as an Event.

3. Day-specific information

“Day-specific information” consists of things that you need to know on a certain day, such as directions to a meeting, what your spouse is doing that day, or where to find contact information for a call you need to make. It can also serve as a pointer to a Reference File or something on your Waiting For list.

Putting Raw Data Into the Calendar Pages

It doesn’t take a genius to print your own calendar pages and then punch some information into the right slots. That’s not the hard part. The hard part is putting the information into your calendar in a way that makes it easy to get that information out again.

Getting Information Out of Your Calendar

How do you read your calendar pages? You think you know, but do you? Marketing and advertising experts have been studying how the human eye and brain looks at text and images for years now — it’s in their best interests to know what you’re looking at and when.

Research has shown that consistently, people look in the same places and in the same patterns. Now that the internet is in such wide usage, researchers have been able to scientifically track where your eyes are going when you look at a web page and by association, at your calendar pages.

The “F-Pattern” and What It Means When You Print Your Own DIY Calendar

Readers don’t read.

Users won’t read text thoroughly in a word-by-word manner. Exhaustive reading is rare, and people are busy.
The beginning is the most important.

The first two paragraphs must state the most important information. There’s some hope that users will actually read all of this material, though they’ll probably read more of the first paragraph than the second.

Subheads and bullets are vital.

Start subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words that users will notice when scanning down the left side of your content in the final stem of their F-behavior. They’ll read the third word on a line much less often than the first two words.

If you can use this information to create a web page that delivers more information more quickly, it follows that you can use the same principles to design a calendar page that does the same thing.

The F-Pattern Put to Practical Use

The result of this work is a set of calendar pages that incorporates the “F-pattern” in its design. Set up as a two-page system, the vertical left-hand column of each page in your DIY Planner is set aside for the most important items that you need to look at.

The strategy behind this design is to incorporate the natural eye-movements in the “F-pattern” found in the eye-tracking study:

* The “Big Rocks” are listed first, on the left-hand edge of the page. This is where your eyes spend the most time, and this is where you look first while planning and executing.

* Your ‘Most Important Tasks’ get listed at the top of the column for each day.

* Appointments for the day go across the top of both pages. This is the second place your eyes will scan, giving you an “automatic” quick-review of what is coming up, and what has been accomplished.

* The middle of the left-hand page leads the eye to an area for focusing on open @Project contexts. This acts as a guide for our eyes, again to be able to review which Next Actions are outstanding. There is room in each box for the Context.

* The small calendar in the very bottom left is dated with the days of the week, in a Monday through Sunday format.

* The middle of the right-hand page contains a prompt for you to enter your Weekly Review notes.

If you found this article useful, consider supporting my efforts here by purchasing the calendar I developed. It is not a free calendar download, but what good are some of the free calendars you can print when they don’t save you any time or improve your productivity?

Click on the image to the left in order to visit the store and see the GTD Printable Calendar, a DIY Planner set of 2-page-per-week calendar pages which you can download. The most current edition is available now. If you are interested in having me design a customized calendar for you, please let me know.

If you would like to get involved join our Affiliate Program, or send an e-mail with your thoughts or suggestions to stephen [at] stephenpsmith [dot] com.

You can purchase this calendar in a PDF download here: (USD $9.00)

Thank you so much for supporting Productivity in Context!

The Innovation Tools newsletter had some really good articles this week, and I thought I would share a couple of them with you.

How Can We Create a Climate that Empowers People?
By Paul Sloane

If you speak to people about what is impeding innovation in their organizations you often encounter a paradox. Senior managers feel frustrated that their people are complacent; they are not showing initiative or enterprise. People lower down the organization feel upset that they are
micromanaged, that they are not empowered to try out their own ideas and that their managers stop them from challenging the established way of doing things. Both groups blame the other. Who is really at fault here? It is often true that middle managers block new proposals. But the real problem lies with the leaders. It is easy for them to make visionary statements that include all the right words about how important innovation, change, enterprise and risk are. But unless they back up the words with actions they will be seen as paying lip service to innovation and not having the will to make it happen.

How can leaders become more receptive, more open to challenging ideas?

And:

Creativity: “Not Required”

November 23, 2009 by Daniel Rose 

I was talking to a large Canadian company about their possible need for facilitation consulting services. The person I was talking to is in HR and has “collaboration” in her portfolio. She suggested that her company would most likely not be in need of my services because the corporate frame of mind was one of “retrenching” and therefore no innovation or creativity would be required.

In my view this is a very narrow and myopic view of how collaboration, visualization and creativity (CVC) can be utilized in companies. CVC does not have to be about brand new product ideas, 10 year plans, hockey stick growth or “out of the box thinking”. A well designed, facilitated workshop with CVC can allow creative thinking to be applied to extremely tactical, operational details.

Please share your thoughts.