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Saturday, February 03, 2007

Some leads

I recommend you subscribe to consultant Michael Stone's Markup and Profit newsletter. The title is self-explanatory. Stone believes contractors often undersell their services; and in fialing to plan their jobs and businesses, waste time on 'free estimates' for people who will not buy (or are just low-ball prospects), and fail to hire and work with the best possible employees and suppliers. His focus is in the residential and direct-to-public rather than business-to-business sectors, but his advice still is as valid as ever. Stone publishes a truly useful newsletter even if you don't follow directly on its marketing intent of getting you to listen to him speak or become one of his consulting clients.

On the Internet side of the picture, I am enoying the mybloglog.com free resource. This tool allows you to gather rather deep statistics about traffic to your blog and know where people are heading when they click off site. It also has potentially useful community/connection and cross referal resources. Like many web applications, the basic system is free -- you can choose to sign on for more advanced capacities if you need them, and your budget allows.

This weekend, we are putting our finishing touches on a proposal for an Ontario-based construction association. Preparing proposals of course takes time and effort, but we figured we would save some time and create greater value by building large segments of the mock-up document into our real, published product (of course receiving the association's approval in advance for any content to be published.

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