Fact. Your business either has wind in it’s sails or it is dead in the water.

The most important part of any business is the idea behind that business. If you a business owner you have the scary job of wearing a lot of hats at the same time to make sure your idea is profitable. But let us ask you, is your idea cohesive? Does your business model work? Are you making more money this year than last year?

[dropcap style="dropcap3" color="black"]C[/dropcap]ohesive comes from the root word “Cohere” which means “to hold together as a mass of parts that stick.” We are in business to give you a unified presence that impresses your existing clients and converts your potential clients to new business. Our mission is simple: to make ideas that stick.

For us at Cohesive, we believe that things like your website and facebook page are tools. If you don’t mind us asking, are they working for you? Why have a website? Why pay money for a billboard? Why pay money for an ad in a magazine? Those are great questions with not so simple answers. They say that 80% of all marketing dollars are wasted every year. And it’s very possible that you are wasting your dollars too.

Ben Pettit and Jeff Gilden with Cohesive Ideas can help you get on the right path. We will help you answer the hard questions about your marketing and create a plan to get you on track. They are a small firm with a big presence in the upstate of SC and beyond. With customers as far west as Arizona and as far north as Pennsylvania, we can help any business big and small.

We offer a free in person consultation and marketing review for any business who calls us. No strings attached. No payment needed. If you or your business is physically located outside of the Greenville and Spartanburg area we gladly meet via conference call or video conference call.

Our goal?

1. For your business ideas to be cohesive.
2. To build a lasting working relationship with you and your company.
3. Your ROI to be the highest it’s ever been.

+1 (855) 692-6437 Toll Free in the USA
ben@cohesiveideas.com OR ext: 700
jeff@cohesiveideas.com OR ext: 701

One integral part of our day to day business is proposal writing. We searched forever trying to find a service that would cut our time down.

Enter Bidsketch.  The perfect online proposal software that will cut your time in half.

If you are looking for a proposal software that will cut your time in half and allow you organize your proposal process, then you need to give Bidsketch a try.  You won’t be disappointed.

Thanks to the creator Ruben for making such a great product.

You may be thinking “I don’t need a Facebook page.  It’s just another thing that I am going to have to manage.”  Your customers are on Facebook so why shouldn’t you be?  Just as Ben posted about the other day, Failing To Plan is Planning To Fail.

Facebook allows you to take your brand online and connect with a network of your customers instantly.  Most of your customers check their Facebook everyday.  Looking at their new feed is an essential part of their morning coffee or their lunch break.  Having a Facebook page allows you to have your message delivered into their Facebook news feed.

This can be powerful when you are wanting to distribute a special or let people know that you are closing for a Holiday so they aren’t left standing out in the cold.

A Facebook page is also good for simply having a presence on the largest social network.  Even if you weren’t active on Facebook with posts and pictures, people can still check-in to your location.  This allows all of their friends to see that they checked-in to your location when they stop by.  This “check-in” is automatically sent out to all of their friends news feed.  If they have 500 friends, then you have 500 potential new customers just from the click of your customers button.  It will say something like “Jeff just checked in to Cohesive Ideas”.  My friends will see that and four of them might say “Let’s go hang out with Jeff at Cohesive Ideas.”  And instantly you have not one but 5 customers there in your shop.

If you have a WordPress website, you can have your blog feed (or status updates) automatically post to your Facebook page.  This will eliminate the need for you to login to Facebook and also scale down the management aspect of social media.  There are plenty of WordPress Plugins such as “Status Updater” that will do the trick.  You can simply browse for these with a quick Google Search with the keyword phrase “wordpress post facebook plugin” and you will find plenty of options in your Google search.

Your customers are also active on Facebook talking about their favorite brands and sharing with their friends with unbiased information and free testimonials and endorsements for your business.  Facebook enables your customers to spread the word for you and reach people on a local or global scale practically overnight.

Social media has become some businesses “tool of choice” for connecting with clients.  As long as you can get people to “Like” you that is.

It’s one of the greatest tools of these days.  Here are 5 ways that you can harness the power of your Apple iPad in your business:

1. Present your business presentations.  All you need is a Pico Projector or some other small form factor projector to project slides out of the Keynote Application.
2. Sign all important documents.  Using the iPad to sign documents not only saves paper but time.  Using apps such as PDF Expert allows you to place your signature on the application and then email it to your recipient.
3. Take all of your documents with you with DropBox.  DropBox allows you to take all of your documents with you to pull up anywhere on the iPad.  You can even upload pictures and other documents to DropBox from supported applications.
4. Use it as a portfolio.  The iPad has a beautiful screen for showing off your work.  Simply upload photos, videos or screenshots of work to the iPad for quick access during a meeting.
5. Use it as a portable conference phone.  You can utilize Skype or another application to make calls from your iPad using the built in microphone and speaker.

There are tons of ways that you can utilize the iPad for your business but these are 5 truly powerful ways that you can harness the power of the industry-leading tablet.

Here are a 3 quick tips on how you can become a better planner.

1. Do a SWOT Analysis. Figure out where your strengths are and where your weakness may lie. It might surprise you. Give an employee, team member or staff member authority over those areas of weakness. The keyword is “authority”. Most people only give “responsibility”. When someone is responsible they report back to you and you micromanage them. This never works out and will leave you just as stressed. Authority allows them to take ownership of the task given. After you give the authority you then mentally separate yourself from it and not think of it again.
2. Set some reachable short term goals. How many sales do you want to make this week? How many customers do you want to call? How many events will you attend this month? Set a goal and reach it. Give yourself a reward for doing well. Bet a fellow staffer something nominal (a $25 gift card to a local restaurant) for who wins the goal first. These small goals can help you reach an other wise unattainable large goal.
3. Lastly, see the big picture and have big vision. Dream big but think about the details it will take to get there. Most people get stumbled on vision because it’s such an overwhelming thing to have. If your vision is big, so might be your confusion on how to get there. The most important part of vision is having it one day, one week, one month at a time. One day is all you should be handling at a time. Plan times on other days and weeks to handle any task that can wait.

Top Ten List:

10. Start a blog, get those thoughts out of your head and start letting people know about them. This will establish you as the expert in your field.

9. Tweet about something. Start getting to know the influencers in your field by re-tweeting their tweets you find enlightening. Do it enough and they might even mention you and increase your followers.

8. Go work at a coffee shop today. You never know who you might meet while your there.

7. Turn your cell phone around and video yourself! Talk about why you are passionate about your business and post it on YouTube.

6. Update your facebook page with your thoughts. A poorly updated facebook page is a dead facebook page. You might as well have not started it.

5. Call your existing customers and see if you can do anything to help them run their business or lives better through your services.

4. Take the day off. As Jeff Gilden told you, sometimes the best productivity is a vacation. Burned out employees are never as passionate as rested ones.

3. Take 30 minutes today with out technology. Technology is great but so often it just distracts us from having productive free thoughts.

2. Have your IT guy block facebook from your company network. As Phil Yanov taught me at a goal setting workshop, “Facebook is a service to be featured on, talked about on, but not on.”

1. Pick up up the phone and call someone!

We can get burnt out from work, relationships, and every day life.  We get so overwhelmed and put so much on our plates that we cannot handle it all.  That’s where the vacation comes in.  It gives you a break.  A chance to recharge and clear your mind (to be filled up again).

Once you come back from a vacation, you will be recharged with energy and ready to seize the day.

You can find great travel deals on sites such as expedia or orbits.  If you have kids, I suggest taking a Disney Cruise.  There are all kinds of entertainment for the kids and family.  You can even drop your baby off and go to the spa.

Bottom line:  Take a vacation.  It will give you more energy and make you more productive than staring at a computer screen and not knowing what to do next.

You can literally customize each section and create your own templates for later use.  This will significantly cut down on proposal time so you can be freed up to get more clients and make more money!

When you become a BidSketch customer you’ll notice that BidSketch focuses on three things:

• Customer service — we work hard to keep you happy.
• Usability — streamlined to save you hours on each proposal.
• Education — we share specific tactics to help you win more business.

BidSketch focus’ on this because they know that it takes more than software to help you become more successful.

Here are some screenshots and examples of the power of their software!  (Click on each thumbnail to view it larger)

WYSIWYG Editor For Sections

Custom Variables For Creating Dynamically Populated Fields

Create Templates For Use With Your Everyday Clients

Create Sections For Use In Every Template Or Proposal.  Plugin and Create!

Add Your Fees As Templates For Easy Pricing Plugins

To checkout everything and even get a 14 Day Free Trial, visit BidSketch to setup a free trial today.

You’ve got nothing to lose and time to gain!

With business, it works the same way. You offer a free prize to your customers and they will care less about the quality/price of the product and more about the prize. More than likely they will just care about the “free prize” being offered.

What free prize can you offer?

• Do they see that you have taken time to carefully craft your website in a way that makes it easy for them to find what they are looking for?
• Do they see your logo to be polished and up to date like the services they are going to receive?

The image of your company directly reflects on the products and services that you offer.  If you don’t have a polished website and logo to match the quality of your products and services, you may be missing out on some clients that could help your business thrive.  If you neglect to take care of this image for the long haul, clients could lose respect for your business and stop bying.

Is your image important for 2012?  You can bet your business on it.

[button size="medium" align="left" link="http://www.cohesiveideas.com/get-a-quote" linkTarget="_self" color="blue"]Click Here To Get A Quote On Updating Your Image[/button]