The book, Catapult Your Business to New Heights: Sure-Fire Strategies to Increase Profit, is coming soon! We’re still working on tweaking the interior text and the back cover. The book should be released in first quarter 2009. In this blog, I give you some highlights.

But first, an endorsement of the book:

"Catapult Your Business to New Heights" is a brilliantly written book by a woman who can and should be given a high five for spreading valuable wisdom in a very engaging manner. Glory Borgeson, you've done a masterful job.

~Jay Conrad Levinson, the father of Guerrilla Marketing; author of the “Guerrilla Marketing" series of books

How cool is that?

For Starters
Why did I write this book? Most businesses in the U.S., and across the world, are small businesses (just by sheer count). Many people want to own a business. Many small businesses fold. Many people believe that in order to own a profitable, successful business, the entrepreneur will become stressed out, which will affect his or her life negatively. Surely that is true for many people who own businesses today. But I don’t believe it has to be that way. I believe you can catapult your business to a higher level of success, and do so without losing yourself in the process. This is why I wrote the book. Create a great business: Create a great life.

Develop Your Vision
During both great times and tough times, your vision for your business and your life will pull you through. That’s why it’s important to have a meaningful vision. (It’s hard to write about this topic without giving you the whole chapter, so I’ll stop there!)

Change Your Way of Doing Business
When you get right down to it, there are only certain types of business activities that give you a high yield of profit for your time. Every entrepreneur has several ways of doing business that result in tasks that do not provide a high return. We take you through various brainstorming activities to pull out of you the best, high-yielding activities for you and your business, and then we get you focused on how you can change your way of doing business so that, over a period of time, you get off your plate those activities that don’t produce much profit for you, either in the short-term or long-term.

Craft Your Business Structure & Systems
Just like a house needs a structure in order to stand through all types of seasons, and systems running through it to make it livable, so does your business need a solid structure and workable systems that can be counted on to (one way or another) create profit. Whether your business is quite small, filled with employees, recently started, or been around for a while, taking the time to work through your business’ structure and systems, and implementing new ideas, will take a lot of pressure off of you as the owner.

Create Superb Customer Service
Thinking of ways to create “Wow!” customer service is a great way to keep customers and to get them to send others to you for new business. How can your business get the “Wow!” response? We think through many aspects of the business where you and your employees have customer contact, do some comparisons with “Ow!” customer service and “Ho-hum” customer service (to make sure you don’t fall into those categories), and figure out ways that you can get more “Wow!” responses from your customers over time.

Delegate to Generate More Success
When should you hire more employees? When (and what) should you outsource to outside vendors? Are there situations when simply delegating tasks to people who are competent isn’t enough? There are so many tasks that can be delegated to vendors these days – things we didn’t even consider 10 or 20 years ago. Certain types of resources are more available to us today because of technology. And other types of services are available because someone saw a need. (For example, if you bring your dog to work and have the dog do his businessin a yard, you can pay someone to clean it up. There are pooper scooper businesses out there. Who knew?) I also include a story of how the Desperate Housewivescreator, Marc Cherry, delegated the writing task in the show’s second season to competent writers, but it didn’t go very well. While I was writing the book, I wrote about what I thought he needed to do in order to change that for the better. Almost telepathically (is he reading my notes?), he changed his direction the following season and delegated in a new way to ensure success.

Lead Great Teams
How many bosses have you had since your first job? Think of who they were. Divide them into three groups: Great boss, bad boss, or so-so boss. Who wants to be the bad boss or the so-so boss? A show of hands please? None? When you’re in the midst of leading your business, right in the thick of things, that is when you can forget those great leadership skills you’ve learned before. Leading great teams is a topic I enjoyed writing about where we explore what you can do (and how you can do it) in order to be a great leader who leads great teams. We break it down into “chewable” pieces so that you can figure out in which areas you need to focus, and then help you figure out how to achieve it.

Build Up Your Marketing Strategies and Sales Skills
We pull together many different marketing strategies that most small business owners have the option of focusing on, depending on the type of business, size, and budget. It’s important to take a graduated approach to marketing, to not go way outside your plan, and to always be marketing in some way, shape, or form. Also, we go through various types of sales strategies that several different types of small businesses can use.

Handle Your Finances With Finesse
Truth be told, I am a former accountant. I dig numbers. The phrase, "Show me the money” rings true for me. If someone wants to tell me that something is a great deal, I want them to show me why by using numbers. In this chapter, I show you how to show yourself the money that is in your business. We go over what certain aspects of your financial statements can tell you, including ratios that you can calculate yourself, and show you how to figure out, using your own financial data, where the business is going right and where it is going wrong. (You will not fall asleep reading this chapter!)

Design a Balanced Life
And then we get back to the entire reason why I wrote this book. Do you believe that if your business is very profitable that you should be stressed out and tired? Or do you believe that if you are living a relaxed life, then it is probably because your business isn’t doing very well? I believe you can have a great business and have a balanced life. It’s just going to take some work (and some time) to get there.

Catapult Your Business to New Heights: Sure-Fire Strategies to Increase Profit. Ready for release in first quarter 2009.