“The biggest mistake many businesses make is to believe that price alone drives sales.” — Elizabeth Wasserman, Inc.com.

I read Ms. Wasserman’s article titled “How to Price Your Products” this morning, and if you know anything about me by now, you know it inflamed my passions.  She very accurately describes the processes required for pricing products accurately and consistently.  I think we all know a lot of what she says to be true; however, in the sign industry, our products just don’t fit the cookie cutter model of pricing – which means every time we price a job, it’s a real challenge to pull all the variables together and get our prices out the door on time.

Why are you in business?

I mentioned a couple of months ago that I was involved in a discussion on an online forum where one of the posters essentially said that he felt he was ripping his customers off if he made a great profit on his work.  This continues to mystify me because the whole reason we are in business is to make money.  Sure, we love our work, the interactions with customers (well – most of ‘em ), and the time we spend actually creating graphic arts for sale.  At the end of the day, though, our whole reason for being in business is to take home a profit that allows us to save for retirement, put the kids through college, take vacations, and ultimately secure our lives.  Otherwise we’re in business for all the wrong reasons.

Relationships are built many ways.  Don’t build yours on price.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, your price should never be the foundation of your relationship with your customer. You see, relationships are built on a foundation.  As long as that foundation – the key element that makes up the core of the relationship – remains stable, your relationship will remain solid.

This means that if you build a relationship based on delivery – getting signs done quickly and delivered on time, every time – or build a relationship based on outstanding quality – knock ‘em dead gorgeous sign work every single time – your customer will pay a premium for those services, and won’t leave you unless that changes.  On the other hand, if the relationship is based on your cheap prices, you will lose the customer when you raise them unless you do some serious salesmanship.

It never pays to be afraid of your customer’s reaction to price. If your customer thinks your price is too high, it just means you haven’t done as good a job as you should have selling them on it.  People  want to feel like they are getting value for their money – and if you provide the best price/value ratio to them emotionally, you’ll sell them higher priced work every single time.

Don’t leave money on the table.

Sign pricing is a challenge. Every time we have to quote a job, we have to think through the work carefully and try to price accurately.  I remember long before I wrote EstiMate, I’d stare up at my “calculator on the ceiling” and think along the lines of, “okay.. 4×8.. that’ll cost about $90 for the board.. should take me about an hour and a quarter to cut and apply the vinyl… painting the board will take 15 minutes… so about $125 in materials and 1 1/2 hours of work… $200.”

Then I’d remember I needed to fill the edges of the MDO and prime the sucker.  After I’d already quoted the customer the price.

Sound familiar?

The heart of solid, consistent pricing is knowing your costs and having everything together so that you can get a proper price to the customer quickly without having to worry about things like me forgetting the priming of the board.  Once you really understand your costs, you won’t be afraid to charge what you have to. I’ll say that again.  Once you really understand your costs, you won’t be afraid to charge what you have to, because you will realize that in order to make money you just can’t underprice and make it up on volume!

Try an experiment and raise your prices.

Next time you have to quote a job for a new customer, spend some time explaining all the benefits of the sign you are selling them.  Talk about successes you’ve had with similar sign jobs.  Show the customer some of the best pictures of your work.  Then, quote a higher price by 20% than you normally would have and in the same breath promise the sign quickly and back it with a warranty.

I bet you’ll have the deposit in hand within an hour, because customers like being treated that way.  They can say to their friend / business partner / significant other, “I’m getting a great sign for  my business, and that guy’s gonna do an awesome job on it.  He even says so-and-so’s business tripled after they put in a new sign he made!”

That’s the power of salesmanship.  It’s really not all about price.

You may or may not know that EstiMate was born out of my own frustration when I was running my basement sign shop from 1993-1999. I had grown up in the sign industry, in my mother’s own basement sign shop, and throughout the late 70s and all of the 80s I watched her struggle to price her work. The phone would ring, she would answer and listen to the customer’s description of the sign they wanted made, and then she would say: “just a moment, let me go figure that.”

She would drum her fingers on the desk for a while, all the while staring at her “calculator on the ceiling,” and then she would get back on the phone and say, “that’ll be $500.”

Sound familiar?

Fast forward to 1993. I just left my job at the newspaper designing advertising, and got my hands on my mom’s old Gerber IVB. I had two fonts: Helvetica and Brush Script. I read everything I could get my hands on about marketing, and went around town putting flyers on car windows advertising magnetic signs for $49.95 per pair. Orders started coming in and all of a sudden I had cash in hand and my business was born.

Little did I know, I was losing money on every pair that I sold.

For a couple of years, I continued on selling my work based on what my mom would charge, or by asking around on the Letterville BullBoard (the primary online forum at the time for signmakers) to see what other people were charging for similar work. After a couple of years, even though I had built a customer base and had steady work, it seemed like I was just barely keeping my head above water.

Then I got lucky and got my hands on a stack of old SignCraft magazines.  In the May/June 1989 issue they published an article called “An Accurate Hourly Rate Is The Basis For Effective Pricing,” written by Jeff Cahill.  I can still remember exactly where I was when I read that article, and how I sat up straight and realized that I had just found the answer to my problems.

I followed his instructions to the letter, and then set about reworking my entire business around the philosophy of profitability over quick cash. The result? Within a year, I had a viable business running and was not just making ends meet, but was actually able to take a family vacation! I knew I had turned a very important corner.

EstiMate Was Born

Since I was 12 years old, one of my passions had always been programming. It was my favorite thing to do when I would procrastinate.

So it occurred to me, why not write a software tool that would allow me to price my work quickly and get quotes out the door that I knew would make the amount of money they needed to, and automate that whole side of my business? I had just read Michael Gerber’s book The E-Myth and was inspired to automate things.  As a result, I set about writing EstiMate, and over the course of three years got it running in my shop. I started talking on the Letterville website about my new program, and found out that a lot of people in the sign industry needed the same thing.

As a result, in December 1998 I started a website and began offering pre-orders to my Letterville friends for an April 1999 release. Amazingly, in those four months, I received 16 pre-orders for software sight unseen. On April 15, I shipped the 16 pre-orders and EstiMate was born.

The Tradeshow Circuit, Or: Making It Fly

Within two years I closed my sign shop in favor of selling EstiMate as my primary line of work. I probably held onto the shop about six months longer than I needed to, because I was so afraid of losing my “back up plan.” To this day, I very much miss making signs, and maybe someday it is something I will do again. For now, however, my focus remains on leveling the playing field for the sign industry and continuing to bring this fantastic product to market.

It’s been a long haul. We went to over 50 tradeshows over the course of the next seven years until the Internet usurped tradeshows as the place to learn about new products and information. We sold EstiMate hand over fist and I got to meet thousands of amazing people who were all excited about his fantastic industry.

To The Future… And Beyond!

I’d just like to say thank you to the thousands of people I’ve met so far that have been so supportive of this project both with their words and their dollars. We couldn’t have gotten here without you!

I’d also like to say thank you to the incredible team members that I have been able to work with over the years: Nancy Peterson, EstiMate’s current vice president and all around right hand woman; Phillip Komar, our technical support magician; Jacqui Ackerman, who for many years ran the customer service desk; Johnathon Bakan, who did technical support for many years and had the uncanny ability to make you feel as if he’d handed you a nice hot cup of tea when you called for support; Scott Cutcher, who helped me widen my mind to new marketing possibilities; my mother Myra, of course, who came with us to show after show after show; and many others who have graced the EstiMate office.

Finally, to my son Ivan, who EstiMate helped raise and who is now pursuing an education as an illustrator and graphic designer – my hat is off to you!

Who knows what the future holds? We have a lot of very exciting ideas for expanding EstiMate and our product line, and look forward to bringing you new products such as our DiamondMine™ business analysis tool among others.

Thanks for reading, and as always, Happy Pricing!

“The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.”’

How’s that for refreshing?  A few evenings ago while I was cruising around the interwebs, I found this video interview with Jessica Hische on humblepied.com.  Jessica is a type designer and hand-letterer working in Brooklyn, NY.  One of the things I absolutely love is hand lettering and the state of mind I get in when I’m doing it.  Painting and graphic design have always overlapped for me — probably why I ended up so deeply embedded in the sign industry — and it’s just a total breath of fresh air to find Jessica’s work.

Back to the comment above, however, I think she is making a very important point for all of us.  Every day when we are working, we are doing bread and butter type work that often robs us of our creative spirit.  I think Jessica is absolutely correct that the things we do to “play” — those things that inspire us, bring us happiness and joy, and that we can completely get lost in — are the things we should be focusing on when we ask ourselves, “what am I here to do?”  I know that for me it’s some pretty odd stuff – discovering haml the other day, for example, had me re-doing large sections of the website and really enjoying myself.

In addition to using this as a tool to find what you really should be spending your time on, it’s a great way to relax.  There’s nothing that can compare to the good feelings that come from doing what we love, and when we are stressed, there’s a reason we return to the tasks that make us happiest.

Right now my son Ivan, who is a senior in high school at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, is applying to art schools around the country to become an illustrator.  He has always been into comic design, and for awhile last term was so overrun with other projects that he couldn’t spend time doing what he loved.  Fortunately this term he is able to do some of that again, and his stress levels have dropped tremendously — a perfect illustration of what Jessica is talking about.

So, thanks Jessica for the wonderful quote, and the fabulous lettering design! You’re a real inspiration to me and I’m sure you will be to others as well.

P.S. Check out Jessica’s Buttermilk Font — it could be great for boutique signs.

Setting The Scene

I live in a really beautiful part of the country — near Asheville, North Carolina — on a relatively rural road with gorgeous views of the backside of the mountains in Bent Creek that I can see from my bedroom window every morning. The other day, I was heading out to the grocery store when I passed a coroplast sign in the front yard of a small home.

The Sign Said: “$20 Signs”

Pretty ironic that sign would be in the yard of a house just a quarter-mile from the home of the guy who wrote EstiMate! Needless to say, I was stunned.

It’s really tempting to stop and talk to them about profitability, but I fear it would fall on deaf ears. I’ve found over the years that people really think cash in hand is the same as profits. I suspect this guy got hold of a vinyl plotter, a few rolls of vinyl, some coroplast blanks, some stakes, and set himself up to make some money. Granted, his cost on those signs is probably in the neighborhood of $8 apiece — or, he might think it’s $3 if he wants to believe some of the people out there shouting “get into the sign business now — it’s a gold mine!”  But, his $12 profit won’t get him very far except as funny money on the side.

It amazes me that even in our industry, a solid industry of hard workers, intelligent people, with a long track record of advertising businesses around the country and making them more profitable, we have hawkers setting people like this up with false expectations and high hopes. There is a lot of money to be made in this business, but it’s not by undercutting and devaluing the industry as a whole. We have to stand up for ourselves, and make a fair profit on our work, or there’s no point in us being in business at all.

If I sound like I’m on a soapbox, I am. This one issue is the one I’m most passionate about and long after I’m gone, I hope the impact I have on the sign industry is to help raise the floor for everybody and bring us all to a for-profit mentality. There is no reason in the world that we shouldn’t be able to sell coroplast signs for $50 and charge for the stake as well.

Why are we in this business anyway?

1. We love it! We eat sleep and breathe signs, we love beauty in advertising, and we’re passionate about this.
2. We want to be our own boss.
3. We want to make better money than if we had a “J.O.B.” — “Just Over Broke.”

Number 3 is where the profitability piece comes in. Neglecting profitability, and undercharging for work, hurts us, hurts the industry, and hurts our futures. Being in business for ourselves gives us the opportunity to retire early, and were throwing it away when we undercharge. Every time we undersell our work, we are incrementally giving away our retirement, our health care, our vacations, and our futures.

As promised, here’s the math

OK, so you’re selling a 4′ x 8′ sign with basic vinyl lettering on it for about $250. You should be making about 100 bucks on this sign, if you’re pricing your work correctly. Now let’s play with the price.

If you cut your price down to $200, yes, you’ll be more likely to get the job. However, that customer is going to come back and expect the same sign for the same $200. If you raise your price, you’ll lose the customer — not because you are too expensive, but because you set their expectations too low the first time you sold them a sign. So now you’re stuck making half the profits you should be, which leads you to work the classic 10 to 14 hours a day in the sign business!

Think about it. By cutting your profits in half — remember, profits are really the only money you’re making — you now have to make twice as many signs to make the same money! You’ve doubled your workload for the security of getting that job.

Now let’s go the other way. If you raise your price to $350 you’ve done the opposite. You now have to make half as many signs (read: get half as many jobs) to make the same amount of money, freeing up gobs of time to chase down more profitable work and really bank some profits. So now, instead of being completely snowed under by work and unable to spend any time with friends and family, you’re spending your time chasing down valuable work and going home at five o’clock. There are thousands of sign makers out there doing this every day who will back me up.  Not getting every bid is a good thing.  Actually, here’s a rule of thumb: for every bid you win, you should lose one too.  If you get more than half the jobs you quote for new customers, you’re too cheap.  If you get less than half, improve your sales skills — your prices are good.

An EstiMate Success Story

My friend and longtime EstiMate user, Glenn Taylor, told me a story nine years ago — this was in 2001, so think about what signs were selling for then — about selling the 4′ x 8′ sign described above for $750. That is not a typo. It was a basic 4′ x 8′ vinyl sign, and he sold it for $750. What expectations did HE set in the customer’s mind? Using the math above, he made about $600 profit on that one job.

That’s the kind of money we should all be making on our work. I grew up in my mother’s sign shop, and I remember her selling signs in the 1980s for the same prices they are being sold for today. According to the measuring worth website $250 in 1985 dollars should be worth $500 at minimum today. Yet we are still selling 4′ x 8′ signs for $250.

It’s really time for a wake-up call and for us to start standing up and charging what our work is worth.

From now on, whenever you hear me use the word “profitability,” just insert this entire article instead of that word. This is what I’m really talking about.

Please Comment

I really welcome your thoughts on this and would love to have this evolve into a profitability discussion.  Please leave your thoughts below.

Now go out and make the rest of 2009 the most profitable year ever!

1. Drive around looking for signs in need of repair, and visit the owner with business card in hand and EstiMate on your laptop.
2. Right now, everybody is having sales. Take out a classified ad advertising banners to the local business community, as a “cross marketing” opportunity. When people call inquiring, explain that you are offering 5% off in exchange for having your name on the banner.
3. Get creative with direct mail. Take the type of work that makes you the very best profit, and direct mail small target groups offering your services. A great example would be holiday window splashes (there’s a new holiday every couple of months).
4. Put new graphics on your shop vehicle! Chances are, it’s been awhile since you’ve redone your graphics.  A fresh look will bring renewed attention and give you the opportunity to show off your shop.
5. Study the competition. Take a driving tour around your city and study what the other shops are doing (don’t drive that shop vehicle)!  Bring your digital camera, and a notebook, and you will probably come away with 3-5 excellent ideas for improving business.
6. Select a neighborhood that’s right for your kind of work. Perhaps a historic district, if you make gold signs, or an industrial area if you specialize in aluminum wall signs. Go door to door, meet the owner, and find out if they have any sign needs. As a matter of fact, this is how I established my new sign company when I first got into the business.
7. Network with your own vendors and contractors. If you have a plumber you use, call him and ask for referrals.
8. Wherever you go, leave your business card. Eat at a restaurant? Leave it on the table. Go to the grocery store? Drop one in the cart. You get the idea.
9. Study your local free newspaper and find out where small business meet and greets happen. Chances are there’s a networking event somewhere tonight.
10. Think about how to expand your services — perhaps when somebody buys magnetic signs, they would like some full color business cards go with them.
11. Network with your friendly competitors. Cross market that way. Between you and them, you should be able to provide full service to customers. Perhaps you make the signs, and they print the t-shirts, or vice versa.
12. Join your local Chamber of Commerce. Talk about networking opportunities! Extending yourself into your community this way can really get you noticed.
13. Do you have your customers’ e-mail addresses? If so, start writing business tips and e-mailing them to your customers. By and large, connecting with your customers this way will bring you more long-term benefit than only e-mailing them specials and advertisements.
14. Use “good, better, best” techniques to upsell your customers. When someone wants a quote, offer them three levels of service: a basic job, a fancier job, or an extremely fancy job. Make sure that the “fancier” and “extremely fancy” prices are fairly close to each other. This will help you take advantage of decoy marketing.
15. Contact local sports teams, and discuss how you might be their primary sign maker for the advertising banners and promotional material surrounding sporting events.
16. Join a club — rub elbows with people who need your services, in a low pressure and nonthreatening environment, and see who they call when they need something done. This, of course, assumes that you gave them your business card at the club meetings.
17. Offer nicer work for the basic price. Often, you’ll be able to improve a job with just a little extra effort. The most important thing to do is to follow the principle of never giving something away without telling them that you did, but take it to the extreme and offer it up front.
18. Make “warm calls” to your customers — ask how the work you’ve done for them in the past is working out, and if there’s any way you can help them right now. An hour spent this way will likely result in a job or two immediately.
19. Get some publicity! Make a sign for charity, or gather a group of kids and teach them how to make sign work. Make sure the press knows about it.
20. Publish a booklet about the advantages of fresh sign work.  Direct-mail businesses with faded signs offering to come touch up their existing signs or replace them with a new image. There’s a local restaurant here in Asheville that I thought was closed for at least the last two years, but it turns out that they are open and continuing to serve. The reason I thought they were closed is that their signs have faded to near invisibility.
21. Reposition your products! Recently I was in a “wedding store” and was shocked to see a brochure rack from a local sign shop. I wondered to myself, “what the signs have to do with weddings?” Then I realized, that the local shop that positioned itself for directional signs, banners, etc. to the local wedding community would likely garner all of that business through referrals.

Some years back I was speaking with my accountant about burnout and how grateful I was to do some monotonous work now and again because it didn’t have to engage my brain.  The equivalent when I was making signs was those nice long afternoons when the phone wasn’t ringing, but I had plenty of work, and I just had to assemble 10 banners or something while watching TV or listening to good music.  You know, “brain dead” work that kept me happy and busy but didn’t require too much real thought.

I said to my accountant, “I feel guilty because I feel like I should be doing more valuable work, but sometimes I just need downtime.”

And she replied, “well, what’s the highest and best use of your time?”

OK, Carol, I thought, that’s what I just said – I’m trying to make the highest and best use of my time, but I’m burned out! Didn’t you hear what I just said? Grrr, grrr…

… but then she said, “so sometimes maybe the highest and best use of your time is to take a break.”

Take a BREAK? Highest and best? What? Carol, you don’t understand, if I don’t work work work work work I’ll never get anywhere!  The sky will fall, the doors will close, the earth will fly off its axis.  How can I not work?

Then I realized the real wisdom of what she said.

If I didn’t give myself downtime, I wouldn’t have anything truly valuable to offer, and I’d just be spinning my wheels.  Kind of like when I make a conscious decision to go to bed and tackle a problem in the morning, because I know if I do it late at night it will take an hour, and if I do it in the morning it will take 10 minutes.

For me, it’s my “programming”

You see, I grew up surrounded by a full-on Protestant Work Ethic (AKA “Workaholic”) and embraced it wholeheartedly.  I believed that if I wasn’t working 12-14 hours a day, 7 days a week, I wasn’t really “working.”  I felt massively guilty about every minute spent in downtime, and still fight those tendencies to this day.

Over the years, what Carol said to me really sank in, and I have learned to take breaks sometimes.  Last weekend Jennifer and I spent the weekend gardening – building big garden beds in our yard – and it was a real triumph for me to spend the weekend *not* at my computer programming or working on EstiMate’s website.

I should take a minute here and give a shout out to Integritive for the new website – these guys are some of the best designers I’ve ever worked with and ended up giving us a site we can take to totally new levels.

But That’s Not Really What This Article Is About

What really got me started on this article was one I read this morning about opportunity cost when commenting on other blogs. Reading this made me think back to my conversation with Carol, and wonder, “what’s the opportunity cost of what a sign shop does every day?”

Opportunity cost is defined as “the value of the next best alternative foregone as the result of making a decision.”

In simpler terms, that means that any time you make a choice of how to spend your time / energy / money, you are paying the “opportunity cost” of spending your time / energy / money another way.

For example, if you spend time surfing the internet, watching TV or reading a novel instead of working, you are paying the cost of not getting the work done now.

What I learned from Carol is that there is another side to this – you are gaining the strength in your downtime to attack the work more effectively later.

You all have seen me mention Tim Ferriss a lot, and I’m a huge fan of his book The 4-Hour Workweek.  I think it’s very important to always do the 20% of work that really matters, and let the other 80% slide.  By focusing on the absolute key tasks you have to do on any given day, you free up time to spend on other pursuits.  That’s why you see me talk about the tradeoff of time vs. money so much, because I strongly believe that our job in this life is to make the most of it for ourselves and those around us.

The workaholic ethic really keeps us from being “all that we can be” — it actually takes us away from the world and keeps us in tunnel-vision mode.

So This Rambling Article Is Really A Poll

I’m curious, what activities do you do every day that you realize are a tradeoff for other activities?  How do you juggle time and manage burnout in your sign shop?

I look forward to your thoughts in the comments!

I’m Going To Be Your Jacob Marley Today

The other day I got into a long online discussion with some folks about prosperity and success in business.  During the conversation it became evident that a few of the participants thought that succeeding in business and earning more than they needed in order to “get by” was the equivalent of cheating the customer.

I was, as usual (you all know me by now , trying to point out how exciting it can be to make enough money to retire, to have what we want in life, to work the hours we choose to work, and as a result to have all the time to do what we want to and have the life we always dreamed of having.

What I didn’t count on was that my ideas would fall on deaf ears.  And I learned a lot in the process.

After the conversation I got on the phone with my friend (and V.P.) Nancy, and I said, “what amazed me today was that not only did some folks I was talking to have serious limiting beliefs going on, they not only didn’t see that they had them, but they wore them like a badge of honor.

Now that’s hard to see, much less overcome.

The Best Gift You Can Give Your Customers

There’s a lot of value — serious value — in “having your customer’s back.”  What many business people fail to understand is that unless they are prosperous, and stay in business, they are actually sabotaging their customer.  The biggest gift you can give to your customers is to stay in business and still be there for them down the line when they need you again.  Your prosperity is your community’s gain.

I’m going to say that one more time.

The biggest gift you can give to your customers is to stay in business and still be there for them down the line when they need you again.  Your prosperity is your community’s gain.

Remember Ebeneezer Scrooge?  In Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Mr. Scrooge was the very first literary example most of us had of someone with serious limiting beliefs.  Interestingly enough, you can see how both sides of the debate I was in evolved from the perspective of Scrooge.

The first side – that of not “cheating your customer” by charging “more than you need to,” is a straight descendent of the belief that to be a “Scrooge” is to hoard, overcharge, and not help your fellow man.  This has been hammered into us from all quarters, and it’s a hard lesson to overcome.

But there is a second side.

The second side came after Scrooge had been visited by the three ghosts of Christmas, and became free with his money, and started giving back to his community, and saved Tiny Tim from the clutches of death.

Here’s the important part: Scrooge could do all of that because he was a wealthy man.

The Cratchits got their Christmas goose.

Tiny Tim did not die.

Your prosperity is your community’s gain.

Flight Attendants Know This Secret Already

When you fly on a plane, and you are preparing for takeoff, there’s a little ritual you always go through: the pre-flight safety lecture.

Over and over again, those of us who fly have heard, “put on your own oxygen mask first, then help those around you.”

The same is true in business and life.  You must take care of yourself first and then take care of those around you, because once you’ve taken care of yourself you will be able to take care of those around you.

In my opinion, your own success and prosperity is the biggest gift you can give to your customers, your family, your community, and yourself.

What are your thoughts? Please leave your comments below.

Jennifer and I recently hung a cork board on the wall to start our very own dream board (a dream board is where you put up images, writing, drawings, etc of all the things you want to do or have, to look at every day – a pretty cool visualization tool).

Well.

After a day or so it was still empty and eventually she printed out all the specs of the car she wants and tacked it up on the board.

Damn.  She beat me to it.

So, we were sitting around and looking at it and she said “You need to hang something on there! I am so way ahead of you!”

I wanted to say, “yeah, about 100% ahead” … but then I thought about it and said “you are INFINITY ahead of me!”

The difference between 0 and 1 is not 100% – it’s infinite.  One exists, and the other doesn’t.  She had taken an action step, and I was still just thinking about what to put up on the board.

Are you getting me here?

Ideas are WORTHLESS.  Utterly, completely, bottomed-out worthless.  No matter how good they are.  Until you take action.

Yesterday my friend Jordan called me with a damn good idea for how to make an absolute killing off of video gamers.  I won’t say more than that, but it sounds genuinely workable to me and could make the man a millionaire.

Will Jordan take action? Only time will tell.  I don’t think he reads this blog, but if he does, let this be a shout out to him that he should do something.

How about you?

What ideas or inventions are you sitting on, thinking about how they “might maybe someday” happen?  I know I’ve had a few over the years that I’ve not pursued … makes me wonder what would have happened if I had.

Would I still be writing and selling sign pricing software? I like to think I would, I’m kind of partial to our industry.

If you have any good ideas or plans that you haven’t started yet, let this be your call to action.  Get off your duff and get moving.

Goethe said, “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.“

Randy Gage is a speaker and author I like a lot – and I suspect many of you would, too.  People have called him the “millionaire messiah” and he has a lot of good things to say about action, too.

Go read Randy.  Then figure out what you’ve been dragging your feet on, and get started!

I’ll be over here staring at my dream board.