***Promote Your Small Business as a Big Business

I smiled at him and said, “That’s funny, because I decided to hire you the moment you bought your plane ticket to Los Angeles.” No one had ever taken a risk like that on me, so I was very impressed. Then I looked him right in the eye and said, “Great, that makes two of us now…” and his jaw dropped into his plate. He couldn’t believe that I was running this huge, international company all by myself. The truth was that, at that time, my company wasn’t a huge international company. In fact, the previous year, the entire revenue of the company was only about $130,000 and the profit was a lot (lot, lot) less. But I had already begun to figure a few things out about being a small business owner. The main thing was that when everyone else was paying fees to become a “Certified Small Business,” I was beginning to create the impression in the marketplace that my company was a BIG business. Like most entrepreneurs, I made a bunch of mistakes in the beginning, but every time that I made one of these mistakes, I learned something. Once I learned some of these secrets, I began to pass them along to other business owners so they didn’t have to make the same mistakes. Folks say that “Experience is the best teacher,” but that is really only about half right. In fact, “Someone ELSE’S experience is the best teacher,” because they have already made those mistakes. Learn from them, and you get to a higher level of success in a much faster time frame.