In modern day business customers are the top most priority. If they are happy in dealing with you, your business will improve, you will earn more profit and your company grows. But how can you analyze how good is your customer service?

• Customer surveys are one popular way of analyzing that, but it will not produce deep information and also personal preferences are often rolled out.
• One other recommended way is to test your competitors by being a customer to them. This helps you in finding out weak points in your customer service and strong points in competitors’ service. This is a very good strategy for testing internet and telephone based customer service.
• Random sampling is one another way. Randomly ask your customers about what is their opinion about your customer service, what things they see to be improved, etc.
• Getting regular and constant feedback from sales and marketing people (of both your company and others) is a cheap but surly working strategy. Prepare some benchmarks and easily measurable indicators, and then let it work continuously.
• Tracking industry standards and reports are one other useful way. It let you to analyze your existing strategy and to know and test new customer service strategies.

As they say ‘you need money to make money’. But the problem is that you have only a small budget on your hand but there are many more requirements. Here are some tips for starting a business with a small budget.

• Maximize your budget by getting money from all possible ways; including your savings, loans, and from friends and partners. But you much keep your total risk to an affordable level.
• Prioritize your startup requirements into ‘most needed’ (like raw-materials, employees, business place, etc), ‘needed’ (like special systems, marketing costs, etc), ‘moderately needed’ (like supporting systems, cash backup, extreme marketing and selling costs, etc), ‘less needed’ (like decorations, personal interests, etc).
• Analyze cost needed to each above prioritized products. Look for cheap but quality products and look for special plans and schemes.
• Negotiate with providers for discounts, if possible make some offer to them – teach them how they can benefit by joining hands with you. You can also find many second hand products at cheaper rates.
• Buy/arrange all most needed items first, then needed ones, and so on, as long as you have money in hand.

I bought a used car a few weeks ago and I’m facing a big problem. Although not very often, my steering box isn’t responding as it should. We all know that if you have a good power steering box, your car will also be able to perform better on the road, especially on heavy traffic on in the highway, where fast reaction is required.

If your power steering is going in and out, be sure to check it or have it check for leaks and other problems. My mechanic told me that, as I was completely oblivious to that. We need to make sure our power steering rack, steering box and pump are of highest quality because these are arguably the most important parts of our cars. Since I just got some extra money, I decided to hunt down a good steering rack. After moving around from one place to the other, a fellow developer told that http://www.powersteeringpros.com had exactly what I was going after. The site has all the power steering parts you need, will full warranty and free shipping. I guess it’s time to put that money at work, wouldn’t you agree?

Success in any endeavour depends on a simple truth: Learning does not always require thinking.

Actually, thinking things too much often hinders learning. Hinders learning? That goes against most of what we know, doesn’t it? As children, we were often reproached when we made mistakes: “You just weren’t thinking! Don’t you ever think about what you’re doing?”

Then there’s the most successful personal development book of all time telling us to do what? Photo courtesy of Lindsey Spirit That’s right, “Think and Grow Rich”. True it is a fantastic book and a must read for success minded people. However, many of us get so tangled in thoughts that we can’t get out of our “heads” and take the action required for success.

Socrates, one of the greatest “thinkers” of all time, said, “Action equals knowledge.” Action, not thinking, is how we achieve results. Take playing the piano for instance. We could think about playing the piano but we will never become better until we start pecking away at the keys. If you were to ask an accomplished pianist to think about what they are playing in the middle of a rapturous concert, the music would probably fall apart into a series of painfully disconnected notes.

The same is true with typing. Ask a person who flawlessly types over 70 words a minute to think about the key strokes, and you could probably watch the mistakes pile up. Thinking hinders execution. Thinking can hinder success. The fact of the matter is we can intellectualise all we want, but until we take action, we will never accomplish anything.

There is a mantra in the martial arts that says “Ready, Fire, Aim”. Simply put, this means take action and correct that action as you go. It is quite probable that many businesses never get out of the starting gate because of over-thinking and over analysing. Most people want all their ducks to be lined up in a row before they begin. This will never happen.

The time will never be perfect. The key is to get started and then “keep on keeping on.” In the martial arts, students practice moves over and over and over again. They train their bodies to transcend thought and take action in the moment.

Imagine a trained martial artist being attacked on the street thinking, “Hmm, okay I’m being attacked. Should I turn my body this way or should it be the other way? Okay, now I have to trap the assailant’s arms, tighten my fists, pull back, and strike.”

Of course, this is not what happens in the martial arts. The key teaching in the martial arts is to ACT. NOW! …In spite of the mind’s tenancy to analyse the situation.

The worst kind of thinking is fear of failure. The “What if” disease. What if I lose all my money? What if, what if, what if?

Fear is paralysing. It stops the movement necessary for success. Fear weakens our decisions, cripples our creativity, and ultimately stagnates our successes. Conversely, movement overcomes fear. When struck by fear, move. Do something!

So, don’t wait to explore your entrepreneurial spirit; take action now. When those pesky thoughts creep up, and they will, scare them away with the mantra, “Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think, don’t think…” and watch your dreams and goals cascade towards you.

What is the bottom line? “Don’t think and grow rich.”

Continuing with my series of debt consolidation and debt relief tips, this time, I bring you a new site. It’s called NetDebt and it’s a very nice resource for those having debt problems and for those seeking some insight on how to best pay off debt and with minimum cost.

The website contains videos in almost all its pages, explaining in plain English how to best achieve debt settlement and how to save the most money while breaking free from debt in the shortest time possible. One of the parts I liked the most is the FAQ Debt Relief where you can find videos explaining the most common questions about debt and debt relief, from “why you should avoid bankruptcy” to “What does debt settlement mean?” and many other useful answers, so be sure to give this a look.

Like you, I don’t like to read news articles that clearly display the reporter did not let something as inconvenient as facts get in the way of their trend story. For example, yesterday The New York Times ran a trend story with the alarming headline, “Worried Banks Sharply Reduce Business Loans.” Wow, that’s a scary headline. I know it scared me.

As editor of MyBusiness magazine, I was scared that we’d totally missed a major story–banks are sharply reducing business loans and we missed it? But wait, I reassured myself, we have access to continuous research from NFIB measuring small business owners’ experiences in trying to access capital and our latest numbers show that, while owners are clearly not optimistic about the economy, they are not yet indicating the credit crunch being reported in The Times.

Here’s a sampling of The New York Times’ lede:

“Banks struggling to recover from multibillion-dollar losses on real estate are curtailing loans to American businesses, depriving even healthy companies of money for expansion and hiring….The scarcity of credit has intensified the strains on the economy by withholding capital from many companies, just as joblessness grows and consumers pull back from spending in the face of high gas prices, plummeting home values and mounting debt.”

The story focuses on an anecdote involving Wachovia Bank turning down a business loan for the purchase of a robot–implying that a rigid business loan market was the cause and that this is part of a greater trend. I was about to start tracking down why the research we track was so out-of-sync with the Times story, when I read this nugget in the story:

“Still, Wachovia’s commercial and industrial loans grew by 13 percent in June compared with the prior year…”

In other words, The New York Times article contains facts that clearly refute the story’s headline and lede–but they didn’t let that get in the way of a good trend story.

For the record, small business owners are not very optimistic these days, but access to capital is not yet showing up as a major concern in the longest-running continuous survey of small business owner optimism, NFIB’s Small Business Economic Trends survey. The current monthly survey reveals the following:

“The net percent of owners reporting loans harder to get in recent months fell one point to a net 7 percent (8 percent said “harder,” 1 percent said “easier”). The average reading since September’s surprise Fed rate hike is 7 percent. Only 2 percent of the owners cited the cost and availability of credit as their No. 1 business problem (down 1 point), far from the record 37 percent reached in 1982. Thirty-five percent reported all their borrowing needs met (up one point) compared to 5 percent who reported problems obtaining desired financing (down two points), a three-point improvement in the net percent reporting all needs met. The remainder did not want to borrow.

So, to sum things up, The New York Times today reported that “worried banks are sharply reducing business loans,” while the most current survey of small business owners reports that, compared to previous recessionary times, concern about access to capital is actually falling. Of course, this could change next month–and it likely will, if people start believing what they read in headlines of The Times.