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It was 8 p.m. on a Friday night and I out with some friends. We were sitting around a table and chatting. At some point, it became a bragging contest where we were essentially trying to outdo each other. My friends and I went back and forth for a little while. Finally, I said, if there was a sweet deal on the table tonight, then I could have more than a million dollars in cash in this house by midnight. Suffice to say that I won our playful argument. Cash to a business is like oxygen to a human. You lose cash and you die. It has nothing to do with your potential, valuation, the value of an intellectual property or physical inventory.

If you are having a heart to heart conversation for 10 to 30 minutes with a prospect, what would you say to them?

The mayor of a small town once wrote to Benjamin Franklin asking for a donation so the town could buy a bell for its town square. Franklin sent money with a note suggesting they forego the bell in favor of buying books for the town library. It is at the library we might find an answer to why so few succeed and why most fail - at anything, at everything.

Help! -I can't Get Out 0f The Box I Put Myself In!"

The fast food industry got the idea for drive-in windows from banks. I guess there was a McDonald's executive sitting at the bank drive-through one day who thought, "I don't think we can fit the milkshakes in these tubes, but..." Netjets, the leader in fractional jet ownership, now owned by Warren Buffet, owes its birth to the vacation timeshare industry. The microwave in your kitchen was not originally intended to go there; its original manufacturer, Litton, believed no consumer would buy it and built them only for restaurants. When was the last time you heard of Litton? What does this tell you?

That successful businesses live or die by cross-industry 'borrowing' of ideas, that inspiration more often comes from outside the box than from within. Ordinary businesses stay ordinary, their owners eking out only ordinary incomes - and working too hard for them - as long as those owners foolishly and stubbornly, mentally stay in their own tiny backyard. Breakthroughs come from bringing fresh ideas, found outside one's own business, in and applying them in new ways. You choose to limit or expand your income by the way you reject or embrace ideas found far afield from your present modus operandi and industry norms.

In my relentless search for I don't know what, I found an article in the December 1, 2008 edition of Nation's Restaurant News, the trade journal of the restaurant industry, headlined: "Operators Bank On Profit And Loss Scrutiny To Stay Afloat." It made me laugh out loud. The article states that "maximizing the profit and loss statement has become a mantra for restaurant operators during the current economic downturn."

This is then presented as some sort of horrific torture imposed on the owners by a vicious economy. What is not said, but should be, is that maximizing profit shouldn't be paid attention to only after dire economic conditions occur, to be given temporary priority, only until 'things get better.' It's supposed to be what anybody responsible for operating a business does everyday. Including what's then described in the article: ferreting out and cutting wasteful spending, controlling labor and administrative costs; creating products, offers and price propositions customers really want. Any business owner complaining about having to attend to these priorities because of a recession is a moron, and any trade-journal writer taking them seriously is dumber than a sandbox.

Odds are, your business lost a lot of customers last year. There are holes in your bucket. And odds are, you can't say for sure how many you lost, who you lost, why you lost them or where they went and are now. If you do nothing different, I can send you this same fax next year too. A great way to make more money is to stop losing customers, beginning with the next one you are about to lose.

It is not easy being a business owner - you have to oversee every part of the operations, manage your employees and clients, and make decisions that can have major consequences. It is understandable that  you clearly  don't have time to micromanage your marketing output. Even worse, it can be daunting being the only one in your business' marketing department. No second opinion. No team support. You need help! Here are some indicators that your business needs a marketing agency.

When you’re a small business, it feels like there are endless articles and advice columns all about how to market your business but very few tell you what to actually focus on or even just how to start!

In this day and age, we’re all looking for credible information! So much of the information we consume every day comes from non-credible sources or is from a good source but goes uncredited. For many of your clients, they can easily become frustrated if they cannot verify where you got information from and if it is from a good source. Poor information management can really hurt your business. I worked with a client last year who put information on their website that they did not fact check or cite correctly. As a result, they had clients asking them about the strange information on their website, and ultimately, they lost customers.