Do you start your day at the workplace at full steam? When you get to your workplace do you have a dozen phone calls and emails to reply to? If you do, how many of those correspondences are business related that generate revenue? How many are new sales leads? Are most of your daily correspondences sales related or are they personal in nature? In other words, how much of your time is spent on critical core business activities?

Before I go on, let me tell you about my self and where I'm coming from that I can talk about this subject. I own and operate an executive office suite. My company rents office spaces and private workspaces (desks). We also provide virtual office services to clients ranging from individual professionals to multi-billion dollar companies and everyone in between. I get to talk to a lot of people in a lot of different business. This broad exposure to many businesses let me see how they operate and see what their daily activities are like. From this, I came to realize that every business has the same core activities that are critically important but not everyone pays attention to those activities.

Every business, regardless of the industry and profession, has common core activities that are critical to the success of the business. The core activities are Product Development, Marketing, Sales, Closing, Delivery and Follow up (repeat sales). Whether you are a large corporation, a consulting professional or a sole proprietor selling widgets, you must maintain ongoing effort on all of these activities to ensure your business growth. If you are a startup company, you may be initially focused on product development and marketing. But eventually, you have to sell it.

Product Development

Whether you have widgets to sell or intangible services to sell, if you are selling some thing, you have a product. Successful businesses continuously spend time and energy improving their products. As a business owner and professional, how much time do you spend improving your product? For example, we have several products / services in my executive office suite business. We provide functional office spaces and workspaces and manage everything related to running an office for our clients. This includes making sure that internet connection and telephone services are working properly, maintaining appropriate level of staffing such as receptionists and cleaning crews, making sure that the copier, printer and fax machines are serviced and that we have enough toners and papers for the machines. The list goes on and on. As part of my product development process, I'm always looking for product improvement ideas. I ask my self, what else can I do to make my serviced office space a better place for my customers to conduct their business? I try to continuously improve my product to ensure that my products are up to date. For example, when I realized that many businesses and people need part-time office space with a permanent business address, we started our virtual office service.

Marketing and Advertisement

If you have the best widgets in the world to sell, would you keep it a secret? That is effectively what you are doing if you are not actively engaged in regular marketing activity - you are effectively keeping your product a secret from your potential buyers. If your potential customers don