Better Business Blog

Linkedin Testimonial For Ilana Eberson From NYCBNG

Thanks to Calvin Strachan for writing this wonderful recommendation on Linkedin.

“Ilana is amazing. I was seeking strategies to take my organization to the next level so I reached out to Ilana for advice, ideas and support.

Her responsiveness, her generosity and the real tangible value she provided me was off the charts. After connecting with her I truly felt she could transform any business. She is a genius.

If you're looking for a superstar, someone who can take your business to the next level, Ilana is the real deal. Ilana is an incredible business woman and I fully recommend her!”

February 20, 2012

Calvin Strachan, Director, The Toronto Power Group

 

 

Linkedin Testimonials For Ilana Eberson And NYCBNG

Thanks to Calvin Strachan for writing this wonderful recommendation on Linkedin.

“Ilana is amazing. I was seeking strategies to take my organization to the next level so I reached out to Ilana for advice, ideas and support.

Her responsiveness, her generosity and the real tangible value she provided me was off the charts. After connecting with her I truly felt she could transform any business. She is a genius.

If you're looking for a superstar, someone who can take your business to the next level, Ilana is the real deal. Ilana is an incredible business woman and I fully recommend her!”

February 20, 2012

Calvin Strachan, Director, The Toronto Power Group

 

 

How to Create an Enchanting Pitch

Welcome to the first in a series of blog posts I’ll be doing as part of a partnership with Microsoft and Office Web Apps. Over the next two weeks, I’ll cover everything a budding entrepreneur needs to turn an idea into an enchanting investment opportunity—from the perfect pitch to a killer business plan to financial forecasts.

I’m going to start with a little dissertation on creating effective PowerPoint pitches for your company. I embedded the sample deck for you to click through by using the PowerPoint Web App. When you’re ready to get started, you can download the deck from my public SkyDrive folder and use it as the starting point for your own perfect pitch. Enjoy!

Read More: How to Create an Enchanting Pitch

You Can Craft A Simple, Atttention Grabbing Message

You can feel the tension in the compressed smiles, quick nods and pointed questions at the annual Morgan Stanley Global Healthcare conference. Schedules are packed as the high-stakes finance crowd gathers to hear 20-minute rapid-fire talks by CEOs of start-ups and public companies who seek funding or favorable stock analysts' reports. Presenters speak fast, using complex medical and financial terms.

 In contrast, my client, the CEO of a new biotech company walks on stage, rolls up his shirt sleeve, and stops at the center of the stage. As he turns to the audience, he pauses briefly to smile. He raises his bare forearm, pointing at a patch. "When patients put on our medical patch they will feel the pain-relieving effects faster than the latest Porsche can go from zero to 90."

Read More: You Can Craft A Simple, Atttention Grabbing Message

5 Ways A Small Business Can Use “Vivid Thinking”

 

"Vivid Thinking” stands for Visual-Verbal Interdependent Thinking, which means talking less while drawing more. Vivid Thinking replaces the over-wordiness of small business communications with quick, simple, jargon-free visual messages.

1. Focus the form of our outbound messages

When our small business competes with a big business, we overcompensate with too many words. Finding the visual form of our message helps strip out everything but the essentials—which means customers “get” what we do fast. (And after all, customers come to us because they expect us to be easier to work with. Being Vivid proves it to them.)

Read More: 5 Ways A Small Business Can Use “Vivid Thinking”

6 Benchmarks That Gauge Success

How do you measure and gauge your success today? Is success all that you thought it was cracked up to be?  By definition, success is a noun: “the favorable outcome of something attempted.”

The answers to the two questions above are tied into the lens we look through at any place in our life cycle. Each place in that cycle is real, legitimate and important. The question and answer of how we gauge our success has dramatically changed for most of us in the past few years, as we have seen our circumstances and assets change. That has gotten me thinking about what the benchmarks are today that gauge success for me.

 

Read More: 6 Benchmarks That Gauge Success

How Music Affects the Brain and How You Can Use It to Your Advantage

Music can often make or break a day. It can change your mood, amp you up for exercise, and help you recover from injury. But how does it work exactly, and how can you use it to your advantage?

Recently, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords used music therapy to help her learn to talk again. The still unproven theory revolves around the idea that music is represented in multiple parts of the brain and therefore accesses deeper pathways between neurons. Music then helps patients connect the stored knowledge of words through songs and helps create the new connections needed for speech. This same idea has been used for stroke victims in the past, and has been referred to as the Kenny Rogers Effect.

You don't need to have suffer from brain damage to get the benefits though, lets take a look at how music affects the brain in a more casual sense, and how you can use it to enhance your day-to-day.

Read More: How Music Affects the Brain and How You Can Use It to Your Advantage

How Music Affects the Brain and How You Can Use It to Your Advantage

Music can often make or break a day. It can change your mood, amp you up for exercise, and help you recover from injury. But how does it work exactly, and how can you use it to your advantage?

Photo by JT Theriot.

Recently, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords used music therapy to help her learn to talk again. The still unproven theory revolves around the idea that music is represented in multiple parts of the brain and therefore accesses deeper pathways between neurons. Music then helps patients connect the stored knowledge of words through songs and helps create the new connections needed for speech. This same idea has been used for stroke victims in the past, and has been referred to as the Kenny Rogers Effect.

Read More: How Music Affects the Brain and How You Can Use It to Your Advantage

Forget About Branded Content, Tell a Great Story

In a few short years, our ability to forcibly interrupt consumers with our advertising is going to be greatly diminished.  There will be more channels, more content across more screens, and many fewer interruptive ads.  Yes, we can continue to place ads in and around the content, and we can continue to hope that consumers see them and are impacted by them; but there is no getting around the fact that the format of interruptive video advertising (TV commercials) is going to take a huge hit as all of our devices become channels that can effectively disintermediate the advertising format we’ve all grown up with.  At Ignited (www.ignitedusa.com) we’re already imagining a world where consumers essentially block all interruptive forms of advertising from their homes.

 It sounds bleak, and can be quite a scary proposition for brands that have built their equity on what is very likely going to become an antiquated platform in the coming decade.  How will big brands reach millions of consumers with their advertising if consumers have the option to skip or avoid it?

Read More: Forget About Branded Content, Tell a Great Story

Best Motivational Books For Small Businesses

Most entrepreneurs want to stay positive and upbeat.  If we don’t we might succumb to defeat, and let down those who are counting on us:  our employees, our customers, and our business partners.

That’s where motivational books come in.  A good inspirational book can be reassuring.  It helps you see that other business owners have encountered the same issues and overcame them.  The right book can also motivate you to tackle the big issues you know you need to tackle, but so far haven’t had the energy or will to.

That’s why we’ve assembled the following list of 10 motivational books (plus one bonus) to inspire you, pump you up, and reinforce your confidence to take on the world! Here they are, in no particular order:

Read More: Best Motivational Books For Small Businesses

12 Tips On Becoming A Better Negotiator

I hate negotiating, mostly because a negotiation often feels confrontational and I tend to shy away from confrontations.

But negotiating is a fact of business life, so here are some ways to make your negotiations less painful, more fun — and most importantly, more successful.

Read More: 12 Tips On Becoming A Better Negotiator

20 Life-Tracking Tools for Better Health, Wealth and Productivity

 

 

 

 

Ari Meisel is co-founder at Less Doing, where he works on making every task in life and business more efficient. He used self-tracking to overcome Crohn’s Disease and compete in Ironman France. You can follow him on Twitter @liontex and read his blog at arimeisel.com.

Optimizing your life can help free up time to enjoy more activities. One of the best ways to start is by figuring out exactly how you spend your time. Self-tracking has become something of a craze thanks to movements such as the Quantified Self, which allow you to track everything in your life and, in some cases, take action.

Here is a list of the top 20 resources for monitoring the most salient aspects of your life. What you do with the information is only limited by your imagination.

Read More: 20 Life-Tracking Tools for Better Health, Wealth and Productivity

Puns For Those With A Higher IQ

(That would be you, of course)

 

 A man's home is his castle, in a manor of speaking.

 

 Dijon  vu - the same mustard as before.

 

 Practice safe eating - always use condiments.

 

 Shotgun wedding - A case of wife or death.

 

 A hangover is the wrath of grapes.

 

 Dancing cheek-to-cheek is really a form of floor play.

 

 Condoms should be used on every conceivable occasion.

 

  Reading  while sunbathing makes you well red.

 

 When two egotists meet, it's an I for an I.

 

 A bicycle can't stand on its own because it is two tired.

 

 What's the definition of a will? (It's a dead give away.)

 

 Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

 

 In democracy your vote counts. In feudalism your count votes.

 

 She was engaged to a boyfriend with a wooden leg but broke it off.

 

 If you don't pay your exorcist, you get repossessed

 

 With her marriage, she got a new name and a dress.

 

 The man who fell into an upholstery machine is fully recovered.

 

 You feel stuck with your debt if you can't budge it.

 

 Every calendar's days are numbered.

 

 A lot of money is tainted - Taint yours and taint mine.

 

 A boiled egg in the morning is hard to beat.

 

 He had a photographic memory that was never developed.

 

 A midget fortune-teller who escapes from prison is a small medium at large.

 

 Bakers trade bread recipes on a knead-to-know basis.

 

 Santa's helpers are subordinate clauses.

 

 Acupuncture is a jab well done.