Hope all's well with you, and I hope your business is on the way to the stratosphere! I know since you're one of the smart entrepreneurs who reads this email, and others like it I'm sure, you are doing well...hopefully even fabulous! I know one of my readers is...Lance, good on you! I can't divulge any specifics without permission, but I can say the numbers on his recent roll out are impressive by any standard. He's a smart chap...and a daily reader of my marketing messages. This weekend I was at the health food store and overhead a guy who, I'm guessing, wasn't doing too well...at least not as well as us'ns (pronounced US-uns...means us smart people vs those other people). I had stopped to pick up some fish oil, good for inflammation and sometimes called natures Prozac...you just need to be careful about what kind of fish oil you get, and a bucket of my favorite superfood. The superfood is 65 smackers a bucket, which lasts me about 2 weeks, but it's full of all kinds of great green leafy alkaline veggies plus a ton of probiotics. This kind of stuff can make a real difference in your day. So when I was checking out, I overhead this guy in the line next to me...."The sign on the juice said $7.99" Cashier: "Yessir" "Then why did it ring up for $9.99?" "It was probably a different juice that was $7.99, sir" "Oh...can I take this back and get the other juice?" "Yessir" And with that he grabbed the bottle of juice and headed back to the back of the store. A couple of thoughts that ran through my mind: 1. If you're looking for cheap, why don't you go to Publix, they have juice for $1.69, instead of $7.99 2. You're gonna walk all the way back to the back of the store, look around for the cheaper juice, walk all the way back to the front of the store and start the checkout process all over again just to save 2 buckaroos. What is you time worth, buddy? Number 2 is the one that's important for you. (Hey that rhymes!) What is your time worth? Don't get me wrong, if the guy was going to get the juice he wanted because he grabbed the wrong brand...no worries, vbut he was going to save 2 bucks...poor choice. I see otherwise knowledgeable, capable, well meaning entrepreneurs doing the same thing, metaphorically. They spend their time doing the most inane stuff. I mean, I understand if you're just starting and don't have the cash to hire someone just yet, but I've seen men and women, who are perfectly capable of hiring someone to handle some grunt work, who insist on doing it themselves....blowing off really high value important work. I just don't get it. Well, actually I do. It's easy to do the grunt work, allows you to tell yourself you're working without doing anything that's hard or uncomfortable. I get it, I used to do the same thing. Lunch meeting that last 2 hours...I was working, I had to meet with the vendor. Driving out to a job to deliver material, when I could've had it delivered or had someone else do it. All ways of hiding from what I should be doing. Today, if I do this kind of stuff I'm honest with myself, "OK I'm gonna play hookey today and just do some menial crap because I don't want to do the high value work." If you're honest with yourself, fine. But if you lie to yourself, "I couldn't do <thus and so important work> today because I had to go run around all day and do errands," well you got a problem. You should ALWAYS spend time at your highest and best value work. Sometimes, like with a new business, that's just not possible. Most of the time, it is possible. And possible or not, you should always be honest with yourself when you're not doing your highest and best value work. So what you have to ask yourself is every minute of everyday is, "Am I working at my highest and best value?" If not, you're walk to in the back of the store just to save 2 bucks...but you're missing $100 to save the 2! To your success Everte Farnell