After taking the time to write down what I want and what I  need to do to have it, I have a much clearer idea of how I need to approach the rebuilding of my businesses. The two questions I realized I needed to answer are:

1. What are the activities that generate sales?
2. How can I automate those sale-generating activities?

I was able to create automation plans for the fragrance and notary businesses, but I’m having a much harder time with automating the sale-generating activity for the real estate business.  The reason for this is that I’ve used so many different methods to generate leads in the past, and I’ve never written them all down. So one of my to-do’s to complete for this week will be to write all those down and find a way to automate the activities. Whoa that was a huge brain dump.

I also discovered a new open-source shopping cart for my fragrance store. I’m waiting for my webhost to upgrade my version of PHP to install it. I expect to have to done by today and report results by the end of this week.

automating lead generation · open source software · reorganization

March is starting out to be a profitable month:

• Just when I thought the fragrance business was going kaput, I got a few orders this week.
• I had a real estate settlement yesterday, I have a rental commission check coming in the mail, and I’ll be receiving a referral commission next week. I also got a new buyer approved who appears to be very serious.
• A new notary service customer requested their third appointment in less than two weeks yesterday.

I like having inflows (money coming in).  My challenge for this month is to automate those inflows as much as possible. I’m not sure how automated the real estate and notary businesses can get, but I know I can automate the products I sell. I woke up early today just to start making notes about what I can change.

Since I’m streamlining and committing to keeping better records, I finally downloaded GNUCash to maintain my books. It’s a free accounting program (very similar to Quickbooks), and it’s awesome. Thank God for open source software.

accounting · automation · Notary business · open source software · pefume business · Real estate business