Have you ever thought about significantly changing the business you’ve created?

If your business makes you feel like you’re the only one doing the work, maybe it’s time to stop being a one-person band and reinvent your business.

Indiana writer Gene Stowe has detailed the process of business reinvention in this article.  I think he did a great job explaining how reinvention works, and how I learned the process of turning a business into a Destination.  He also covers why becoming a Destination is the best choice for most small businesses.

To read the article, click here.

Participants will wear Pokens, whimsical devices that use near field communication (NFC) to retrieve and store information from fellow attendees, and then, electronically network with their connections from their computers.

The conference, organized by The Schallert Group of Longmont, Colorado, brings eight headline speakers to a single stage, providing independent entrepreneurs and small businesses access to insights usually available only to Fortune 500 companies.

Rather than exchanging business cards, Summit attendees can collect contacts by holding the Pokens close, – a “high four” from the four-fingered hand of playful characters such as a kitten or panda.

The green glow signals that the connection has been made.

In a first-in-the-U.S. pilot, conference-goers can visit Boulder businesses equipped with Poken technology and will experience this two-way NFC exchange of information. For example, information and videos about fine wine for sale can be passed to customers, while the store receives information about the prospective purchaser.

“Boulder will be the first city in the country where Poken Sparks and Poken Tags are demonstrated,” says Jon Schallert, president of The Schallert Group and a speaker at the conference. “We’re going to put them in different retail stores and conduct a Downtown Boulder treasure hunt.”

Poken devices, created in Switzerland and just now coming to North America, are popular for social networking – a paperless way to collect more than phone numbers at parties – and are finding application in more fields.

This fall, Indiana State University became the first college to distribute Pokens to all incoming students, easing introductions and potentially boosting retention for the school.

Schallert, arranged to introduce Pokens at the Summit Business Conference after he discovered the technology in an in-flight magazine article.

The cutting-edge application fits the event’s aim to elevate small businesses, he says.

“Our conference is really a way that any size business can play on a level playing field with some big companies that would normally get this expert advice. There’s a synergy that comes from combining new technology and these top business experts together to teach independent entrepreneurs.”

In addition to Schallert, speakers are Michael Kerr, a humor expert; Debra Fine, a business networking expert; Terri Norvell, a leadership development expert; Andy Core, a wellness expert; Marti Barletta, author and worldwide expert on marketing to women; Henriette Klauser, an author and authority on writing productivity; and Shawne Duperon, an Emmy-winning TV producer and publicity strategist.

That’s why Klauser, author of Write It Down, Make It Happen: Knowing What You Want, And Getting It and four other books, advocates list-making to achieve your goals.

It worked for her 10-year-old son Peter, even though he forgot the list for two years. When he discovered it while cleaning his room, every item, including learning karate, sleeping overnight in a park and getting a pet bird had happened.

It also worked for Lou Holtz when he lost his job at 28 and his wife urged him to record his dreams. At last report, 91 of the 107 goals, including coaching at the University of Notre Dame, winning a national championship, meeting the Pope, dining at the White House, appearing on the Tonight Show and making a hole-in-one have happened.

It can work for anybody, Klauser says.

“When you write up your list, write what you would do if money was not an object and time was not a factor,” she advises, insisting that each record include the date. “Then I tell them money is not an object and time is not a factor.”

Klauser is among nine headline experts appearing at the Summit Business Conference (www.SummitBusinessConference.com) Oct. 18-19 in Boulder, Colorado, a rare gathering that brings Fortune 500-level advice business entrepreneurs and community leaders.

Her focus on writing started when she noticed that some of her university students and some of her fellow Ph.D. candidates suffered writing anxiety. Her first book, Writing on Both Sides of the Brain, is in its 39^th printing.

“I wanted to put in concrete evidence about how the brain is functioning,” she says. “It was a natural thing when I heard about the RAS. I want to change the nature of people’s relationship with writing, to recognize that writing is a tool that can help us.”

Another book, With Pen in Hand, describes how writing can help deal with tragedy and loss, with a chapter about a Vietnam veteran who recorded his experiences because he couldn’t talk about them. Put Your Heart on Paper tells the stories of people who enjoyed improved relationships from sharing written thoughts.

In Write It Down, Make It Happen, Klauser explains that brain-heightened attention triggers “go-incidences” (rather than co-incidences) by gaining a sharper focus on the world.

Examples come easy: your ear catches your spoken name above the chatter across a crowded room; a mother awakes to her baby’s cry and no other sound; after Klauser bought a “eucalyptus” Honda, she began to notice how many other green cars are on the road.

“The world cooperates with the plan,” she says. “It activates part of your brain. You start paying attention. You make a commitment to its possibility and things start happening. Once you write down a goal, your brain is working overtime to see that you get it.”

For more information on Klauser’s presentation and how to register, visit www.SummitBusinessConference.com

The Summit Business Conference Contest

This is Jon Schallert.  Our company loves contests, especially ones that motivate communities to support local businesses. That’s why we’re awarding $22,000 in our company’s consulting services to those communities who send the most people from their city or town to the Summit Business Conference in Boulder, Colorado, October 18-19 (where I’m one of the 9 speakers).

If you are not familiar with the Summit Business Conference, it’s an amazing, one-of-a-kind gathering of nine (9) business experts and authors who typically conduct keynote speeches for major international conferences or consult with Fortune 500 companies. But for the Summit Business Conference, they’ll all be presenting on one stage, over 2 days, united together to help independent business owners, entrepreneurs and anyone who supports local businesses.  You can read more about the Summit Business Conference at their website www.SummitBusinessConference.com

But back to our Summit Contest.  Here are the details:

The top two (2) communities that have the most people attending the Summit Business Conference from their city or town will receive a free Destination Business workshop, presented by me (Jon Schallert) in their area, to be scheduled in 2012. The value for each workshop is over $8,000. Better yet, if you’re one of the winning communities, when I come to speak in your area, charge admission to this event and use my workshop as a fundraiser!

The next three (3) communities with the next highest attendance will receive a free Destination Business Live Webinar, broadcast from our Destination University studio for up to 500 of your members. The value of each Live Webinar is $1,500.

The next five (5) communities having the next highest attendance will receive a free community membership to our online training network, Destination University. This annual membership is valued at $360.

In the event of a tie in any of the above categories, a random drawing will be held to determine the awarding of the prizes.

How to Enter

It’s very simple: Publicize the Summit Business Conference in your city, town,  downtown, or Main Street district and encourage your local business owners to register. Send a representative from your organization too, if you want them to learn the advanced business skills that are going to be discussed at the Summit Conference.  But remember: Since there are a limited number of seats, once the 250 seats are sold, attendance will be closed. Obviously, communities that register the most people earliest will have the best chance to win.

Encourage your community leaders and business owners to learn about the Summit Business Conference by visiting the Conference website, www.SummitBusinessConference.com, and the Summit Conference blog on the website. You can download digital PDF brochures of the conference by clicking here. Once downloaded, you can email them to your community leaders and entrepreneurs. If your group would like hard-copy brochures to distribute to your local businesses, just call our office. We will ship them to you so you can pass them out.

We have structured this contest so both large cities and small towns have an equal chance to win.

Good luck!  We look forward to seeing you in Boulder, Colorado on October 18-19.

Jon Schallert

PS:  Some communities like Phillips County, Kansas have created scholarships for their business owners to help them pay for the costs of attending the Summit Business Conference.  If you want the businesses in your community to improve, you have to be proactive!

I especially like this section of her article, where she talks about why we limit our success:

“In my most recent surveys, findings indicated that the fear of failure is one of the most notable obstacles that people feel limit their success. This fear of failure shows up in many forms. It includes lack of self-confidence, holding back rather than speaking up, feeling insecure, and dealing with too much change. Certainly our economic fluctuations are cause for challenges.”

You can read the rest of Terri’s article at our Summit Business Conference blog (www.SummitBusinessConference.com)

Terri will present her Breakthrough Success keynote at our Summit Business Conference, next month in Boulder Colorado on October 18-19. Read about Terri and a full description of her presentation by clicking here.

Mike is going to teach all of us how we as leaders of our businesses and organizations can stamp out daily stress, boost the morale of our teams, infuse creativity into our lives, and create an inspiring business and work environment, one that’s loved by our employees and also our customers.

You can read more about Mike at www.MikeKerr.com but you can also see how excited Mike is to begin his Monday workday by clicking on the link below to watch the video on our Summit Business Conference blog.

Mike Kerr is excited to go to work?  Wouldn’t it be great to feel this way?

Here’s why it’s important that you think about attending the Summit to hear her message:

Click here to read my post on the Summit Business Conference blog.

I first read about Yammer in a business magazine, where a boss was talking about how he was connecting easily with his employees and keeping everyone on the same page. “Wow”, I thought, “this program is for me.” I thought since I travel a lotand I have employees often working on projects that I should know about, this would be the perfect way for me to pull them all together.

Wrong!  But here’s how to know if it’s right for your company.  Click here to read the rest of this article (or whatever you say).

Yammer is quite an innovative program. Yammer allows you to set up an email communication network with your employees through their computers and smartphones.  As the owner, you start the ball rolling by inviting all of your employees to get Yammer on their computers.  One requirement though: all employees must have a verified company email address, or put another way, they all must have email addresses that end in the same company domain suffix.

This all is activated by you, as the initiator of the network, by emailing all of your employees and telling them to download the free Yammer software into their computers, and to download the software into their smartphones, if you want to also communicate with them through their phones.

Right away, you can see some of the parameters that have to exist for this program to work for your company: multiple employees in various locations who have computers or smartphones. If you and two employees are in the same physical location, there’s no need for Yammer.

But if you do have multiple locations with several employees, Yammer allows everyone to hear the same information coming from you. I can see a real advantage of this when you want to convey one message to everyone. But unlike emailing a group of employees, Yammer also allows them to contribute and bounce ideas off each other through your private Yammer network.  For those of you who have several stores, with employees in each store, I see Yammer as a way to get your employees more involved in discussions and to get them to contribute with their ideas. Of course, as the contributions happen, everyone connected to the Yammer network sees all the conversations.

I can see the strengths of using Yammer for some of you.  Check it out at www.Yammer.com.

No such luck.  Their store close-out sale begins today.

Honestly, I did like our local Borders.  They were convenient, had a pretty good selection, and some of my neighbors even worked there, so it had a somewhat non-chain feel to me. It’s always painful to see any store close, and it’s especially not fun when your community loses a business like Borders.  It meant a lot to a huge group of people, including those employees who are now out of a job.

I learned about the closing first from our local newspaper, and then, through a mass email sent out by
.  And that’s what I want to talk about, specifically this following paragraph that comes from his email, where he explained why the closings occurred:

“We had worked very hard toward a different outcome. The fact is that Borders has been facing headwinds for quite some time, including a rapidly changing book industry, the eReader revolution, and a turbulent economy.  We put up a great fight, but regrettably, in the end, we weren’t able to overcome these external forces.”

I don’t want to be one of those guys who piles on when someone’s down on the canvas, but, Mike…how about taking a little responsibility in your final goodbye?

Just once, I’d like to see a CEO of a chain NOT blame their store closings on external forces.  Just once, I would like to hear a CEO of a business that’s closing admit any of these:

“We had a faulty business plan, and we should have altered it earlier”

“We paid our executive team too much and they really didn’t contribute to making our stores better, and that includes me”

“We made too many mistakes in our site selection process and lease negotiations”

“We were lax in keeping adequate inventory on our shelves and that ensured that people went online to buy”

“We made a huge mistake having our competition build our main website” (this would be one unique to Borders)

“We consistently provided customer service that customers could find anywhere, even while shopping online”

“We were average or below average in most categories when compared to our competition”

Or, to sum it all up, just once, I’d like to hear a CEO admit:

“We really weren’t a Destination to our customers.”

Mike could also throw in, at the end: “And the poor economy and Kindles hurt a bit, too.” I’ll give you that as a contributing factor, but not the main one.

Borders now joins a long list of retail failures in our country’s history, businesses that were unwilling to change course when it was obvious that they should, who started ignoring the little things that make a business slip from great to OK.  Collectively, companies like these look the other way, start settling for the average, and then, seem surprised at the result.

I never like to see any company fail.  But I like it even less when the leader of a company plays the victim without acknowledging the internal slide that’s been happening for years.

Mike (if you take on another CEO role), how about a little honesty to your customers in that final goodbye?

Looking back, I was wrong about them.  I admit it!

I am now ready to embrace the complainers!  Here’s why:

My revelation on this point occurred when Alisa, our new Business Development Manager, left during the morning for a dentist appointment, but later returned a couple of hours later, resuming her regular duties.  Thinking about my own dentist appointments that are often filled with needles of Novocain shot into my gums, making it impossible for me to talk when I return to work, I couldn’t help but notice that she seemed quite functional.

So, I asked her: “How are your teeth?  Are you in pain?  Are you still OK to be at work?” But Alisa assured me she was totally fine.

She then said to me: “My dentist told me that if all his patients took care of their teeth like me, there’d be no need for her.  She’d be out of work.”  She explained that she took great care to clean and maintain her teeth after being told how important it was, and how her dentist appointments were non-eventful checkups absent of the pain I regularly came to associate with my visits.

We talked a little more and then, my light bulb moment occurred. It came to me in a flash that if everyone with teeth, brushed, flossed, and cared for them like Alisa, what a huge impact that would have on the dental industry! How would these dentist offices stay open, if all of their patients gave them nothing to do?

Let me use my dentist as an example.  I think my dentist’s office employs about 5-7 people, and I’d guess they are all pretty well paid professionals, all doing their work on people who don’t brush and floss as well as Alisa does. What if these people had no work?  For example, my dentist is a great dentist and a great guy, but I bet he doesn’t have any other marketable skills besides dentistry (maybe watch repair, with those tools he’s accumulated and his steady hand). But the rest of his staff? Not so talented.  I foresee “Will clean teeth for food” handwritten signs by the interstate.

Now, take this idea a step further. Multiply the impact if every dentist office in the country closed because everyone took care of their teeth like they should. Think of the massive unemployment problems that would result.  I bet most of these dental workers would be out on the streets, forced to selling their stash of free toothbrushes and mini toothpaste tubes. And think about that loss of revenue that previously circulated in our economy from people paying for dentures, implants, cleanings, oral surgery, x-rays…all of it gone!  What an economic downturn our country would experience, if everyone cared for their teeth like Alisa!

And that’s when it dawned on me that I’ve been looking at this the wrong way.  All those business owners who don’t attend my workshops, who don’t make their businesses unique and distinctive…these are people I should be thanking!  The owners who complain all the time and do little to help themselves while remaining stagnant, I should hug!  These owners are the ones who are maintaining the below-average business standards that allow the rest of my clients to stand out.  These owners are the people who set the low bar! These are the entrepreneurs who make it possible for any other company to look so good, by them being so bad at what they do.  These are the people whose poor service gets anchored in the minds of customers, so when my clients’ employees go just a little above and beyond the call of duty, their efforts seem Herculean.

I am the first one to admit when I am wrong, and I was wrong about the slackers.  It was wrong for me to have berated them.  The slackers, malcontents, and complaining business owners have done nothing wrong.  Granted, they haven’t done anything particularly right either, but they don’t deserve to be flogged into changing.

I’ve changed my mind!  Immobile owners like these should be praised. They should be encouraged to “Do nothing, move nowhere, change not!” Their businesses are perfect, in their most imperfect states, and the rest of the proactive business world needs them to maintain their business inertia.

So to all owners out there who are constantly working to improve yourself and your business position, do this: The next time you see one your business peers who fits this slacker/complainer description, don’t avoid them. Don’t look away. And certainly don’t berate them with those positive suggestions of change you typically heap on them. Next time, give them a hearty pat on the back and a cheery “Carry on!”

Their mediocre business is crucial to your creation of the Destination Business of your dreams. Without them, your challenges would be much more difficult.