Wednesday Wisdom is the go to place for ideas to help grow your business.  Whether the ideas come from articles, blogs,  books or videos, we’ll share them right here.

You can contribute to Wednesday Wisdom by adding your own thoughts, ideas or articles you’ve found,  which will help others grow their business, in the comments section below.  If you’d like to read articles from our previous Wednesday Wisdom posts you can do so by clicking the link.

Here’s what we’ve found this week, so sit back and grab a coffee and get ready to find something that will inspire you in your business:

Blogs

1. A blog that continues to give me inspiration is James McCullough  writing at Foursides.ca – James is a Canadian based blogger who is the anti-niche superhero writing on a wide variety of topics, including business and work.   In this article James explains, by reference to Jason Fried of 37 Signals and Timothy Ferriss why work is not such a great place to get things done and suggests alternative places to work. Inspiring article with some great resources – read the article: How to Get In The Groove
2. Author Richard Jordan shares some Founders’ Advice for New Entrepreneurs gleaned from interviews with 45 of America’s leading company founders, some great nuggets of inspiration here.
3. If you saw the Oscars awards you will be aware that British Comedian Ricky Gervais was a little controversial!  Brian Armstrong picks 3 examples including Gervais as to why Being Controversial Is Good Marketing and good for business.
4. I’m a big Fan of Mobile Internet and the opportunities for location based services. In fact I recently helped one restaurant gain $1000 extra business, 2 hours after our consulting appointment, using Facebook to promote his business. Mikal Belicove on Entrepreneur.com explains the different deals that Facebook offers which allows you to connect with your customers well worth considering if you have a ‘bricks and mortar’ offering.  How to plan your social engagement success
5. Linda Hunt King asks Is Your Business Prepared For Disaster? which is a question every entrepreneur needs to ask themselves and a subject of a separate post here on this site in a few weeks.

Video

David Siteman Garland on TheRiseToTheTop.com interviewed Kevin Miller about the realities of working for yourself and features some great tips on starting a business and working for yourself.

Books

With the internet, many people tend to think of books as outdated, but the truth is far from it. Good books contain a wealth of timeless advice and if you get one idea from it, the time reading it is well spent.  In fact the single biggest piece of advice that we give entrepreneurs is read plenty of books. Pound for pound, dollar for dollar, an investment in a book can pay for itself 1000′s of times sometimes millions. Quite literally I’ve seen books change people’s lives.

Nowadays of course you don’t necessarily have to ’read’ a book to ‘read’ a book. With the huge growth in iPods/iPhones and MP3 players you can listen to a book anywhere.  Last week I listened to all 8 hours of Tony Heish’s book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose. On Audible.com. This is a really interesting book as it’s part biography (Tony sold his first business Link Exchange to Microsoft for $270m and Zappos.com to Amazon for $1.2bn), part corporate history and how to create a values based business. One of the things that appealed to me was that Tony described how every aspect of the Zappos business could be replicated by the competition. The only thing that the competition couldn’t replicate was the culture of Zappos.  Takeaway: in your business focus on what is unique about you and exploit it. Another story that stood out was in the early days of Zappos when they were proving the concept they business founders went ot the local shoe store and took photos of the shoes on display. When someone bought one of the pairs of shoes from Zappos they went to the shoe store and bought the pair and mailed it out. Thus getting  immediate feedback and testing the business concept to enable funding.

So, that’s what we’ve discovered this week, what about you? What stands out that is worth sharing?