If you are making a cake the end product is only as good as the starting line up.  Fine flour, fresh eggs, room temperature butter and the right process will yield a great tasting cake. But even the best Kitchen Maid mixer or other equipment won’t be able to turn less-than ingredients into an awesome cake.

Same with the product/service you are selling. Great ingredients (quality raw materials, good manufacturer, well trained staff, decent packaging) will set you up for a great product.

Of course you might not want or need to sell a great product. But if you do, here’s a tip: check the freshness of your ingredients. And it goes to follow that if you want to bake a great business, the ingredients going into that need to be pretty good too.

You can't work 10 times harder so how are you going to increase your income?

It's a big tough question. So how about for the next 7 days you spend a few minutes thinking of (and doing) a very small step that will get you towards being a little bit cleverer with every hour or dollar you spend.

It might be as simple as starting a proper to do list ( I love this one here) or it might be it's as big as increasing your prices...

 We women are funnyosities about our bodies. We stand in front of the mirror and think we are the only ones who have potbellies, saggy boobs and thunder thighs.

We are the same about our businesses.

Last week I spoke privately to 15 small businesses run by women. Each women thought her business was the only one that wasn’t profitable*. None of them were!

As women we dress carefully to hide our wobbly bits, as business owners we are measured in the way we talk about our businesses.

Let’s make a resolution today, International Women’s Day, to be kinder to each other. Let’s be honest about what doesn’t work in our businesses, let’s take heart from the fact that other businesses are a bit less-than too, and let’s help each other build better businesses.

*When I say “profitable” I mean making enough money to compensate the owner for the (usually huge) effort she is putting in. A business can make a profit but not be profitable because it’s taking way too much owner-time to make that profit