The other day, I was visiting with someone and they had brochures for their business. I looked at one and thought, wow. That doesn’t really reflect on what they’re doing at all! What’s happened here? Are they mad? Why would they write these strange things about their work and not mention the REAL benefits of hiring them at all?

I put this question to the owner of the business. He picked up the brochure and likewise said, “Wow. That’s the first time I’ve looked at this properly in five years!”

Here’s the deal. When someone first starts out with their business, of course they’re a bit shy, a bit nervous, a bit freaked out. They won’t have had much experience with their users yet, not a lot of feedback or testimonials, and they may not even have found their rightful niche in the market at that time. They may further have had little experience with writing cool ad copy back then, or even with desktop publishing as a whole.

So that first brochure is going to suck, we can take that as read.

But they had to place a minimum order at the time of a thousand, and so as “not to waste that investment”, they keep using the sucky brochures anyway and don’t really look at them, along the lines of, “Well I did that and it’s done, thank god …”

As the business evolves, or tries to evolve (!), all the things related to it must likewise keep pace – of course.

So today’s exercise is to have a look around your business and check out if you have something like that brochure which is still stuck in the past and basically dragging your business down, in the here and now.

And don’t shy away from considering anything, even logos that were so lovingly created with a kid’s stencil set and you were so proud of at the time, a web site you paid major money for, or boxes of business cards where you still have 99,876 of the original 100,000 left!

If it’s not in the spirit of the now then it needs to go into the past where it belongs.

To bring all the components of your business right up to date is priceless and keeps your business cohesive and always forward moving – as it should.

The MindMillion Energy Exercises created by Silvia Hartmann, exclusive to The Guild of Energists