About once a month I like to send an e-mail or give a ring to customers to ask them how they’re last bit of service with me went and if there’s anything else that’s cropped up since that I could help them with. You wouldn’t believe how much extra business a simple phone call or e-mail like this can bring in.

As I am preparing to do this myself, I figured I’d remind all of you to do the same. Drop everyone a line and ask ‘em how they’re doing. Find out if things are running smoothly and if not, be a superhero and save their day. If things are good on both ends, just shoot the breeze and build on your relationship.

It only takes a minute - open your e-mail app right now and get on it. Come back and post comments about the responses and extra biz you generate.

This is a paid review

We have the Oscars, Cannes, Clios, Grammy, and hundreds of other award ceremonies that we see each year. For many industries these awards represent the highest level of achievement, and whether you admit or not, can be the primary motivation behind your actions at times.

There’s always been an argument in the ad industry between those that enter hundreds of campaigns into the awards each year and those that ban their agency from entering at all. No matter which side you choose or industry you’re in, there’s no question that having a gold Cannes Lion or Oscar on your bookshelf and resume takes you to a new level.

You may have received a trophy at a spelling bee when you were a kid, or an award at the golf tourney you were in last year. Chances are somewhere in your house or office is a product from a company like Crystal Occasion.

Crystal Occasion is the first company to request a review from us through ReviewMe.

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Usually anything that comes from the mouth of an athlete is destined for the blooper reel. If not, it’s a composition of umh, and, ah, and, umh, did I mention ah?

I’m sure “the Great One� aka Mr. Wayne Gretzky had similar moments in front of the camera, but this one classic quote from him hit me today.

As simple as that may sound, I think it’s a really powerful quote for entrepreneurs. Much like every young go getter, I’ve got a board full of ideas that are waiting to be brought to life, and I never really thought about them the way this quote makes me think.

We all spend so much time planning our big business idea, worrying about the details and how little capital we have to work with, and finding the right developer to build it for us, and on and on and on…

It seems the business world has always been described as hit or miss. Either your idea will fly off the shelves or plummet into the clearance bin.

Apply Gretzky’s quote to that ideology and you start to see it a different way. Every single idea that’s executed with passion and good intent is a hit. The key word there is “executed�, a shot that has been taken.

The internet and media has brought metrics into the forefront and created a false set of standards that all of us compare our businesses to. If you don’t get a million unique hits or a million sign-ups your website is a failure. Bullshit.

If your website is an idea scribbled on a post-it note, then it’s a failure/missed shot, simply because you didn’t make the attempt to the hit the net.

No matter how small you have to start or how little you have to work with, attempting the shot as soon as possible should be your goal.

As you’ve probably learned, it’s impossible to predict the future and whether or not your shot will hit the net, but at least you’ll see how close you come to hitting it and be able to adjust your approach to turn on that goal light on the next attempt.

Who’s the cat that won’t cop out, when there’s danger all about? YGG. Right On! They say this cat YGG is a bad mother… SHUT YOUR MOUTH!

We signed up for that ReviewMe program way back when and never got an offer. They finally update our Alexa and Technorati rankings, BOOM!, we’re in the same league as Shaft. That would be of course if Shaft were number 3 on Today’s Best list, but he’s not, now is he?

Alright, that’s the end of me trying to tie an era before my time into this egotistical post.

So we’re going to give this a try and see how it works out. You’ll see a couple review posts popping up over the next week or so. We’ll let you know they’re reviews so it’s not shady or anything.

Some people don’t mind these posts, others hate them. To the latter, can you speak a bit louder? We can’t hear you over the sound of a handful of one dollar bills fanning by our ears. ;)

1) Don’t provide any telephone support

2) When they’re forced to use chat support in their browser, make them wait for 45 minutes to acknowledge their presence

3) Make sure the support rep can barely understand English and is fluent in copying and pasting prewritten responses

4) If you can’t help the customer, blame others and make them call them

5) If your customer manages to find a phone number for the company, make sure every employee in the office refuses to help them, directs them to the chat support that they already wasted half their morning on, and refuse to refund a single cent from the monthly fee they were charged only two days ago

6) Celebrate the loss of a customer and see the effectiveness of blogging in how quickly the true face of your company is shared with the public.

Thank you Reseller Zoom, really, I appreciate all your support. MediaTemple, here I come.

For future search result optimization and those that missed the subject of my anger, let’s throw in an alternative title, “6 reasons why you should never use Reseller Zoom”.

I had composed this list a few weeks ago. As a sign of what’s to come with copyright enforcement, every single video I had bookmarked has been yanked off of YouTube since then. Hopefully these will last at least a few days.

This list ranges from the 70s to present day, and each song that made the list was ranked by it’s lyrics, energy, and memorability.

Pamela over at Escape from Cubicle Nation had created a list of her top entrepreneurial songs back in October, and surprisingly enough, I chose 10 different songs than her.

Please feel free to suggest other songs that you find motivating in the comments and maybe we’ll put a second version of this list together down the road.

A few of the music videos were not available, so some of them are either the original music with a homemade video, or a re-recorded version.

Anyways, here are the Top 10 Motivational Songs for Entrepreneurs:

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