In addition to working with existing clients many of whom are having record sales years, I've been working with several new clients getting them ready for having a big year in 2010.

In addition, I've been doing the road warrior thing giving speeches across the country. I started a month ago in Baltimore, then moved on to Dallas, Las Vegas, Seattle, Boston, New York City and I'm off to San Diego in about an hour.

Business owners everywhere are concerned about the economy and how to do well in it. I suppose it's good to be the "recession guy" in the middle of a recession. (There is a really big lesson in that last sentence if you read it very carefully a few times. Hint: I was NOT the recession guy BEFORE the recession.)

What has been interesting to me is to get feedback from business owners across many different cities in America.

In my speeches, I talk about the importance of finding the overlooking opportunity in your business that is growing despite the fact that it is being ignored and under-resourced.

When I mention this idea, the initial reaction is often "Ha! like I'd overlook that kind of gift."

Towards the end of my talk, I often ask people in the room how many have some portion of their business (often it's a small portion of the business) that is either growing or has not been negatively impact by the economy as much as other parts of the business.

For some businesses, it's a particular product or service line. In other, it's a particular customer segment that continues to buy despite the economy.

But what I have noticed is that in EVERY audience I speak to, about 10% – 15% of the businesses owners in the room, when prompted, acknowledge that this phenomenon happens to describe their business.

Then I ask the "killer" question… the one that "shames" people into action… I then ask, "Over the past 12 months, have you increased your personal focus, staffing, or funding to further develop this particular revenue stream?"

And 95% of the team the answer is a very sheepish, "No."

The owner of a very successful business up in Seattle said it best, "Ya know, I'm almost ashamed to admit. But you know, we actually do have this one service that has been growing month-over-month for the past 15 months in a row."

"It's a service that I think is kind of lame. I personally find it annoying. But, when I think about it our customers must really like it because it continues to grow despite our best efforts to ignore it.

We originally offered it on whim, but customers keep buying each month. And ya know, we haven't done anything with it at all. Geez… that's just so embarassing."

This is reaction is extremely common. Many very successful business owners overlook these growth areas because the growth does not match their mental model of their own business.

If they think they are in the business of selling "Product A," they interpret any growth in Product B as an accident… and they're slow to recognize it as an opportunity.

One of the reason I insist that all of my clients look at their dashboard numbers regularly and for making major strategic decisions is to use facts to blow away any assumptions they're holding about the business.

The facts describe reality. What you choose to do with it is an entirely other matter.

For example, I also met a former General Motors executive who was probably one of the top 50 in all of GM. He described to me how GM would look at their monthly sales figures and compare them to Toyota regularly.

They noticed that monthly sales had shrunk steadily 240 months in a row (that's every month for 20 years). During that same time, Toyota and Honda sales grew steadily 240 months in a row… in the exact opposite trend of GM.

How did other GM executives interpret these market facts?

They concluded that Toyota didn't know how to make "real" cars. They didn't know how to "push iron" like the folks in Detroit.

Geez 240 months in a row of declining sales for GM vs. 240 months in a row of increasing sales for Toyota. There is a message in dashboard metrics if one is willing to look at it objectively.

See the real problem was DENIAL. GM was unable to accept the brutally harsh reality that Toyota was doing something right–at least by customer's standards. It never occurred to the executives at GM to deal with reality and to learn from it.

This is a mistake. Don't let happen in your business.

Business metrics tell a story… if you care to look. If your business stinks, it stinks. Deal with it. But whatever you do, don't just stick your head in the sand and deny it.

Similarly, if the runt of your product line is selling well… don't deny and discount it's successes. Often times, you will stumble upon doing something exactly right in your marketplace. When you do, it's important to be smart enough to realize you just got lucky, and capitalize on it.

Of course, it helps a LOT to be deliberately experimenting with new ways of generating revenue. Lots of disciplined trial and error will eventually allow you to stumble upon an opportunity.

The trick is then to realize you just got lucky and to capitalize on it.

This is how you find growth in virtually any business. It's the process I used with all of my clients to find ways to grow their businesses when their competitors are shrinking.

What has surprised me (but shouldn't have) is how many people have been following this "train wreck is slow motion" story.

The more reporters dig, the more dirt they find… and apparently there seems to be an abundant supply of it.

I too have been following this story out of a morbid curiosity to watch a great American brand get destroyed.

In the early 1990's, I was the photography editor for my college paper – The Stanford Daily. During that time, there was a student on campus who was supposed to be a pretty good golfer.

His name was Tiger Woods.

This was a few years before he became famous. I had a few chances to photograph him, but thought photographing golf would be too boring — so I handed out the assignment to other members of my staff.

I forget the exact timing of what happens next, but a year or two later I realized I probably should have taken that assignment myself.

In Tiger's Junior or Senior year he decided to go "pro" and was eligible to take endorsement money. And in his first endorsement deal he got something like a $120 million deal from Nike or something crazy like that.

And with that a great American "squeaky clean" brand was born.

And more recently that brand has been getting demolished.

I think Tiger's PR team is taking the wrong strategy. They have been trying to lay low hoping the whole thing will blow over… Ahem… I don't think it's working.

Now in our society infidelity is sadly nothing new. But what is new and shocking is infidelity tied to the guy with the cleanest image in sports.

People are not gawking a any old indiscretions, they're gawking at Tiger's indiscretions.

His fans are frankly quite disappointed in him… and I'm sure his family is that much more disappointed.

Personal time and space aside, I think laying low is the wrong approach. His fans trusted him and he has violated that trust.

Just like when a major company's product has a major problem (Think: Tylenol in the '80s), the right thing to do is be super pro-active about it, communicate about it frequent and often… until people are so bored by the updates they stop paying attention.

The hiding from the public has only caused enormous speculation and buzz. By staying so quiet, it looks like he's hiding something… and I guess he actually IS hiding something.

So here's my message to Tiger and to anyone else who screws up and disappoints customers. Come clean, get control of your own message, and set the record straight – no matter how ugly the record.

Today's episode of More Profits TV was filmed in front of the Treasure Island Hotel in Las Vegas. In it, I share with you the #1 rule of marketing and how the companies in Las Vegas are amazingly good at it.

Ferrari owners puts his Ferrari Spider 355 for sale at local gas station. Only in Silicon Valley.

I was driving by my local gas station the other day here in Silicon Valley (about 2 miles south of Stanford University) and was the funniest thing.

Some guy had parked his Ferrari Spider F355 (original list price close to $100k) at the gas station with a big for sale sign on it.

I had to do a double take to make sure it was really a Ferrari. I had two reactions: 1) Only in Silicon Valley would you see something like this, 2) Must be a sign of the times. Maybe Ferrari owners need a bailout too…

I was in Baltimore last week speaking to members of the CEO Club of Baltimore. I noticed several people in the room were have great sales and profits in 2009. Today's video explains what these companies had in common and how they were successful in deciding to NOT participate in the Great Recession.

Over the weekend, I saw the newspaper headlines that the US unemployment rate broke the 10% mark. For those in the US, we're now at 10.2% unemployment.

Quite ironically, I was on my way to speak at event that I think epitomizes the solution the average person and entrepreneur can use to combat the effects of 10.2% unemployment. See the video above for the simple idea.

This entrepreneur decided to get into the auto business in 2003 (just 6 years ago) and is as we speak selling a plugin electric car that gets more range per charge than the Chevy Volt (and Prius plugin edition) and sells for half the price… and did this all in just the past 6 years starting with no auto industry experience.

Turns out this caught the eye of Warren Buffet who recently bought 10% of the company.

The following story from Fortune Magazine is a must read

http://money.cnn.com/2009/04/13/technology/gunther_electric.fortune/index.htm

I'd love to your thoughts on this article. Feel free to post them below.

The real cause of The Great Recession is simple.

In nutshell, it's not illegal to be stupid.

Why a bank would lend someone a million dollars to buy a home that's broke, unemployed, and has no income, I'll never know.

It's stupid, but guess what? It's not illegal.

For the borrower that was broke, unemployed, with no savings that got the million dollar loan, perhaps it seemed too good to be true (it was)… and upon further reflection on the idea that the borrower does have to REPAY that loan at some point, it probably wasn't too smart to say "yes" to that loan.

It's equally dumb to basically make side bets on whether these loans to sub-prime borrowers will be repaid. It's even more dumb to make such bets by borrowing tons of money… so any loss is magnified by 100 fold.

It's also pretty dumb in my opinion to let all of this happen without any of it being illegal. I'm all for a free market economy, but even I believe there are some limits.

It may not be illegal to be dumb, but it ought to be illegal to be dumb and reckless.

The reason I mention this is because right now conditions exist in the economy that will form the basis of the NEXT recession – which in my opinion will quickly follow the end of THIS recession.

Yes, I think the likelihood of a dreaded back-to-back recession has steadily been increasing over this past year.

The primary reason for my perspective is the bulk of the recovery has been driven by government spending as opposed to improved customer demand, higher incomes, or more jobs.

The reason I mention this perspective is because many businesses got hurt and many killed because they were caught off guard by the economy.

It wasn't the economy that hurt them. It was the fact that they weren't prepared the hurt them.

Well, let me be one of the few voices to say that there will be continued uncertainty in our economy.

This IS the New NORMAL.

It is best to adapt to it. Decide you will prosper regardless. Take actions to make it happen.

I am working on a new program that will show you HOW to grow your business despite what's happening in the economy.

I'll share with you the premise right now.

Imagine the economy is an economic pie. Under normal circumstances, you get your slice of that pie.

When the economy shrinks, the size of the economic pie shrinks. The only mathematically possible way to grow your business (i.e., get more pie) in a shrinking economy is to get a bigger slice of the shrinking pie.

You do this by taking business away from competitors who aren't as nimble or quick to adapt… the ones who are not prepared to prosper in tough market conditions… the ones who are sitting by waiting for the good times to return (bad idea).

In short, you prosper in this economy by meeting customer needs when competitors are too busy hunkering down, retrenching, clinging to bad decisions, and waiting to be rescued to give customers what they want right now.

While this is common sense, I can assure you as a behavior it is most certainly not very common.

This is the premise behind a new program I am working on… a program for the entrepreneur and business owner that has vowed not to participate in any "bad" economy.

(Hint: It's never a bad economy when your business is growing)

Stay tuned for more details…

In this video, I give my commentary on the old phrase "How to Sell Ice to Eskimos".

Don't forget to add your comments, using the comment form below.

Here is what I mean.

When deciding what to sell and whom to sell it to, you can sell people what they need or should have, or you can sell them what they want.

The easiest way to make money is to sell people what they want… the equivalent of what I call "selling donuts to fat people."

This lesson is especially apparent here in Silicon Valley where the landscape is littered with failed companies who created products that customers should have, probably need, but fundamentally did not want.

This always ends in disaster.

How do I know this?

Because I've made this mistake before and it has cost me dearly. There is a fortune that can be lost in trying to convince a customer they want something, they simply just don't want.

It is MUCH easier to just ask customers what they want and give it to them. It is not much more complicated than that.

Too often thought, we are stuck in a very internally-centric view of our business. As in, "I'm a CPA. I am in the CPA business." "I'm a retailer. I sell things."

At the end of the day, customers don't really care much about us. They just care about themselves and getting what they want taken care of.

What makes this simple principle more difficult to pull off in a recession is customers' spending priorities often change… in some cases quite dramatically.

So if 2 years ago you were selling what customers wanted, but they no longer want it today… and if you haven't changed along side them, then you have a serious problem.

One of the things I always tell my business coaching clients is to remember the easiest way to drive sales in any economy is to simply "sell donuts to fat people". If your business is flexible enough to change what it provides to customers, the trick is to find the new "donut" your customers now crave.

If changing your products/services is too difficult (e.g, such as in a capital intensive business like manufacturing), then you my find it easier to find a different audience or market to serve with your pre-existing "donut".

Either way, you gotta find a way to make this formula work. Just sell people things that the really want… even if it's not what YOU want to sell them. In the end, the person with the money (the customer) votes. And their votes count a lot more than yours.