Here is Part 1 of the books that always keep me challenged and pushing forward in my life and business even while wandering in my robe.

Trust your gut, the research is done and proven!

The Kolbe Concept and Kathy Kolbe’s work are both mind bending and life altering. These three books are a bit older now but they make no less of an impact now then they did when they were released.

When I was still working in a corporate environment doing marketing for a recruiting and coaching company I was introduced to the Kolbe A index. A test that validates our instincts and studies the Conative part of our brain. Kolbe Wisdom says that if we are free to be ourselves and faced with a task each of us will use a path of least resistance perfectly matched for ourselves to get to an outcome.

When I took the Kolbe A index and got my results it was one of the most liberating days of my entire life and gave permission to be who I am. I have long been branded on the ADD and ADHD scale but I and many other entrepreneurs will be happy to know that Kathy’s work attacks that the whole notion of this head on.

The impact of this work has been so great that I headed to Phoenix a few years ago to become a Kolbe Certified Consultant so I would be able to share this knowledge and coach people and businesses about it’s impact. So shameless plug time, if you have any questions about Kolbe don’t hesitate to contact me.

I have a lot more to say on the subject but I will do it in an upcoming series of articles, in the mean time if your are on twitter you need to be following @kathykolbe. At our growth seminar we were bugging Kolbe Corp that they need to be doing more in social media and now we have Kathy addicted to Twitter. Her tweets are always informative and will help to shed light on the tool.

Powered by Instinct: 5 Rules for Trusting Your Guts is a simple read done much like a conversation between two people. It might be to informal and lacking a bit of meat for some readers but it can be consumed in a few stress free hours.

The Conative Connection: Uncovering the Link Between Who You Are and How You Perform is Kathy’s first book and goes into a lot of the research, It was written in the 90’s so some of the research has changed but it is still very valuable information.

Pure Instinct: Business’ Untapped Resource This book goes into a lot of detail for how the Kolbe tools are used in a business group setting. I would suggest that you leave this one until you have a better understanding of the concept or if you like to read deep into a subject.

The “Secret” but built for Business without all the “When I wish Upon a Star” and still sit on my ass all this free money will come to me.

When I was on the road to getting the hell out of the corporate world and was looking for guidance for how I could take my small side evening business and make it more then just a hobby I got caught up in the whole “The Secret”  movie explosion.

Do I regret it, not a chance. I credit myself with taking the time to study and listen to what the teachers from the movie were actually saying. In my opinion that 90 min movie will go down as one of the best pieces of marketing ever. Most of all it opened a dialogue to make it acceptable to say things like you are a business person who meditates.

If you take the time to look at the other coaching the teachers do you will understand that the Law of Attraction is only one law and a starting point. During the movie John Assaraf was the person in the movie that resonated most with me, I think because he came to it from a business perspective. I was on a conference call with him and his OneCoach partner Murray Smith when he said we all need to remember the next most important universal law, The Law of “GOYA” or GET OFF YOUR ASS. If you just sit on your couch and ask the universe to give you everything eventually they will come and take your house from around you and your seat out from under you.

From that I joined the OneCoach’s Business Mastery Program that taught me how to put the right things in the right order to create a successful business.

John and Murray took the process they were teaching clients with great success and published The Answer: Grow Any Business, Achieve Financial Freedom, and Live an Extraordinary Life It is a great read and provides a very good framework to help make sure as a business owner you doing the highest income producing activities that are right for your specific business.

I will be back with part two of my book list very soon. I also want to hear about your great reads and resources. I am an avid business, marketing and personal development  reader so I am always on the look out for new concepts.

Again here are the books I talked about in this post:

Powered by Instinct: 5 Rules for Trusting Your Guts by Kathy Kolbe
The Conative Connection:  by Kathy Kolbe
Pure Instinct: Business’ Untapped Resource by Kathy Kolbe
and The Answer by John Assaraf and Murray Smith

• Building on strengths or fixing weaknesses?
• Late Payments Can Be a Good thing in a Slow Economy
• It’s Time to Reconnect
• “You can lose just as much money being as happy as hell”
• Doing and Knowing What You Love

First, the following is not supposed to be considered a popularity contest, and by no means am I claiming to be the coolest guy out there-well, my five-month-old son may think I’m pretty cool! But what I’d like to ask you is: Who do you know? I don’t want to know if you’ve ever seen James Woods in a Starbucks or if you’re the type of person who gets the thumbs up from everyone you pass. I just want to see if you can develop a list of people you know. Why develop a list? Because, whether you’re a first-year small-business greenhorn or a veteran badass, creating a contact list is one of the best ways to get your marketing wheels rolling. And…uh huh, you know what’s coming here…it’s free!

Instead of buying the first shiny marketing package that catches your eye, set aside a significant period of time and develop a list of all the people you know. By first creating a list of contacts that you can solicit and present your business to, you’ll be taking advantage of verified, warm leads; leads you didn’t have to spend a single marketing dollar on. The first phase of creating your list should be done through a stream of consciousness, writing down every single name that comes to mind. Subsequently, you’ll use a filter and qualify each of the name’s you’ve written down. Try categorizing them into Direct Purchase, Referral Prospects, Barter Candidates and Sleepers.

• Direct Purchase: Who on your list is ready to buy? Which names did you write down that fall under your classifications for your ideal client?
• Referral Prospects: Want to double or triple your new contact list? Then ask yourself “Who do they know?” For example, let’s say you’re a used-car salesman. Okay, so you’ve got your brother on the list, but he’s always been a new-or-nothing kind of guy and though he loves you, refuses to buy from you. Instead of testing this familial tie’s strength, simply think of who he knows or ask him if he thinks any of his friends might be interested. No matter what industry they’re in, business owners would do well to view their company as a network marketing company or an MLM. Look beyond the surface; there are many levels to a solid business.
• Barter Candidates: Who on your list could you trade services/products with? Perhaps your neighbor doesn’t need a car at this time, but you can still ask him if he’d be willing to trade you a few hours of his skills for some car repair discounts you get through your vendors.
• Sleepers: These are the people you just can’t seem to categorize. Perhaps you only briefly met them on the street once and don’t have an actual relationship with them. Either way, you should never assume a contact is worthless until you’ve made the effort to market to them.

Just as we encourage equality in society, so shall it be with your business. Never assume anything about your prospects or contacts until you’ve dealt with them directly-after that, you can judge them as much as you’d like.

Look for our future feature article on follow-up to help you capitalize on your contact list.

• Word of Mouth Marketing: Thank your referrers
• Find Your Comfort Zone & Get Your Message Out!
• Email Marketing, It’s like adding an Army of Employees
• 10 Ways to Improve Workflow
• Submission Doesn’t Always Mean Obedience

Slim Timer - This tool is great to time your daily activities, jobs, ect. You do not have to take the stress of writing down times yourself on paper, and then figuring how many minutes and hours you worked, it does it all for you. You can print your job once completed, or you can export it to excel. Best of all, (for any bootstrapper, this is the best piece of news) it is 100% FREE! We use this for all of our jobs, weather it is designing, development, writing on this blog, or any other tasks we are working on. This is a great tool.

SimplyBill – This is a great invoicing tool for any business owner who needs to send out invoices, but does not want to spend the time making your spreadsheet look “pretty”. SimplyBill does this for you. The cost is minimal ($5.00 – $15.00 per month depending on package) The interface is very easy to use, and it takes out the time and hassle of creating them yourself.

BackPack – WOW. If I was without this tool, I do not know what I would do. This website is great, and best of all, FREE! (there are pay plans available also, but the free plan has worked out very well for me). If you need to keep track of tasks, to-do lists, messages, files and a calendar that can send reminders to your email or cell. If you need to be more organized, this is the tool for you. A+ from us!

HighRise – This is another project from 37signals that exceeds all of our expectations. If you need to keep track of who you talk to, what you said, and what to do next, HighRise is the product for you. I personally use this tool daily for all of my clients, and any business contacts I meet along the way. The Free plan offers you no file storage, and only 250 contacts but if you are on a small scale, this is perfect to test it out, start using it, and once you get to the point of growing your contact list larger, you can upgrade (paid accounts are $12.00 per month for 500 contacts all the way up to $149.00 for 50,000 contacts and 50GB of file space and CampFire for free.

My New Company – This is the place to go if you want to form an LLC or Corp. If all of the forms are overwhelming and you would rather use an easy interface, and quick signup process, then My New Company is the place for you to go. This website helped us out a lot when forming a few LLC’s recently. The price is also very low compared to other companies doing the same thing.

WordPress – This is by far the best Content Management System for any website to be built on. I would recommend other tools like wordpress, but this is #1 on any CMS list for us. Bootstrapping Blog is built on wordpress as well as 90% of all other websites we run. With the setup being as simple as it is, the admin panel being so easy and straight forward, not to mention the 1,000,000’s of free templates out there, wordpress is by far the best CMS for anyone wanting to setup a website and not deal with the hassles of HTML coding.

eFax – Need to fax out a lot of documents every month but would rather not go through the hassle of a new phone line, a new fax machine, and all of the other headaches that go along with it? eFax is your website to visit then. We love this place. A free 30 day trial gives you the advantage to find out how useful it really is with the hands on approach. Sending faxes and receiving them through email. How great is that? The cost after the 30 day trial is $18.00 (AUD) per month plus $0.14 per page sent. The simplicity of this website is great; add @efaxsend.com to the end of the number you are sending to, attach the file you want to send, and it sends to their fax machine. Any faxes sent to the number eFax provides you with goes straight to your email as well.

We will be providing more detailed reviews of products and tools in the future as well, but for the first post in the bootstrapping tools category, we wanted to touch base with a little bit of everything. If you have any tools you think we should cover, feel free to drop a comment and let us know about them.