Seth Godin is setting a trend. He has simple, quirky, back to basics advice in a complicated technological age. Marketers talk about him on a first name basis, Seth (like Cher) - they read his blog posts religiously, post links on Facebook and quote him in conversations.

Though his marketing insights are profound, some of the most helpful information for business people is his “common sense” observations and recommendations on customer service and sales. Here are a few favorites:

“Top Twelve Ways to Grow Your Business in a Down Market”

“The Vice President of No”

“Sell”

Like most business people, I am always reading some type of business, leadership or personal development book. I have read so many over the years (many really bad) that I am always looking for recommendations before heading to the bookstore.

The Inc. Magazine staff put together a top 30 list called ” The Business Owner’s Bookshelf”. Though I have not read them all, the books on the list that I have read deserve to be there. Here are the top 5:

1. Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, by Peter Bernstein (1996)

2. The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything, by Guy Kawasaki (2004)

3. The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, by Marc Levinson (2006)

4. Brand New: How Entrepreneurs Earned Consumers’ Trust from Wedgwood to Dell, by Nancy F. Koehn (2001)

5. The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle’s-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads, and Other Workplace Afflictions, by Scott Adams (1996)

To read the full list click here.

Spreadsheets are great for calculating interest but they are not an effective way to generate reports. Use your software.

Today every business management software package has some kind of custom report writer, yet many businesses are creating their business critical reports using Excel. Learning your system’s custom reporting tool and creating your reports using these tools will provide companies with huge return. Once custom reports are created, and all transactions are completed for that accounting period, then reports are generated at the touch of a button and the report contains actual data.

Spreadsheet reports require too much time for data entry, possibility for data entry error and probability of formula corruption. Spreadsheet reports lack timeliness, integrity and the ability to reproduce historical reports.

In a recent issue of The Peachtree Insider, the tip of the month addresses keyboard shortcuts: a way to keep your hands on the keyboard rather than slowing down to move to the mouse for a couple of clicks just to go back to the keyboard. If you are unfamiliar with reasons why you might want to leave your mouse alone, read this.

While the short list included is a fine start, it hardly scratches the surface on ways you can keep your productivity up by keeping your fingers on the keyboard. Going beyond mere keyboard shortcuts, other tools are available to help with text substitution. Text substitution is a system in which a user creates a hotstring (specific characters) that when typed are automatically replaced with a longer string of text. For example, rather than typing the entire name of our company, I can simply type A-S-L to get Acuity Solutions, LLC.

I recommend Texter from the folks at Lifehacker.com which works across all Windows applications so you can use it in Peachtree, Word, Excel, Outlook…you get the idea. Texter allow users to include date and time variables in text replacement and punctuation can be used in hotstrings. By the way, it’s free.

If you’re using text substitution, let us know how it works for you. We also want to hear any others ways you avoid the mouse.

This is the first post on our new blog - Make Your BUSINESS BETTER. Thanks for visiting! We have been helping businesses improve their business process for over 20 years and have created this blog to share some of the things we have learned and provide a portal for information we come accross. We appreciate feedback and suggestion. If you like it - tell your friends and associates.