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Creating a snappy email signature, assembling a slide deck for a big sales presentation, or throwing together a flyer at the last minute for a conference or trade show? With the proliferation of desktop publishing apps and cheap image editing software, we're all graphic designers now.

Hint:  Ask the right question
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Leadership expert Simon Sinek has made a living encouraging business owners, managers and entrepreneurs to do one REALLY SIMPLE thing: Figure out why you do what you do.

McKinsey Quarterly Offers a Few Tips

If you're feeling like sales at your small business have reached a plateau (or even dropped), here are some suggestions to get you up and running strong once again.

Hunt in packs

No one likes to cold call. Even gristly sales veterans would rather "farm" existing customers for new business than hit the phone.

We recently partnered with Central Washington Sleep Diagnostic Center to launch a new website.   We wanted to give the site a modern and clean look, along with ensuring it was easy to navigate for visitors.  You can visit their new website at www.cwsleepcenter.

If you travel for work, you've probably experienced something like this before: You board an airplane for a long flight with the idea of getting some work done during the trip. With several hours free from cell phones and the usual office interruptions, you should be able to get some real work done — until you realize that your laptop battery's going dead and there's no way to recharge before arriving at your destination.

If you’re like a lot of us, you get so much email every day that you might spend as little as 15 seconds scanning a message to determine how it applies to you. Now, imagine that other people are reading your email the same way. If they can't quickly identify the purpose of your message, they’ll probably delete it or leave it in the Inbox for "later"— if later ever comes.

Companies today have too much information. What companies don't have enough of is intelligence - and no, we're not talking about your staff. Business intelligence refers to the insights you discover when you turn all that data into something that your employees can use to make smart business decisions.

We recently presented a seminar highlighting new features in Office 2010 with the local Chamber of Commerce and were pleased to have a great turnout.  The feedback we received was that these types of seminars would be very beneficial to our clients.  So, we are still in the planning phase but wanted to reach out to our clients and see what type of training would be beneficial.

Our staff is starting to utilize Microsoft OneNote 2010 more and more with everyday tasks.  What is OneNote you ask?  OneNote is a newer program in the Microsoft Office Suite that works similar to a digital notebook.   Here's how Microsoft describes it:
With Microsoft OneNote 2010 you can collect and organize everything you need—notes, photos, videos, and web links— for any project you are working on.

When you walk into a business meeting, do you wear pajamas?
Do you let your children manage the accounts receivable for your office?
When you buy business technology, do you choose products designed for home use?

The pricing on consumer-grade technology is tempting.