My new book ‘The Botty Rules – success secrets for business in the 21st Century’ was published on 1st February.

It tells the story of my entrepreneurial career and of the five separate million pound + businesses that I’ve built over the last five years. Interwoven within the story are The Botty Rules – the simple but powerful lessons that I’ve learned along the way, sometimes painfully, but which collectively are a complete blueprint for success for any business owner or entrepreneur.

Botty Rule No. 7 in the book is:“To build a big business, the business owner – that’s you – has to become a ‘marketer’ of their thing, not a ‘doer’ of their thing.”

This is something that the great Dan Kennedy www.dankennedy.com taught me. Most business owners that I meet (and I meet a heck of a lot, every single week as I travel round the country) are very much doers of whatever it is that they do. I have a friend, Julie, who is a florist. Julie loves creating beautiful things with flowers – it’s what she enjoys and gets her pleasure and fulfilment from, but she knows that in making the conscious decision to be a doer of floristry, she is compromising and inhibiting the growth of her business.

In contrast, my friend, David Costa in Brighton is also a florist. The difference is David sees himself as a marketer of floristry services. He has no interest in arranging the flowers – what he is focused on is finding new customers and looking after the ones that he’s got. That’s why he’s one of Interflora’s top three florists in the whole country – he sees himself as a marketer of floristry services; he spends his time marketing floristry services and he thinks, all the time about how he can better market his floristry services.

If you want to build a super successful business then I’ve learned that you have to get focused for very large chunks of time on the marketing and that starts with how you see your role.

Are you a marketer or are you a doer? It matters. A lot.

We finished publishing ‘The Botty Rules’ tweet by tweet on Twitter recently! It was a genuine world first which we’re really proud of so if you enjoy reading things in chunks of 140 characters at a time why not visit @bottyrules and start from the bottom up!

Or if you’d prefer to read it the traditional way, you can order ‘The Botty Rules’ at all good book stores or via Amazon.

• @andypayne007 check out http://www.secretmeetimg.co.uk/demo in reply to andypayne007 #
• @iguanasolutions Great to have you on board Lucy! Looking forward to working with you! in reply to iguanasolutions #
• Thanks for all the comments about last night's webinar guys… it's was a good one! Hope you've got more stuff done today as a result! #
• Think I'm even more excited than the kids about spending this weekend in the Treehouse at Center Parcs! #
• So pleased with the high calibre people who've applied to come on board as BGA's in so many areas of the UK! #
• @cbridgenuk Glad to help Chris. Good luck with it! It's a great cause. in reply to cbridgenuk #
• Really pleased – we've got some really high calibre people in so many areas of the UK coming on board as BGA's! #
• @Colourbox Boycott was my idol as a kid – & he hails From a nearby village so not a completely bonkers observation in reply to Colourbox #
• RT @Colourbox: @NigelBotterill @MarkCreaser Entrepreneur's Circle Blueprints came today. They are awesome! #
• Appreciate all the retweets of the latest blog post guys! How's the week shaping up for you? #
• @thebestofTruro Glad you liked it! Gets you thinking doesn't it! in reply to thebestofTruro #
• @sparklebizcards Thanks for that! Are you signed up for the webinar tomorrow too Steve? Best ever! in reply to sparklebizcards #
• @GaryOMahoney_qp Old one went 3 weeks ago I'm afraid… New one might be going as well at this rate!! #
• @RichardDixonSM- Probably Richard! Guess we'll just have to wait and see! in reply to RichardDixonSM #
• @_NickAllen That's great Nick! What job are you doing now then? in reply to _NickAllen #
• Thanks for all the retweets guys! Appreciate it! #
• @Awakenlifecoach Me and you both Beverley! Glad it was useful. in reply to Awakenlifecoach #
• @martingladdish Let me know how it goes Martin! in reply to martingladdish #
• Don't think I've ever spoken to so many people on phone in 1 day. Dozens of calls to our BGA applicants. It's all coming together… #
• Range Rover v poorly. DepArted on a flatbed truck So far v good cust service from dealer. Have RR Sport instead for few days #
• Don't all laugh at once but my lovely new 3 week old Range Rover won't start #

My new book ‘The Botty Rules – success secrets for business in the 21st Century’ was published on 1st February.

It tells the story of my entrepreneurial career and of the five separate million pound + businesses that I’ve built over the last five years. Interwoven within the story are The Botty Rules – the simple but powerful lessons that I’ve learned along the way, sometimes painfully, but which collectively are a complete blueprint for success for any business owner or entrepreneur.

Botty Rule No. 11 in the book is:“Most people in your industry or sector are wrong… about everything”.

This is something that I came to realise only fairly recently. You see, in any group of people, you’ll be able to break that population down into roughly these percentages; 5%, 15%, 60%, 20%.

This applies to, for example, children in a primary school class, franchisees in thebestof, business owners in Bradford, or hairdressers in the UK. It doesn’t matter what the population is, it will break down, broadly, into those percentages. Here’s what those percentages represent. In business speak, 5% are very successful and rich. 15% are getting there, 60% are getting by and 20%, at any one time, are struggling.

Now, that’s all very well, but when you stop to think about the implications of that analysis for a moment, then it forces you to reach the inescapable conclusion that most people in your industry or sector are wrong – about everything. Because, you see, most people are in the 60% and the 20%.

If you were to look at that group as franchisors in the UK then, by any definition, we are in the top 5% (probably in the top 1%, in truth). Over the last six years, we have rewritten the rules of franchising in the UK (which, incidentally, we didn’t do deliberately, it’s just that we didn’t have £100,000 to throw at a franchise consultant when we first started out and so we mapped out how we thought we should do it without realising that what we had mapped out was, in fact, almost the polar opposite of established practices amongst franchisors. The fact that we did everything very differently and are in the top 1% is not a coincidence).

Work out who the 5% are in your sector or industry and then make it your business to find out what it is that they are doing differently to everybody else because, I promise you, there will be things that they are doing very differently to everybody else and that’s why they’re getting the very different results.

You cannot ignore this. If you follow the crowd and do what everybody else does then you’ll get the results that everybody else gets and those results will be mediocre and average. You will not become super successful by doing what everybody else does.

You can order ‘The Botty Rules’ at all good book stores or via Amazon.

Kindle Edition also available here.

We finished publishing ‘The Botty Rules’ tweet by tweet on Twitter recently! It was a genuine world first which we’re really proud of so if you enjoy reading things in chunks of 140 characters at a time why not visit @bottyrules and start from the bottom up!

You might have heard me say this a few times in the past, but it’s that important that I’m going to say it again!

What other people say about you holds a lot more weight than what you say about yourself. Fact.

Word of mouth has always had an important part to play in growing businesses, so it surprises me how few people actually use testimonials in their marketing! Madness!

We’ve just finished a great campaign on thebestof called ’14 Days of Love’ that really encouraged businesses to get behind the power of testimonials and the results we’re seeing off the back of that are great.

We know that businesses who have lots of testimonials attached to their features on thebestof get more business. It’s not hard to understand why really, let’s face it, if you are presented with two businesses that offer a service or product that you are looking for and one of them has no customer testimonials and the other one has a hundred – you’re going to go with the one with a hundred aren’t you!

What other people say about your business really matters! So… what are your customers saying? And are you using their testimonials in your marketing?

Apart from boosting your bottom line, testimonials can work wonders for morale too. Last week I featured the story of Dan Gavrovski Banana Fudge Studios in Norwich who had been on the brink of giving up. During ’14 Days of Love’ his customers left him 119 testimonials earning him the title of 2nd ‘Most Loved Photographer in the UK’. Because of those testimonials, he could see how valued his service is and now he’s hoping to take it up a notch and win the ‘Most Loved Photographer in the UK’ award next year!

Jane’s Ironing Service is a business in Truro who joined thebestof Truro just a week before the end of the campaign and nearly 70 testimonials later, she had won the accolade of ‘UK’s Most Loved Ironing Service’ – she has already had a fair bit of interest from the press and a whole bunch of new customers as a result! She’s even having her logo redesigned to include her new title! Good move. That’s the power of testimonials.

There’s no way YOU could go out there and claim to be the ‘most loved’ or best business in your area of expertise – only your customers can do that for you and there’s real power in it if they do!

How do you use testimonials in your marketing? And if you’re not using them – why not?

My new book ‘The Botty Rules – success secrets for business in the 21st Century’ was published on 1st February.

It tells the story of my entrepreneurial career and of the five separate million pound + businesses that I’ve built over the last five years. Interwoven within the story are The Botty Rules – the simple but powerful lessons that I’ve learned along the way, sometimes painfully, but which collectively are a complete blueprint for success for any business owner or entrepreneur.

Botty Rule No. 10 in the book is:“The internet is here to stay, baby, and super successful business owners all embrace the web and use it to help them grow their profits BUT 90% of local businesses are doing nowhere near enough to exploit the potential of the web”.

I’m amazed at how few local businesses, really, have tackled the web and used it to help them develop and grow. At the end of the day, it is just another media, but it is a very powerful one and one that is becoming woven into the very fabric of our society.

For instance, if you haven’t learned about and experimented with Google ad words (or Pay-Per-Click, or Sponsored Links – they’re all the same thing). Then you are bonkers. I’m serious. For many businesses (okay, this doesn’t apply to absolutely every industry or sector, but it does apply to the vast majority). There are large numbers of people looking online, in your area, for what you do, today. What Pay-Per-Click does is to give you the opportunity to be found by them quickly and easily and if you haven’t learnt how to do that and tested and trialled it, then you have probably made a very big mistake hitherto. The good news is you can correct it tomorrow.

An even bigger omission by many businesses is a failure to be registered on Google Maps or Google Places as it’s now being called.

When someone undertakes a “local search”, Google will normally throw back a map at the top of the search results with red pins in it. There’s never more than seven pins and each pin relates to a local business that ostensibly provides the service that you have just searched for.

Registering your business with Google Places is free and it takes less than 10 minutes to do, yet it can get your business on the front page of Google every day.

In my experience, 90% of businesses that I talk to have not done this. Completely bonkers.

Again, if you need instructions on how to do this, then you can get it through my Entrepreneurs Circle membership (and there is a two-month free trial, don’t forget!)

The key here is that just having a website is nowhere near enough. You have to be utilising the internet to drive leads and enquiries, build your database and make sales for your business. If you’re not, then, in all likelihood, it offers you the single biggest potential for growth over the next six to nine months.

You can get free access to online training on Google Adwords and instructions on how to get your business registered on Google Places as well as a two month free trial of my Entrepreneur’s Circle by visiting www.nigelbotterill.com

You can order ‘The Botty Rules’ at all good book stores or via Amazon.

Kindle Edition also available here.

We finished publishing ‘The Botty Rules’ tweet by tweet on Twitter this weekend! It was a genuine world first which we’re really proud of so if you enjoy reading things in chunks of 140 characters at a time why not visit @bottyrules and start from the bottom up!

• Freezing to death in the Directors Box at Port Vale. It's a long story…but not the ideal way to end what has been a v good week:) #
• Thanks for all the blog post re-tweets and the comments about yesterday's Time Management meeting guys! It was a good one wasn't it! #
• Great day in Leicester yesterday – always good to see so many of you! #
• @ORB_UK It'll be worth it Jill! See you there in reply to ORB_UK #
• Looking forward to a great day in Leicester today! #
• @mjrwebdesign Nice in reply to mjrwebdesign #
• Two amazing goals from Arsenal. Brilliant… #
• @Sarah_Foden Thanks Sarah – glad you enjoyed it in reply to Sarah_Foden #
• @GaynorRamsden That was a nice interview wasn't it! Very nice man… in reply to GaynorRamsden #
• @GrahamOnCall No Leeds are my team…so I live a lot in the past as well #
• Doing loads of radio interviews today re 14 Days of Love. Merseyside, Bolton & channel Islands have been best so far:) #
• @davidwillmott very strange. All working ok & lots received. Can u try again pls? in reply to davidwillmott #
• @JuliaCanham Rise above your prejudices Ms Canham… Twill be a fab day in reply to JuliaCanham #
• @Colourbox no time to recover from his Merseyside debacle and his new squad aren't good enough to avoid the drop… in reply to Colourbox #
• @GrahamOnCall Him – probably. Club – definitely. #
• @jamiereevesuk No chance! in reply to jamiereevesuk #
• @farmersboyinn We'll help you get it sorted…don't worry. C u Thursday in reply to farmersboyinn #
• Can't believe Hodgson has gone to West Brom… #
• RT @HeidiRodriguez_OMG just checked price of Botty Rules on Amazon & 2 sellers have copies at £41 each! [it's good but not that good ] #
• @alerterblog Looks like I'll be in London again tomorrow but the team will look after you royally. Safe trip… in reply to alerterblog #
• In the Green Room at CNBC – I genuinely don't understand all the jargon…s&p markets, 50 day correlations…this could be fun #
• Live on CNBC at 11.45… Re 14 Days of Love… #
• @bottyrules is number 6 in Amazon's 'Development' Bestsellers today! Great stuff! http://amzn.to/fiT266 #
• @keshmorjaria Not the been unfortunately , or I would def have taken up your offer. in reply to keshmorjaria #
• @JuliaDoherty Not quite Julia! in reply to JuliaDoherty #
• @Iain_at_TG We are indeed! Will do! in reply to Iain_at_TG #
• Got a busy day of interviews lined up for tomorrow in London. Great way to start the week! Looking forward to it. #
• @itsPaulKirby Had great time thanks Paul – hope u did too. Mind you didn't enjoy my humiliation by the ventriloquist in the 12.30 show… in reply to itsPaulKirby #
• @DaveAllan72 Bournville, Birmingham- home of Cadburys #
• @shudokanpreston You sound like Sue in reply to shudokanpreston #
• Can't believe all those late goals for Cardiff, Norwich & Swansea. Thought we were gonna close some ground… #
• Leeds really do need 3 points against Bristol City… #
• Cadbury World is great fun. Much more to it than I expected…& lots of chocolate #
• @twistystraws …and a sore bum in reply to twistystraws #
• Still chuckling after Russell Howard gig at NEC last night… #
• Todays #14daysoflove prize is £250 to spend with any thebestof business! Share the love here! http://bit.ly/hb5V7v #
• @Crazyassmedia Call Julia in my office on Monday & she can send you a copy out directly. We'll even cover the P&P!! in reply to Crazyassmedia #
• Earning my 'Good Dad' badge this morning – taking children to Cadbury World… #
• @pauldonno Good to see u yesterday – hope it was helpful…. in reply to pauldonno #
• @Crazyassmedia I know for a fact that they have 3039 copies in stock right now!!! in reply to Crazyassmedia #
• @Linksocialmedia works both ways. Ping me an email & I'll get one of the team to have a chat with you in reply to Linksocialmedia #
• @ikdkitchens Glad it was helpful – great to see you… in reply to ikdkitchens #

My new book ‘The Botty Rules – success secrets for business in the 21st Century’ was published on 1st February.

It tells the story of my entrepreneurial career and of the five separate million pound + businesses that I’ve built over the last five years. Interwoven within the story are The Botty Rules – the simple but powerful lessons that I’ve learned along the way, sometimes painfully, but which collectively are a complete blueprint for success for any business owner or entrepreneur.

Botty Rule No. 4 in the book is: “Attitude is everything, attitude is the foundation of everything”

This is a quote from Geoffrey Gitomer. I like Geoffrey a lot. He’s an American (but we mustn’t hold that against him) and he’s a real master of selling in particular.

However, my favourite book of his is “The Little Gold Book of Yes! Attitude”. If you haven’t got a copy of this book, I heartily recommend it to you. In it, Geoffrey articulates in his own unique style (full of large print and lots of pictures!) the importance of attitude to success in business, as indeed any other aspect of life.

When people come to our offices in N5, they invariably comment on what a great vibe there is around the place. And they’re right. There is. And it comes from the attitude in this business. Of course things go wrong occasionally, but we are an incredibly “can do” bunch. No one is allowed to be down for more than a few minutes (yes, really!) and we all smile. It’s not forced, it happens naturally because everyone that I’ve hired into N5 has the right attitude. It’s the first criteria on our selection sheet. Give me the right attitude over skills or experience any time, because I can teach the skills and experience, but attitude is much harder to learn. With it, however, you can move mountains. Or at least you can build businesses, bloody fast, and have fun on the way.

You do have to work at having a great attitude, because we all take knock-backs occasionally and despite what people say, I don’t believe you were born with your attitude. (Imagine the scene in the maternity unit now, “Congratulations, Mrs Smith, it’s a baby boy … the bad news is, he’s a negative one!” It wouldn’t happen, would it?) This is particularly important if you’re a business owner. It’s lonely and bad things do happen. Regularly. You’d better make sure you’ve got the right support system in place and the right people around you to help get you back up when you take a knock. And you have to get back up quickly – you can’t fester in self-pity or negativity for days, not if you’re running your own business. My Entrepreneurs Circle can help with that.

You can also follow @bottyrules on Twitter and support us as we publish the whole book tweet by tweet! This is a genuine world first so spread the word!

My team received a message from Sara and Chris Greenfield who run thebestof Norwich yesterday and I had to share it’s contents with you.

One of their clients, a photographer called Dan Gavrovski wrote a blog post about what the 14 Days of Love had meant to him – he’d thought about giving up his business last year and the campaign may well have given him the will to carry on.

Take a look at what he has to say here. It’s a really heart warming read and just goes to show how important it is that we continue to recognise the best businesses in our local areas.

Good work guys!

This year’s 14 Days of Love campaign has been a huge success! Well over 100,000 local people from all corners of the UK put forward their nominations for more than 16,000 of their favourite businesses and now the results are in…

The Left Bank Brasserie in Ormskirk, Lancashire, is officially Britain’s Most Loved Business for the 2nd year running with 1700 testimonials going towards their 2011 win (they have 2360 in total at the time of me writing this)! Any business that’s loved that much deserves some recognition I say – and that’s what 14 Days of Love is all about.

Here are a few of the other businesses that made it to the Top 100 List:

- Pampered Pets Dog & Cat Grooming in Walsall
- Trilby’s Hairdressers in Basingstoke
- Tiggers Children’s Nursery in Stroud
- Parcels4Delivery Courier Service in Banbury
- Wildmoor Oak Pub & Restaurant in Bromsgrove
- Two Front Teeth Photographers in Cheltenham
- Chiropractic Life, Chiropractors in Brighton
- Shifnal Balti Indian Restaurant in Telford
- Gwen McCreadie Weight Loss Clinic in Dundee

We had quite a few celebrities supporting the campaign this year too – World Boxing Champion Amir Khan, X Factor winner Matt Cardle, TV Presenter Eamonn Holmes and Champion Swimmer and TV personality Sharron Davies all shared the love for their favourite local businesses!

I’ve been busy giving interviews about 14 Days of Love for the last few days which I’ve enjoyed immensely – the one I did for CNBC is below for your viewing pleasure

I’d like to finish by congratulating everyone who was involved in making this campaign such a success – it’s been a job very well done guys and there are now a lot of local businesses all around the UK who are feeling ‘loved’ today because they’ve been recognised for all their efforts. Good work!

My new book ‘The Botty Rules – success secrets for business in the 21st Century’ was published on 1st February.

It tells the story of my entrepreneurial career and of the five separate million pound + businesses that I’ve built over the last five years. Interwoven within the story are The Botty Rules – the simple but powerful lessons that I’ve learned along the way, sometimes painfully, but which collectively are a complete blueprint for success for any business owner or entrepreneur.

Botty Rule No. 21 in the book is: “You’ve got to stop the sabotage in your business.”

This applies particularly if you employ staff – although not exclusively so. What I mean by sabotage is things happening in your business that you don’t want to happen and that are diminishing either your level or sales or your level of customer service. Let me give you a couple of examples to make my point here.

I was in a very nice restaurant for Sunday lunch a few weeks ago. It’s part of a small national chain (they have 13 restaurants around the country). I noticed that when the waiters were bringing the bill out to the other tables, the bills were being presented on top of a nice blue postcard. I also noticed that no one was filling in the postcard. I was intrigued to see what was on it. When we finished our meal, the waiter brought me the bill and, sure enough, it was brought to me on a little silver tray sat on top of a nice blue postcard. It was all wonderfully branded and it was a straightforward play for them to capture contact details and build their database. A big tick.

What had happened here is that the marketing manager at head office decided that they ought to try and build a database and collect contact information which is clearly the right thing to do. He/she had commissioned a designer and they’d done a good job designing a very nice postcard that was functional and looked appropriate. Then all the restaurant managers had been briefed and they, in turn, had to brief their staff about the new process for handing out the bills and what to do with the cards, etc. In short, a lot of effort had gone into getting that postcard onto my table, and everyone else’s table in that restaurant that day – yet no one was filling them in. Why not?

Two reasons:

Firstly, there was no pen. This is the classic ship being sunk but for a ha’poth of tar.

The second reason was that none of the staff ever mentioned the postcard or made a request for it to be filled in. If they had just said, “Here’s your bill, Sir, and while I go and get the credit card machine, if you’d like to just fill your details in on this postcard here we have a series of wine tasting events and food events and also some special offers and we can keep you in touch with those to make sure you don’t miss out on anything in the months ahead”. If they’d have done that and handed you a pen at the same time, then they would have got most people to fill those cards in. As it was, they got hardly anyone. Sabotage.

When we introduced call tracking into our business I found that we were missing over 40 calls a week into our sales lines that were coming in after we’d switched the phones onto night service, but before staff had left for the evening. Sabotage.

One of our restaurant customers on explosive marketing www.explosivemarketing.co.uk our Done-4-U restaurant marketing service is open from 12.00 till 2.00 and then from 5.00 till midnight. There’s never anyone in his restaurant during the afternoon. One day he was in the restaurant with his accountant doing his year-end figures when the phone started ringing. He answered it and on both occasions it was someone enquiring whether the restaurant was open that evening and if so, could they book a table. The restaurant, you see, is out in the sticks. It’s a destination place. They don’t get any passing traffic, and what was happening here is that people were ringing up to check they were open before they made the trip and that there’d be a table available for them. Long story short, that restaurant owner now has his phone answered by an answering service until 5.00 p.m. every day and the result of which is that his bookings have risen by 25% a week. He was sabotaging his own business.

What’s happening in your business, today, this week that’s sabotaging your results? If you want to be super successful you’ve got to find it and stop it.

You can order ‘The Botty Rules’ at all good book stores or via Amazon.

Kindle Edition also available here.

You can also follow @bottyrules on Twitter and support us as we publish the whole book tweet by tweet! This is a genuine world first so spread the word!