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what are your new year’s resolutions? add your comment here.

by rick telberg

the new year always feels like the right time to reflect and then identify a few key strategies to break some bad habits, set new goals and improve skills – both professionally and personally. the question remains open: what are your new year’s resolutions?

while you consider your answers, check out these from professional colleagues around the world and let us know what you think.

i have plenty of items to pick from, but i think my commitment will be:

professionally – explore new avenues of delivering value to our clients using technology in a new way. web delivery, video conferencing and online communities, to name a few will be areas that i will be concentrating on in 2009.

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the sba released a reference guide (pdf, 106 pages) to small business activity that includes state level detail.

a lot of good information including:

• between 2000 and 2005 the number of nonemployer business (personal businesses) grew at a rate almost 4 times faster than the overall growth growth rate for businesses. as of 2005 there were over 20 million nonemployer businesses.
• the number of small employer business (less than 500 employees) grew at a rate roughly 3 times faster than large companies. in 2005 there were roughly 6 million small employer businesses.
• small businesses created almost 80% of the us economy’s net new jobs from 2004 to 2005.

“these numbers clearly illustrate the growing role the small business sector is playing in the us economy,” according to small business labs: interesting small business facts and data from the sba.

marcus, the reigning guru of professional services marketing, has a few tips for marketing into a recession. well worth reading, remembering and using:

1. there may be real opportunity in that competitors may be retrenching, which means that if you attack where competitors retreat, your normal marketing impact may be magnified.
2. refocus your marketing efforts to emphasis strategy. for example, if you’ve been concentrating on the catalogue of marketing tools, shift emphasis to market analysis and an abrupt strategy change. by demonstrating your ability to focus on markets for your firm’s services, you might bring management to better understand the firm’s markets. if you can do this effectively, you might get the firm to prune efforts in weaker services, and on weaker clients, and refocus on services and clients that give greater return on investment.
3. analyze the firm’s clientele in terms of the number of clients in each of the declining, static, and emerging industries. focus strategies on prioritizing on clients and prospects in emerging industries, next on static of table industries, and least on companies and clients in declining industries. by designing programs in this context, you increase potential return on investment, and by making your total marketing efforts more effective, you even may save money.
4. without minimizing efforts to build name recognition and reputation, focus on demonstrating your firm’s professional capabilities. if you do this, the name recognition and reputation will emerge on their own.
5. minimize marketing efforts to sell the whole firm, and focus instead on individual practices. again, focus on practices in which you have greater strength, or are in industries in which you have greater experience.
6. think target marketing. a well-devised direct mail program, for example, is not only effective but cost effective. make a list of ten companies your firm would most like to have as clients, and hit them with a full follow-up program.
7. don’t worry too much on esoteric problems like firm differentiation. in professional services marketing, competition is won not by showing that your firm is better than their firm, but by demonstrating competence and superior performance industry by industry and practice by practice.

full article at the marcus letter.

there’s no smart at smart, says bowman. (subscribe here.)

james j. smart, who founded the firm smart & associates as a sole owner in 1998 and expanded through creative acquisition to a 600-person firm with more than $100 million revenue, is out at smart business advisory and consulting, according to today’s bowman firstalert. steve m. samek replaces smart as ceo-president.

great hill partners, the private equity firm that bought 80% of the firm in may 2007, reportedly asked him to step down. smart isn’t upset. “that’s private equity playbook 101. you replace the ceo who founded the firm with your own person,” he told the philadelphia business journal. “i’m proud of the organization i built and the people there. it’s tough to leave. the next target would have been an ipo and that’s still a long way off. this is a good time for a handoff. there’s not as much acrimony as one would believe.”

to get the firm to ipo, bowman says, samek will need a little more success than he’s had since he was mp at arthur andersen. after aa folded, samek became ceo-principal of fulcrum capital, a strategic and financial consulting and investment firm. for the past couple of years, samek was ceo of chicago-based uhy advisors, a firm with similar issues to sbac including moving into an ipo.

samek, who lives in chicago, will divide his time between sbac’s devon, pa., headquarters and the firm’s chicago and new york city offices. smart, who has a five-year noncompete that runs through may 2012, is meeting with members of the local private equity community in hopes of running another business. he has little interest in re-entering the accounting profession. “i’ve done that,” smart says.

within just a few weeks of ending an 18-month absence in new york with the acquisition of mahoney cohen & company, cbiz is filling a huge hole in boston by acquiring cambridge, mass.-based tofias, according to bowman’s accounting report. subscribe here.

the two transactions add about $93 million to cbiz’s top line. in addition, the deals reinforce cbiz as a major player in acquisition deals, says allan koltin, the chicago based consultant. it also establishes a high-bar for making an acquisition. cbiz is paying premium prices for the practices.

stay tuned. bowman’s soon will report additional insight into the acquisitions.

related:

• cbiz expands unsecured credit facility