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Entrepreneurship and business are two of my latest passions. I’ve recently blogged about venture capitalist extraordinaire Dan Rua. I just really love so many facets of business.

However, the one I think wraps everything else together is strategic planning. Strategic Planning Thoughts is a blog dedicated to the subject of strategic planning. I really like the site because it has some great insights on strategic planning. In one post, Robert Bradford does an analysis of the various types of ways that a business in Ann Arbor obtains customers. Of course word of mouth and Repeat! customers were the highest. However, most of their money was being spent on the least productive customer finding methods, location and advertising. Of course he points out that we should focus more on the other finding methods.

My biggest complaint about the blog post is that he doesn’t really talk about how you generate more word of mouth customers. Sure, it’s a noble idea that you should generate more word of mouth customers, but how do you actually accomplish that goal?

I’ve thought about similar things on one of my websites. We’ve accomplished it by scraping people’s email contact list to gain referrals. Of course we have a refer a friend on the website. These type of tools really help produce what Robert Bradford talks about on his blog.

Here’s a nice tip from his latest post:

Tip Number One – Be Disciplined in Your Strategic Planning

Reminds me of a conversation I had recently about a company being ADHD and changing their direction every other day. I guess that’s the discipline he’s talking about.