2. Concentrate your energy on 2 - 3 main ideas. Entrepreneurs are known for their many great ideas. Sometimes this asset can quickly turn into a negative if your attention and efforts are spread too thin. Create a system to capture your ideas such as a tracking spreadsheet or index card file. Next, identify top 2 or 3 ideas that will yield highest return. Focus on those and only those. The other ideas are safely tucked away for you to return to later.

3. Be humble. One pitfall that many entrepreneurs fall into is over-promising and under-delivering. Be humble and understate what you can accomplish; this will help alleviate some of pressure you may be under. Getting into habit of under-promising and over-delivering will definitely impress your customers with your level of service.

4. Respond, don't react. Always be forward thinking so that you are able to plan ahead and anticipate situations. This will give you luxury of being able to respond and make intelligent decisions, versus being forced to react, putting out one fire after another.

5. Treat people like people. Your customers are not commodities; they are people. Your employees are not resources; they are people. Always treat people with respect and consideration regardless of situation. Its relationships that your form with people (customers, employees, vendors, business associates, etc), that can make or break your business.

While we're on subject of brochures, let me vent one of my pet peeves: grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors. Aaaaggghhh! Maybe it's just me, but if you want to make a bad impression, bad punctuation is a good way to do it, especially a misused apostrophe. For example, a local restaurant used "tomato's" as plural for "tomato", and made that mistake throughout its entire menu. I can certainly understand a typo once in a while, but geez.

You can only imagine how I reacted to this one: large, block letters, in neon, above a pet store that read "Pet's, Fish, and More". How many people saw that and didn't realize that there should be no apostrophe??

I don't mean to make you paranoid. Wait a minute, yes I do! Be very careful how you present yourself to world. Little things can mean a lot, whether your customers think so or not.

Remember that you only get one chance for that first impression. Make it a good one.