Direction is defined as examining where are you now and where are you going. It helps to look at everything as if you were a beginner. Always know why you are in business of your choice. If your strategy is not clear, you won't recognize destination when you get there. This is time to bring in your outside Vision Team.

Vision is who you are about and what your life is about. This is where you determine values you need to experience on a continuing basis. Vision is also where you become expert in your field and decide purpose of your business. Remember, smaller niche, larger reward. Abandon any preconceived beliefs you have about this or any other business. They can restrict your thinking. Live out of this new vision, not your past comfort.

Too Many online businesspeople assume that because this is a "digital age" and Internet is a "digital medium", their customers expect and prefer to interact with their company via digital, automated means.

While it is crucial to success of your online business to automate certain time consuming, tedious but necessary tasks, it is extremely important that you know right from start that your customers do not belong in that "time consuming" category.

You must always remember that without your customers you have no business. You must be readily available to your customers when they need you. You must avoid trapping your customers in voice mail hell, late responses to emails and phone messages or worse yet no response at all. Exceptional customer service breeds satisfied customers which in turn produces repeat business for you and even new business from referrals.

When you have an extremely well funded organization, adding a customer service solution to your business is as simple as finding appropriate staff to handle job and then deciding on right tool to handle customer service requests.

But, what if you are a one (or two) man operation. Can you really do everything that a well funded company with a full-time customer service staff can do to keep customers happy? Yes, you certainly can and if you leverage correct technology, you may be able to do a more efficient job than those larger companies are able to do.

If you run a company, regardless of size, you should consider implementing some of these unique tools and techniques to increase productivity of your customer service staff.

My small company, Goldbar Enterprises is run by my wife and I, our affiliate manager, and a team of expert developers. We have been blessed by much success which we attribute not only to our hard work and perseverance and quality of our products and services but a huge chunk of our success is directly tied to our exceptional customer care.

We're not happy until our customers are happy. Our business has become a lot more than a full-time job. We wear several different hats: marketers, deal makers, customer service, technical support, and business web site providers.

To avoid extra work, we set up our members only marketing supersite, The Ultimate Marketers Resource ( http://success.goldbar.net ) to be completely automated from start. We spent months working out technical details so that a customer could purchase membership, receive his/her login details and gain access in under 10 minutes time.