We took a day out of our business today to determine what our core values are and what our core focus is for the business for the next 12 months.

This came about as a result of Matthew from Rocket Lift recommending we read Traction by Gino Wickman – which we did.

So here are the core values we agreed our business is based on:

• leadership
• passion
• betterment
• innovation
• teamwork
• empowerment
• transparency

I’ll write another blog post soon explaining what these mean to us and why we chose them, but for now I just wanted to get them down. Interestingly, this exercise took us about 45 minutes to complete.

We then spent about 30 minutes discussing our core focus. That is, the reason our business exists.

In Traction, Gino Wickman suggests that your core focus should meet the following criteria:

• be stated in 3 – 7 words
• be written in simple language
• be big and bold
• have an “aha” effect
• come from the heart
• involve everyone
• be more than about money
• be bigger than a goal

So here is our core focus:

Empower our customers to build an exceptional business.

It’s eight words. Sorry Gino.

This is the reason we get out of bed every morning. It’s the reason we built the video user manuals plugin. It’s the reason we make the free White label CMS plugin. It’s the reason we started the WP Elevation business mentoring program for WordPress consultants. It’s the reason we took over development of the Google Analyticator plugin from Ronald.

It’s the reason I’ve interviewed Joost, Vlad from ManageWP, Justin Cutroni from Google and Ben Hunt as well as Adii from WooThemes, Derek Sivers, Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz and Cristian Antohe from WPMail.me who’s interviews haven’t been published yet.

It’s the reason we invested heavily to go to Pressnomics last year and the reason I’m spending three weeks on the road this year going to WordCamp Europe and Pressnomics 2.0

Empower our customers to build an exceptional business.

It’s the reason I dissolved my web design partnership in 2012 so I could focus on this business full time.

It’s the reason I have a premium Mixergy account, a gold subscription to Audible and spend thousands of dollars every years on mentoring and coaching.

It’s the reason we have a full time assistant and developer working with us in the Philippines.

Empower our customers to build an exceptional business.

This is the reason we do what we do.

We hope we can contribute in some small way to help you build an exceptional business.

If you haven’t already, download the free “Better WordPress for Clients” ebook – it’s a great place to start.

And feel free to leave us any comments below.

The video user manuals plug-in is now available on a single site license for $70.

This single site license is designed for WordPress consultants and developers who only have one or two clients and are not ready to commit to the developer license which is $24 per month. This is a great opportunity to use the plug-in and see how valuable it is.

The single site license still has all the great benefits of the developer license, such as: Continue reading →

This guest post is by Chris Gregory, managing partner and director of SEO at DAGMAR Marketing in Jacksonville, Florida.

Disclaimer: Chris is one of our customers but we did not ask for this guest post, it was offered to us. It’s the first time we have published a guest post and I would like to sincerely thank Chris for taking the time to contribute it. Take it away, Chris…

Our digital marketing agency has SEO clients across the board, from family-owned local service businesses to an international tech-staffing enterprise. Although their budgets are just as diverse as their lines of business, we strongly recommend to most of our clients that they maintain a blog.

Just having a blog in place isn’t enough though — it has to be kept updated with some kind of regularity in order to be of any SEO value. For our small business clients who don’t have the budget for us to write their blog content for them, blogging is DIY. If that process is overly complicated, one of two things will happen: they’ll call on us for help, which means using billable hours that were earmarked for other activities, or their blogs will sit idle. Continue reading →