When asked what they do, most people respond with a canned answer describing their job title. If you work in a large company doing a typical job, this is probably a suitable answer, but if you are an entrepreneur running your own business, this is far from a suitable answer.

People are busy, usually stressed and often wrapped up in their own world so when you tell them that you’re a lawyer, accountant, business consultant or whatever it is that you do, it does not stand out. To them, you are just another face in the crowd. They know that if they need the type of services you offer, they can simply visit a search engine, ask an associate or friend to refer them to someone or even pick up the yellow pages.

If you want to avoid this situation, it’s often as simple as perfecting your answer to the question. Hopefully, you’re more than just a lawyer, accountant, business consultant or whatever it is that you do. For example, one of our clients is an accountant that specializes in developing tax strategies for small businesses so they can maximize their revenue to become larger and more profitable. That’s pretty specific and definitely stands out from all of the other “accountants” in the area. Furthermore, you can bet that any small business owner who’s trying to grow their business will be interested when they hear that.

So take some time to determine what exactly it is that you do, and craft your answer around that. It will be one of the best investments of time you can make in your business.

A common misconception business owners have is that all of their clients already know about them. While it may be true that many of your clients have been doing business with you for years, it’s also very likely true that they were doing business with someone else before you came along. This means that they can chose one of your competitors over you at any time. Another important factor to consider is that clients enter and leave the market all the time, so while you may have been satisfied with meeting the needs of your existing clients, new ones are entering the market everyday and if you’re not working to add them to your client list, you can be sure someone else is. Over time, this situation can snowball and give your competitors a serious advantage over you.

So how do you avoid this? Toss out the idea that everyone already knows about your company. Even if they do today, it doesn’t matter tomorrow. Aside from the obvious, such as providing a quality product or service at a reasonable price, you need to maintain exposure to your existing client base while effectively targeting new clients. This ensures you a solid foothold in your market that can weather the ups and downs of business.

Anything worth doing is worth doing well, however anything worth doing well is worth doing poorly until you are able to do it well. In this case, I’m talking about sales calls, presentations and networking. If these are activities you’re not comfortable doing, chances are, your skills are not up to par, so you tend to avoid them. As a result, your revenue suffers. The longer you put these activities off, the longer you will not improve at them, and the more entrenched in your habits you’ll become. So get out there, no matter how bad you may be (and you’re probably nowhere near as bad as you think, in fact you may even be pretty good) and start practicing in the real world. You’ll start to see your skills improve and your revenue increase, which is probably one of the reasons you started your own business in the first place.

For those of you that have been unsure about your decision to become an entrepreneur, you should read Caught Between A Dream and A Job, by one of our clients, Delatorro L. McNeal II. While you’re at it, be sure to pick up School’s Out, by Jeremy L. Knauff, and learn how to effectively market your new business!

Microsoft made a $44.6 billion cash and stock bid for Yahoo! on Friday, which could make both companies a slightly more competitive against Google than they currently are. While combining the two companies in any capacity would certainly shake things up a bit, chances are that it wouldn’t have a significant impact initially, because collectively, they would still only hold a little less than 30% of the market share, while Google dominates with over 65%.