Q: One of my key employees is giving me trouble. He has started showing up late for work and has developed a bad attitude in general. The rest of my employees are complaining since they are having to take up his slack. I’ve tried talking to him, but he doesn’t seem to listen. To make matters worse, he has become one of my best friends since I hired him five years ago, so firing him is out of the question. What can I do?
– Allen B.

A: One reason I am so qualified to dispense sage business advice every week, Allen, is that I have made just about every business blunder you can imagine. I am like the Evel Knievel of the small business world, if Evel Knievel wrote a weekly column on motorcycle safety.

One of the more unpleasant things I’ve had to do is fire a good friend who was not doing the job I hired him to do. He needed a job, I needed an employee, so I thought I would give him a shot. It turned out to be a match made in business hell. He took advantage of our friendship by showing up late for work, spending time goofing off instead of working, and making a joke out of my complaints about his behavior. Because of our friendship I defended his actions to my other employees, but after a few weeks I knew I had to show him the door. We’re still friends, but certainly not

Taking your ad and turning it into paragraph-style prose is not a press release - chances are it will only lead the publisher to call and invite you to run it as a paid ad. A press release is for news or for information about a topic the audience needs to know.

Any press release that reads too much like an ad will likely lead a media person to forward it to the advertising department.

For example, here’s a headline that sounds too much like an ad:

“Financial Planner Chet Thompson Saved Families $600,000 On Estate Taxes Last Year”

This headline is attention-getting, but for the wrong reasons. It doesn’t tell the media person anything other than that Chet Thompson is a good financial planner. This isn’t news. But that same headline can easily be rewritten to sound more “newsy”:

“Estate Planning Tips Saved Local Families More Than $600,000 Last Year”

This same information is now a headline that will grab a media person’s attention. It suggests questions that their readers will be interested in: What tips?

Rememberyou are never the news. News is information. As much as possible, keep ego tripping out of a press release and focus on the information that will help improve the lives of readers/listeners/viewers.

Ned Steele works with people in professional services who want to build their practice and accelerate their growth. The president of Ned Steele’s MediaImpact, he is the author of 102 Publicity Tips To Grow a Business or Practice. To learn more visit

While it is true that heavily branded websites like amazon.com
are household names and carry an implied trust with visitors, the
vast majority of websites are not well known and are found and
visited as a result of searches performed with search engines.
In these instances, the visitor is probably arriving at the
website for the first time and human nature often dictates fear
or suspicion of the unknown.

If someone is shopping around for the best price for a particular
item, say a Cuisinart food processor, they would probably go to a
site such as Ask Jeeves (at ask.com using the Smart Search for
Products feature) and quickly obtain a list of sources and prices
for the desired item. The “yes/no” purchase decision has already
been made and it is simply a question of who to buy it from.

In the case of network marketing, it is of critical importance to
build a sense of trust with your team members. Network marketing
is very definitely a relationship business and each relationship
typically starts out with two complete strangers sitting at their
respective keyboards.

The team building aspect of network marketing is of vital
importance to the success of each individual member and to the
team as a whole. Two key elements of team building are trust and
confidence and these factors play a very large role, particularly
for new team members.

As a team leader, you need to be knowledgeable about the business
(products, services, or whatever) and straightforward with
answers to questions about the business