Cents sense.

I get annoyed pretty quickly when it comes to other people's business, mainly because it's my job.

I get to see quite a few business people in their work environments with my job, ranging from the struggling to the highly successful. They all undoubtedly work hard at their business, and many of them have piles - if not shelves - of business and management literature.

And I always seem to see the same mistakes.

I don't know what these books and DVDs are saying to my clients, but there must be something fundamentally missing in the self-help sections that we consistently see similar mistakes over and over and over. Unnecessary mistakes that cause stress on the business owners and the business itself. They may not be fatal to the business, but all the unnecessary stress sure isn't making their job* any easier.

Here's my four-point guide to business that you don't have to pay $29.95 at Borders for. It isn't going to solve all your problems, but they're healthy fundamentals that aren't missing from good businesses.

Clearspeak.

I was fairly certain at one stage that most people were on the same wave-length as me. We generally had the same idea on what 'good' meant - good quality, good nature, good ethics. Given this idea, I made a conscious choice that I could sacrifice some level of communication when talking with other people because good people would 'get it'.

Then the internet came, and without the additional hints of gestures* and vocal recognition, it became paramount that my written word was made clearer so that I was understood. This quickly separated myself from the majority of other IRC users, many of whom were populating #funfactory and creating the foundations of today's txt-speak. This discipline to grammar that I exercised with extreme prejudice in my own written communication lead to my desire to start writing.

Surely since I could string a sentence together, I could be a writer, right?