Perhaps this is counter-intuitive? In this era of frantic, ever accelerating pace-of-life, it’s crucial to make every minute count, even when running a simple errand.

Looking for a specialized organic tincture today, I had my daughter with me and knew I couldn’t spend the day meandering from place to place on the off chance somebody had it. First I used google’s local search to compile a shortlist of herbalists and natural health-food stores in my area, then I started calling them.

I had about a 90% failure rate. Most of them went into voicemail after about 20 rings, and the voicemail greeting didn’t answer any basic questions: hours of operation, location, common directions, type of business carried out.

The rest didn’t even go into voicemail.

The one person who answered the phone, told me they had what I wanted in stock. Guess what? They got the sale, along with a few other items I wanted after I made the trip directly to their location.

All of these places struck me as mom-and-pop’s or owner-operated shops. They all serve as a good example of what we talk about here: growing your business through common sense approaches and using web tools to extend any business.

So our takeaways from today’s odyssey could be:

• A ringing phone is a surgically optimized lead screaming CLOSE ME, so maybe pick up the phone and close that sale.
• If you can’t answer the phone within a short number of rings, have it go into voicemail with an informative message: store hours, locations and if you have a website, your URL.
• Then on your website, have an easy-to-use search function, hopefully with some degree of search-engine-optimization that lists everything you carry, or if you’re a service, every type of service you provide. So when people like me type “organic echoberry tincture, etobicoke” your page would likely be on the first page

It isn’t rocket science, yet we find time and again, the few businesses that succeed above their peers take these basic common sense mechanisms and automate them, optimize them and have them operating 24/7.

Mark Jeftovic has been a self-employed internet professional since 1994, currently he is the founder and president of easyDNS Technologies Inc., the DNS hosting company and domain registrar. His personal blog is at http://mark.jeftovic.net