Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, delivered a simple message this morning in a presentation titled: The game is changing but the rules are the same. The theme of the talk was a road map for growing a business in today’s environment.

Here are the three major points for Intuit’s success according to Cook:

1. Treat your employees as a volunteer workforce - Nurture your employees as entrepreneurs
2. Ultimately the work is delivered by people and process - Experiment and Adopt tools that let you stay agile
3. Word of mouth is more important than ever - Demonstrate value ahead of the sale and Proactively create customer delight

These words were delivered by the leader of one of the biggest companies around and yet, they apply to the one person shop equally.

ducttapemarketing.com

Millions of people have more than one phone number these days — home, work, cellular, hotel room, vacation home, yacht — and with great complexity comes great hassle. You have to check multiple answering machines. You miss calls when people try to reach you on your cell when you’re at home (or the other way around). You send around e-mail messages at work that say, “On Thursday from 5 to 8:30, I’ll be on my cell; for the rest of the weekend, call me at home.”

And when you switch your job, cellphone carrier or home city, you have to notify everyone you know that you have new phone numbers.

A new service called GrandCentral, now in its final weeks of public beta testing, solves all of these problems. It’s a rather brilliant melding of cellphone and the Internet.

Its motto, “One number for life,” pretty much says it all. At GrandCentral.com, you choose a new, single, unified phone number (more on this in a moment). You hand it out to everyone you know, instructing them to delete all your old numbers from their Rolodexes.

From now on, whenever somebody dials your new uninumber, all of your phones ring simultaneously, like something out of “The Lawnmower Man.”

No longer will anyone have to track you down by dialing each of your numbers in turn. No longer does it matter if you’re home, at work or on the road. Your new GrandCentral phone number will find you.

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Here’s a checklist to make sure that your MySpace page is optimized to generate leads for you.

They all center around one huge rule: You must bring the business conversation away from MySpace. As long as you are on MySpace, you have to play by its members’ rules.

1. The first thing you must have is a form to get your visitors email addresses. You will increase your sign-up five-fold if you give them some sort of incentive to give their email address. Promote this by posting bulletins.
2. Syndication code. MySpace users are Web savvy. They know how to edit basic html and add it to their MySpace page. You want to have a pre-made banner ad with a link to your Web site and supply the html code so that if one of your MySpace friends wants to post your ad on his/her page, doing so is very easy.
3. There must be an obvious link to your Web site.
4. A reason to come back. Have fun on that one.

Here’s a little wisdom so you don’t have to learn the hard way. The most important advice I can give you is to never send unsolicited messages to other MySpace users.

marketingprofs.com

Why do small business owners write on blogs?

1. A faster and better way to create newsletter articles.
2. A strategy for getting published.
3. A low-cost way for a small business owner to market online.
4. A method to communicate and connect — especially important for business owners.
5. Satisfaction of some inner need to share.

Why do you blog? Or, if you do not currently blog, tell us the reason you do not.

smallbiztrends.com

The folks over at FaxZero don’t think you should have to pay to send faxes, and offer free (ad supported) faxes from your computer in a one-page form. Faxes can be sent to any U.S. phone number (Puerto Rico included).

You can type in text to fax or you can attach a PDF file, Microsoft Word (.DOC) file, or Excel Spreadsheet (.XLS).

The free version of FaxZero has a two fax per day limitation. You can also pay $1.99 per fax that doesn’t have any ads on the cover page if you wish.

Especially useful if you still deal with industries that rely on faxes, these online fax services can help you save on fax paper, fax machine upkeep and keep digital copies of all your fax communications.

Life of an Internet Entrepreneur

Ever suspect your employees are fudging their timesheets by clocking in for one another? A new biotechnology tool from VeriTask Software can help ensure employees are recording and reporting their hours with absolute accuracy.

VeriTask’s Biometric Time Clock verifies an employee’s identity through his or her fingerprint. As employees enter and leave the workplace, they check in using a fingerprint scanner, which keeps a precise record of the time. The system can be upgraded to manage a virtually unlimited number of employees, while attendance data can be easily exported to QuickBooks or Microsoft Excel.

The professional version of the Biometric Employee Time Clock, which includes a fingerprint reader and software to manage up to 50 employees, costs $399. An enterprise version, which can manage up to 100 employees, costs $699.

inc.com

Posful is betting on the fact that many people still don’t use email, (apparently 65 million Americans) and that we know people who can’t receive any.

So the team at Posful has come up with a solution to bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds. Send an email to a special unique address with the subject line as the mailing address, and its gets outputted into a printed piece and mailed out at the other end.

Total cost, $.99 for one page full color, printing, mailing and postage included.